Damian Hinds has been MP for East Hampshire since 2010 and has held more ministerial posts than almost anyone of his generation, including a spell as Education Secretary. He is the model of the safe pair of hands, and the trouble with safe hands is that they rarely leave fingerprints.

Hinds came to politics after roughly eighteen years in the hospitality and brewing industry, rising to strategy director at Greene King, and he took a first in philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford. He is intellectually serious, with a genuine and long standing interest in social mobility, and he is widely regarded across the House as decent and undramatic. In July 2022 he resigned as security minister as the Johnson government collapsed, citing the loss of confidence in standards in public life, a resignation on principle rather than calculation. Since leaving the front bench he has campaigned with real persistence on children's online safety, pressing in 2025 for a minimum age for social media and criticising a watered down phones bill. The causes are right and the work is sincere.

The offices produced strikingly little. He was Education Secretary for eighteen months from January 2018, and the considered verdict of the education press was that the period passed without a single big initiative. He published a teacher recruitment and retention strategy and an edtech strategy, talked about character and workload, and scrapped the floor and coasting standards, but he failed to win the argument inside government for restoring school funding, and the workload he promised to cut barely moved. He launched a £50 million fund to expand selective schools, channelling scarce money to grammars that the evidence says do nothing for attainment once background is accounted for.

His clearest reversal came on faith schools. The 2017 Conservative manifesto promised to scrap the 50 per cent cap on faith based admissions to new free schools. In May 2018 Hinds abandoned that promise and kept the cap, offering a workaround instead, a decision the Catholic Church accused the government of breaking faith over and secularists attacked from the other side. He had managed to satisfy no one, which is its own kind of achievement.

The pattern is a man always in the room and rarely the author of what happens in it. He served Cameron, May, Johnson and Sunak across the Treasury, work and pensions, education, the Home Office and justice, competent in each and defining of none. Badenoch dropped him from the shadow cabinet in November 2024.

Hinds is the better sort of professional politician, honest, capable and serious about the things he cares about, and the country could use more of his temperament and less of some others. The criticism is not character. It is that a decade and a half of high office should leave more behind it than a reputation for being reasonable. In 2024 he held East Hampshire by 1,275 votes. The reasonable man very nearly lost his seat.