Esther McVey: working-class Tory grafter with tough line on poverty

Esther McVey’s background could scarcely be more different to that of many of her Conservative colleagues. When she was born in Liverpool in 1967, her young, working-class parents were unable to cope, she revealed to the Tory party conference last month, and she spent the first two years of her life in foster care with the charity Barnardo’s before being returned to her family.

“Most people fall upon tough times at some point,” she said of her early childhood. “I want to give the message that anyone can succeed given the opportunity.”

It may be this attitude that has earned her passionate supporters and furious detractors in equal measure; to the Tory right, she is a grafter who can authentically take a hard line on poverty; to those on the left, she has betrayed the poor, particularly those struggling with the hated universal credit that she has spent much of the past year defending as work and pensions secretary.

Despite the family’s difficult start, McVey’s father, Jimmy, rose from dealing in scrap metal to build a successful demolition and construction firm. Esther attended the independent Belvedere academy in Toxteth before reading law at Queen Mary University in London. A three-minute demo tape on My Liverpool, sent speculatively to the BBC, led to a career in television, including presenting GMTV and several youth programmes.

No-confidence proceedings

Forty-eight Conservative MPs would need to back a no-confidence vote in Theresa May to trigger a leadership contest, according to party rules.

There are two ways a contest can be triggered, most obviously if the leader of the party resigns. If they do not, 15% of Conservative MPs must write to the chairman of the 1922 Committee of backbench Tories. With the party’s current crop of 317 MPs, 48 would be needed.

After David Cameron announced his resignation, five Tory MPs stood for the leadership. Unlike Labour party rules, under which candidates go to a ballot of members as long as they have the support of 15% of the party’s MPs, Conservative candidates are whittled down to a final two before party members have their say.

The ballot is based on “one member, one vote”, but in 2016 one of the final two candidates, Andrea Leadsom, withdrew from the race after a damaging interview with the Times about the fact that May did not have children. Her withdrawal meant May was made party leader without having been elected by members.

After a stint running her own business in Liverpool providing training for startups, she failed to win Wirral West for the Conservatives in 2005 but took the seat five years later, becoming the first Tory MP in Merseyside since 1997. Her subsequent ascent was rapid: from parliamentary private secretary to the then employment minister Chris Grayling, she rose through the Department for Work and Pensions under Iain Duncan Smith, becoming a minister of state for employment in 2013.

The following year, McVey was the subject of a still contentious incident in which John McDonnell, the Labour shadow chancellor, recounted visiting a “sack Esther McVey” event in Liverpool at which, he said, some in the audience argued “why are we sacking her? Why aren’t we lynching the bastard?” McDonnell has repeatedly refused to apologise, saying he was merely repeating the comments of others.

She was narrowly defeated at the 2015 general election and took up a post as chair of the British Transport Police, but returned to parliament two years later, winning the Tatton constituency that had previously been held by George Osborne.

In January this year, after a spell as deputy chief whip, she was promoted to work and pensions secretary where she has staunchly defended her department’s troubled rollout of universal credit, despite growing concerns among Conservatives that the system will not operate smoothly.

Last month McVey was forced to concede that some of those in receipt of universal credit, which rolls six benefits into one, will be worse off as a result, contradicting earlier assurances that no one would lose out.