Jesse Norman


Alexander Jesse Norman is a British Conservative Party politician serving as Financial Secretary to the Treasury since 2019. He has been the Member of Parliament for Hereford and South Herefordshire since 2010.
Norman was a director of Barclays before leaving the City in 1997 to research and teach at University College London. Prior to that he ran an educational charity in Eastern Europe immediately following the Communist era. Despite his unconventional past Norman was identified by Bruce Anderson, formerly political editor of The Spectator, in January 2013 as a potential future Leader of the Conservative Party.
He was first elected as the Conservative MP for Hereford and South Herefordshire at the 2010 general election, having been selected as his party's candidate by open primary in December 2006.

Family

Norman is the son of Sir Torquil Norman and his wife Lady Elizabeth Montagu, the paternal grandson of Air Commodore Sir Nigel Norman, 2nd Bt., and the great-grandson of Sir Henry Norman, 1st Bt. He and his children are therefore in remainder to the Norman baronetcy.
In 1992, he married The Honourable Kate Bingham, daughter of The Lord Bingham of Cornhill, the former Lord Chief Justice. They have two sons and one daughter.

Life and career

Norman was educated at Eton College and Merton College, Oxford, graduating with an Upper Second in Classics. He pursued further studies at University College London, where he held an honorary research fellowship in philosophy, and was awarded a PhD in 2003. He also lectured in philosophy at University College and Birkbeck.
His books include The Achievement of Michael Oakeshott, Breaking the Habits of a Lifetime and After Euclid. He is a Trustee of The Roundhouse, an arts venue and charity founded by his father, Sir Torquil Norman. He serves on the boards of the Hay Festival, the Kindle Centre in Hereford and the Friends of St Mary's Ross-on-Wye.
He worked for Barclays from 1991 to 1997.
Norman was a Senior Fellow at Policy Exchange and writes regularly for the national press. His book Compassionate Conservatism, co-written with Janan Ganesh, has been described as "the guidebook to Cameronism" by The Sunday Times. Its successor, Compassionate Economics, was favourably reviewed by Daniel Hannan. His other policy publications include "Living for the City" and "From Here to Fraternity".
In 2007, Norman founded the Conservative Co-operative Movement.
Norman's later books include The Big Society: The Anatomy of the New Politics, published by University of Buckingham Press, a biography of Edmund Burke, which was long-listed for the 2013 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, and Adam Smith: What He Thought, and Why It Matters, published by Allen Lane.

Parliamentary career

Norman won the new seat of Hereford and South Herefordshire at the 2010 General election with a 5.1% majority over the Liberal Democrats. He was a member of the Treasury Select Committee from July 2010 to March 2015, is Chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Employee Ownership, founder of the PFI Rebate Campaign and founding member of the Campaign for an Effective Second Chamber which campaigns for the House of Lords to be appointed rather than elected.
On 10 July 2012, Norman was identified as a ringleader of the rebellion over the House of Lords Reform package presented to the House of Commons.
On the vote being overturned, Government Whips suggested to David Cameron that before the debate "Norman had spread a rumour to rally rebels" the Prime Minister was in reality unenthusiastic about the reforms. Immediately after the intensive debate, culminating in a narrow Government defeat by Labour's rejection of the Lords Election proposals as tabled, Cameron is reported to have confronted Norman in the Members' Lobby telling him that such "conduct was 'not honourable'"; Norman then withdrew in the direction of the Members' Bar but allegedly was immediately stopped and escorted from the Palace of Westminster by four Whips. Despite assertions by the then-Leader of the Opposition, Ed Miliband, a spokesman denied that there had been a heated argument, saying that Cameron had merely told Norman he had misrepresented his views. Miliband, then also leader of the Labour Party, described the scene as "fisticuffs in the Lobby" at Prime Minister's Questions the following day. Accounts of the severity of Cameron's words or gestures used vary to no close finger-pointing at all and The Daily Telegraph wrote that cynics say this "public argument may have been staged" to try to prove to Liberal Democrats that Cameron shared their vision of Lords Reform.
In 2013, Norman said that so many Old Etonians were in government positions because of Eton's "ethos" of public service that "other schools don't imbue the same commitment". Later on Twitter, Norman said his comments were "defending one institution, not attacking others". Norman describes his educational background as following "an educational argument between my mother, who despised any form of privilege, and my father, who took the view that he had set up his own business, so he was entitled to spend money on his kids' education".
Norman was sacked from Downing Street's Policy Board after rebelling against the Government again in opposition to military intervention in Syria.
On 27 June 2014, just prior to the nomination of Jean-Claude Juncker to the presidency of the European Commission, Norman gave his wholehearted support of Cameron's stance, as being "absolutely right ... in opposing Mr Juncker". He argued firstly that the EU constitution requires elected heads to choose its "President" and secondly that Juncker's manifesto fails to tackle what he sees as the President's duty to address the unpopularity of EU mandates. He then asserted that democracy, for the British, involves legitimacy derived from the ballot box, whereas for some Europeans, it involves centralised bureaucracy.
In September 2014 Norman raised the issue of rules concerning football club ownership in the House of Commons, alleging the then-Chairman of Hereford United had a criminal conviction, in support of Supporters Trust's campaign to oust the Agombar régime at Hereford Utd FC. On 19 December 2014, the club was wound up in the High Court.

Chairman of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee

On 19 June 2015, his election as Chairman of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee was announced.
On 8 September 2015 at a hearing of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee convened to discuss recent allegation of blood doping in athletics, Norman said the following "When you hear the London Marathon, potentially the winners or medallists at the London Marathon, potentially British athletes are under suspicion for very high levels of blood doping... " thus seemingly using parliamentary privilege to implicate Paula Radcliffe as being involved, since she is the only British London Marathon winner since 1996. This prompted Radcliffe to respond with a statement denying any involvement in doping though Norman said it wasn't his intention to implicate any individual.

Brexit

Norman chose not to publicly reveal how he voted over the UK's continued membership of the European Union in the 2016 referendum saying only, "A referendum is not an act of representative government and I am not a minister, so my vote can properly be a private one."
In 2017, Norman expressed support for his fellow Old Etonian Jacob Rees-Mogg to lead the party. Norman subsequently felt obliged to contact the newspaper concerned to say that his was a light-hearted response to a question in an interview about whether Rees-Mogg would make a good candidate and he was not backing him.
In November 2019, he was appointed to be a member of the Privy Council.