John Whittingdale

He is the only son of John Whittingdale FRCS (1894–1974) and Margaret Esme Scott (1920–), née Napier, who had previously married firstly, in 1942 (div. 1946), Capt. Ephraim Stewart Cook Spence, of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, and secondly, in 1946, her cousin, Major Alexander Napier (d. 1954), of the Indian Army.

Via his mother Whittingdale is in distant remainder to the lordship of Napier.

Whittingdale was privately educated at both Sandroyd School and Winchester College, followed by University College London (UCL) where he was Chairman of UCL Conservative Society.

He was Vice-Chairman of the 1922 Committee.

Sir John Flasby Lawrance Whittingdale (born 16 October 1959) is a British politician serving as Member of Parliament (MP) for Maldon (and its predecessors) since 1992.

Whittingdale was born on 16 October 1959, in Sherborne, Dorset.

He graduated with a 2:2 in Economics in 1982.

From 1982 to 1984, Whittingdale was head of the political section of the Conservative Research Department.

He then served as Special Adviser to three successive Secretaries of State for Trade and Industry, Norman Tebbit (1984–1985); Leon Brittan (1985–1986), and Paul Channon (1986–1987).

He worked on international privatisation at NM Rothschild in 1987 and in January 1988, became Political Secretary to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Whittingdale has been an MP since the 1992 general election, for a series of constituencies centred on the town of Maldon, Essex.

Upon her resignation Whittingdale was appointed Order of the British Empire and continued to serve as her Political Secretary until being elected to Parliament in 1992.

Whittingdale entered the House of Commons in 1992 as the MP for South Colchester and Maldon.

He was appointed Parliamentary Private Secretary to Eric Forth, Minister of State for Education and Employment, but resigned, as is customary, after voting against the Government for an amendment that would have allowed media publishers with more than a 20% share of the national press market to buy an ITV company.

He was later Shadow Culture Secretary from 2004 until the reshuffle following the general election in 2005, at which he was returned as MP for Maldon and Chelmsford East.

He was a member of the Executive of Conservative Way Forward (2005–2010) and the Conservative Party Board (2006–2010).

Whittingdale served as Chairman of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee from 2005 to 2015.

In 2005, he was appointed to the Executive of Conservative Way Forward, a Thatcherite pressure group within the Conservative Party.

He is a council member of The Freedom Association and of the European Foundation.

On 14 July 2005 he became the chairman of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee.

In 2008, he was elected as a parliamentary member to the Board of the Conservative Party and Vice Chairman of the Conservative Parliamentary 1922 Committee.

In this role he led the committee's 2009/2010 investigation into libel and privacy issues, including the News International phone hacking scandal after The Guardian first revealed the extent of the practice at the News of the World.

He was alleged to have warned members of the committee to consider not compelling former News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks to testify due to the potential risk that their personal lives would be investigated in revenge, but has strongly denied the accusation.

In 2011, he was Chairman of the Football Governance Inquiry.

In April 2011 he called for a public inquiry into phone hacking at the News of the World and to why a series of investigations by Scotland Yard failed to link any News International employees to phone hacking other than the News of the World's former royal editor, Clive Goodman.

Whittingdale said: "There are some very big questions; what I find [most] worrying is the apparent unwillingness of the police, who had the evidence and chose to do nothing with it. That's something that needs to be looked into."

With just one out of three of News International's senior executives agreeing to appear before the committee session on 19 July, Whittingdale took the rarely used step of issuing a summons to compel the Murdochs to attend.

Whittingdale said Select Committees had taken such steps against individuals in the past and they had complied and continued "I hope very much that the Murdochs will respond similarly."

In 2012, he was Chairman of the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Privacy and Injunctions.

he was Vice Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Intellectual Property Group.

Whittingdale was among the 175 MPs who voted against the Same-sex Marriage Bill in 2013.

In 2014, Whittingdale along with six other Conservative MPs voted against the Equal Pay (Transparency) Bill which would require all companies with more than 250 employees to declare the gap in pay between the average male and average female salaries.

A member of the Conservative Party, he served as Culture Secretary from 2015 to 2016.

Whittingdale was most recently Minister of State for Media, Tourism and Creative Industries and Minister of State for Data and Digital Infrastructure from May to December 2023, during the maternity leave of Julia Lopez.

He was appointed Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport by Prime Minister David Cameron in May 2015.

He was one of the six Cabinet ministers to come out in favour of Brexit during the 2016 EU referendum and was afterwards a supporter of the Eurosceptic campaign Leave Means Leave.

He was dismissed in July 2016 by incoming-Prime Minister Theresa May.

He was in favour of Brexit during the 2016 EU membership referendum.

Following the referendum, which resulted in a narrow majority in favour of Brexit, he was one of several Conservative MPs who signed a letter to PM Theresa May urging that the UK withdraw from both the European single market and the Customs Union.

After the referendum, Whittingdale was a supporter of the Eurosceptic campaign Leave Means Leave.