Andrew Griffith has been MP for Arundel and South Downs since 2019. Before politics he was Chief Operating Officer at Sky, a senior figure in UK media and telecoms, and a non executive director on several boards. The pre political CV is one of the most substantively business credentialed of any Conservative MP of his cohort, and the political offer rests on that.

He was a junior minister in the late stage Johnson, Truss and Sunak governments, mostly on the City and financial services side. The work was technically real. Listings reform, financial services regulation, the Edinburgh Reforms. None of it broke through to a public political audience, which is the standard fate of City facing policy. Griffith was fluent in it, which most of his colleagues were not.

His political brand is business friendly Conservatism in a fairly classical sense. Growth, competitiveness, deregulation where it makes operational sense, tax structures that do not actively punish capital allocation. There is a coherent case there. The political problem is that the case has been made by successive Conservative governments for fourteen years, and the cumulative economic record during those years is the case against it. Growth was slow. Productivity stagnated. Living standards declined.

The honest defence of his position is that the policy mix actually delivered during those fourteen years was not, in practice, the policy mix his strand of Conservatism would have run. Brexit, immigration and the Truss episode all worked against the business friendly version of the party. The criticism is that he was inside those governments and voted for the programmes they delivered, and the gap between the abstract case and the actual record is the political consequence.

Arundel and South Downs is comfortable. His majority was reduced but not eliminated in 2024. The seat is the kind of South Downs Tory territory the Liberal Democrats are now targeting seriously, and the political pressure on Griffith from the centre is increasing rather than decreasing.

His political weakness is the standard one for technocratic Conservatives. The vocabulary, productivity, competitiveness, capital formation, sounds correct in a financial services audience and abstract in a constituency conversation. Voters who are not in the FT comments section need to know what the politics actually does for them, and the answer in the 2010 2024 period was, on average, very little.

There are also the questions about share dealings during his time at Sky that surfaced periodically in the press. Nothing in those reports ever produced a regulatory finding against him, but the cumulative impression is part of how voters with limited time read the kind of politician he is.

He is more substantive than most of his front bench colleagues. Whether the post 2024 Conservative Party can rebuild itself around business friendly seriousness, or whether it commits more deeply to the culture war right, will determine whether figures like Griffith have a future role or remain back bench economists with a parliamentary salary.