 Dominic Grieve has been hailed as a "star performer" |
Dominic Grieve QC is to take over as shadow home secretary, following David Davis' resignation. A Conservative activist from a young age and the son of a former Tory MP, Dominic Grieve was first elected to the Commons in 1997. He was recognised as one of the most intellectually able of the new Tory intake and is regarded by his peers as a skilled and assiduous Commons debater. Tory leader David Cameron has hailed him as "a star performer in Parliament". A barrister and a former member of the London Diocesan Synod, he is interested in constitutional issues and was fervently opposed to devolution. 'Moral values' He became his party's front bench spokesman on Scottish affairs before moving to a home affairs role in 2001. In November 2003, he was appointed shadow attorney general. In 2004, despite being clad in black tie, he gave chase to and ensured the arrest of a vandal destroying a bus stop in London. Mr Grieve said at the time that crime would never be tackled "unless people are encouraged to participate with a little bit of gentle law enforcement". He attracted controversy during the Conservative Party's row over selective education in 2007, when he told his local newspaper that if more grammar schools were needed in Buckinghamshire, they should be built. Mr Grieve is seen as a traditionalist who has argued that Victorian society was one where "a sense of moral values and of the responsibility people owed to each other did seem to be pervasive". Born in May 1956, he was educated at Westminster School, Magdalen College, Oxford, and Central London Polytechnic where he took a diploma in law. Called to the bar in 1980, he specialised in health-and-safety law and was appointed as a QC in 2008. A Hammersmith and Fulham councillor from 1982 to 1986, he contested the safe Labour seat of Lambeth Norwood in 1987. He was a member of the Prime Minister John Major's Campaign Team during the 1992 general election. He is married to a fellow barrister, Caroline Hutton, and they have two sons.
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