Caroline Dinenage has been MP for Gosport since 2010, served five years as a minister across four departments, and since 2023 has chaired the Culture, Media and Sport Committee. She is more effective now, scrutinising power, than she was when she held it. That is both to her credit and a comment on her time in government.

Dinenage set up a manufacturing company at nineteen and ran a business for two decades, a harder apprenticeship than most of her colleagues served. As a select committee chair she has used the role with purpose, running an inquiry into grassroots music venues that pushed the government to respond, examining the future of British film and high end television, and launching a fan led review of live music modelled on the review that produced a football regulator. This is the work of someone who has found her level, holding broadcasters, platforms and ministers to account rather than reciting a line.

Her convictions have a habit of arriving exactly when they become useful. In February 2013 she voted against same sex marriage, telling constituents the state had no right to redefine it. In May 2015, on being appointed equalities minister, she announced she was fully committed to advancing LGBT equality and supported the law she had opposed. People are allowed to evolve. It is the timing that invites suspicion, a principle discovered at the moment a brief required it.

The independence she now performs has had blind spots of its own. In August 2023, while chairing the committee that scrutinises Britain's broadcasters, she hosted a parliamentary drinks reception for GB News, a channel her committee was in a position to examine. The following month she wrote to the video platform Rumble about its monetisation of Russell Brand's content, and Rumble publicly dismissed her letter as inappropriate and dangerous, a rare and pointed rebuff to a committee chair. The watchdog has not always watched her own conflicts as closely as everyone else's.

Then there is the money. In 2022, two years after leaving her post as care minister, Dinenage took a paid board role at LNT Care Developments, a care home developer owned by a Conservative donor, worth £50,000 a year from April 2023. She said the appointments watchdog had approved it with restrictions. It is within the rules. It is also the former care minister taking a salary from the care development industry, the kind of arrangement that explains why public trust in the second jobs of MPs is where it is.

Dinenage is industrious, has a genuine business record and is a capable chair who does the committee work properly. She is also a study in how easily principle bends to advancement and how loosely the line between scrutiny and interest can be drawn. The later career is the better one. The question it raises is why the conviction was so much harder to find when she was the one in office.