Gareth Davies has been a Conservative MP since 2019, for Grantham and Stamford and now Grantham and Bourne, and he is one of the few members who genuinely understands the financial system he helps to legislate for. That makes the way he has used the knowledge all the more telling.

Before politics he spent more than a decade in investment management at Threadneedle, rising to head of responsible investment solutions, advising pension funds and sovereign wealth funds, with a Harvard public administration degree along the way. He brought that expertise to bear early and to good effect. He made the case for a British sovereign green bond before the Treasury issued its first green gilt, argued for a national infrastructure bank of the kind later created, and championed impact investing, the idea that private capital can be directed at social goods. As Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury from 2023 he took through the Finance Bill that made full expensing permanent, a genuine and well regarded pro investment measure. On the technical merits he is among the more serious people his party has sent to the Treasury.

Which is what makes the reversal so striking. The man who built his City career and his early parliamentary reputation on responsible and green investment turned, in opposition, into a critic of it, declaring in January 2025 that environmental, social and governance investing had gone too far and that fund managers were imposing their values on portfolios. The position he now attacks is, in substance, the one he used to sell. It is possible he has genuinely changed his mind. It is at least as likely that he has read the direction of his party under Kemi Badenoch, which has abandoned the net zero target, and adjusted his sails accordingly.

The voting record points the same way. He has backed his party in almost every division of this Parliament, against assisted dying, against the windfall tax, generally against new climate measures, the discipline of a man with ambitions rather than the independence of a specialist. That discipline has not entirely paid off. In the reshuffles of 2025 and early 2026 he was moved out of his Treasury brief, where his expertise actually lay, and into a junior business and trade role, a sideways step at best for someone of his background.

In 2024 he held Grantham and Bourne with a majority of 4,496, the Conservative vote down nearly thirty points, with Reform pushing hard into third behind Labour.

Davies is clever, qualified and capable of the serious work the Treasury needs, and full expensing is a real achievement. He is also a case study in how quickly expertise yields to expediency, a responsible investment professional who disowned responsible investment the moment his party's mood turned. The ability is not in doubt. The willingness to use it for something other than his own advancement is.