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Backbencher of the Year

Rt Hon David Davis MP

David Davis was the unanimous choice of the jury for Backbencher of the Year. The panel commended his courageous decision to resign as Conservative Shadow Home Minister and as an MP in order to provoke a wider debate concerning what he saw as the erosion of civil liberties in the UK, after the introduction of a 42-day pre-charge detention period. In the resulting by-election he successfully made this a campaigning issue and was re-elected the following month. As a backbencher he has continued to campaign for civil liberties, most recently raising the case of Rangzieb Ahmed, a British resident tortured in Pakistan and Morocco with the alleged complicity of British intelligence.

In the jury’s view, David Davis has used the backbenches to telling effect, bringing the issues of liberty and freedom to the fore of public debate. He has made both his own party and the Government think again about the loss of personal freedoms and demonstrated that parliament does indeed matter.

Westminster and the political classes were shocked by David Davis’s decision in June 2008 to resign both his post as shadow home secretary and his seat in parliament in protest at what he called the ‘slow strangulation of fundamental British freedoms’. Perhaps they should not have been: Mr Davis has always held personal principles in much higher esteem than party politics. He comes from an activist background: his grandfather was a communist who in the 1930s joined the Jarrow hunger march. Mr Davis was the son of a single mother who lived on council estate, while his stepfather was a shop steward at Battersea power station. He attended Bec Grammar School, Tooting, then worked as an insurance clerk while raising money to continue his education. At the same time he enrolled in the Territorial Army where he was a member of 21 SAS Regiment.

After studying molecular science and computer science at the University of Warwick Mr Davis went on to gain an MSc at London Business School, where he became National Chairman of the Federation of Conservative Students. He started work for Tate & Lyle after graduating in 1974, rising to become strategic planning director ten years later. He was a member of the CBI’s financial policy committee from 1977 to 1979. In 1984-5 he completed the Advanced Management Programme at Harvard Business School.

In 1987 Mr Davis stood successfully for the parliamentary seat of Boothferry. He became parliamentary private secretary to Francis Maude, under-secretary at the Department of Trade and Industry, in 1989, then served as a whip from 1990 to 1993. He was parliamentary secretary at the Office of Public Service and Science from 1993 to 1994, and was minister of state for Europe from 1994 until the general election of 1997. At that election he contested and won the seat of Haltemprice and Howden.

After Labour came to power, Mr Davis served for four years as chairman of the House of Commons Public Accounts committee. He became Chairman of the Conservative Party in September 2001, and the following year joined the Conservative front bench shadowing John Prescott’s role at the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. He was appointed Shadow Home Secretary in November 2003, a post he continued to hold until his resignation in 2008. Following the Conservatives’ 2005 election defeat, Mr Davis stood for the leadership of the party and was for a time the front runner, before eventually losing with good grace to David Cameron.