Mel Stride has been MP for Central Devon since 2010 and is now Shadow Chancellor, the man charged with making the Conservative economic case after the party lost the public's trust on the economy. It is a serious job and he is a serious figure, which makes one episode in his past sit all the more awkwardly.

He is, on paper, well equipped. Oxford PPE, president of the Union, a business in exhibitions and publishing before politics, and a command of detail that served him well as chair of the Treasury Select Committee from 2019. In that role he did genuine public service. During the Truss government's mini budget crisis in September 2022 he pressed publicly for the Office for Budget Responsibility forecast to be published far sooner than the government wanted, arguing the markets needed independent numbers, and the turmoil in the gilt market proved him right. A select committee chair who reads the danger before the Treasury does is worth having.

The episode that shadows the rest is the loan charge. As Financial Secretary to the Treasury between 2017 and 2019 Stride was the minister who designed and drove through Parliament a policy to recover tax retrospectively from tens of thousands of people who had used disguised remuneration schemes, some of it going back many years. The human cost was severe, the policy has been linked to suicides, and Stride repeatedly declined to give evidence about it to a House of Lords committee, which raised the ministerial code against him. Then, weeks after leaving the Treasury, he was elected to chair the Treasury Select Committee, the body that scrutinises the policy he had just imposed, which campaigners called a farce and affected families called an insult. An independent review in 2025 finally offered those people relief and vindicated years of criticism of the scheme he built.

The rest is the curriculum of a safe Conservative. He was briefly Leader of the Commons in the dying weeks of Theresa May's government, ran Work and Pensions from 2022 with a welfare reform agenda that disability groups condemned, and stood for the leadership in 2024, where he was eliminated early. He was a Remainer who loyally backed the government's Brexit, which is to say his instincts were managerial rather than ideological.

In 2024 he held Central Devon by 61 votes, one of the closest results in the country, and was knighted in Rishi Sunak's resignation honours in 2025.

Stride is competent, numerate and a more effective scrutineer than he ever was a minister, and as Shadow Chancellor he lands blows on Labour that better known colleagues miss. He is also the author of one of the crueller tax policies of the era and the man who then took the job of judging it. The ability is not in question. The judgement, on the issue that will follow him, is.