Priti Patel
Dame Priti Sushil Patel is a British politician who has served as Shadow Foreign Secretary since November 2024, having previously served as Home Secretary from 2019 to 2022. A member of the Conservative Party, she was Secretary of State for International Development from 2016 to 2017. Patel has served as Member of Parliament for Witham since 2010. She is ideologically on the right wing of the Conservative Party; she considers herself to be a Thatcherite and has attracted attention for her socially conservative stances.
Patel was born in London to a Ugandan-Indian family. She was educated at Keele University and the University of Essex. Inspired to get involved in politics by the Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher, she was involved with the Referendum Party before switching allegiance to the Conservatives. She worked for the public relations consultancy firm Weber Shandwick for several years before seeking a political career. After she unsuccessfully contested Nottingham North at the 2005 general election, the new Conservative leader David Cameron recommended Patel for the Party's "A-List" of prospective parliamentary candidates.
She was first elected MP for Witham, a new seat in Essex, at the 2010 general election. As a backbencher, Patel was vice-chair of the Conservative Friends of Israel and co-wrote a number of papers and books, including After the Coalition and Britannia Unchained. Under the coalition government of Cameron, she served as Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury from 2014 to 2015. After the 2015 UK general election, Cameron promoted her to Minister of State for Employment, attending Cabinet.
A longstanding Eurosceptic, Patel was a leading figure in the Vote Leave campaign for Brexit during the 2016 referendum on UK membership of the European Union. Following Cameron's resignation, Patel supported Theresa May's bid to become Conservative leader; May subsequently appointed Patel Secretary of State for International Development. In 2017, Patel was involved in a political scandal involving unauthorised meetings with the Government of Israel which breached the Ministerial Code, causing May to request Patel's resignation as International Development Secretary. She was forced to resign from her Cabinet position as the Secretary of State for International Development after it transpired that she misled the public about her undisclosed meetings with Israeli officials in secrecy.
Under Boris Johnson's premiership, Patel became Home Secretary in July 2019. In this role, she launched a points-based immigration system, an asylum deal with Rwanda to address the English Channel migrant crossings, advocated the passage of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, and approved the extradition of Julian Assange to the United States. She was also found to have breached the Ministerial Code in relation to incidents of bullying. Following the resignation of Johnson and subsequent election of Liz Truss as prime minister, Patel resigned as home secretary on 6 September 2022. After the Conservative Party's loss in the 2024 General Election, Patel stood in the 2024 Conservative Party leadership election but was eliminated in the first MP ballot. Upon Kemi Badenoch's victory in the leadership election, Patel was appointed Shadow Foreign Secretary.
Early life
Born on 29 March 1972 to Sushil and Anjana Patel in Harrow, London, her paternal grandparents were born in Gujarat, India, before emigrating to Uganda, and running a convenience store in Kampala. In the 1960s, her parents emigrated to the UK and settled in Hertfordshire. They established a chain of newsagents throughout London and the South East of England. She was raised in a Hindu household. Her father Sushil was a UKIP candidate for Bushey South seat within Hertsmere District at the 2013 Hertfordshire County Council election.Patel attended a comprehensive school in Watford before going up to read economics at Keele University. She then pursued postgraduate studies in British Government and Politics at the University of Essex. The former Conservative leader and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher became her political heroine: according to Patel, she "had a unique ability to understand what made people tick, households tick and businesses tick. Managing the economy, balancing the books and making decisions—not purchasing things the country couldn't afford". She joined the Conservative Party in 1991, when John Major was Prime Minister.
Early career
After graduating, Patel became an intern at Conservative Central Office, having been selected by Andrew Lansley. From 1995 to 1997, Patel headed the press office of the Referendum Party.In 1997, Patel rejoined the Conservative Party having been offered a post to work for the new leader William Hague in his press office, dealing with media relations in London and the South East of England. In August 2003, the Financial Times published an article citing quotes from Patel and alleging that "racist attitudes" persisted in the Conservative Party, and that "there's a lot of bigotry around". Patel wrote to the FT countering its article, stating that her comments had been misinterpreted to imply that she had been blocked as a party candidate because of her ethnicity.
