Telegraph: Fame and Fortune, 2 July 2023
Jesse Norman, 60, has been the MP for Hereford and South Herefordshire since 2010, and currently serves as Minister of State for Decarbonisation and Technology at the Department for Transport. In 2019-21 he was Financial Secretary to the Treasury, where he ran the Covid-19 furlough scheme and set up the UK Infrastructure Bank. He was previously Paymaster General, and a minister in the Department for Transport and the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. He was made a privy councillor in 2019.
Before entering politics, Norman was a director at Barclays Bank. He also researched and taught philosophy at University College London. He is the author of numerous books and pamphlets, including Compassionate Conservatism, Edmund Burke: Politician, Philosopher, Prophet and Adam Smith: What he Thought, and Why it Matters, which won a Parliamentary Book Award in 2018. Norman was Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year and The House Backbencher of the Year in 2012. He lives in London and Hereford with his wife, the venture capitalist Dame Kate Bingham. They have three children.
YOUR FATHER WAS A SUCCESSFUL BUSINESSMAN WHO SET UP BLUEBIRD TOYS. WHAT DID YOU LEARN FROM HIM?
My father is an astonishing human being and showed me what a vigorous, energetic person, who wants to help others, can do. He always said that the secret to success in the toy business was having a mental age of seven and an eye for detail. He has always had massive flair, but also a practical side.
He set up Bluebird Toys in 1980, makers of the Big Yellow Teapot, the Big Red Fun Bus and the internationally successful Polly Pocket line of dolls. He employed several hundred people and the company had a multi-million pound sales line. These toys were a formative part of my childhood and an incredible gift to millions of young people.
DID YOUR FATHER USE HIS MONEY FOR PHILANTHROPIC ENDS?
When he’d finished building Bluebird, Dad sold his shares and, in 1996, reinvested £3m in the derelict Roundhouse arts centre in Chalk Farm, north London. As founder and chairman, he then raised £27 million from public and private sources, and contributed almost another £4 million of his own funds, to restore the crumbling Victorian engine shed.
In the 1960s and 70s it had been used for experimental theatre and as a concert venue for the likes of The Doors and Cream. It reopened in June 2006 and was soon the base for a major season by the Royal Shakespeare Company; it has also played host to lots of big-name concerts. Particular highlights for me were seeing Prince, Bob Dylan, Morrissey, Nile Rodgers and The Specials perform.
DID YOU HAVE A PRIVILEGED UPBRINGING?
Dad’s business career went up and down when I was young so my childhood didn’t feel enormously affluent. I grew up in London, the eldest of five children. It was a pretty rumbustious, energetic and mildly chaotic upbringing. I went to a local state primary school, then a progressive co-ed comprehensive in London followed by a crammer, and finally to Eton as the bottom boy in the school. I had a mixed educational background and I’ve always been glad of that because I think it gives you a better understanding of other people.
WASN’T YOUR MOTHER OPPOSED TO YOU ATTENDING ETON?
My mum died in 2006 of Alzheimer’s disease. She despised any form of privilege and wanted me to have a normal education. Dad just wanted what he thought was best for his kids.
My mother was a much quieter, less exuberant character than my father, but very artistic and rather Bohemian. She was a painter who had studied at the Sorbonne and the Slade in the 1950s, and painted all her life.
WHAT WERE YOUR FIRST JOBS?
After reading classics at Oxford, I worked for a company called Institutional Shareholder Services which was advising pension funds and other institutions in America on shareholder rights.
I then worked on Wall Street for the investment bank Kleinwort Benson before leaving to run an educational charitable project called the Sabre Foundation in Boston. When I left, we were giving away $7m worth of new medical textbooks a year to Polish, Hungarian and Ukrainian doctors in Communist Eastern Europe, setting up networks of doctors and entrepreneurs, and supporting free institutions.
By 1991 it was obvious that what these countries needed was not donations but investment and good financial advice, so I went to work for Barclays who were making a massive investment in Eastern Europe. I ended up as a director.
BUT YOU QUIT YOUR HIGHLY-PAID JOB TO STUDY – WHY?
When I left Barclays in 1997, my colleagues thought I was mad. The internet and financial markets were booming, but I wanted to pursue academic work. My wife and I also had one child, and one on the way, and I wanted to spend time with them while they were growing up.
SINCE BECOMING AN MP, YOU’VE HELD THREE OF THE BIGGEST MINISTERIAL ROLES OUTSIDE THE CABINET. WHICH HAS BEEN THE BEST PAID?
