Chris Heaton-Harris has been trusted by Boris Johnson to marshal Conservative MPs during the most hazardous period of his political career. The newly appointed chief whip is a longtime insider and minister who remains little known to the public – beyond the occasional mini-controversy.
The MP for Daventry since 2010, who is now onto his seventh ministerial role in six years (though the first in the cabinet), is a die-hard Brexit supporter whose fervour for the cause brought perhaps his most uncomfortable moment in the spotlight.
In 2017, when he was a junior whip under Theresa May, Heaton-Harris was accused of attempted McCarthyism when he wrote to the vice-chancellors of all English universities asking them to declare what they were teaching about Brexit, and to give a list of teachers’ names.
His letter asked for a copy of each university’s syllabus and any online lectures on Brexit, with a series of university leaders calling the requests sinister and unprecedented.
While Heaton-Harris argued he was seeking the information in his role as a whip, he was soon cut adrift by Downing Street, which said he had been acting purely as an individual MP.
He remained a minister, becoming a junior Brexit minister in 2018. The following year he resigned in protest after May began talks with Labour on a possible end to the Brexit impasse. When May stepped down, Heaton-Harris backed Andrea Leadsom as the new leader – she was eliminated in the first round of Tory MP voting.
Heaton-Harris returned to the government under Johnson, spending two years as a junior transport minister, with duties including helping to enforce Downing Street’s efforts to promote cycling in the face of scepticism from some Tory-run councils.
In December last year, he began what became a brief stint as Europe ministerfc in the Foreign Office, but spent increasing amounts of his time helping Johnson with what was, in effect, an unofficial second whipping team, liaising with backbenchers increasingly disgruntled over reports about alleged lockdown-breaking parties.
In a slightly unlikely sideline, Heaton-Harris is also a devoted fan of tweeting what appear to be deliberately bad dad jokes, although he has held off recently. A sample of his oeuvre is: “For my next trick, I will eat a percussion instrument in a bap. Drum roll please...”
Being a chief whip is never the easiest of cabinet jobs even at the best of times – and this is far from that. If Heaton-Harris manages to even stem the trickle of no-confidence letters from Tory MPs, buying time for Johnson to plot a fightback, he will have repaid the PM’s confidence in him.
