Maria Caulfield
Maria Colette Caulfield is a Conservative Party politician and nurse. She was first elected as Member of Parliament for Lewes in 2015. She was given the role of Conservative Campaign Headquarters Vice Chair for Women on 8 January 2018, until her resignation on 10 July 2018 in protest at the Brexit strategy of the Prime Minister, Theresa May. She is a supporter of the European Research Group and is a board member of Blue Collar Conservativism.
Early life and career
Maria Caulfield was born on 6 August 1973 to Irish immigrant parents and grew up on in a working class area of Wandsworth, London. Her father was from a farming family, but after his emigration worked as a builder while her mother was a nurse.While Caulfield was in her teens, her mother died from breast cancer and after leaving school she became an NHS nurse. She has spoken about her upbringing saying that she "grew up in a run-down area of South London where the only careers advice given to us was the phone number of the local council housing office for when you became a single mum and needed a council flat".
As a nurse, she eventually specialised in cancer research and moved to the south coast of England where she worked at the Royal Sussex County Hospital and the Princess Royal Hospital and then the Royal Marsden. She became involved with the Conservative Party after joining a campaign to save local hospitals in the Brighton area.
Political career
In the 2007 Brighton and Hove City Council election, Caulfield stood as a Conservative Party candidate and became a member of the local city council for the previously safe Labour ward of Moulsecoomb - winning by just one vote. She served in the cabinet of the then Conservative authority and held the Housing Portfolio. In the following 2011 local election she lost her seat to the Labour Party candidate by over 600 votes.At the 2010 general election she unsuccessfully stood in the Caerphilly constituency, a safe Labour seat, coming second to Wayne David, the defending sitting MP. She had been shortlisted for the position of Conservative Party candidate for Gosport in the previous year. She received criticism from local political rivals for both campaigns on the grounds that her focus should be on her council work in Brighton.
For several years, she held the role of Deputy Regional Chairman for the South East Conservatives and was a Co-ordinator in the NO2AV campaign in the 2011 AV referendum.
In 2013, she was selected for the constituency of Lewes in East Sussex by the Lewes Conservative Association, and at the 2015 general election she overturned a 7,647 majority and defeated the incumbent Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker. She was re-elected at the 2017 general election.
Caulfield backed Brexit during the 2016 EU membership referendum.
A practising Roman Catholic, she supports lowering the current abortion time limit.
In September 2017, she faced criticism after she hosted a Parliamentary event with the Royal College of Nursing to gain support for scrapping the below inflation cap on nurses pay but did not take part in a parliamentary debate on this. Defending her position, Caulfield argued the only way to lift the nurses' pay cap would be during a meaningful budget vote.
On 8 January 2018, Caulfield was appointed the Conservative Campaign Headquarters' Vice Chair for Women; the appointment was criticised by Women's rights groups, including the Women's Equality Party, because she had opposed a Ten Minute Rule bill in March 2017 which sought to allow abortion to term and for voting in 2015 with the government to oppose the removal of the so-called tampon tax, currently levied on female sanitary products as the UK can currently not zero rate VAT on these products while a member of the EU She later submitted her letter of resignation from this position on 10 July 2018 in protest at the Brexit strategy of the Prime Minister, Theresa May.
In the House of Commons she sat on the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee, the Women and Equalities Committee and Committee on Exiting the European Union until becoming a Government whip in 2019.
Caulfield employs her husband as her office manager. The practice of MPs employing family members, has been criticised by some sections of the media on the lines that it promotes nepotism. Although MPs who were first elected in 2017 have been banned from employing family members, the restriction is not retrospective - meaning that Caulfield's employment of her husband is lawful.
On 1 August 2019, Caulfield was made Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Secretary of State for Transport Grant Shapps as part of a government reshuffle.
In October 2019, Caulfield signed a letter to The Guardian pledging climate action. Caulfield has also supported plans for a Green Brexit, by enhancing environmental protections after the UK leaves the European Union.
Caulfield was reelected at the 2019 general election with a reduced majority.
On 20 March 2020, Caulfield announced that whilst continuing to fulfill her parliamentary duties, she would be answering the UK government's call for former doctors and nurses to volunteer in order to help the NHS deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.
On 14 May 2020, Caulfield shared a video from her Twitter account which had been doctored to depict the Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, apparently giving reasons as to why he, as the director of public prosecutions, had not prosecuted grooming gangs. In fact, Starmer had been answering a question about what the "wrong approach" was and why historic child sexual abuse allegations had been ignored for decades by the authorities. The doctored video came from a Twitter account known to spread far-right and anti-Islam views. The account was subsequently suspended. Caulfield was reprimanded by Conservative whips and later apologised.
Personal life
She lives with her husband Steve Bell, an ex-serviceman and former builder, who now works as her Office Manager. He is also a Brighton and Hove City Councillor, as well as being active in the voluntary party and was President of the Conservative National Convention, the organizing body of the voluntary party. She is also a member of the Conservative Christian Fellowship.Caulfield is an urban shepherdess, part of an environmental project which uses sheep and cattle to graze public open spaces. She also holds a non-executive director position on the board of the housing charity BHT Sussex. She supports Tottenham Hotspur F.C. and Lewes football clubs, and is a shareholder of the latter.