John Cooper inherited his seat from the Scottish Secretary he had advised, and he holds it by 930 votes. That number is the gravitational centre of his career: a thin margin in a rural Scottish seat where an opposition Conservative has almost no leverage to pull.

John Matthew Cooper was born in 1966 in Stranraer, at the western tip of the constituency he now represents. He went to Rephad Primary and Stranraer Academy, and at seventeen he walked into the offices of the local paper, the Stranraer and Wigtownshire Free Press, as a trainee reporter. What followed was not a quiet career in local journalism but three decades in the national press.

From the Free Press he moved through the weekly papers and set up his own Edinburgh news agency specialising in court reporting, before joining the Sunday Mail in Glasgow, then the Scottish Daily Mail, then crossing to Dublin to help launch the Irish Daily Mail. He returned as Associate Editor of the Scottish Daily Mail. The local paper came later: when he moved back to Stranraer in 2019 he modernised the Free Press from a broadsheet into a full colour tabloid and edited it until 2022. He also holds an MA from the University of Birmingham.

His route into Parliament ran through Whitehall. In 2021 he joined the Scotland Office as special adviser to Alister Jack, the Secretary of State for Scotland, handling media relations. When Jack stood down in 2024 after five years running the Scotland Office under Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, Cooper stepped into the candidacy. He was, in plain terms, the adviser who inherited his minister's seat.

He won on 4 July 2024 with a majority of 930, or 2.1 per cent, edging the SNP into second and Labour into third. He sits on the Business and Trade Committee and its sub committee on economic security, arms and export controls. Locally he campaigns on upgrading the A75 and A77 trunk roads and restoring full ScotRail services to Stranraer and Barrhill, working alongside the local MSPs Finlay Carson and Oliver Mundell.

At 59, with three decades of journalism, an Associate Editor's title and Scotland Office experience behind him, Cooper is better equipped for the communications side of the job than most new MPs. The harder reality is that a rural Scottish Conservative in opposition has almost no purchase on either a Labour government at Westminster or an SNP administration at Holyrood, the two bodies that would actually fund his roads and his railway. Whether the A75, the A77 and the Stranraer line show visible improvement from the opposition benches is the question his 930 vote career hangs on.