“I do question whether I’m actually a politician,” Edward Timpson says. “It’s a bit late now, isn’t it?” I say. He laughs. “Yes, it’s a question I should have asked at the start.” Why does he question it? “Because … maybe I didn’t feel I was ruthless enough, not sharp-elbowed enough.”
However much he is in denial, the Conservative MP is definitely a politician, though not for much longer. He joined parliament in 2008 as member for Crewe and Nantwich after the death of Labour’s Gwyneth Dunwoody, who had represented the area for 34 years, lost his seat by 48 votes after three recounts in 2017, and returned to parliament in 2019 representing the neighbouring seat of Eddisbury. Now a boyish 50, he’s had enough, and is standing down at the next election.
Timpson is certainly no conveyor-belt MP. He is reserved, a little shy and deeply serious, with a mission to make the life of the country’s disadvantaged children better. He is also supremely fit (the week we meet he is about to run his 16th London marathon) and equally obsessed with his family and Manchester City football club. When he’s not showing me pictures of his four children and wife (“She was born on the same day as Kate Moss, though my wife is the more beautiful one”), he’s sharing photos of his mother with City players shortly before she died. When I match him with a photo of my daughter wearing a signed shirt Kevin De Bruyne gave her, he can’t contain himself. “Oh, no way. Wowzers! Blimey. Oh my God! Wowwwww!”
We meet in a park next to the Foundling Museum in London – his choice. Timpson belongs to the Manchester shoe-repairing and key-cutting dynasty that goes back five generations. His father, John Timpson, was worth an estimated £190m in the 2020 Rich List. The Timpson Group is not just a great British success story; it’s a success story with a soul. Former offenders constitute 10% of its employees, and it offers staff free use of holiday homes, weekly bonuses for exceeding targets, and days off for birthdays, a child’s first day at school, becoming a grandparent and pet bereavements.
But this has little to do with Edward Timpson. The only time he worked for the family business was in his late teens, earning money to travel the world. All the Timpson kids were given work experience to see if they were suited to a career in the company. For Edward, the pain is still fresh. “I was scouring a shoe, and my thumb went into the scourer and I sliced the top of it. It was hanging off, flapping here.” He wobbles the top of his thumb, which has healed. “Slightly embarrassing. I passed out on the shop floor in front of customers. I remember thinking: ‘I don’t think this is for me.’”
But the company’s values had already seeped into Timpson’s bones. As had those of his mother, Alex, a foster carer who looked after almost 90 children. He was about six years old when she started fostering. Edward, the youngest of three children, wasn’t best pleased. He responded in the only way he knew how – sulking, and retreating to his bedroom. “That was my reaction to the first children who came. They were three and five, going around on my tricycle saying: ‘Fuck fuck fuck.’ I didn’t normally cause trouble, but on that occasion I barricaded myself in the bedroom and refused to come out till they left.” He soon discovered he’d have to change his plans. “I thought they’d be gone in a few minutes, but it turned out to be quite a few weeks later.”
Over time, Timpson grew to love all the foster children as much as his mother did. The house rule was that the fostered children had to be younger than him, and he soon became his mother’s assistant. “We had a lot of babies, and as Mum was so exhausted I’d say: ‘Oh, I’ll do the 10pm feed’ because then I could stay up and watch whatever was on TV.”
His love of children and his desire to improve their lives have shaped everything he’s done since. As a barrister, he spent his time in the family courts, and towards the end only did cases involving children. When he went into politics he was again fuelled largely by this single issue.
Timpson’s successful campaign in the 2008 byelection was a baptism of fire. The seat had always been Labour’s, and the party, then led by Gordon Brown, was desperate to hold it. Things quickly got nasty. Labour painted him as a toff who didn’t know how to relate to ordinary people. It was both unfair and foolish. The Timpsons weren’t posh; they were just successful.
“I wondered what the hell I’d walked into. The ferocity of it and how they made it the central plank of their campaign was a shock to the system, particularly when you’ve never been involved in politics before.” But it backfired on Labour. “They hadn’t done their homework, so it was quite easy to push back and say, ‘Well, actually we’re cobblers from Wythenshawe in Manchester, and my parents have fostered almost 90 children; what d’you think about that?’” The irony was that his Labour rival, Tamsin Dunwoody (Gwyneth’s daughter), was in Burke’s Peerage because her maternal grandmother, Norah Phillips, had been given a life peerage in 1964. Crewe and Nantwich went Conservative for the first time.
