Greg Smith has been a Conservative MP since 2019, for Buckingham and now Mid Buckinghamshire, and he is one of the more ideologically consistent backbenchers his party produces, a free market libertarian who has built his name fighting railways, road charges and net zero deadlines. Consistency is his strength. It is also his limit.

He is, to his credit, a campaigner who occasionally wins. A former Hammersmith and Fulham councillor who came up through marketing, Smith made opposition to large infrastructure his cause, and on the Oxford to Cambridge expressway he prevailed, the scheme cancelled in 2021 after he had fought it from the moment he arrived. He used the Transport Select Committee to grill the executives of HS2, the project he called a financial catastrophe, and shared in the satisfaction when its northern leg was scrapped. As one of the leaders of the Free Market Forum he gives the Thatcherite wing of the party an organised voice. He believes what he says, which cannot be said of everyone.

The trouble is what the convictions amount to in the round. Smith is a reliable opponent of HS2, of the London mayor's clean air zone, of low traffic neighbourhoods and of the 2030 ban on new petrol and diesel cars, a politics of being against things that plays well with motorists and the party base and offers little beyond grievance. In October 2020 he voted against extending free school meals through the school holidays, and then asked a local tea room to let him hand out food for a photo opportunity, a request the owners publicly refused, telling him no child should go hungry. It was a small moment that captured a hardness beneath the libertarian principle.

For a man who styles himself a guardian of value for money, his register of interests sits awkwardly. In 2023 he accepted around nine and a half thousand pounds in flights, hotels and Formula One paddock hospitality for the Bahrain Grand Prix, the kind of freebie the taxpayers he champions rarely see.

In 2024 he held Mid Buckinghamshire with a majority of 5,872, the Liberal Democrats in second, one of the few Conservative survivors in the county. Kemi Badenoch gave him junior shadow roles on transport and energy.

Smith is consistent, energetic and a more effective single issue campaigner than most, and the expressway victory was a genuine one for his constituents. He is also a reminder that conviction without breadth is a narrow thing, a politician with a clear list of what he is against and a much shorter one of what he is for, whose hardest vote is the one his constituents are most likely to remember. The energy is real. The purpose beyond opposition is harder to see.