Who is the current Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer?

Lucy Frazer, the current Culture Secretary, will be standing once again in the Ely and East Cambridgeshire constituency for the Conservatives.

The change comes as Prime Minister Rishi Sunak detached the digital arm of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. Frazer has been heading up a streamlined Culture, Media and Sport since a cabinet reshuffle in February 2023.

So who is Lucy Frazer? On the eve of the general election, which is taking place on July4, here’s everything to know about the Culture Secretary.

Background

Born in Yorkshire in 1972, Frazer was educated privately at Gateways School for Girls and Leeds Girls’ High School before going on to Newnham College, Cambridge, where she was President of the Cambridge Union. She met her husband David Leigh, who runs a recruitment company, while at university and the couple share two children.

Frazer had a successful career as a barrister in commercial law, and was appointed a Queen’s Counsel in 2013 at the age of 40. She decided to go into politics because she wanted to make a difference, “I am simply someone who has been lucky in her professional career who feels it is important to contribute to society,” she said.

She’s had notable roles in government since 2019

Frazer, the Conservative MP for South East Cambridgeshire, was first elected to the position in 2015.

Since then she’s held numerous governmental positions including Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Paymaster General (2016), Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (2018 to 2019), Minister of State for Prisons (2019), Solicitor General (in 2019 and 2021) and Financial Secretary to the Treasury (2021).

After this, Frazer was the Minister of State in the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities and spent six weeks as the Minister of State at the Department for Transport during the political turbulence that was autumn 2022.

In the past she was also elected to the Education Select Committee and was appointed a Privy Counsellor.

The daughter of Jewish immigrants, in 2018, when she was appointed to a position at the Ministry of Justice, she was reportedly the only Jewish woman in government.

Differing from Donelan

Unlike her predecessor Michelle Donelan, Frazer didn’t have any direct experience with culture, media or sport before stepping into the culture role. Donelan had worked as an International Marketing Communications Manager at WWE, as well as for The History Channel and for Australian publisher Pacific Magazines.

However, in 2018 she hosted a News Media Association roundtable about the News Media and court access. At the time she said: “As we continue to reform our courts and tribunals, it is important that we work with the media to ensure access is maintained and, where possible, enhanced.”

Recent efforts as Culture Secretary

– Frazer has said she wants a clearer policy on transgender athletes, after meeting with several sporting organisations including the FA and the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB).

"Sporting bodies have a duty to women competing in sport to set out clear guidance and take an unambiguous position,” she said, writing in the Mail in April. "By protecting the female category, they can keep women's competitive sport safe and fair and encourage the young girls who dream of one day being elite sportswomen. We must get back to giving women a level playing field to compete."

– Frazer defended the government’s late April decision to effectively block the sale of The Daily Telegraph to an Abu Dhabi-backed company. “This is a fundamental principle about freedom of our newspapers,” said Frazer. “It’s really important we don’t impinge on democracy.

“We worked as a department for about three weeks, nonstop over weekends, up till the early hours,” Frazer said. “It’s impossible for others to understand the intensity . . . the sense of importance of the decisions that we’re taking.”

– She has been part of a governmental effort to increase tech companies’ transparency over how they teach their AI models after members of the creative industry shared concerns about work ownership and copying. “The first step is just to be transparent about what they [AI companies] are using. [Then] there are other issues people are very concerned about,” said Frazer to the FT in May. “There’s questions about opt in and opt out [for content to be used], remuneration. I’m working with industry on all those things.”

– She found herself in hot water in January after telling Kay Burley on Sky News that “on occasion the BBC has been biased”. The discussion came after the government moved to extend Ofcom’s oversight to BBC News articles. Labour's shadow culture secretary Thangam Debbonaire wrote on X it was, "Just the latest in a long line of Secretaries of State for Culture Wars”.

– In May, at a Culture, Media & Sport Committee hearing, Frazer was asked about a meeting with BBC bosses in which some parties believed she had been too focused on reporting on the Israel-Gaza war and not enough on other issues, such as the licence fee.

“We discussed the position of the BBC not referring to Hamas as ‘terrorists’,” said Frazer. “I put points to the BBC in a private meeting about something I had said publicly about the reasons why I thought their guidance allowed them to refer to Hamas as ‘terrorists’, and I put forward a number of points as to why. I had previously asked officials whether it was appropriate to do that and I told the BBC I might raise it at the meeting.”– She isn’t a fan of trigger warnings in theatre: “If you go to see Macbeth, you pretty much know before you’re going in that it’s going to contain uncomfortable issues," she said to The Sun. “I think we should treat people who go to the theatre in an adult way.”

– And she’s against potentially controversial historical literature being rewritten: "I do not think our literature should be whitewashed... It’s really important that when you read something, we’re not overprotecting the public."

Her voting record

Frazer has voted for legalising abortion (in certain circumstances) and for legalising civil partnerships between non-same-sex couples in Northern Ireland. Frazer also voted for assisted dying of the terminally ill to be deemed lawful if permission had been granted by the High Court.

In 2022, Frazer voted twice to raise welfare benefits in line with inflation.

However, she voted against keeping the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights after Brexit, has voted against higher taxes on banks, and has voted against improving air and environmental quality.

She has received death threats

Speaking on BBC Radio Cambridgeshire in 2019, Frazer said she had received death threats since becoming an MP. “I have had death threats, not recently, but I have had them,” she said. “It is very distressing but you need to become resilient.”

Speaking about Brexit, she said: “People have strong feelings about Brexit... So I expect their feelings to come to me as their MP who is someone who is voting about things that they care about.” Frazer voted to remain in the EU in 2016, and then against leaving the European Union without a withdrawal agreement in April 2019.

In 2017, Frazer wrote, “I voted to remain in the European Union but we live in a democracy and that means we have to respect the outcome of a national vote. We must now focus on getting the best deal, for us both locally and nationally.”

What did people say online, when she was appointed Culture Secretary?

As could have been predicted, responses to Frazer’s appointment were mixed. Many people were simply fed up with a new person stepping into the role: One Twitter user said: “Lucy Frazer is the 8th Culture Secretary in 5 years… will she be the 1st to actually care about culture? Let’s hope so,” while another said, “Lucy Frazer is our new Culture Secretary – the 12th culture secretary in 12 years – truly pitiful.”