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Claire Coryl Julia Coutinho (; born 8 July 1985) is a British politician and former investment banker who has been Shadow Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero and Shadow Minister for Equalities since 2024. A member of the Conservative Party, she has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for East Surrey since 2019. Coutinho previously served in the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero from August 2023 to July 2024. She has been described as a close ally of former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and an ardent supporter of Brexit.
After graduating in mathematics and philosophy from Exeter College, Oxford, Coutinho worked as an associate at the investment bank Merrill Lynch for nearly four years, and co-founded, with food writer Mina Holland, a literary-themed events company called The Novel Diner. She also worked at the centre-right think tank Centre for Social Justice, at the industry group Housing and Finance Institute created by Natalie Elphicke, and for accounting firm KPMG as a corporate responsibility manager. She left KPMG to become a special adviser at HM Treasury; initially working for Julian Smith, she became an aide to Sunak.
Coutinho joined the frontbench as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Disabled People in September 2022 under Prime Minister Liz Truss. After Truss's resignation the following month, Coutinho endorsed Rishi Sunak's successful leadership bid and subsequently was appointed Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Children, Families and Wellbeing in Sunak ministry. She was promoted to the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero in August 2023. After the defeat of the Conservative Party in the 2024 general election, Coutinho became the Shadow Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero in Sunak's Shadow Cabinet. She was reappointed to the position after the election of Kemi Badenoch as leader in November 2024, and gained the additional position of Shadow Minister for Equalities.
Coutinho worked at Iain Duncan Smith's centre-right think tank Centre for Social Justice for two years; she focussed on financial inclusion, education, and regeneration policy. As of 2016, she was a programme director for the industry group Housing and Finance Institute created by Natalie Elphicke. She also worked for accounting firm KPMG as a corporate responsibility manager.
Coutinho left the company to become a special adviser at HM Treasury. Initially working for Julian Smith, she then became an aide to Rishi Sunak. Coutinho has commented that she left KPMG to join the government as a special adviser so that she could help deliver Brexit "from the inside", having supported the Leave vote in the 2016 EU membership referendum.
She was elected as MP for East Surrey at the 2019 general election, which was held on 12 December, with 59.7% of the vote and a majority of 24,040. This was almost exactly same share of the constituency vote that the Conservative Party has secured in the previous election in 2017, when Gyimah took 59.6% of votes cast.
In May 2020, she was criticised by several of her local constituents for supporting Dominic Cummings, then the chief adviser to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, in taking a controversial trip from London to County Durham during a national lockdown in the COVID-19 pandemic. In June 2020, the windows of the East Surrey Conservative Association offices were graffitied with the words "liars, cheats, traitors" in black paint.
Coutinho joined the advisory board of the centre-right think tank Onward in February 2020. She was appointed as a Parliamentary Private Secretary (PPS) to Rishi Sunak in March 2020, She was a senior fellow at the conservative think tank Policy Exchange in 2021. Coutinho resigned from her position as PPS on 6 July 2022 in protest at Prime Minister Johnson's leadership following the Chris Pincher scandal, and endorsed Sunak in the following Conservative Party leadership election.
Coutinho served as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Disabled People between September and October 2022 and Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Children, Families and Wellbeing between October 2022 and August 2023. The government signed a £19.5 million contract with consultancy Newton Europe in June 2022 to design and develop its Delivering Better Value (DBV) programme, which aimed to reduce budget deficits in the education of children with special educational needs and disabilities with a target of at least 20% cut in new education provision. In May 2023, Coutinho stated to the Education Select Committee that there were no targets.
In August 2023, Coutinho wrote to social landlords, housing associations and developers calling on them to let childminders work from rented properties. She commented that restrictive clauses in their contracts may stop them working from their homes.
At the 2024 general election, Coutinho was re-elected to Parliament as MP for East Surrey with a decreased vote share of 35.6% and a decreased majority of 7,450. The Conservative Party lost the election, and on 8 July 2024, she was appointed as Shadow Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero in Sunak's shadow cabinet.
In a speech at the 2023 Conservative Party Conference, Coutinho claimed that the Labour Party supported the introduction of a meat tax. Factchecking charity Full Fact found no evidence of this. When pressed by Sky News journalist Sophy Ridge on her comments, she said that it was only a light-hearted moment in her speech and provided no evidence for her assertion.
In April 2024, Coutinho replied to criticism from Chris Stark, the outgoing Head of the Climate Change Committee that provides independent advice to ministers, that Sunak's government had hampered progress on climate change. Coutinho countered that the UK was the first major economy to reduce its emissions by half since 1990, and that she had made changes to the tax system to encourage investment in the energy sector. She added that the government would be "sensible and pragmatic" in its plans for net zero, and avoid "heaping costs on families".
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