24/06/2011

David Davis is a Conservative MP. He was Shadow Home Secretary for five years until 2008, when he stood down as MP for Haltemprice and Howden and forced a by-election (which he won), in order to promote debate about, “the slow strangulation of fundamental British freedoms” by the Labour Government. Earlier this year Conservative Home conducted a survey of Tory activists and found that David was their overwhelming favourite to become Conservative Chairman. This week he welcomed the Government’s changes to sentencing reform as a “good u-turn” and said, "I haven't seen a community punishment that works better than prison." In February he successfully forced a vote on allowing prisoners the vote: “it is a historic decision with enormous consequences. Do we allow an international court to exceed the remit we agreed over fifty years ago, or do we assert the right of the British people to make their own decisions about their own democracy through their own democratic institution, Parliament?” In 2005, he was defeated by David Cameron in his bid to become the party’s next leader and this year he said his party needed people with a sense of the priorities of the poorer part of the country. Cameron and Osborne, “come from their own background, they don’t actually come from backgrounds where they had to scrape for the last penny at the end of the week…” Benedict Brogan of the Telegraph was clear about Davis: “No10 cannot afford to dismiss him any more: he is a threat”. As a party whip under John Major, he earned the nickname the “Bruiser”. By 1997 he had held two ministerial jobs, including Minister for Europe. In his first challenge for party leadership in 2001, he was defeated by Iain Duncan Smith who later sacked him as party chairman. A former member of the SAS reserve, he was a successful businessman before becoming an MP in 1987.

Fraser Nelson describes himself on Twitter as, “Editor of The Spectator, columnist for News of the World, board member with the Centre for Policy Studies and proud owner of weird accent”. He has been described as the “fastest rising star in rightwing political journalism” and took over from Peter Oborne as the magazine’s political editor in 2006 before becoming editor in 2009. He thinks David Cameron, “an outstanding and potentially transformative Prime Minister”, though he “has set world records in political surrender.” Fraser argues that spending cuts so far have been “modest and measured”. In fact, he wrote this week, “in cash terms, a new record has been set in state largesse. George Osborne has so far outspent Gordon Brown every month that he’s been in the Treasury.” Fraser started out as a business reporter on The Times, later joining The Scotsman as its political editor. He’s described himself as a “numbers geek” to explain his ‘data-based’ approach to his journalism.

Jason Cowley is Editor of The New Statesman and a widely published cultural critic and journalist. Two recent editions of the magazine attracted a lot of attention: they had been guest edited by Jemima Khan and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Before the election, Jason was very clear about what the country did and did not need to help it through its “national emergency”: “What it doesn't need is a Cameron victory and a Tory-led social revolution”. Yesterday he wrote, “Everyone knows now that Cameron, for all his poise and verbal fluency, is an arch-equivocator: he changes his mind, flip-flops and makes U-turns depending on what the latest polling data from Andrew Cooper is telling him.” Jason was previously editor of Granta and editor of the Observer Sport Monthly magazine and a staff writer on The Times. He has published two books, a novel, Unknown Pleasures and, most recently, the memoir The Last Game: Love, Death and Football. In 2009, he won the British Society of Magazine Editors’ Editor of the Year award in his category. The judges said he had transformed the New Statesman and "created issues of the magazine that were the envy of the industry".

Mary Creagh, the MP for Wakefield since 2005, was appointed Shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in October 2010. When she was speaking against the Government’s plans for a privatisation of state-owned woodlands earlier this year, the Independent’s sketch writer was full of “horrified” admiration: “Her full, womanly voice fills the Commons like an incoming airstrike, she's taken her accent down 2.5 sub-classes, and when she loses her glimpses of humour she'll be Yvette Cooper by another name.” She was a Government Whip from June 2009 until Labour's defeat in May 2010. She first joined the government in September 2006 as the Parliamentary Private Secretary to Andy Burnham. Before entering Parliament, she lectured at the Cranfield University School of Management and was a councillor in the London Borough of Islington, serving as Labour group leader between 2000 and 2004.