Crispin Blunt

Blunt was born in Germany, one of three sons of English parents Adrienne (née Richardson) and Major-General Peter Blunt (1923–2003).

Crispin Jeremy Rupert Blunt (born 15 July 1960) is a British politician who has served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Reigate since 1997.

During the 1980s, he was stationed in Cyprus, Germany, and Britain, serving as a Troop Leader, Regimental Operations Officer and Armoured Reconnaissance Squadron Commander.

He was educated at Wellington College, and the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, where he won the Queen's Medal, gaining a regular commission, before reading politics at University College, Durham between 1981 and 1984, where he was elected president of the Durham Union Society in 1983 and graduated with a 2:1 degree.

Blunt was commissioned as an officer into the 13th/18th Royal Hussars (Queen Mary's Own) and served until 1990.

He resigned his commission as a captain in 1990.

In 1991, he gained an MBA degree at the Cranfield School of Management.

From 1991 to 1992, Blunt was a representative of the Forum of Private Business.

Blunt contested his first Parliamentary seat at the 1992 general election, as the Conservative candidate in West Bromwich East.

In 1993, he was appointed a special adviser to Malcolm Rifkind, the Secretary of State for Defence, and worked in the same capacity when Rifkind became Foreign Secretary from 1995 to 1997.

Blunt first entered the House of Commons at the 1997 general election, when he replaced the then MP Sir George Gardiner, who had been deselected by the Constituency Conservative Association Executive Council and joined the Referendum Party.

At the 1997 general election, Blunt was elected to Parliament as Member for Reigate in Surrey, succeeding the long-serving strongly Eurosceptic MP Sir George Gardiner, who had been deselected by the local Conservative Party.

Blunt was subsequently appointed to the House of Commons Defence Select Committee.

In July 1997, he was elected as Secretary of the Conservative Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs Committee and the Conservative Middle East Council.

In May 2000, he joined the House of Commons Environment, Transport and Regional Affairs Select Committee and in July 2003 he was elected Chairman of the Conservative Middle East Council, a position he still occupies.

The new Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith appointed Blunt to the Opposition front bench as Shadow Minister for Northern Ireland in September 2001.

In July 2002, he was appointed as deputy to Tim Yeo, Shadow Secretary of State for Trade and Industry.

On 1 May 2003 he resigned his position on the front bench, saying that Duncan Smith was a "handicap" to the Conservatives.

He decided to resign at that time in the expectation that the Conservative Party would make over 500 gains in the 2003 local government elections, but in the belief that these would be achieved in spite of, rather than because of, Duncan Smith's leadership.

Blunt timed his resignation so that it became public after the polls closed but before the results were declared.

The following day he was unanimously reselected by his local party as their prospective parliamentary candidate, but in May 2003, he failed to persuade 25 of his fellow Conservative MPs to call for a vote of confidence.

He accepted that no challenge for the party leadership would be immediately forthcoming and returned to the back benches.

In November 2003, Michael Howard replaced Duncan Smith after a vote of no confidence.

Blunt became a party whip under Howard, but on 9 June 2005, he took a leave of absence from that role to support the expected leadership bid of Malcolm Rifkind.

However, when Rifkind was knocked out of the party leadership contest, Blunt returned to the Whips' office and wrote to all party members in his constituency asking them to rank the remaining contenders in order of preference so he could best represent his constituents.

Blunt is a former joint chair of the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding.

Formerly a member of the Conservative Party, he was the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Prisons and Youth Justice within the Ministry of Justice from 2010 to 2012 and Chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee from 2015 until 2017.

When the Conservative and Liberal Democrat Coalition formed a government in 2010, Blunt was appointed as the first Minister of State for Prisons at the Ministry of Justice.

His responsibilities included prisons and probation, youth justice, criminal law and sentencing policy, and criminal justice.

He is also a member of the All-Party Parliamentary Humanist Group.

In 2013, Blunt was deselected by the Constituency Executive Council, with speculation that this was due to his public announcement that he was gay.

In November 2013, Blunt was re-selected to stand in the 2015 general election for the Conservative Party, having undergone a postal ballot of constituency members.

The postal ballot was triggered when the executive council came to a vote with a majority decision not to endorse his candidacy.

Having won the postal ballot Blunt called for the executive council to consider their position.

The lack of support from a majority of the executive council was partly attributed to the allegedly homophobic views of some older Conservative voters in the area.

Roger Newstead, the chairman of the Reigate South and Earlswood Branch, wrote a private letter to Ben Mearns, who had resigned from the branch committee after protesting the decision to force a postal ballot.

However, after a ballot of party members in Reigate, the decision was overturned by a margin of 5–1 and Blunt was reselected as the Conservative candidate for the 2015 general election.

On 1 May 2022, he announced he would be standing down at the next general election.

In October 2023, he was arrested on suspicion of rape and possession of controlled substances, and released on conditional bail.

He subsequently had the Conservative Party whip removed, continuing to sit as an independent MP.