Julia Lopez has been MP for Hornchurch and Upminster since 2017 and is one of the more capable junior front benchers in Kemi Badenoch's shadow cabinet, a former parliamentary researcher who has spent the bulk of her career in digital and media policy. Capability has not always been matched by what she has been asked to defend.

She came to politics through the back office. Before standing she was chief of staff to Mark Field, the long serving Tory MP, and in November 2016 she made her first national appearance, photographed leaving the new Brexit department carrying a handwritten note that read, in full view of a press camera, what's the model, have cake and eat it. The phrase became shorthand for a government that had no plan, even if she was the aide carrying the paper rather than its author. It was a small lesson in how Westminster works that she has spent the rest of her career outrunning.

In office she did real work. As media and digital infrastructure minister at DCMS from 2021 she ran the rollout of Project Gigabit, the programme that pushed gigabit capable broadband from under one in ten homes to most of the country in a couple of years. As one of the first ministers to take statutory maternity leave under a new act in 2023 she modernised the role itself, a small contribution to a Parliament that had taken decades to allow it.

She also led the case for one of the more pointless policies of the last government, the privatisation of Channel 4, a fight she carried on for two years before her own department abandoned it in January 2023 and admitted the project had been wrong. By then around two million pounds of public money had been spent on consultants, research and stakeholder management for a sale that never happened. She continued as a minister under the line she had just been defeated on.

In 2024 she held Hornchurch and Upminster by 1,943 votes, with Reform UK in second, the surge that nearly took the seat. Badenoch made her parliamentary aide and then, in July 2025, shadow science secretary, replacing Alan Mak.

Lopez is intellectually serious, fluent on technology and policy and rare among recent Conservatives in taking digital infrastructure seriously enough to deliver on it. She is also a reminder that the wrong fight, fought too long, can define a career, a minister identified equally with the rollout of gigabit broadband and with one of the more wasted episodes of departmental energy in recent memory. The competence is real. The pick of which battles to fight has not always been.