Victoria Atkins has been MP for Louth and Horncastle since 2015, was Health Secretary in the last year of the Conservative government, and is now Shadow Environment Secretary. She is one of the more substantial lawyers on her benches, and her career shows both the use and the limits of that.

The strengths are real. A criminal barrister before politics and the daughter of a Conservative MP, Atkins arrived with a command of the law and put it to good use on the brief that suits her best. As a Home Office minister she was the minister in charge of the Domestic Abuse Act 2021, which for the first time put a statutory definition of domestic abuse into law, recognised economic and coercive control, and stopped abusers cross examining their victims in court. It is a genuine and humane piece of legislation and it is hers. As Health Secretary she introduced the bill for a smoke free generation, banning tobacco sales to everyone born after 2008, a bold public health measure that fell when the 2024 election was called and was then passed, largely unchanged, by the government that replaced her.

The criticisms are sharper on consistency and conflict. The clearest is cannabis. Her husband ran British Sugar, which grows cannabis under licence for medicinal use, while Atkins was a Home Office minister responsible for drugs policy and a public opponent of liberalisation. The conflict was obvious enough that in 2018 she recused herself from anything to do with cannabis, which managed the problem without dissolving the awkwardness of a drugs minister married to the cannabis growing business. It is the kind of arrangement that looks worse the longer you consider it.

The rest of the record is closer to the party line than her independent lawyer's image suggests. She voted to trigger Article 50 having leant towards Remain, took a hard Home Office line on crime and drugs including vetoing a critic's appointment to the government's own drugs advisory council, and held the Treasury and Health briefs competently without leaving a mark on either to rival the domestic abuse law.

In 2024 she held Louth and Horncastle with a majority of 5,506, with Reform UK, not Labour, in second place, a sign of where the pressure on her seat now comes from. Kemi Badenoch made her shadow environment secretary.

Atkins is able, serious on the law and responsible for one of the better pieces of social legislation of recent years, and that should not be diminished. She is also a reminder that competence and a good cause can sit alongside a conflict of interest a more careful politician would never have allowed, and that a strong start in one brief does not make up for a thin record across the rest.