Chris Grayling

Early life

Grayling was born in London and grew up in Buckinghamshire, where he was educated at the Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe. He then went to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he graduated with an upper-second class Bachelor of Arts degree in history in 1984.

Early adulthood

Grayling joined BBC News in 1985 as a trainee, becoming a producer in 1986. He left the BBC in 1988 to join Channel 4 as an editor on its Business Daily television programme. He rejoined the BBC in 1991 as a business development manager on BBC Select. On leaving the BBC again in 1993, he ran several television production companies, including managing the corporate communications division of Workhouse Ltd from 1992–95 and SSVC Group in Gerrards Cross from 1995–97.

He became a management consultant in 1997 with Burson Marsteller, where he remained until his election to Parliament. Prior to joining the Conservative Party, Grayling was a member of the Social Democratic Party.

Borough Councillor (1998–2002)

Grayling was selected to contest the Labour-held marginal seat of Warrington South at the 1997 general election, but was defeated by Labour candidate Helen Southworth by 10,807 votes. He was elected as a councillor for the Hillside ward in the London Borough of Merton in 1998 and remained on the council until 2002.

Elected Member of Parliament (2001)

Grayling was elected to the House of Commons to represent the Surrey seat of Epsom and Ewell at the 2001 general election following the retirement of the veteran Tory MP Archie Hamilton. Grayling held the seat with a majority of 10,080 and has been returned as MP there since. He made his maiden speech on 25 June 2001.

Shadow Cabinet (2001–2010)

Grayling served on the Environment, Transport and the Regions Select Committee from 2001 until he was promoted to the Opposition Whips' Office by Iain Duncan Smith in 2002, moving to become a Spokesman for Health later in the year. He became a Spokesman for Education and Skills by Michael Howard in 2003.

Following the 2005 general election he became a member of Howard's Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Leader of the House of Commons; and after the election of David Cameron as the leader of the Conservative Party in December 2005 he served as the Shadow Secretary of State for Transport. In June 2007, he was made Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, a post he held until January 2009 when he became Shadow Home Secretary.

Conservative "attack-dog"

Grayling became known as a national politician through his "attack dog" pressure on leading Labour politicians. He was heavily involved in the questioning of David Blunkett, the then Work and Pensions Secretary, over his business affairs which led to Blunkett's resignation in 2005.

Grayling also challenged Tony Blair and his wife Cherie over the money they made from lectures while Blair was Prime Minister. He also challenged minister Stephen Byers over his handling of the Railtrack collapse.

Expenses claims

Between 2001 and 2009, Grayling claimed expenses for his flat in Pimlico, close to the Houses of Parliament, despite having a constituency home no further than 17 miles away. Grayling says he uses the flat when "working very late" because he needs to "work very erratic and late hours most days when the House of Commons is sitting." During the Parliamentary expenses scandal, The Daily Telegraph reported that Grayling refitted and redecorated the flat in 2005 costing over £5,000. Grayling's expenses issue was seen as embarrassing for the Conservative Party as he had previously criticised Labour ministers for being implicated in sleaze scandals.

Comparing Moss Side to The Wire

As Shadow Home Secretary, Grayling provoked controversy in August 2009 when he compared Manchester's Moss Side area to the American TV crime drama The Wire. His comments received angry responses from Manchester locals and police. Having been out on patrol for a day with the police, observing the results of a shooting at a house, he described himself as having witnessed an "urban war". Police responded that gang-related shootings in Greater Manchester had fallen by 82 percent from the previous year and that to speak of "urban war" was "sensationalistic".

A local councillor, Roy Walters, complained of Moss Side unfairly being a "negative target" due to historical associations. He was, however, defended by right wing commentators who said he spoke for the "mainstream majority". Sticking by his comments, Grayling said, "I didn't say Moss Side equals Baltimore. What I said is that we have in Moss Side symptoms of a gang conflict in this country which I find profoundly disturbing." Baltimore, with a population of about 600,000, was noted as having 191 gun related murders in the previous year, in comparison to Moss Side, population 17,537, which had none.

Statistics controversy

Grayling came under fire as Shadow Home Secretary over the Conservative Party's use of statistics on violent crime. In February 2010, the Conservative Party issued press releases to every constituency in the UK claiming that crime had "risen sharply" in the UK. They failed, however, to take into account the more rigorous system for recording crime. The chairman of the UK Statistics Authority, Sir Michael Scholar, said that the figures Grayling was using were "likely to mislead the public" and "likely to damage public trust in official statistics" as the way in which crime was calculated had been changed in 2002.