They’re all on a standard tariff. It’s a matter of public record.
AS FINANCIAL SECRETARY, YOU MANAGED THE COVID-19 FURLOUGH SCHEME. THE NATIONAL AUDIT OFFICE ESTIMATES AS MUCH AS £6.3BN MAY HAVE BEEN CLAIMED IN ERROR OR IN FRAUD AND HAS CRITICISED THE GOVERNMENT FOR NOT DOING MORE TO PREVENT MISTAKES. IS THIS FAIR?
No one wants fraud and error, but with any scheme that is thrown together in a matter of weeks, you’re bound to get some. The HMRC initial estimate is that it was actually at the lower end of the range. The economic situation was dreadful, and the overall outcome was much better than anyone could have dreamt of, so I think it was massively worthwhile.
YOU LED THE TORY REBELLION AGAINST HOUSE OF LORDS REFORM, REBELLED AGAINST THE GOVERNMENT AGAIN IN OPPOSITION TO MILITARY INTERVENTION IN SYRIA AND WERE ONE OF THE FIRST TO WRITE A LETTER OF NO CONFIDENCE IN BORIS JOHNSON. IS THIS WHY YOU’VE NEVER HELD A CABINET POSITION?
I don’t know. I’m a Burkean Conservative. You have to do what you believe in, and I believe in reform, not revolution. No one can see into the future, but I would love to run a department of state. If you want to make a difference then that’s the highest ambition.
IS IT TRUE YOU CALLED FOR JOHNSON’S RESIGNATION AS PM BECAUSE HE FIRED YOU AT THE TREASURY?
Not at all. Boris asked me to step down because he said he wanted to improve the Treasury’s gender balance. I agreed on the basis that we would have a proper discussion about a Cabinet job at the next reshuffle. Nothing came of it because nine months later I sent my letter. By that point I felt the wheels had fallen off the Johnson premiership so comprehensively that someone needed to speak out.
YOU’VE WRITTEN SEVERAL ACCLAIMED BOOKS. WHICH HAS EARNED THE MOST MONEY?
None of my books has been very successful financially, but the best of them has been my biography of Adam Smith. My latest is a historical novel – the story of the toxic rivalry between Francis Bacon and Edward Coke in the time of Elizabeth I and James I. The £5,000 advance, and any proceeds, will go to the New Model Institute for Technology and Engineering in Hereford, a pioneering specialist STEM university with a particular remit to turn kids with undiscovered talent into skilled, high-earning engineers. I hope we can create similar models around the country.
CREDIT: The Winding Stair by Jesse Norman is published by Biteback Publishing at £20.
Wanted: a British superman to lead the recovery and save the world
Daniel Johnson, published 24th July in The Debate
It is clear that the Covid-19 pandemic is moving into a new phase. The initial crisis is over, but a long war of attrition against the coronavirus is just beginning. The question for the Government should be: how could the UK leverage its world-beating record in biomedical research into an economic revolution? It would send out a powerful signal — a global as well as a national one — if the Prime Minister were to create a Cabinet-level Department for Research, with responsibility for universities, science and the humanities.
So who should step up to the plate as the inaugural Secretary of State for Research? There are several good candidates on the front bench, but only one who is outstanding: Jesse Norman. As an accomplished writer and public intellectual, he has the clout to make the case for universities, but also for reform within them. If he weren’t a politician, his books on Edmund Burke and Adam Smith would qualify him for a chair in political thought at any university in the country. As Financial Secretary to the Treasury, he has a good grasp of the public finances and he stood out during the Brexit debates for his calm and considered contributions.
Continue reading ‘Wanted: a British superman to lead the recovery and save the world’ »
The Times Saturday interview: Jesse Norman
Rachel Sylvester, published 18th July 2015 in The Times
Jesse Norman plays the trumpet in the parliamentary jazz band and has just started learning the tenor sax — music is “calisthenics for the soul”, he says. His hero is Louis Armstrong and he describes Bob Dylan as a “god”.
Continue reading ‘The Times Saturday interview: Jesse Norman’ »
Jesse Norman: ‘Priorities can’t be driven by media obsessions’
Jasper Jackson, published Sunday 28 June 2015 in The Guardian
Jesse Norman is three working days into his new job as chair of the culture, media and sport select committee and the Conservative MP is keen to talk about about football, regional arts funding, rural broadband and mobile coverage.
