Jesse Norman

Alexander Jesse Norman (born 23 June 1962) is a British Conservative Party politician, who has been Member of Parliament for the Hereford and South Herefordshire Constituency since the 2010 general election.

He served as a Minister in the Treasury, Foreign Office, Cabinet Office, Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, and the Department for Transport.

Among his MInisterial roles he served as Paymaster General and Financial Secretary to the Treasury.

From 1989 to 1991, Norman ran a charitable project donating new medical textbooks and journals and business and other books and building independent professional networks in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Ukraine.

He was for many years a trustee of The Roundhouse, a North London arts venue and charity founded by his father, Sir Torquil Norman.

He has also served on the boards of the Hay Festival, the Kindle Centre in Hereford and the Friends of St Mary's church, Ross-on-Wye.

Norman worked for Barclays from 1991 to 1997.

He was a Senior Fellow at Policy Exchange and writes regularly for the national press.

His books include The Achievement of Michael Oakeshott (ed.) (1992), Breaking the Habits of a Lifetime (1992) and After Euclid (2006); The Big Society: The Anatomy of the New Politics (2010), published by University of Buckingham Press.

Norman was a director at Barclays before leaving the City in 1997 to research and teach at University College London.

Prior to that he ran an educational charity in Eastern Europe during and after the Communist era.

Norman pursued further studies at University College London, where he was appointed an Honorary Research Fellow in philosophy, taking an Master of Philosophy (MPhil) in 1999 and a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in 2003.

His doctoral thesis was titled "Visual reasoning in Euclid's geometry: an epistemology of diagrams".

He also lectured in philosophy at University College London and Birkbeck, University of London.

His book Compassionate Conservatism (2006), co-written with Janan Ganesh, has been described as "the guidebook to Cameronism" by The Sunday Times.

Its successor, Compassionate Economics, was favourably reviewed by Daniel Hannan.

His other policy publications include "Living for the City" (2006) and "From Here to Fraternity" (2007).

At the 2006 local elections in Camden, Norman was one of the three Conservative candidates for Camden Town with Primrose Hill ward.

However, he was unsuccessful, in what was a close contest between the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties.

In 2007, Norman founded the Conservative Co-operative Movement.

Norman is the son of Sir Torquil Norman and his wife Lady Elizabeth Montagu (daughter of the 10th Earl of Sandwich), the paternal grandson of Air Commodore Sir Nigel Norman, 2nd Bt, CBE, and the great-grandson of Sir Henry Norman, 1st Bt. He and his sons are therefore in remainder to the Norman baronetcy.

Norman was educated at Eton College and Merton College, Oxford, graduating with a Second in Classics.

Norman was first elected as the Conservative MP for the newly created seat of Hereford and South Herefordshire at the 2010 general election, having been selected as his party's candidate by open primary in December 2006.

Norman won the new seat with a 5.1% majority over the Liberal Democrats, who had held the predecessor constituency.

He was a member of the Treasury Select Committee from July 2010 to March 2015, is Chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Employee Ownership, founder of the PFI Rebate Campaign and founding member of the Campaign for an Effective Second Chamber which campaigns for the House of Lords to be appointed rather than elected.

On 10 July 2012, Norman was identified as a ringleader of the rebellion over the House of Lords Reform package presented to the House of Commons.

On the vote being overturned, Government Whips suggested to David Cameron that before the debate "Norman had spread a rumour to rally rebels" the Prime Minister was in reality unenthusiastic about the reforms.

Immediately after the intensive debate, culminating in a narrow Government defeat by Labour's rejection of the Lords Election proposals as tabled, Cameron is reported to have confronted Norman in the Members' Lobby telling him that such "conduct [misrepresenting Cameron to rally Lords Reform dissenters] was 'not honourable'"; Norman then withdrew in the direction of the Members' Bar but allegedly was immediately stopped and escorted from the Palace of Westminster by four Whips.

A spokesman denied that there had been a heated argument, saying that Cameron had merely told Norman he had misrepresented his views.

On 11 July 2012, Ed Miliband, the then leader of the Labour Party, described the scene involving Cameron and Norman as "fisticuffs in the Lobby" at Prime Minister's Questions.

Accounts of the severity of Cameron's words or gestures used vary and The Daily Telegraph wrote that cynics say this "public argument may have been staged" to try to prove to Liberal Democrats that Cameron shared their vision of Lords Reform.

Norman rebutted much of this narrative in an article for The Spectator.

His biography of Edmund Burke was long-listed for the 2013 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, and was described as "A must-read for anyone interested in politics and history" by the Sunday Telegraph.

In 2013, Norman said that so many Old Etonians were in government positions because of Eton's "ethos" of public service that "other schools don't imbue the same commitment".

Later on Twitter, Norman said his comments were "defending one institution, not attacking others".

He was elected as a visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford in 2016-17, and a Two-Year Fellow in 2022.

Norman's research interests include Edmund Burke and Adam Smith.

His book Adam Smith: What He Thought, and Why It Matters (2018), won the Parliamentary non-fiction book award in 2018.

, and was described as "superb" in the Financial Times.

His first novel, The Winding Stair, about the rivalry between Francis Bacon and Edward Coke, was published in June 2023.