Maria Caulfield | |
---|---|
Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Mental Health and Women's Health Strategy | |
Assumed office 27 October 2022 | |
Prime Minister | Rishi Sunak |
Preceded by | Caroline Johnson [lower-alpha 1] |
Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Women | |
Assumed office 27 October 2022 | |
Prime Minister | Rishi Sunak |
Preceded by | Katherine Fletcher |
Minister of State for Health | |
In office 7 July 2022 –7 September 2022 | |
Prime Minister | Boris Johnson |
Preceded by | Edward Argar |
Succeeded by | Will Quince |
Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Patient Safety and Primary Care | |
In office 17 September 2021 –7 July 2022 | |
Prime Minister | Boris Johnson |
Preceded by | Jo Churchill |
Succeeded by | James Morris |
Vice Chairman of the Conservative Party for Women | |
In office 8 January 2018 –10 July 2018 | |
Leader | Theresa May |
Preceded by | Office established |
Succeeded by | Helen Whately |
Member of Parliament for Lewes | |
Assumed office 7 May 2015 | |
Preceded by | Norman Baker |
Majority | 2,457 (4.5%) |
Personal details | |
Born | Maria Colette Caulfield 6 August 1973 London,England |
Political party | Conservative |
Website | Official website |
Maria Colette Caulfield (born 6 August 1973) is a British politician and nurse serving as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Mental Health and Women's Health Strategy and Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Women since October 2022. [1] [2]
She served as Minister of State for Health from July to September 2022. A member of the Conservative Party,she has been Member of Parliament (MP) for Lewes since 2015.
Maria Caulfield was born on 6 August 1973 to Irish immigrant parents and grew up on in a working class area of Wandsworth,London. Her father was from a farming family,but after emigration worked as a builder,while her mother was a nurse. [3]
While Caulfield was in her teens,her mother died from breast cancer. [3] After leaving school Caulfield became an NHS nurse. [4] [5] She has spoken about her upbringing saying that she "grew up in a run-down area of South London where the only careers advice given to us was the phone number of the local council housing office for when you became a single mum and needed a council flat." [5]
As a nurse,she eventually specialised in cancer research and moved to the south coast of England,where she worked at the Royal Sussex County Hospital and the Princess Royal Hospital and then the Royal Marsden. Her career in the NHS lasted over 20 years. [6] She became involved with the Conservative Party after joining a campaign to save local hospitals in the Brighton area. [5]
In the 2007 Brighton and Hove City Council election,Caulfield stood as a Conservative Party candidate and became a member of the local city council for the previously safe Labour ward of Moulsecoomb - winning by just one vote. She served in the cabinet of the then Conservative authority and held the Housing Portfolio. In the following 2011 local election she lost her seat to the Labour candidate by over 600 votes. [7]
At the 2010 general election,Caulfield unsuccessfully stood [8] in Caerphilly,coming second with 17.1% of the vote behind the incumbent Labour MP Wayne David. [9] [10] She had been shortlisted for the position of Conservative Party candidate for Gosport in the previous year. She received criticism from local political rivals for both campaigns on the grounds that her focus should be on her council work in Brighton. [11] [12]
For several years,she held the role of deputy regional chairman for the South East Conservatives [13] and was a co-ordinator in the NO2AV campaign in the 2011 AV referendum.
In 2013,Caulfield was selected as the prospective parliamentary candidate for Lewes by the Lewes Conservative Association. [5] At the 2015 general election,Caulfield was elected to Parliament as MP for Lewes,winning with 38% of the vote and a majority of 1,083. [14] [15]
Caulfield backed Brexit during the 2016 EU membership referendum. [16]
At the snap 2017 general election,Caulfield was re-elected as MP for Lewes with an increased vote share of 49.5% and an increased majority of 5,508.