Lobbying and corporate relations
In 2000, Patel left her job with the Conservative Party to work for Weber Shandwick, a PR consulting firm. According to an investigative article published by The Guardian in May 2015, Patel was one of seven Weber Shandwick employees who worked on British American Tobacco, a major account. The team had been tasked with helping BAT manage the company's public image during the controversy around its Burmese factory being used as source of funds by its military dictatorship and poor payment to factory workers. The crisis eventually ended with BAT pulling out of Myanmar in 2003. The article went on to quote BAT employees who felt that though a majority of Weber Shandwick employees were uncomfortable working with them, Patel's group was fairly relaxed. The article also quoted internal documents specifying that a part of Patel's job was also to lobby MEPs against EU tobacco regulations. She worked for Weber Shandwick for three years.Patel then moved to the British multinational alcoholic beverages company, Diageo, and worked in corporate relations between 2003 and 2007. In 2007, she rejoined Weber Shandwick as Director of Corporate and Public Affairs practices. According to their press release, during her time at Diageo, Patel had "worked on international public policy issues related to the wider impact of alcohol in society."
Parliamentary career
Member of Parliament for Witham: 2010–present
In the 2005 UK general election, Patel stood as the Conservative candidate for Nottingham North, losing to the incumbent Labour MP Graham Allen. Patel finished in second place and won 18.7% of the vote. After her unsuccessful election campaign, she was identified as a promising candidate by new party leader David Cameron, and was offered a place on the "A-List" of Conservative Prospective Parliamentary Candidates. In November 2006, Patel was adopted as the PPC for the notionally safe Conservative seat of Witham, which was a new constituency in central Essex created after a boundary review. At the 2010 general election, Patel was elected to Parliament as MP for Witham, winning 52.2% of the vote and a majority of 15,196.Along with fellow Conservative MPs Kwasi Kwarteng, Dominic Raab, Chris Skidmore and Liz Truss, Patel was considered one of the "Class of 2010" who represented the party's "new Right". Together, they co-authored Britannia Unchained, a book published in 2012. The book was critical of levels of workplace productivity in the UK, making the controversial statement that "once they enter the workplace, the British are among the worst idlers in the world". The authors suggested that to change this situation, the UK should reduce the size of the welfare state and seek to emulate the working conditions in countries like Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea rather than those of other European nations. In the same year, Patel was elected to the executive of the 1922 Committee.
In October 2013, Patel was drafted into the Number 10 Policy Unit, and was promoted as Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury the following summer. In October 2014, Patel criticised the plan of the Academies Enterprise Trust to merge the New Rickstones and Maltings Academies, claiming that to do so would be detrimental to school standards. Patel lodged a complaint with the BBC claiming one-sided coverage critical of Narendra Modi on the eve of his victory in 2014 Indian elections. In January 2015, Patel was presented with a "Jewels of Gujarat" award in Ahmedabad, India, and in the city she delivered a keynote speech to the Gujarat Chamber of Commerce.
At the 2015 UK general election, Patel was re-elected with an increased vote share of 57.5% and an increased majority of 19,554. During the campaign, she had criticised Labour Party rival John Clarke for referring to her as a "sexy Bond villain" and a "village idiot" on social media; Clarke apologised. After the election, Patel became Minister of State for Employment in the Department for Work and Pensions, and was sworn on to the Privy Council on 14 May 2015.
In October 2015, a junior employee at the Department for Work and Pensions was dismissed from her role. In response, the employee brought a formal complaint of bullying and harassment against the DWP, including Patel. In 2017, a settlement was reached for £25,000 after the member of staff threatened to bring a legal claim of bullying, harassment and discrimination on the grounds of race and disability against the department and Patel.
In December 2015, Patel voted in support of Cameron's planned bombing of Islamic State targets in Syria.