A Conservative-commissioned report by the independent House of Commons library suggested that, depending on how figures were calculated, Grayling's claims may have been justifiable and that violent crime may have risen in the period between 1998 and 2009. The incumbent Home Secretary, Alan Johnson called Grayling's use of crime statistics "dodgy" and that, using the British Crime Survey, it could be shown that violent crime had, in fact, reduced by 41% over the same period.

Gay couples in B&Bs controversy

In March 2010, Grayling was recorded at an open meeting of the Centre for Policy Studies think tank saying that during the debates on civil liberties under the Labour Government, he had felt that Christians should have the right to live by their consciences and that Christian owners of bed and breakfasts should have the right to turn away gay couples. Grayling said:

"I personally always took the view that, if you look at the case of should a Christian hotel owner have the right to exclude a gay couple from a hotel, I took the view that if it's a question of somebody who's doing a B&B in their own home, that individual should have the right to decide who does and who doesn't come into their own home. If they are running a hotel on the high street, I really don’t think that it is right in this day and age that a gay couple should walk into a hotel and be turned away because they are a gay couple, and I think that is where the dividing line comes."

When the recording was released by The Observer, on 3 April 2010, Grayling's comments caused uproar, with Ben Summerskill, Chief Executive of the gay rights group Stonewall, saying that this position would be "illegal" and "very alarming to a lot of gay people who may have been thinking of voting Conservative". Lord Mandelson, the most senior gay minister in the (then Labour) Government, added that the comment showed that the Conservative Party had not changed, that "when the camera is on they say one thing, but when the camera is off they say another". Conservative Party leader David Cameron was subsequently urged to "back or sack" Grayling, with gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell saying that "Cameron's silence is worrying. Many voters – gay and straight – will be disturbed by his failure to swiftly disown Grayling's support for homophobic discrimination. What does this say about the sincerity and seriousness of his commitment to gay equality?"

Author Douglas Murray has dubbed Grayling "a political buffoon, unsure of what he is saying and with little idea of how to say it." Anastasia Beaumont-Bott, founder of LGBTory, a gay rights group which campaigns for the Conservatives, announced that she would be voting for Labour, not the Conservatives, in response to Grayling's comments. She said, "I feel guilty because as a gay woman affected by LGBT rights I am on record saying you should vote Conservative, and I want to reverse that. I want to go on record to say don't vote Conservative. I'd go as far to say that I'll vote Labour at this general election." Beaumont-Bott was joined in defecting from the Conservatives to Labour a week later by prominent gay rights campaigner David Heathcote. Grayling’s comments, however, were defended by a number of commentators, including the Today Programme presenter and leading gay broadcaster Evan Davis and leading Christian groups.

Grayling apologised on 9 April, saying "I am sorry if what I said gave the wrong impression, I certainly didn't intend to offend anyone... I voted for gay rights, I voted for this particular measure." Various commentators speculated that he might have been "hidden away" by his party when he made relatively few public appearances in the days of the general election campaign that followed. It is unclear whether his remarks were the reason that David Cameron chose to appoint Theresa May as Home Secretary in his new Cabinet, rather than Grayling who held the position in the Shadow Cabinet; Grayling was not given any Cabinet post, as had been predicted by some media commentators prior to the election. On 31 January 2013, it was reported that Grayling would vote in favour of same-sex marriage in England and Wales.

Minister for Work and Pensions

On 28 May 2010, Grayling was sworn to the Privy Council in the 2010 Dissolution of Parliament Honours List. Grayling served as Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions, from 2010 until 2012, before being promoted to the Cabinet, on 4 September 2012, as Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice. As minister at DWP he was responsible for jobcentres. A controversial minister at the despatch box, measures were introduced to reduce costs, leaving 100,000 staff redundant in offices around the country. In the context of a "Broken Society" he accused some families of being habitually unemployed, generation after generation, living in sink council estates in the inner cities. Grayling was advocated for cuts to the DWP budgets in order to constrain welfare spending.

The policy later informed treatment of prisoners, refusing the right to vote, and clamping down on abusive behaviours in jails. He announced work programs for prisoners, encouraged an end to the "something for nothing culture". More people than ever were found fit to work as part of a package of measures in £5 bn program to make work for the long-term unemployed.