Continue reading Jesse Norman: ‘Priorities can’t be driven by media obsessions’»
Interview with Jesse Norman MP: “I don’t really believe in making political promises.”
By Andrew Gimson in ConservativeHome
Politics is “a noble calling”, and so is conservatism. Few politicians are much good at explaining why they believe what they believe, but Jesse Norman delights in making boldly unfashionable declarations of this kind, and producing the arguments to back them up.
Jesse Norman, the Government's worst nightmare - an intellectual conscience
By Sarah Sands of the Evening Standard
The former government adviser Jesse Norman is perplexed by his sacking last week after abstaining over the vote on intervention in Syria. “I seem to have acquired this reputation as the Che Guevara of the Conservative Party,” he says gloomily.
Continue reading "Jesse Norman, the Government's worst nightmare - an intellectual conscience" »
Jesse Norman, Tory Rising Star, On Boris, Burke And His Row With Cameron
By Mehdi Hasan of Huffington Post
To call Jesse Norman “clever” would be an understatement. The Conservative MP for Hereford and South Herfordshire has a classics degree from Oxford, a PhD in philosophy from University College London and is the author of several highbrow books, including ‘Compassionate Conservatism’ and ‘The Big Society’. His pre-parliamentary career included stints as a director of Barclays Bank and executive director of the right-wing thinktank Policy Exchange. He is, in the words of GQ, “the preeminent intellectual theorist of Cameronism”.
Continue reading "Jesse Norman, Tory Rising Star, On Boris, Burke And His Row With Cameron" »
“Tories must not forget there is more to life than money”
Jesse Norman, David Cameron’s new policy adviser, insists it won’t be all Old Etonian mates at No 10, he tells Rachel Sylvester and Alice Thomson of The Times
Jesse Norman plays the trumpet in the parliamentary jazz band and his hero is Louis Armstrong, although he says “don’t ask me to choose between him and Bob Dylan”. The other trumpeter in the group is Lord Glasman, Ed Miliband’s “blue Labour” guru — “so it’s blue-on-blue blues,” the Tory MP says.
Continue reading "Tories must not forget there is more to life than money" »
Jesse Norman: Impeccably conservative
Despite having led a backbench rebellion against Lords reform, Jesse Norman is one of the last defenders of Cameron’s “big society”. What’s more, he tells Rafael Behr, its influence is growing. NewStatesman
There’s a great scene in The African Queen, the 1951 film about a colonial military escapade in the First World War: Rose Sayer, a Methodist missionary, disposes of the stash of gin belonging to Charlie Allnutt, a drunken Canadian boat captain. “A man takes a drop too much once in a while,” he complains. “It’s only human nature.” Sayer responds: “Nature, Mr Allnutt, is what we are put in this world to rise above.”
Continue reading "Jesse Norman: Impeccably conservative" »
Interview with Jesse Norman
Jesse Norman speaks to Jane Merrick of the Independent on Sunday about Westminster, the battle of ideas and the joys of jazz.
Jesse Norman has been talking for nearly an hour before I notice the pale green, slightly tatty, cotton wristband on his right hand. It's the fashion among the more socially aware MPs to wear a charity band. This threadbare strap, Norman says, was given to him by a Dusun tribesman in Borneo last year. The man, whose grandparents were headhunters, spotted the MP's own wristband and asked him to swap, and Norman obliged. "So there's a Borneo tribesman wandering around the jungle with a Help for Heroes wristband on his arm," he says, amused.
Continue reading "Interview with Jesse Norman" »
Jesse Norman: Captain Sensible proves a major adversary for Cameron
by Nicholas Watt and Juliette Jowit in The Guardian.
As one of the most erudite MPs at Westminster, Jesse Norman naturally turned to Charles James Fox to describe his own predicament yesterday.
Hours after David Cameron remonstrated with him outside the commons division lobbies, after Norman led the biggest Tory rebellion of the parliament, the backbencher quoted the 18th-century Whig statesman.
Continue reading "Jesse Norman: Captain Sensible proves a major adversary for Cameron" »
Jesse Norman looks firmly towards a bright future, for both county and country
by Tom Kennedy in the Hereford Times
Jesse Norman certainly has a clear image of what he wants for the future of Hereford. The Tory politician is highly respected within the party, and considered as a true pioneer of compassionate conservatism. It is his fresh thinking approach the Tories will need to embrace in order to gain the necessary support to succeed in next year’s general election.
Continue reading "Jesse Norman looks firmly towards a bright future, for both county and country" »