The Rt Hon Jesse Norman 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 Jesse was Financial Secretary to the Treasury, where he was responsible for management of the furlough scheme and other Covid schemes, and set up the UK Infrastructure Bank, among other things.
He was previously Paymaster General, and held ministerial office in the Department for Transport and the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. As a backbencher, he was a member of the Treasury Select Committee 2010-15, and Chair of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee in 2016-17. He was made a Privy Councillor in 2019.
Before entering politics Jesse was a Director at Barclays. He also researched and taught philosophy at University College London, and ran a charitable project in Communist Eastern Europe, among other things.
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. Jesse was Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year and The House Backbencher of the Year in 2012.
Jesse has degrees in Classics (Oxford University: MA) and philosophy (University College London: MPhil, PhD). He has held various honorary academic fellowships, and was elected as a Two-year Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford in 2022. He is an enthusiastic cyclist, hill-walker and amateur jazz musician.
His latest book is The Winding Stair, a historical novel set in the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, focusing on the intense rivalry between Edward Coke and Francis Bacon. https://www.bitebackpublishing.com/books/the-winding-stair
Favourites
- The Spectator: My Clash with Cameron -- The true story behind the Lords reform rebellion
- Times op-ed: Don't copy America's flawed democracy
- The Spectator, 1 November 2003: Tell Us The Reason Why.
- Remembering Tom: A portrait of Lord Bingham
- New Statesman: Review of Michael Oakeshott’s Notebooks, 17 April 2014
Recent Posts
- Letter to the London Review of Books
- Westminster scheming is not all bad. Just ask Bacon and Coke
- The Winding Stair
- Governments must step up to the mark and clean up our rivers
- Slow Politics Episode 5: Any ideas?
- My Letter of No Confidence in Boris Johnson
- Sterile debates over university expansion miss the point
- Bright Blue: Centre Write Interview
- The Spectator: My Clash with Cameron -- The true story behind the Lords reform rebellion
- UnHerd: The Tories should have listened to Jesse Norman