Justice Secretary

Sworn in as Lord Chancellor on 1 October 2012 at Westminster Abbey, he was elected an Honorary Bencher of Gray's Inn on 11 December 2012, due in part to his lack of legal qualifications. He was the first non-lawyer to have served as Lord Chancellor for at least 440 years.(It was reported that the last such non-lawyer was the Earl of Shaftesbury in 1672–3; but the Earl was admitted to Lincoln's Inn in 1638.) Grayling's appointment was widely seen as a return to a more hard line approach than that of his predecessor, Clarke. Indeed, Grayling pursued a "tough justice" agenda, including ending automatic early release for terrorists and child rapists, ending simple cautions for serious offences, and introducing greater protections for householders who defend themselves against intruders. The leading human rights barrister Lord Pannick described Grayling's performance as "notable only for his attempts to restrict judicial reviews and human rights , his failure to protect the judiciary against criticism from his colleagues and the reduction of legal aid to a bare minimum. "

Prisoner reforms

One of Grayling's first acts at the Ministry of Justice was to commence a project to change the way offenders were rehabilitated in an effort to cut reoffending rates. Under a system of "payment by results", private companies as well as charities were to play a greater role in looking after offenders on licence in the community. Grayling's ban on books being sent into UK prisons has been widely criticised by the Howard League for Penal Reform and the literary establishment, including Philip Pullman, Mark Haddon, Anthony Horowitz, Susan Hill and Emma Donoghue. The ban was described as obscene by Shaun Attwood of the TV show Banged Up Abroad who read over a thousand books in prison and credited books for being the lifeblood of rehabilitation.

The move was defended as being not about a ban on books being sent into prison, but about parcels being sent in, as giving prisons access to the latter would almost certainly increase the amount of contraband getting into the prison estate. On stepping down from his role as Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Prisons Nick Harding criticised Grayling for "robustly" interfering with the contents of reports and Graying’s department for using financial controls to influence what was inspected, thereby threatening the independence of the Inspector's role.

Prison benchmarking and staff cuts

A prison "benchmarking" programme was introduced in 2012 by Grayling to reduce the costs of public sector prisons to match comparable private sector prisons, along with associated new core standards intended to result in prisoners having similar amounts of time spent outside their cells across similar prisons. Prison officer numbers were reduced from about 23,000 in 2012 to about 18,000 in 2015.

In 2015 the Justice Select Committee, following a year long prison inquiry, were critical of Justice ministers for apparent complacency about a 38% rise in prison deaths since 2012. The committee concluded that efficiency savings and staffing shortages had made "a significant contribution to the deterioration in safety" in prisons.

A 'tough justice' agenda: court reforms

Grayling's proposed cuts to legal aid were widely criticised by the legal profession. In May 2013, 90 Queen's Counsels signed a letter sent to the Daily Telegraph that branded the cuts "unjust", as they would seriously undermine the rule of law. 6 January 2014 saw the first strike in British history by barristers and solicitors in protest at the cuts. In February 2014, he introduced the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015 to the House of Commons. The Bill included measures to outlaw "revenge porn". In October 2014 Grayling unveiled the Conservative Party's proposals for reforms to human rights in order to curb the European Court of Human Rights' influence over British court rulings, whilst honouring the text of the original Convention on Human Rights in a British Bill of Rights and Responsibilities. In December 2013, Alan Turing was granted a pardon by the Queen, after a process initiated by Grayling in his capacity as Lord Chancellor. April 2015 saw Grayling introduce mandatory flat-fee court charges for magistrates courts, the lowest fee being £150 for a guilty plea. Lawyers feared that defendants may plead guilty to avoid falling into debt, and the president of the Law Society described the change as a threat to fair trials. The charges for crown court are up to £1,200.

Justice department security failure

In January 2015, data relating to three fatal police shootings including details of marksmen and the deceased's family were lost in the post by the Justice Department. According to The Guardian it was particularly embarrassing for Grayling as the Government was claiming it needed to access personal data to deal with terrorism and could keep it securely. The data included details of the Mark Duggan shooting incident which had triggered the 2011 England riots.

Father's 4 Justice Protests

On multiple occasions in 2014 and 2015, protesters seeking extra rights for fathers in family courts targeted Grayling's constituency home in Ashtead, Surrey in January and October 2015.

Other incidents include a weekend protest camp set up outside his house by 4 protesters.

Leader of the House of Commons

After the 2015 general election, Grayling was appointed Leader of the House of Commons and Lord President of the Council. Michael Gove, who replaced Grayling as Secretary of State for Justice and Lord Chancellor, was reportedly unimpressed with Grayling's "innovations".

Transport Secretary

Grayling was appointed as Transport Secretary by new PM Theresa May in July 2016. In December 2016, he blocked a move by the London Mayor Sadiq Khan to give control of the metro services run by Southeastern to TfL. A leaked letter revealed that in 2013, Grayling wrote to then-London Mayor Boris Johnson saying that he opposed such a move because it could put those services “in the clutches of a Labour mayor”. The leak led to Grayling being accused of putting his party's political interests over those of the public and commuters, as well as members of his own party calling for his resignation.

Grayling was criticised for injuring a cyclist by opening the door of his ministerial car without looking in the Westminster area in October 2016.

Personal life

Grayling is married to Susan Clare Dillistone and has two sons.

Publications