Mims Davies has been a Conservative MP since 2015, for Eastleigh, then Mid Sussex, and since 2024 for the new seat of East Grinstead and Uckfield, three constituencies in three elections, a record that says something about boundary reviews and something about her.

She is, by the standards of the modern Conservative front bench, a workhorse. A trained journalist who came to Parliament through local government in Mid Sussex, she has held junior ministerial office under four prime ministers without ever rising to the top of any department. Whips, Wales, sport, employment, safeguarding, disabled people, women, the brief changed but the role was always the same, a competent and uncontroversial minister of state. As minister for disabled people in 2024 she launched the government's Disability Action Plan, and earlier at the Wales Office she had a hand in scrapping the Severn Bridge tolls. Service of that volume and longevity is not nothing.

The episode that follows her is the one she did not need to volunteer for. In October 2019 she announced she would stand down in Eastleigh to spend more time with her children, and reportedly told the press it was not true that she was looking at another seat. A week later she was on the shortlist for the much safer Mid Sussex, succeeded Sir Nicholas Soames and won it with a majority of more than eighteen thousand. Other Conservative MPs publicly fumed about preferential treatment in selections. The arrangement was within the rules. It was also, in plainer language, a carpetbag, and she has had to outrun the label ever since.

She resigned from Boris Johnson's government in July 2022, joining the wave of departures that brought him down, and was rewarded by Kemi Badenoch with the post of shadow Welsh secretary, despite never representing a Welsh seat, alongside the shadow women's brief.

In 2024 she held East Grinstead and Uckfield with a majority of 8,480, the Liberal Democrats in second, one of the steadier Conservative results of a brutal night.

Davies is diligent, durable and the survivor of more reshuffles than most members of any generation, and the Disability Action Plan is one piece of work she can point to with pride. She is also a study in the Conservative selectorate at its worst, a politician who declared she was leaving Parliament to be with her family and then took a safer seat instead, and whose record of junior office over a decade has yet to amount to a reform the country would notice. The endurance is real. What it was for is harder to say.