A couple of years ago he was at a Manchester City match with his fellow Tory MP and City fan Karen Bradley. She pointed out another politician sitting near them – Labour’s Alex Norris. At half-time, they all went for a beer. “He said: ‘You don’t know who I am, do you?’ I said: ‘Course I do. You’re Alex Norris, the MP for Nottingham North.’ He said: ‘No, I’m the guy who wore a top hat and tails and was following you around during the byelection in Crewe and Nantwich.’ I thought: ‘You bugger!’”
Unlike most MPs, Timpson had not spent a lifetime dabbling in party politics. In many ways he was a political virgin. Yes, he had studied politics at Durham University, but that was international politics – an academic exercise rather than a practical one. He didn’t even join a party till 2005, three years before he was elected. What makes him a Conservative? “I believe in everybody getting the best chance to be the best they can be. The philosophy of one nation is where every citizen is as good as another.” Couldn’t that just as easily be Labour or Lib Dem? “I do believe in sound money and you can’t leave debt hanging over for generations. The economic backdrop to what drives a Labour administration might be quite different, particularly on borrowing to invest. The idea you would spend money you don’t have in government isn’t one that would sit comfortably with me.”
Timpson’s favourite time in government was the 2010-15 coalition. He believes it was a victory for non-tribalism and serious politics. “Although I think there were elements of the austerity programme where we got the balance wrong, as an overall approach I understood the necessity of it.” How did they get the balance wrong? “There were some things we did to save money around benefits that were targeted in the wrong areas and in hindsight could have been done in a much fairer and, dare I say it, compassionate way.”
From a personal point of view, he couldn’t have been happier under David Cameron’s leadership. Between 2012 and 2017 he served as undersecretary and then minister for children and families. He’s proud of what he achieved for adopted and cared-for children. “We invested in an adoption support fund that saw the number of children adopted rising significantly, reducing the time the process took, and that happened because the secretary of state, Michael Gove, let me get on with it. He was adopted himself and had a personal interest in it.”
As a politician, he says, it was important for him to understand people’s lives, whether those of civil servants or cared-for children. In his department, he introduced an awards ceremony for unsung heroes. “My dad’s always believed in incentivising, and I took a leaf out of his book. See, my dad has had some influence on my life! At our pre-Christmas drinks, I got some trophies, probably from Timpson, and I asked all the team leaders who was the unsung hero on their team. It was one of the most enlightening moments in the department because suddenly they could see the point of why I was there and what we were doing.”
Had nobody done it before? “No.” Why not? It’s hardly rocket science. “I don’t know.” Does he think many politicians lack emotional intelligence? “It’s easy to fall into the trap of briefings, charts and data, which can tell a story, but you have to back that up by experiencing what it’s like to walk in the shoes of the people whose lives you’re trying to improve. I had a group of care leavers I used to meet every couple of months over several years. So we got to know each other, and I got to understand their stories, their lives, and that gave me insight into the barriers stopping them getting on. It led to a change in policy. We got the DWP [Department of Work and Pensions] to flag when care leavers come into the benefits system in advance so they don’t end up with gaps in their support. If you don’t engage at that level you’ll never find out about the problems people face.”
He cites this as one of his highs. As for the lows, there have been plenty. In May 2017, protesters spent three days on the roof of Timpson’s house in Cheshire. His family were terrified. “We had to leave under police protection for three days and we’d just had a baby three months before.” The protest was believed to be against forced adoption, something that Timpson had nothing to do with. A month later he was “dumped” at the general election, losing his seat to Labour. You can tell by the language he uses how painful it was, and how personally he took it. “It was devastating because it’s not just you. I had staff who had been with me since 2008 sobbing in the sports hall in Crewe. People have said: ‘Why the hell did you come back, having gone through that?’, and I thought: ‘It’s because I’ve still got something to offer.’ There aren’t many people in parliament, and particularly my own party, who’ve gathered the personal and professional experience I’ve got in children’s policy and children’s social care.”
