Answering the question “who is Grant Shapps?” is more complicated than it would be for most MPs.
The new home secretary has had a varied political career, with rapid rises and precipitous falls – serving as transport secretary, minister of state for international development, Conservative party chairman, housing minister and now home secretary.
Upon taking up his latest position on Wednesday, he said: “There is a very important job to do. People expect their government to ensure there is security for them. The Home Office is at the heart of that in so many different ways.
“It is a great office of state. I am obviously honoured to do that role. I am going to get on with that serious role right now.”
But to truly answer the question, one also has to ponder “who is Michael Green?” – the pseudonym Shapps admitted to using when he held a second job as the founder of a web publishing business.
Other names he was alleged to use were “Sebastian Fox” or “Corinne Stockheath”.
He has denied using all the aforementioned names at various points, but in 2015 ultimately admitted to having had a second job while being an MP and practising business under a pseudonym. He later said he had “over-firmly denied” having a second job.
Shapps is not only a high flyer in his political and business careers: he also holds a pilot’s licence and lists aviation as a hobby.
But his career in the Commons is slightly more perfunctory than those of some of his relatives – his brother Andre played keyboards with post-punk band Big Audio Dynamite alongside his cousin, the Clash guitarist Mick Jones.
Shapps, a remain-voting one nation Tory, has been MP for Welwyn Hatfield since 2006, is seen as one of the Tory party’s best communicators and is often seen doing the broadcast rounds after a tough day for the government. But he has been dogged by controversies, often verging on the bizarre.
In September 2012, the Observer reported that he had deleted information from his Wikipedia page, including the names of donors to his private office.
One of the most unusual edits was to delete a reference to his studies at Watford grammar school for boys, where it was noted that he “obtained four O-levels including an A in CDT”.
These farcical episodes saw him effectively demoted after the 2015 election, removed as chair of the Tory party and appointed as international development secretary.
He also accepted responsibility amid claims he had failed to act on allegations of bullying after the death of party activist Elliott Johnson in 2016.
Shapps maintained his innocence in the affair but tendered his resignation as a trade minister on the grounds that “responsibility should rest somewhere”.
He returned to the backbenches for nearly four years, until July 2019 when the recently elected prime minister, Boris Johnson, appointed him as transport secretary.
It was from his support for Johnson that another peculiar morsel of information emerged; it was reported that Shapps kept a spreadsheet on his fellow Tory MPs, detailing their support for leaders or leadership candidates.
He held on to the department until the fall of Johnson. Like many of his peers in this period, his tenure was broadly defined by the response to Covid, specifically in transport the opening and closing of borders, the controversial red-listing of countries and the hard-to-navigate quarantine rules.
It was while he was transport secretary that it emerged he had registered his UK-based private plane in the US, meaning that he benefited from rules perceived as less stringent than domestic regulations.
Later on, he was at loggerheads with the transport unions as repeated strikes brought the rail network to its knees – a problem handed over to his successor, Anne-Marie Trevelyan.
He had a short run at the leadership this summer and his return to the frontbench, especially to one of the great offices of state, will raise eyebrows: he was sacked as transport secretary by Liz Truss after she reportedly told him there was “no room at the inn” for him after she became PM. While he shied away from explicitly criticising Truss in the leadership campaign, when he dropped out of the race he backed her rival, Rishi Sunak.
What sort of home secretary he will make remains to be seen, but unlike his previous two predecessors, Suella Braverman and Priti Patel, he is suspected to be more moderate on issues of immigration, policing and national security.
As home secretary, among the first questions he is sure to be asked is whether he will persist with the Patel policy of deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda. During the leadership campaign he suggested he would, caveating that it “must be done properly”.
But with the staggering pace and scale of change witnessed within government in the last week, he may feel that he does not want to have his name associated with such a divisive policy, whichever name he chooses.
• This article was amended on 20 October 2022. Grant Shapps was minister of state in the Department for International Development, not a former “international development secretary” as an earlier version said.
