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Sir Oliver Letwin (born 19 May 1956) is a British politician, Member of Parliament (MP) for West Dorset from 1997 to 2019. Letwin was elected as a member of the Conservative Party, but sat as an independent after having the whip removed in September 2019. He was Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer under Michael Howard and Shadow Home Secretary under Iain Duncan Smith. He was Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster from 2014 to 2016.
Following the 2015 general election Letwin was given overall responsibility for the Cabinet Office and became a full member of the Cabinet in the Conservative government. Previously he had been the Minister of State for Government Policy from 2010.
During the Second May ministry in 2019, Letwin rebelled against leading Eurosceptics within the Conservative Party by tabling a cross-party motion to hold "indicative votes", allowing MPs to vote on several Brexit options in order to establish whether any could command a majority in the House of Commons; it transpired that none of them could. Letwin sought to extend Article 50 through passing the Cooper–Letwin Act. In August 2019 he announced that he would stand down at the next election. On 3 September 2019, he lost the Conservative party whip and sat as an independent MP after that.
He was educated at The Hall School, Hampstead and at Eton College. He then went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he received a double first in history. From 1980 to 1981, Letwin was a visiting fellow (a Procter Fellow) of Princeton University, then a research fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge, from 1981 until 1982. His thesis, Emotion and Emotions, earned a PhD awarded by the Cambridge Philosophy Faculty in 1982. He is also a graduate of the London Business School.
According to official government documents from 1985, released in December 2014 under the thirty-year rule, Letwin recommended that the Prime Minister "use Scotland as a trail-blazer for the pure residence charge", i.e. the controversial Community Charge or "Poll tax", having trialled it there first, and to implement it nationwide should "the exemplifications prove ... it is feasible."
Another 1985 internal memo released in December 2015 showed Letwin's response to the Broadwater Farm riot, which blamed the violence on the "bad moral attitudes" of the predominantly Afro-Caribbean rioters, claiming that "lower-class, unemployed white people lived for years without a breakdown of public order on anything like the present scale". It also criticised some of the schemes proposed to address inner-city problems, suggesting David Young's proposed scheme to support black entrepreneurs would flounder because the money would be spent on the "disco and drug trade". Letwin later apologised, saying that parts of the memo had been "both badly worded and wrong."
Letwin co-authored Britain's biggest enterprise: ideas for radical reform of the NHS, a 1988 Centre for Policy Studies pamphlet written with John Redwood which advocated a closer relationship between the National Health Service and the private sector. This is regarded as providing a theoretical justification for NHS reforms carried out by subsequent governments, particularly the Health and Social Care Act 2012.
Letwin stood unsuccessfully against Diane Abbott in Hackney North and Stoke Newington at the 1987 election, and against Glenda Jackson for the Hampstead and Highgate seat at the 1992 election.
He had previously been an official Opposition spokesman on Constitutional Affairs, Scotland and Wales from 1998, and was promoted to Shadow Financial Secretary to the Treasury in 1999.
During the campaign for the 2001 general election, Letwin expressed an aspiration to curtail future public spending by £20 billion per annum relative to the plans of the Labour government. When this proposal came under attack as regressive, Letwin found few of his colleagues to defend it, and he adopted a low profile for the remainder of the campaign. He went into hiding during the 2001 election. At this election, his majority in his West Dorset constituency was cut to 1,414 votes.
In September 2001, he was appointed Shadow Home Secretary by the new Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith. In this role, he attracted plaudits for his advocacy of a "neighbourly society", which manifested itself in calls for street by street neighbourhood policing, modelled on the philosophy of the police in New York. He was also largely credited with forcing the then Home Secretary to withdraw his proposal in 2001 to introduce an offence of incitement to religious hatred. He successfully argued that such an offence would be impossible to define, so there would be little chance of prosecution. He also argued that Muslims would feel persecuted by such a law. In late 2003, Michael Howard appointed Letwin as his successor as Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer. As Shadow Chancellor he focused on reducing waste in the public sector.
