LAST UPDATE | 5 Jul
EIGHT CONSERVATIVE CABINET ministers have so far lost their seats in the UK general election, beating the previous record of seven ministerial defeats in 1997.
A Tory wipeout in the election had been predicted for some time, with opinion polls consistently showing Labour would take a huge majority of seats.
But the polls couldn’t say who exactly would be booted out by the British public – one of the biggest questions of last night.
Now we know that several senior Tories have lost their seats, including a former Prime Minister. There are still some results to be finalised, but here are some of those who are MPs no more.
Liz Truss, Britain’s shortest-ever serving Prime Minister whose 49-day reign in 2022 was infamously outlasted by the shelf life of a lettuce, was among the big Conservative names who missed out.
She lost her seat her seat in South West Norfolk to Labour’s Terry Jermy by just 630 votes at around 7 o’clock this morning.
The Labour MP overturned a 26,195 majority secured by Truss in 2019 – a notional 27.85% swing from Conservative to Labour – and the result means that Rishi Sunak is now the only Prime Minister from the last 14 years whose seat remains Conservative.
Initially a Remain supporter, Truss became the darling of the Brexit-backing Conservative right wing and won the Tory leadership contest in September 2022.
Her time in Downing Street, which spanned the death of Queen Elizabeth II, ended in disaster after a damaging mini budget that included unfunded tax cutting measures, which triggered mass market turmoil.
Before her electoral defeat was announced this morning, candidates in South West Norfolk were left waiting on stage for several minutes as they waited for Truss to appear.
The crowd awkwardly slow-clapped for several minutes as they waited for the former Prime Minister to show up, and when she did, she was notably not wearing a Conservative party rosette and left without making a speech.
Asked later this morning why she felt she had missed out, Truss told the BBC: “I think the issue we faced as Conservatives is we haven’t delivered sufficiently on the policies people want.”
Jacob Rees-Mogg, who exemplified the arch-Brexiteer wing of the Conservatives around the time that Britain was leaving the European Union, was another of those who lost his seat to a Labour candidate.
The 55-year-old has served as Leader of the House of Commons and held a number of other cabinet posts since the 2019 election – though left after the implosion of Liz Truss premiership in 2022.
He held his seat in North East Somerset since 2010 and achieved a majority of 14,729 in 2019, but was overtaken by Labour’s Dan Norris – who held the seat before 2010 – by more than 5,000 votes.
Best known for his posh accent and his strident anti-EU views, Rees-Mogg worked in finance before becoming an MP and has an estimated wealth of more than £100 million.
He lives in a 17th century manor house in with his wife and their six children, and said in a 2017 interview with Nigel Farage (who was then a presenter with the radio station LBC) that he had never changed a nappy.
His political career has not been without controversy either.
In September 2019, he was criticised after being photographed lounging on the front bench of the House of Commons during a Brexit debate.
Weeks later, he also apologised for saying that leaving the Grenfell building in London – where 72 people died in a fire in 2017 – would have been the “common sense” thing to do.
And in April 2022, it emerged that he left notes on empty desks for civil servants which read “sorry you were out when I visited”, as he wanted them to stop working from home.
Outgoing chair of the Chair of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee Robert Buckland lost his seat in his constituency of Swindon South.
His loss to Labour’s Heidi Alexander was the first of many instances of Conservative seats being overturned last night.
Buckland served as an MP from 2010 and held positions in government including Secretary of State for Wales and justice secretary under Boris Johnson – though he reportedly turned down the role of Northern Ireland secretary in Liz Truss’ short-lived government.
A week after his appointment as justice secretary, Buckland controversially told The Times newspaper that suspects accused of serious crimes should be granted anonymity if their reputation was threatened.
“Let’s say you are a reputable local business person who is accused of fraud. Your good name is going to be really undermined by this mere accusation. That might be a meritorious case for anonymity,” he told the newspaper.
Like Rees-Mogg, he returned to the Tory backbench upon the appointment of Rishi Sunak as Truss’ successor.
Former transport minister Grant Shapps lost his seat in his constituency of Welwyn Hatfield to Labour candidate Andrew Lewin.
He had been an MP since his initial election in 2005 and had pointed to his pride in a “record of real results” in the constituency.
Shapps was perhaps best known over the past few years for overseeing the UK’s transport department during the Covid-19 pandemic – and the ensuing airport chaos as travel resumed, when he faced criticism for failing to engage with unions over industrial action.
He has held a number of other cabinet posts over his time in government, and has served as Secretary of State for Defence since August 2023.
Shapps launched a short-lived Tory leadership bid in 2022, but became a major backer of Rishi Sunak in the contest that saw Liz Truss briefly appointed as Prime Minister.
Shapps is said to have recorded Tory colleagues’ doubts about Truss in a running spreadsheet, wielded on a pricey foldable smartphone.
He had been politically ambitious from a young age and had a rapid rise in the Tory ranks, which stalled in 2015 when he was accused of anonymously editing his own entry and those of other Conservative politicians on Wikipedia (though the company said it could find no evidence of this).
Months before that scandal, Shapps was accused of having breached the codes of conduct for ministers and MPs when it was revealed he held a second job after entering parliament.
He was exposed as having continued working as a marketer of get-rich-quick schemes under the pseudonym Michael Green.
An interesting bit of trivia is that Mick Jones – a founder member of The Clash – is Shapps’ cousin, while Shapps’ brother Andre also played keyboard with Jones’ post-punk outfit Big Audio Dynamite.
