Alan Mak has been MP for Havant since 2015 and was a junior minister in Conservative governments at the Treasury and the Department for Business, and later Shadow Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology. Before politics he qualified as a solicitor and worked in corporate law and business. He is part of the wing of Conservatism that takes productivity, innovation policy and digital infrastructure seriously, which is a smaller part of the party than the public profile of the last decade suggests.

His instincts are technocratic. Mak is interested in the parts of government that other politicians find boring. Regulatory sandboxes, life sciences capacity, the architecture of the digital economy, the question of how the UK retains research strength while losing manufacturing. These are real questions and most of his frontbench colleagues are not equipped to discuss them.

The political weakness of that profile is that it does not transmit. Mak speaks the language of growth, productivity, competitiveness and reform. Most of his constituents are not currently in conversations about productivity. They are in conversations about wages, the cost of energy, the local hospital and whether the high street has anything left in it. There is a real argument that the language of innovation policy connects to those concerns through a long chain of consequences. There is also a real argument that politicians who only speak the long chain language lose the audience long before the consequences arrive.

Havant is not uniformly comfortable. Parts of the seat have absorbed steady economic damage during years the Conservatives were in office, including years Mak voted with the government. The technocratic positivity that defines his public manner sits awkwardly with the lived experience of the harder pressed parts of his constituency.

His Brexit position was loyal.

Mak announced in February 2016 that he would campaign to keep Britain in the European Union ahead of that June's referendum, a stance that drew a local Conservative accusation that he had presented himself as a Eurosceptic at his selection the year before. After Havant voted Leave, Mak fell in behind Brexit, backing the Withdrawal Agreement and stating that his preferred fallback if it failed was leaving with No Deal, completing a move from campaigning Remainer in 2016 to a reliable supporter of the harder exit options by 2019. He defended whichever deal the leadership of the day was selling, and he was visible in defence of the Johnson and Sunak governments through the period when most of his colleagues went quiet. That kind of loyalty produces a particular kind of political cost when the project being defended is unpopular, and the post 2024 Conservative Party still has not collectively addressed the cumulative damage of the years he spent on television defending it.

He is not theatrical. He does not perform outrage. He has avoided the scandals and the leadership tantrums that consumed parts of the parliamentary party during his career. That restraint is increasingly unusual on the right of British politics and is one of the few qualities the Conservatives will need more of if they are going to rebuild.

Whether Mak is part of that rebuild depends on whether the party leadership wants serious technocratic conservatism in the front line again, or whether it stays in the harder edged populist territory that has dominated since 2019. The intellectual case for his version of Conservative politics has not disappeared. The political demand for it, currently, has.