Alberto Costa has been MP for South Leicestershire since 2015. He is a solicitor by background and one of the quieter Conservative MPs of his cohort, the sort of legalistic backbench figure who does committee work and constitutional argument rather than studio appearances. He has chaired the Standards Committee since September 2024 and previously served on the Justice and Scottish Affairs select committees through some of the more politically charged years of Westminster's relationship with Scotland.

His best moment in office was an unusual one for a Tory loyalist. During the May government's Brexit negotiations, Costa publicly broke with the front bench to demand that the rights of EU citizens already living in the UK be unilaterally guaranteed. He resigned his junior role over the rebellion and was widely credited with shaping the eventual outcome. The episode mattered. EU citizens' rights were one of the genuinely difficult human consequences of Brexit, and Costa made the moral case at political cost.

That single moment, however, sits inside a much longer voting record that tracked the Conservative whip through the rest of the period. Austerity, welfare reform, the legislation that left local government and public services visibly worse. South Leicestershire contains affluent parts and parts that absorbed the cumulative effect of those policies. Costa's measured legalistic style is harder to reconcile with the cumulative voting record than the citizens' rights episode alone might suggest.

His procedural seriousness is real. He is fluent in select committee work, takes evidence sessions seriously, and writes the kinds of reports that civil servants actually read. In a Conservative cohort that produced an unusual amount of theatrical politics during his time in Parliament, that seriousness is a credit. Voters do not vote for select committee reports, but the country is better governed when people on those committees know what they are doing.

The wider critique of his strand of Conservatism is the standing one. Procedural conservatism without an economic answer for declining communities is not a sufficient politics. Costa is fluent on constitutional process, careful on legal protections and quietly supportive of socially moderate positions. He is less audible on the economic policies that hit his constituents hardest, and his record on those is conventional Conservative loyalty rather than independent thought.

He has not been involved in the scandals that consumed several of his contemporaries. He is not on the culture war right of his party. He has avoided the showmanship that defined the parliamentary class of 2019. None of these is a small thing in the post 2010 Conservative Party, and his survival into 2024 with both his seat and his reputation broadly intact says something about the difference between visible politicians and useful ones.

Whether he ends up remembered as a serious quiet Tory or as one of the loyalist backbenchers who failed to stop their own party going off the rails is a question his career has not yet answered, and may not.