Just who is Alex Burghart? And have the Tories found a new rising star?
Alex who? As veteran MPs like to joke about young upstarts in politics who are largely unknown, he’s not even a household name in his own home.
But he has long been a member of Kemi’s gang and resigned from Boris Johnson’s government along with the future Tory leader over the Chris Pincher scandal in 2022.
Mr Burghart is 47, but looks younger, and succeeded Tory big beast Eric Pickles as Conservative MP for Brentwood and Ongar, on London’s border with Essex, in 2017.
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Educated at Millfield public school, he’s a brainy historian with an Oxford BA and a PhD from King’s College, London, and has written for BBC History and the Times Literary Supplement.
But until his impressive debut as Kemi Badenoch’s stand-in against Angela Rayner at PMQs, his climb up the greasy pole of politics had been worthy but unspectacular.
He was initially a history teacher and university tutor, before working for Iain Duncan Smith’s Centre for Social Justice thinktank and writing a book about vulnerable children.
He also worked for the Children’s Commissioner for England, Anne Longfield, before becoming Theresa May’s special adviser on social policy when she became prime minister in 2016.
Once in parliament, he was a parliamentary private secretary – unpaid bag-carrier – to attorney generals Geoffrey Cox and Jeremy Wright and Karen Bradley, then Northern Ireland secretary.
His big break came when Boris Johnson became prime minister in 2019 and made him his PPS (parliamentary private secretary) and two years later he became a junior education minister, responsible for apprenticeships.
But his own apprenticeship for the big jobs came to a halt when along with Kemi Badenoch and her other close allies Neil O’Brien, Lee Rowley and Julia Lopez he quit in protest against the Pincher sleaze scandal.
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