One Nation Tory intellectual, biographer of Burke and Smith, the minister who steered furlough through Parliament as Financial Secretary and the backbencher who sent Boris Johnson a no confidence letter calling his leadership "grotesque". The July 2024 majority was 1,279 over Labour with Reform third and the Lib Dems a distant fourth.

Born 1962; Classics at Merton Oxford with a 2:2; MPhil and PhD at UCL on Euclidean geometry and visual reasoning. Director at Barclays through the mid 1990s before leaving in 1997 for academic work at UCL and Birkbeck. Elected for Hereford and South Herefordshire in 2010 on a 2,481 majority that grew to 19,686 in 2019 and was nearly wiped out in July 2024.

The books made his name. Compassionate Conservatism with Janan Ganesh in 2006 was billed by the Sunday Times as the guidebook to Cameronism. Edmund Burke: Philosopher, Politician, Prophet in 2013 was long-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize. Adam Smith: What He Thought, and Why It Matters in 2018 won the Parliamentary Book Award for non-fiction. Two Year Fellow at All Souls from 2022, a rare achievement for a sitting parliamentarian.

The backbench rebellions came early. On 10 July 2012 he led the Tory revolt that killed Cameron''s Lords reform package; the angry confrontation in the lobby afterwards was such that Ed Miliband described it as "fisticuffs". In September 2013 Cameron dismissed him from the Policy Board for rebelling on military intervention in Syria. Member of the Treasury Select Committee from 2010, then Chair of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee from June 2015 to July 2016.

Junior minister at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy from July 2016, then minister at the Department for Transport from June 2017 covering roads and aviation. Financial Secretary to the Treasury from May 2019 to September 2021, where he delivered the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme architecture, the Self-Employment Income Support Scheme, and the framework for the UK Infrastructure Bank. He also implemented the April 2021 IR35 off payroll working reform for the private sector and was accused by contractor groups of selectively quoting industry voices in defence. Minister at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office under Truss covering the Americas and Overseas Territories, then Minister of State for Decarbonisation and Technology at the Department for Transport under Sunak from October 2022 to November 2023. Shadow Leader of the House of Commons under Badenoch from 5 November 2024.

The 6 June 2022 no confidence letter to Boris Johnson cited Partygate, the Rwanda scheme as "ugly, likely to be counterproductive and of doubtful legality", and the Northern Ireland Protocol bill as "economically very damaging, politically foolhardy and almost certainly illegal". Public, signed, on Twitter. The Burkean was finally moved. He has never disclosed which way he voted in the 2016 referendum; in 2019 he published a ConservativeHome essay on why he was "considering standing" for leader, then did not. In 2024 he endorsed Kemi Badenoch early and was rewarded. He backed Zahawi, then Truss, then Sunak, then Badenoch in sequence.

Did not vote on the Rwanda Bill at third reading on 17 January 2024, abstaining where colleagues divided. Voted No on the Leadbeater assisted dying bill at second reading on 29 November 2024. The Paula Radcliffe doping insinuation at the DCMS Committee in September 2015, which she had to categorically deny and he had to walk back, is on the record. So is the April 2013 line that the number of Old Etonians in government reflected Eton''s "ethos of public service", a bad look from an Old Etonian.

The intellectual seriousness is real and unusual on the green benches. The party loyalty across four winners runs alongside it.