Oliver Letwin

Sir Oliver Letwin (born 19 May 1956) is a British politician, Member of Parliament (MP) for West Dorset from 1997 to 2019.

Letwin, who was born 19 May 1956 in London, is the son of William Letwin (14 December 1922 – 20 February 2013), emeritus professor at the London School of Economics, and the conservative academic Shirley Robin Letwin.

His parents were "Jewish-American intellectuals from Chicago whose parents had fled persecution in Kiev."

He was educated at The Hall School, Hampstead and at Eton College.

He then went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he received a double first in history.

From 1980 to 1981, Letwin was a visiting fellow (a Procter Fellow) of Princeton University, then a research fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge, from 1981 until 1982.

His thesis, Emotion and Emotions, earned a PhD awarded by the Cambridge Philosophy Faculty in 1982.

He is also a graduate of the London Business School.

He was a member of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's Policy Unit from 1983 to 1986.

According to official government documents from 1985, released in December 2014 under the thirty-year rule, Letwin recommended that the Prime Minister "use Scotland as a trail-blazer for the pure residence charge", i.e. the controversial Community Charge or "Poll tax", having trialled it there first, and to implement it nationwide should "the exemplifications prove ... it is feasible."

Another 1985 internal memo released in December 2015 showed Letwin's response to the Broadwater Farm riot, which blamed the violence on the "bad moral attitudes" of the predominantly Afro-Caribbean rioters, claiming that "lower-class, unemployed white people lived for years without a breakdown of public order on anything like the present scale".

It also criticised some of the schemes proposed to address inner-city problems, suggesting David Young's proposed scheme to support black entrepreneurs would flounder because the money would be spent on the "disco and drug trade".

Letwin later apologised, saying that parts of the memo had been "both badly worded and wrong."

Letwin stood unsuccessfully against Diane Abbott in Hackney North and Stoke Newington at the 1987 election, and against Glenda Jackson for the Hampstead and Highgate seat at the 1992 election.

Letwin co-authored Britain's biggest enterprise: ideas for radical reform of the NHS, a 1988 Centre for Policy Studies pamphlet written with John Redwood which advocated a closer relationship between the National Health Service and the private sector.

Letwin won the historically safe Conservative seat of West Dorset at the 1997 general election, achieving a majority of 1,840 votes over the next candidate.

He had previously been an official Opposition spokesman on Constitutional Affairs, Scotland and Wales from 1998, and was promoted to Shadow Financial Secretary to the Treasury in 1999.

As Leader of the Opposition and Leader of the Conservative Party William Hague appointed Letwin as a member of his Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury in September 2000.

He supported Michael Portillo and Michael Howard in their consecutive tenures as Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer.

During the campaign for the 2001 general election, Letwin expressed an aspiration to curtail future public spending by £20 billion per annum relative to the plans of the Labour government.

When this proposal came under attack as regressive, Letwin found few of his colleagues to defend it, and he adopted a low profile for the remainder of the campaign.

He went into hiding during the 2001 election.

At this election, his majority in his West Dorset constituency was cut to 1,414 votes.

In September 2001, he was appointed Shadow Home Secretary by the new Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith.

In this role, he attracted plaudits for his advocacy of a "neighbourly society", which manifested itself in calls for street by street neighbourhood policing, modelled on the philosophy of the police in New York.

He was also largely credited with forcing the then Home Secretary to withdraw his proposal in 2001 to introduce an offence of incitement to religious hatred.

He successfully argued that such an offence would be impossible to define, so there would be little chance of prosecution.

He also argued that Muslims would feel persecuted by such a law.

In late 2003, Michael Howard appointed Letwin as his successor as Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer.

As Shadow Chancellor he focused on reducing waste in the public sector.

Previously he had been the Minister of State for Government Policy from 2010.

This is regarded as providing a theoretical justification for NHS reforms carried out by subsequent governments, particularly the Health and Social Care Act 2012.

He was Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster from 2014 to 2016.

Following the 2015 general election Letwin was given overall responsibility for the Cabinet Office and became a full member of the Cabinet in the Conservative government.

Letwin was elected as a member of the Conservative Party, but sat as an independent after having the whip removed in September 2019.

He was Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer under Michael Howard and Shadow Home Secretary under Iain Duncan Smith.

During the Second May ministry in 2019, Letwin rebelled against leading Eurosceptics within the Conservative Party by tabling a cross-party motion to hold "indicative votes", allowing MPs to vote on several Brexit options in order to establish whether any could command a majority in the House of Commons; it transpired that none of them could.

Letwin sought to extend Article 50 through passing the Cooper–Letwin Act.

In August 2019 he announced that he would stand down at the next election.

On 3 September 2019, he lost the Conservative party whip and sat as an independent MP after that.