In September 2017,she faced criticism after she hosted a Parliamentary event with the Royal College of Nursing to gain support for scrapping the below-inflation cap on nurses pay but did not take part in a parliamentary debate on this. Defending her position,Caulfield argued the only way to lift the nurses' pay cap would be during a meaningful budget vote. [17]
On 8 January 2018,Caulfield was appointed vice-chair of the Conservative Party for Women;the appointment was criticised by women's rights groups,including the Women's Equality Party,because she had opposed a Ten Minute Rule bill in March 2017 which sought to allow abortion to term and for voting in 2015 with the government to oppose the removal of the so-called tampon tax,currently levied on female sanitary products as the UK can currently not zero rate VAT on these products while a member of the EU [18] She resigned from this position on 10 July 2018 in protest at the Brexit strategy of the Prime Minister,Theresa May. [19]
In the House of Commons Caulfield sat on the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee,the Women and Equalities Committee and the Committee on Exiting the European Union until becoming a Government whip in 2019. [20]
Caulfield employs her husband as her office manager. The practice of MPs employing family members has been criticised by some sections of the media on the grounds that it promotes nepotism. [21] [22] Although MPs who were first elected in 2017 have been banned from employing family members,the restriction is not retrospective –meaning that Caulfield's employment of her husband is lawful. [23]
On 1 August 2019,Caulfield was made Parliamentary Private Secretary (PPS) to the Secretary of State for Transport Grant Shapps as part of a government reshuffle. [24]
In October 2019,Caulfield signed a letter to The Guardian pledging climate action. [25] Caulfield has also supported plans for a Green Brexit,by enhancing environmental protections after the UK leaves the European Union. [26]
Caulfield was again re-elected at the 2019 general election,with a decreased vote share of 47.9% and a decreased majority of 2,457. [27]
In March 2020,Caulfield announced that whilst continuing to fulfill her parliamentary duties,she would be answering the UK government's call for former doctors and nurses to volunteer in order to help the NHS deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. [28] [29]
In May 2020,Caulfield shared a 22-second video clip from her Twitter account which had been doctored to depict the Labour leader,Sir Keir Starmer,apparently giving reasons as to why he,as the director of public prosecutions,had not prosecuted grooming gangs. She accompanied the tweet with the words:"True face of the Labour leader #shameful". [30] In fact,Starmer had been answering a question about what the "wrong approach" was and why historic child sexual abuse allegations had been ignored for decades by the authorities. The doctored video came from a Twitter account that had spread far-right and anti-Islam views,which was subsequently suspended. A Downing Street spokesman said:"These tweets have rightly been deleted. The MPs involved have been spoken to by the Whips' Office and reminded of their responsibility to check the validity of information before they post on social media sites." [31] [32] Caulfield later apologised. [33]
On 17 September 2021,Caulfield was appointed Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Patient Safety and Primary Care in the second cabinet reshuffle of the second Johnson ministry. [34]
On 7 July 2022,she was appointed Minister of State in the Department of Health and Social Care as part of the caretaker cabinet installed by outgoing Prime Minister Boris Johnson. [35]
On 7 September 2022 following the appointment of Liz Truss as Prime Minister and the subsequent formation of her ministry,Caulfield was dismissed from her role in Government and returned to the backbenches.
Caulfield is a former board member of Blue Collar Conservativism. [36]
In October 2022,when Caulfield was appointed Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Women,the appointment was criticised by the British Pregnancy Advisory Service because she had voted against buffer zones outside abortion clinics and against legalising abortion in Northern Ireland. She has said that protesters outside abortion clinics might be there in order "to comfort" those entering the clinic. [37] [38]
Caulfield lives with her husband Steve Bell,an ex-serviceman and former builder,who works as her office manager. He was a Brighton and Hove City Councillor until his defeat in 2023, [39] as well as being active in the voluntary party,and was President (2015–16) of the Conservative National Convention,the organizing body of the voluntary party. [40] She is also a member of the Conservative Christian Fellowship. [41] [42]
Caulfield is an urban shepherdess,part of an environmental project which uses sheep and cattle to graze public open spaces. [43] She previously held a non-executive director position on the board of the housing charity BHT Sussex. [43] [44] She supports Arsenal [45] and Lewes football clubs,and is a shareholder of the latter. [46]
A practising Roman Catholic, [41] [47] Caulfield supports lowering the current abortion time limit. [48] [49] She reports that (at some point prior to July 2022) she had suffered a stroke. [50]
Sir Michael Louis David Fabricant is a British politician. A member of the Conservative Party, he has served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Lichfield in Staffordshire, formerly Mid Staffordshire, since 1992.
Anne Frances Milton is a former British politician and lobbyist who served as Minister of State for Skills and Apprenticeships from 2017 to 2019. She was Member of Parliament (MP) for Guildford from 2005 to 2019. Elected as a Conservative, she had the whip removed in September 2019 and subsequently sat as an independent politician.
Nadine Vanessa Dorries is a British author and a former politician who served as Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport from 2021 to 2022. She was Member of Parliament (MP) for Mid Bedfordshire from 2005 to 2023 for the Conservative Party.
