Claire Coutinho


Claire Coryl Julia Coutinho is a British Conservative Party politician. She has been the Member of Parliament for East Surrey since the 2019 general election. Prior to her political career, Coutinho worked for investment bank Merrill Lynch, accounting firm KPMG, and as a special adviser in HM Treasury.

Early life

Coutinho was born in 1985 in London, England. Her parents emigrated from India in the late 1970s and are of Goan Christian descent. Her father Winston is a retired anaesthetist, and her mother Maria is a GP. Coutinho was privately educated at James Allen's Girls' School in Dulwich. She studied mathematics and philosophy at Exeter College, Oxford. After graduating, she worked in the emerging markets equity team as an associate at the investment bank Merrill Lynch for nearly four years. In 2012, Coutinho left the company, and co-founded a literary-themed supper club, The Novel Diner. Two years later, she appeared on the cooking game show The Taste.
Coutinho then worked for two years at Iain Duncan Smith's centre-right think tank Centre for Social Justice. She then became a programme director for the industry group Housing and Finance Institute. After this, she worked for accounting firm KPMG as their education lead. Coutinho left the company to became a special adviser at HM Treasury. Initially she worked for Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury Julian Smith, and then became an aide to the Chief Secretary to the Treasury Rishi Sunak. Coutinho has commented that she left KPMG to join the government as a special adviser so that she could help deliver Brexit "from the inside", which she had supported in the 2016 EU membership referendum.

Parliamentary career

Coutinho was selected as the Conservative candidate for East Surrey on 11 November 2019. It is a notionally safe Conservative constituency having elected a member of the party since 1918. She was elected as MP in the 2019 general election with a majority of 24,040. The seat had previously been held by former minister Sam Gyimah who had the Conservative whip withdrawn after voting for the European Union Act 2019, an attempt to prevent a no-deal Brexit, and had subsequently joined the Liberal Democrats.
She was appointed as a Parliamentary Private Secretary at HM Treasury, and joined the advisory board of the centre-right think tank Onward in February 2020.
She supported Dominic Cummings for taking a road trip to Durham amid a 2020 controversy. A number of days later, an apparent protest took place as the windows of the East Surrey Conservative Association offices were daubed in black paint.

Views

Coutinho supported Brexit, and voted in the House of Commons against further EU integration. She also voted against introducing a proportional representation system for electing MPs.