Grant Shapps ‘plotting route back to parliament as an MP’
Former minster was one of several Jewish MPs to lose their seat at the last election
Lee Harpin is the Jewish News's political editor
Former BBYO president Grant Shapps is weighing up a possible route back to parliment as an MP, sources have confirmed to Jewish News.
Shapps, who lost the Welwyn Hatfield seat he had represented since 2005 at the July election, is said to be interested in suggestions that a Tory MP in a nearby seat to Shapps’s old one has told friends that they are not planning to serve their full five years.
Former MP Shapps was one of several senior Jewish Conservatives to lose their seat at the election, having served in a succession of ministerial roles.
He was seen in Birmingham at the current Tory conference on Tuesday. One source close to Shapps told Jewish News that reports in The Times newspaper about his wish to return to Westminster were “not incorrect.”
In an email to failed election candidates sent by Shapps last month he said that he first ran in 1997 and remembered how dispiriting it was for the party to lose three elections in a row.
Shapps is backing James Cleverly in the Conservative leadership contest, and is known to be on the party’s moderate wing throug a group known as Conservatives Together.
Run by Shapps the group said that the Tories are in “the uncomfortable position of learning from the efficiency of the Liberal Democrats’ campaign machine” after Sir Ed Davey won 72 seats.
Many of the Lib Dem successes came in “blue wall” former Tory seats.
In an interview last year with Jewish News, Shapps said he was part of “a traditional Jewish family in as much as we are loosely observant, you know… Friday night dinners, shul a couple of times a year.”
Shapps, who took a business course at Manchester Metropolitan University, would later marry his wife Belinda, a practicing psychotherapist, who hails from the Prestwich community on the outskirts of the same city he studied in.
They now have three children.
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