Roger Gale has been a Conservative MP since 1983, which makes him the oldest member of the Commons and one of its longest serving, a former broadcaster who has spent more than four decades on the back benches without ever holding ministerial rank. Longevity is the headline of his career. It is also, in a sense, the verdict on it.

He came to politics from broadcasting, a disc jockey on the pirate station Radio Caroline in the 1960s who became a producer at the BBC and a director of its children's television. In Parliament he has been a workhorse of the unglamorous kind, a long serving member of the panel that chairs Commons business, an acting deputy speaker, and for years the leader of the British delegation to the Council of Europe, even briefly its acting president. His signature cause has been animal welfare, pursued with genuine persistence over decades, on live exports, slaughterhouse cameras and the theft of pets, the kind of patient backbench advocacy that rarely makes headlines and occasionally changes law.

He has also shown a willingness to break with his own side that many younger and more ambitious colleagues lacked. A Remainer who never hid it, he warned against his party drifting towards the politics of UKIP, and over Partygate he became the first Conservative MP to confirm publicly that he had submitted a letter of no confidence in Boris Johnson, saying plainly that the prime minister had misled the House and should go. On the central test of integrity in his party's recent history, he was early and he was right.

The blot on the record is a serious one. In 2020 Gale was one of a group of MPs who wrote to senior judges about the trial of their colleague Charlie Elphicke, who was facing sexual assault charges. The Commons standards committee found this an improper attempt to influence judicial proceedings and recommended his suspension, noting pointedly that he was the longest standing of the group and still did not accept that he had done anything wrong. For a parliamentarian who presents himself as a guardian of proper conduct, it was a revealing lapse.

In 2024 he held the new seat of Herne Bay and Sandwich with a majority of 2,499, Labour in second. He was knighted in 2012.

Gale is a serious and independent minded constituency man, decent on animal welfare and braver than most in calling out his own leaders, and four decades of service is not nothing. He is also proof that long service and high office are different things, a backbencher who outlasted almost everyone without ever being trusted to run a department, and whose one grave misjudgement, leaning on judges for a friend, sat oddly with the rectitude he otherwise preached. The endurance is remarkable. The mark on the country is faint.