Antoinette Sandbach

She was also an elected executive member of the 1922 Committee of backbench Conservative MPs from 2015 to 2019.

One of her main policy interests was improving services for those who suffer the loss of a baby.

Her mother, Annie Marie Antoinette of the Dutch Van Lanschot family, married Ian Mackeson-Sandbach in 1967.

Antoinette Sandbach was educated at Haileybury and Imperial Service College and subsequently at the University of Nottingham, where she studied law.

She practised as a criminal barrister in London for 13 years, latterly at 9 Bedford Row chambers.

She was twice elected to the Bar Council in that time.

She then ran the family farming business, Hafodunos Farms Ltd, at Llangernyw in the Elwy valley of North Wales from where she embarked on a political career.

Antoinette Geraldine Mackeson-Sandbach (born 15 February 1969), known as Antoinette Sandbach, is a barrister, farm manager and politician who was elected as a North Wales region Member of the Welsh Assembly at the May 2011 election, and subsequently elected Member of Parliament for Eddisbury in Cheshire at the 2015 general election.

In the 2007 Welsh Assembly election, Sandbach contested the Labour-held constituency of Delyn.

She lost, but achieved a swing of 3.7% from Labour to Conservative and Labour narrowly held the seat by just 511 votes.

Sandbach contested the Delyn parliamentary constituency in the 2010 general election, but lost again, though achieving a larger swing of 6.7% from Labour to Conservative.

Following the death of Brynle Williams in 2011, she became a Conservative Regional Assembly Member for North Wales.

During her time in the Assembly she was appointed Shadow Rural Affairs Minister.

In 2014, she was appointed Shadow Minister for the Environment.

Sandbach also sat on the Assembly's Environment and Sustainability Committee.

In March 2015, Sandbach was selected as the Conservative Party candidate for the Conservative-held seat of Eddisbury in Cheshire, England.

She held the safe Conservative seat with a majority of nearly 13,000, and promptly resigned from the Welsh Assembly, to be succeeded by Janet Haworth.

Following a debate in the House of Commons in November 2015, she helped set up the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Baby Loss, of which she was appointed co-chair.

The group worked with all the major child loss charities to develop the national bereavement care pathway which has since been adopted by 108 NHS trusts in England.

Ms Sandbach secured a £1.5 million grant for a new counselling centre at Alder Hey Childrens hospital in Liverpool, the hospital which provided support for her after the loss of her son

Sandbach has been a strong advocate for improving representation of women in the workforce, women's rights and female representation in Parliament.

In some of her first appearances in the House she raised the issue of encouraging more girls to study Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths subjects in order for them to access those highly paid, highly skilled jobs and reduce the gap between men and women in the workplace.

On entering the House she was elected to the Welsh Affairs Select Committee and the Energy and Climate Change Select Committee, which she sat on until it was disbanded in October 2016.

Sandbach supported the United Kingdom remaining within the European Union (EU) in the 2016 EU membership referendum.

In the referendum, the UK voted to leave the EU (Brexit).

In March 2017, she was elected on to the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Select Committee and was subsequently re-elected to the Committee after the 2017 General Election.

Sandbach was appointed to the joint committee examining the failure of Carillion and was highly critical of the lack of oversight by the auditors and directors of the company.

She retained the Eddisbury seat at the 2017 United Kingdom general election, with a majority of 11,942.

Sandbach was one of 11 Conservative MPs to rebel against then Prime Minister Theresa May's government in voting for an amendment to the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 on 13 December 2017, which guaranteed MPs a vote on the final Brexit deal agreed with the European Union.

She voted for May's withdrawal agreement on all three opportunities.

Elected as a Conservative, Sandbach had the Conservative whip removed on 3 September 2019 and later lost a vote of no confidence by the Eddisbury Conservative Association.

Following deselection as a Conservative, Sandbach chose to become a Liberal Democrat.

She lost her seat to her former party in the 2019 general election.

Born in Hammersmith, West London, Sandbach is the eldest of four sisters.

Sandbach endorsed Rory Stewart during the 2019 Conservative leadership election.

She was one of 21 Conservative MPs who had their whip withdrawn on 3 September after rebelling against the government by voting for opposition MPs to control the parliamentary process to try to prevent a no-deal Brexit, after which she sat as an Independent.

On 12 September, she declared her support for a referendum on the Brexit withdrawal agreement.

Ms Sandbach was one of a number of female MPs, including Nicky Morgan MP and Anna Soubry MP who went public about the increasing threats received by female MPs featuring in the ITV documentary "Exposed" filmed in 2019

On 15 October 2019.

the members of the Eddisbury Conservative Association passed a motion of no confidence in her.