Northern Ireland Office minister Steve Baker, formerly an outspoken member of the Brexiteer European Research Group, lost his seat in Wycombe to Labour’s Emma Reynolds.
He was a prominent Brexiteer and had held the seat since 2010 and won by around 2,200 votes in 2019.
This time round, Labour won by over 4,500 votes and Baker suffered the ignominy of being informed live on air by the BBC last night that he had less than a 1% chance of winning.
Last year, after he was unexpectedly pictured with a beard and wearing an earring, Baker revealed that the stress of Brexit had caused him significant mental health problems and that he had eventually suffered a breakdown.
Weeks ago he hinted at a leadership run if the Tories lost the election and he retained his seat, but that prospect is now dead.
Baker went viral during the election campaign, after giving BBC presenter Victoria Derbyshire a quick-fire response when asked what he would do if he lost.
“Skydiving, motorcycling, fast catamaran sailing… the wide range of things I’ll do,” he said.
Upon losing, he said: “Thank God I’m a free man.”
ICYM
— Victoria Derbyshire (@vicderbyshire) May 24, 2024
Day the election is called …
NI Minster Steve Baker contemplates losing his seat (majority = 4214)#Newsnight pic.twitter.com/NHrd8LMPc8
Gillian Keegan is another cabinet minister to lose her seat, though her Chichester seat has gone to Liberal Democrats’ Jess Brown-Fuller rather than a Labour candidate.
Keegan has served as Secretary of State for Education since 2022, a job that has also seen her court controversy.
Less than a year into the role, she was fighting a major crisis after ordering more than 100 schools to make closures because of concerns that a crumbling aerated concrete could collapse.
The strain of that erupted in public when she unwittingly vented her frustrations, swearing about a lack of gratitude towards her while others have “sat on their arse and done nothing” while the cameras were still rolling after a broadcast interview with ITV.
“Does anyone ever say, you know what, you’ve done a f****** good job because everyone else has sat on their arse and done nothing?”, she said in front of the journalist and his watchful cameras. “No signs of that, no?”
She subsequently apologised for her “choice language” and what she described as an “off-the-cuff remark”.
She said the criticism was about “nobody in particular” and blamed the initial interviewer for “making out (the concrete crisis) was all my fault”.
Education secretary Gillian Keegan is recorded on camera saying others ‘have been sat on their a***s’ on schools Raac crisis and shares frustration about not being thanked for doing ‘a f***ing good job’https://t.co/c02gI4dXiM pic.twitter.com/jWbYTVZl5D
— ITV News Politics (@ITVNewsPolitics) September 4, 2023
Chief Whip Simon Hart lost his seat after 14 years as an MP, with his seat going to Plaid Cymru in Wales, where he was formerly Secretary of State.
Hart was not wearing the blue Conservative rosette when it was announced that he came third in the Caerfyrddin constituency.
He came to Parliament in 2010 with a background in rural affairs as chief executive of the Countryside Alliance and a former master of the South Pembrokeshire Hunt.
Hart quit as Welsh secretary in 2022 as pressure mounted on then prime minister Boris Johnson to resign.
He has since served as chief whip of the House of Commons and Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury since October 2022.
Once seen as a potential Conservative leader – and among the front-runners to replace Sunak should he resign after the Tories’ disastrous result – Penny Mordaunt is no longer in a position to harbour such ambitions after losing her seat in Portsmouth North.
The Leader of the House of Commons was ousted by Labour’s Amanda Martin – who won by just 780 votes – in a seat she’s held since 2010.
Mordaunt has already had two failed bids to become Tory leader, having lost to Liz Truss and then Rishi Sunak in 2022.
A former magician’s assistant, she went viral for carrying two heavy swords at the coronation of King Charles, where as Lord President of the Council, she was responsible for bearing the Sword of State and presenting the Jewelled Sword of Offering to the new king – the first time the duty had been carried out by a woman.
She was also a former Navy reservist, and made the UK’s first female defence secretary in 2019.
During the Brexit campaign, Mordaunt was an ardent Leaver, and during the referendum campaign she faced accusations of untruths after claiming that the UK would not be able to stop Turkey joining the EU.
In 2022, her uncle Henry Mordaunt revealed her family’s extensive Irish Catholic roots and said that she was “the only member of the family, brothers, father, uncles, cousins and others that supported Brexit”.
Thérèse Coffey has joined her fellow party members in another loss to Labour, this time in her constituency of Suffolk Coastal, where Jenny Riddell-Carpenter took the former Deputy Prime Minister’s seat.
She has been an MP since 2010, and has held positions primarily within the department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
Mercer came from a military family and graduated from Sandhurst in 2002, going on to serve around the world.
He was first elected in 2015, having never voted before.
He went on to serve as Minister for Veterans’ Affairs at the Cabinet Office before he dramatically quit the government in protest over the prosecution of British soldiers for Troubles killings.
Earlier this year he faced controversy when he was told by a judge he must hand over names of the people who told him about alleged special forces murders in Afghanistan.
Michael Fabricant was replaced by Labour candidate Dave Robertson in Lichfield.
He has previously held offices including Lord Commissioner of the United Kingdom Treasury. He became an opposition whip following the 2005 general election.
Another who was a victim the trend of Tory seats being snapped up by Labour candidates, Liam Fox lost his seat to Labour’s Sadik Al-Hassan by 637 votes.
Fox was an MP for Somerset North since 1992, and has held cabinet posts including Secretary of State for Defence and Secretary of State for International Trade.
- Contains reporting by Stephen McDermott and Press Association.
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