Priti Patel

Dame Priti Sushil Patel (born 29 March 1972) is a British politician who has served as Shadow Foreign Secretary since November 2024, having previously served as Home Secretary from 2019 to 2022. A member of the Conservative Party, she was Secretary of State for International Development from 2016 to 2017. Patel has served as Member of Parliament (MP) for Witham since 2010. She is ideologically on the right wing of the Conservative Party; she considers herself to be a Thatcherite and has attracted attention for her socially conservative stances.

Patel was born in London to a Ugandan-Indian family. She was educated at Keele University and the University of Essex. Inspired to get involved in politics by the Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, she was involved with the Referendum Party before switching allegiance to the Conservatives. She worked for the public relations consultancy firm Weber Shandwick for several years before seeking a political career. After she unsuccessfully contested Nottingham North at the 2005 general election, the new Conservative leader David Cameron recommended Patel for the Party's "A-List" of prospective parliamentary candidates.

She was first elected MP for Witham, a new seat in Essex, at the 2010 general election. As a backbencher, Patel was Vice-Chair of the Conservative Friends of Israel and co-wrote a number of papers and books, including ''After the Coalition'' (2011) and ''Britannia Unchained'' (2012). Under the coalition government of Cameron, she served as Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury from 2014 to 2015. After the 2015 UK general election, Cameron promoted her to Minister of State for Employment, attending Cabinet.

A longstanding Eurosceptic, Patel was a leading figure in the Vote Leave campaign for Brexit during the 2016 referendum on UK membership of the European Union. Following Cameron's resignation, Patel supported Theresa May's bid to become Conservative leader; May subsequently appointed Patel Secretary of State for International Development. In 2017, Patel was involved in a political scandal involving unauthorised meetings with the Government of Israel which breached the Ministerial Code, causing May to request Patel's resignation as International Development Secretary. She was forced to resign from her Cabinet position as the Secretary of State for International Development after it occurred that she misled the public about her undisclosed meetings with Israeli officials in secrecy.

Under Boris Johnson's premiership, Patel became Home Secretary in July 2019. In this role, she launched a points-based immigration system, an asylum deal with Rwanda to address the English Channel migrant crossings, advocated the passage of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, and approved the extradition of Julian Assange to the United States. She was also found to have breached the Ministerial Code in relation to incidents of bullying. Following the resignation of Johnson and subsequent election of Liz Truss as Prime Minister, Patel resigned as Home Secretary on 6 September 2022. After the Conservative Party's loss in the 2024 General Election, Patel stood in the 2024 Conservative Party leadership election but was eliminated in the first MP ballot. Upon Kemi Badenoch's victory in the leadership election, Patel was appointed Shadow Foreign Secretary. Provided by Wikipedia