His second stint as an MP reached its zenith when he was appointed solicitor general in July 2022 after a mass resignation in protest at Boris Johnson’s handling of the Chris Pincher scandal. “It was the perfect mix for me because you’re part politician, part lawyer, and that’s probably what I am.” The problem was he made it clear he was championing Rishi Sunak in the leadership contest after Boris Johnson resigned. Within a day of becoming prime minister, Liz Truss sacked him. He had lasted 63 days. “Yes, I made the fatal error of uttering the words Rishi and Sunak in public during the leadership campaign.” He smiles. “The 63 days is longer than she was prime minister, so I do have that to hang on to.”
It has been such a humiliating period for the Conservatives: three prime ministers over one parliament, myriad lies, scandals and resignations, and a political incoherence only matched by the populist brutality. What’s it like being in a party so at odds with many of your values? How does he feel, for example, about the DWP prosecuting carers who have made honest mistakes for benefits fraud? “There are definitely things that make me feel uncomfortable,” he says with typical understatement.
One thing that saddens him is the deterioration in the tone of political discourse. “For somebody like me who is a consensus-builder, who tries to find a route through that people feel they can gravitate towards to make progress, it’s been quite a difficult period, which may explain why I haven’t had that same platform I had the first time around.” Since losing his job as solicitor general, he has been relegated to the backbenches.
Has he ever felt ashamed of being part of this government? “The overwhelming sense is one of frustration that it’s a missed opportunity. The one time it was like ‘What the hell are we going to do next?’ was the night and the morning of the Liz Truss resignation; we were so far away from where we needed to be connecting with the public and demonstrating we were the answer to their problems.” How did it affect him? “It’s a hard one to swallow. The risk is that you completely disengage and lose interest. You don’t feel it’s your mission.” He says he re-engaged when Sunak took over.
But he acknowledges there is plenty of work to be done to make the public trust politicians. “There’s been so much volatility since 2015. We’ve have more prime ministers in a short period of time than we’ve ever had, and that’s going to breed curiosity in some people, and contempt in others.”
He has served under five Conservative prime ministers, and has no problem in ranking them. “David Cameron was for me the best. He gave me my job. He’s No 1. Then Rishi. Theresa. Boris. And finally Truss.”
Timpson is returning to his chambers to practise law and hopes to become a judge in the family courts. His two years away from politics in between 2017 and 2019 taught him that sometimes it’s easier to effect change outside parliament.
Timpson is that rare creature – a politician who is backwards at coming forward. Does he wish he was leaving politics better known? He seems surprised by the question. “It depends what you’re better known for. I’m proud to be known as someone who actually achieved for children. I’ve got to be satisfied with that. I was never someone seeking the spotlight. But I did feel I had got to a point as children’s minister of state where I was capable of stepping up to the next level, and I would have loved to have had the opportunity to do that: to prove myself in cabinet – secretary of state for education or lord chancellor. So there’s a bit of regret that never happened. I say that as somebody who doesn’t blow my own trumpet – I probably haven’t done it enough – but I think I would have been quite good.”
One thing puzzles me. Timpson consistently voted to send asylum seekers to Rwanda. I tell him I can’t believe that he would support a policy that the archbishop of Canterbury described as “outsourcing” our morality, and ask why he voted for it. “Loyalty,” he says simply. “I’m a team player.” Perhaps Timpson was too loyal.
What does his wife, Julia, think of him leaving politics? “She feels even more than I do that I’ve been underutilised in the last four years. She feels a little bitter about that.” He reminds me that he’s only 50 and he’s got a lot of good work left in him. “I believe I’ve still got unfinished business, something significant in our country’s social policy to contribute.” So can he see a return to politics? Not as an MP, he says. A seat in the Lords? He smiles.
As we head off he shows me more family photos. “I’ll quickly show you a picture of my kids and then I’ll let you go.” He looks so happy sharing his photos. So unlike a politician. We’ve talked about how disillusioned the public are with politics. Is he? “No because I’ve had massive highs and deep lows, but I’m still here and I’m moving on on my own terms. So politics has been good to me.” He pauses. “It’s also given me a slap in the face.”
