Chris Heaton-Harris

Christopher Heaton-Harris has been the Conservative MP for Daventry since 2010. Born in 1967, Heaton-Harris attended Tiffin Grammar School for Boys then worked for his family’s wholesale fruit and vegetable company at New Covent Garden Market, going on to run it. He also worked as a football referee. Heaton-Harris unsuccessfully contested Leicester South and the 1997 general election and at the by-election in 2004. He was elected to the European Parliament in 1999 as an MEP for the East Midlands and re-elected in 2004, becoming the chief whip for the Conservatives in the European Parliament for three years. He stood down as an MEP in 2009 and was elected as the MP for Daventry at the 2010 general election, holding the seat for the Conservatives with a majority of 19,188. A staunch Brexiter, Heaton-Harris chaired the Eurosceptic European Research Group between 2010 and 2016 while also sitting on the European Scrutiny Committee. In 2017, while a whip for Theresa May’s government, he was accused of breaking the ministerial code for hosting an ERG breakfast meeting. He has been critical of climate change and convinced over 100 MPs to sign a letter to then PM David Cameron asking subsidies to the wind turbine industry should be “dramatically cut”. In 2017, he hit the headlines after writing to the vice-chancellors of every university in the UK asking for the names of academics lecturing on Brexit and requesting copies of all course material, an act that was described as “sinister” and “McCarthyite” by academics. Heaton-Harris was appointed as one of three parliamentary under-secretaries of state at the Department for Exiting the European Union in 2018 before resigning in April 2019 in protest at Theresa May’s decision to hold talks with Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. After Boris Johnson became prime minister, Heaton-Harris became a minister of state in the Department for Transport. He was re-elected in 2019 with a majority of 21,734.