Chloe Rebecca Smith is a British Conservative Party politician who has served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Norwich North since 2009. She previously served as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions from September to October 2022 and Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology from April to July 2023.
Anne Marie Morris is a British politician and former lawyer. She has been Member of Parliament (MP) for Newton Abbot since 2010. She was elected as a Conservative, though the party whip has twice been withdrawn from her, once from July to December 2017 and again from January to May 2022.
Dame Jacqueline Doyle-Price is a British Conservative Party politician and former civil servant. She was first elected as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Thurrock in the 2010 general election.
Fiona Claire Bruce is a British Conservative Party politician who was elected the Member of Parliament (MP) for Congleton in the 2010 general election.
Tracey Elizabeth Anne Crouch is a British politician who has served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Chatham and Aylesford since 2010. A member of the Conservative Party, she gained the seat from Labour's Jonathan Shaw. Crouch was appointed as Minister for Sport, Civil Society and Loneliness in 2017, but resigned in 2018 due to a delay over the introduction of reduced limits on the stakes of fixed odds betting terminals.
Angela Rayner is a British politician serving as Deputy Leader of the Labour Party since 2020 and Shadow Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Shadow Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities since 2023. Rayner has been Member of Parliament (MP) for Ashton-under-Lyne since 2015. She ideologically identifies as a socialist and as being part of Labour's soft left.
Helen Olivia Bicknell Whately is a British politician serving as Minister of State for Social Care since October 2022, and previously from 2020 to 2021. She also served as Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury from 2021 to 2022. A member of the Conservative Party, she has been Member of Parliament (MP) for Faversham and Mid Kent since 2015.
Lisa Cameron is a Scottish politician and former consultant clinical psychologist who has served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow since winning the seat at the 2015 general election. First elected for the Scottish National Party (SNP), she was re-elected for that party in 2017 and 2019, before she crossed the floor to the Scottish Conservatives in October 2023.
Dame Andrea Marie Jenkyns is a British politician serving as Deputy Chairwoman of the European Research Group (ERG) since 2019.
Catherine Jane Smith is a British politician who has served as Member of Parliament (MP) for Lancaster and Fleetwood since 2015. A member of the Labour Party, she was a member of the shadow cabinets led by Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer from 2016 to 2021 as Shadow Secretary of State, previously Shadow Minister, for Young People and Democracy.
Dame Amanda Anne Milling is a British politician serving as Member of Parliament (MP) for Cannock Chase since the 2015 general election. She served as Minister without Portfolio in the UK cabinet and, alongside Ben Elliot, as Co-Chairman of the Conservative Party from February 2020 to September 2021. She also served as Minister of State for Asia and the Middle East from September 2021 to September 2022. She previously worked in market research.
Heidi Suzanne Allen is a British businesswoman and former politician who served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for South Cambridgeshire from 2015 to 2019. Initially elected as a Conservative, she resigned from the party in February 2019, joining and later serving as leader of Change UK. She resigned from Change UK in June of the same year, and joined the Liberal Democrats in October 2019. She announced on 29 October of that year that she would not stand for re-election at the next general election.
Lloyd Cameron Russell-Moyle is a British Labour and Co-operative Party politician who was elected as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Brighton Kemptown in the 2017 general election. He is a member of the left-wing Socialist Campaign Group parliamentary caucus.
Sarah Mei Li Owen is a British politician and trade unionist serving as Member of Parliament (MP) for Luton North since 2019. A member of the Labour Party, Owen is the first MP of South East Asian descent and the first female MP of Chinese descent.
Dehenna Sheridan Davison is a British Conservative Party politician and former broadcaster. She has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Bishop Auckland since the 2019 general election. She served as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Levelling Up between September 2022 and September 2023.
Richard John Holden is a British politician who has been Chairman of the Conservative Party and Minister without Portfolio since November 2023. He has served as Member of Parliament (MP) for North West Durham since the 2019 general election. He is the first Conservative MP in the constituency's history. Holden served as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Roads and Local Transport from October 2022 to November 2023.
In September and October 2022, the Conservative Party government led by newly appointed prime minister Liz Truss faced a credibility crisis. It was caused by the September 2022 mini-budget and a disorganised vote in the House of Commons over a parliamentary vote to ban fracking, ultimately resulting in the loss of support of Conservative members of parliament (MPs).