At the 2005 general election the Conservative Party claimed to have found £35 billion worth of potential savings, to be used for increased resources for front-line services and for tax cuts. This approach was credited with forcing the government to introduce bureaucracy reduction and cost-cutting proposals of their own. In May 2005, Letwin's majority in his seat increased to 2,461 votes, despite his hard pro-EU views. After the election, Letwin was appointed Shadow Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. The Times reported that he had requested a role less onerous than his former Treasury brief so that he would have time to pursue his career in the City. Until December 2009, he was a non-executive director of the merchant bank NM Rothschild Corporate Finance Ltd.
Following Michael Howard's decision to stand down as Conservative Party leader after the 2005 election, Letwin publicly backed the youngest candidate and eventual winner David Cameron.
In the lead-up to the 2010 general election, Letwin played an important role in the development of Conservative policy, and was described by Daniel Finkelstein as "the Gandalf of the process".
The 2010 general election saw him increase his majority to 3,923 votes.
Letwin was appointed as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster on 14 July 2014, succeeding Lord Hill of Oareford who became the United Kingdom's next European Commissioner. He also continued in his role as Minister for Policy until the 2015 general election, when the position was abolished.
He was returned with a much increased majority of 16,130 votes by his West Dorset constituents at the 2015 general election. Following that election, Letwin remained Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Cameron also appointed him as a full member of the new Conservative government's Cabinet with responsibility for overall charge and oversight of the Cabinet Office.
Immediately after the 23 June 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, Cameron appointed Letwin "Minister for Brexit". He appeared on 5 July before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee and was criticised for Government's lack of planning for a leave vote. The Cabinet was accused of "dereliction of duty". When committee chairman Crispin Blunt observed, upon the resignation of Cameron, that Letwin had been left "holding the baby", Letwin said, "I can only say that the baby is being firmly held, and that my intention is that the baby should prosper – because I care about the baby in question. It is, in fact, our country."
Letwin was awarded a Knight Bachelor by David Cameron in the 2016 Prime Minister's Resignation Honours List. This gave him the Honorific "Sir" for life.
In 2018, Letwin led an "independent review" into the delivery of housing on large development sites.
During the Second May ministry in 2019, Letwin rebelled against leading Eurosceptics within the Conservative Party by tabling a cross-party motion to hold "indicative votes", allowing MPs to vote on several Brexit options in order to establish whether any could command a majority in the House of Commons. Though no option received a positive number of votes, the "People's Vote" proposal from Margaret Beckett was the most popular.
After announcing that he would not stand in the 2019 general election, Letwin was succeeded as the Conservative candidate for Dorset West by Chris Loder, who was subsequently elected as the seat's MP.
Letwin said it would not ameliorate the situation but would do little more than "subsidise Rastafarian arts and crafts workshops" stating that black "entrepreneurs will set up in the disco and drug trade." When the 1985 paper was released to public record by the Cabinet Office along with other Whitehall papers under accelerated procedures of the Thirty-year rule into the public record through the National Archives in Kew, West London on 30 December 2015, a chastened Letwin apologised on the same day for "the offence caused".
Trevor Phillips OBE, former head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission observed that, "I don't think these remarks would have raised a single eyebrow at the time."
The 1985 Broadwater Farm memo argued the riots were caused by bad behaviour not social conditions. The policy unit proposed a programme for creating "better attitudes," including measures to encourage the establishment of 'old-fashioned independent schools' which Cabinet Secretary Sir Robert Armstrong warned in 1985 constituted social engineering.
Labour MP Chuka Umunna, whose Streatham constituency included parts of Brixton, said the tone of the memo was "positively Victorian." He added:
The attitudes towards the black community exhibited in the paper are disgusting and appalling ... The authors of this paper illustrate a complete ignorance of what was going on in our community at that time, as evidenced by their total and utter disregard of the rampant racism in the Met Police which caused the community to boil over – there is no mention of that racism in their paper.
In July 2014 the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, apologised "unreservedly" for the shooting and the time it had taken to say sorry" following an inquest into the death of Dorothy "Cherry" Groce, whose shooting by the Metropolitan Police triggered the riots. The jury inquest blamed the Metropolitan Police for failures that contributed to Groce's death.
In 2003, The Independent reported Letwin saying that he would "go out on the streets and beg" rather than send his children to the state schools in Lambeth where he and his family lived.
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