Harriett Baldwin has been MP for West Worcestershire since 2010, spent four years as a Treasury minister and two chairing the Treasury Select Committee, and is one of the few members who understood high finance before she ever reached the Commons. The expertise is real. What she did with it is more mixed.

She came to politics from the City, more than twenty years at JP Morgan, rising to managing director and running currency management in London. That is a genuine career in the markets her party legislates for, rarer on the green benches than the Conservatives like to pretend, and it gave her a command of financial detail that served her well. She held the City brief as Economic Secretary to the Treasury, then defence procurement, then a spell as minister for Africa, a broad and serious ministerial run.

Her strongest work came later and from outside government. Elected chair of the Treasury Select Committee in 2022, beating two former cabinet ministers for the post, she used it with purpose. Her committee exposed the scale of debanking, the tens of thousands of business accounts closed by banks each year, and pressed the case that ordinary firms were being cut off on vague grounds of reputational risk. She argued, against her own government's Treasury, that consumer crypto trading more closely resembled gambling than investment and should be regulated as such. It was the work of someone holding the financial system to account rather than flattering it.

The criticisms are of the record beneath the competence. For all the offices, there is no reform the country associates with her name, the familiar fate of the able minister who administers rather than changes. Her voting has been harder than her measured manner suggests, consistently for cuts to welfare including the bedroom tax, and generally against measures to limit climate change. And her time as defence procurement minister from 2016 overlapped the early years of the Ajax armoured vehicle programme, one of the costliest equipment failures of the era, a problem she neither created nor fixed.

In 2024 she held West Worcestershire with a majority of 6,547, the Liberal Democrats in second, and she was made a dame the same year.

Baldwin is genuinely expert, a more effective scrutineer of finance than almost anyone on her benches, and the debanking work was a real public service. She is also a study in how much capability can pass through high office and leave so little behind, a City professional who reached the Treasury and then did her best work only once she had left it. The knowledge was never in doubt. The use she put it to in government was.