Maria Caulfield was born on 6 August 1973 to Irish immigrant parents and grew up in a working class area of Wandsworth,London. Her father was from a farming family,but after emigration worked as a builder,while her mother was a nurse.[3]
While Caulfield was in her teens,her mother died from breast cancer.[3] After leaving school Caulfield became an NHS nurse.[4][5] 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."[5]
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 candidate by over 600 votes.[7]
At the 2010 general election,Caulfield unsuccessfully stood[8] in Caerphilly,coming second with 17.1% of the vote behind the incumbent Labour MP Wayne David.[9][10] 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.[11][12]
For several years,she held the role of deputy regional chairman for the South East Conservatives[13] and was a co-ordinator in the NO2AV campaign in the 2011 AV referendum.
At the snap 2017 general election,Caulfield was re-elected as MP for Lewes with an increased vote share of 49.5% and an increased majority of 5,508.
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.[17]
On 8 January 2018,Caulfield was appointed vice-chair of the Conservative Party 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 levied on female sanitary products as the UK could not zero-rate VAT on these products while a member of the EU.[18] She resigned from this position on 10 July 2018 in protest at the Brexit strategy of the Prime Minister,Theresa May.[19]
In the House of Commons Caulfield sat on the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee,the Women and Equalities Committee and the Committee on Exiting the European Union until becoming a Government whip in 2019.[20]
Caulfield employed her husband as her office manager. The practice of MPs employing family members has been criticised by some sections of the media on the grounds that it promotes nepotism.[21][22] 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 was lawful.[23]
Caulfield was again re-elected at the 2019 general election,with a decreased vote share of 47.9% and a decreased majority of 2,457.[27]
In 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.[28][29]
In May 2020,Caulfield shared a 22-second video clip 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. She accompanied the tweet with the words:"True face of the Labour leader #shameful".[30] 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 that had spread far-right and anti-Islam views,which was subsequently suspended. A Downing Street spokesman said:"These tweets have rightly been deleted. The MPs involved have been spoken to by the Whips' Office and reminded of their responsibility to check the validity of information before they post on social media sites."[31][32] Caulfield later apologised.[33]
In May 2024,Caulfield was called upon by opposition MPs,including Liberal DemocratDaisy Cooper,to refer herself to the government's ethics advisor for having spread the '15-minute cities' conspiracy theory in publications she had sent out to her constituents.[34] The '15-minute cities' conspiracy theory was one of eight included in a guide to MPs published by Leader of the House Penny Mordaunt in May 2024. The guide stated that the conspiracy theories 'can pose a danger to democracy'.[35]
On 7 July 2022,she was appointed Minister of State in the Department of Health and Social Care as part of the caretaker cabinet installed by outgoing Prime Minister Boris Johnson.[37]
On 7 September 2022 following the appointment of Liz Truss as Prime Minister and the subsequent formation of her ministry,Caulfield was dismissed from her role in Government and returned to the backbenches.
In October 2022,when Caulfield was appointed Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Women,the appointment was criticised by the British Pregnancy Advisory Service because she had voted against buffer zones outside abortion clinics and against legalising abortion in Northern Ireland. She has said that protesters outside abortion clinics might be there in order "to comfort" those entering the clinic.[39][40]
Caulfield is an urban shepherdess,part of an environmental project which uses sheep and cattle to graze public open spaces.[45] She previously held a non-executive director position on the board of the housing charity BHT Sussex.[45][46] She supports Arsenal[47] and Lewes football clubs,and is a shareholder of the latter.[48]
A practising Roman Catholic,[43][49] Caulfield supports lowering the current abortion time limit.[50][51] She reports that (at some point prior to July 2022) she suffered a stroke.[52]
Notes
↑ As Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Mental Health and Public Health.
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