Receive free Claire Coutinho updates
We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Claire Coutinho news every morning.
Claire Coutinho’s promotion to energy security secretary in the UK government on Thursday marked a fresh high in her meteoric political ascent.
First elected in 2019, the 38-year-old Conservative MP for East Surrey is one of prime minister Rishi Sunak’s closest and most trusted allies. “She’s the most loyal of loyal Sunak people. There is no one in politics who is closer than her to him,” said one Tory party insider.
Sunak’s decision to appoint Coutinho to lead the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero makes her the first member of the 2019 intake of Tory MPs to enter cabinet — a steep step up after holding just two junior government briefs as minister for disabled people, health and work, and then children’s minister.
Now charged with ensuring the UK meets a legally binding pledge to cut carbon emissions as Sunak faces pressure to water down green policies, Coutinho had been a member of the government for only 11 months before Thursday’s reshuffle. Long tipped as a future Tory star, the promotion will bolster speculation that she could one day become party leader.
Coutinho’s alliance with Sunak predates her arrival in the Commons. She was one of his special advisers when he was chief secretary to the Treasury between 2019 and 2020 and, after becoming an MP, served as his parliamentary aide when he was chancellor.
The similarities between the pair go beyond their work in Westminster. Like Sunak, Coutinho is of Indian descent and the child of migrants who settled in Britain in the second half of the 20th century.
While Sunak’s father was a GP and his mother a pharmacist, Coutinho’s mother worked as a GP and her father as an anaesthetist.
London-born Coutinho also mirrors the prime minister in having attended an elite private school, James Allen’s Girls’ in Dulwich, before studying at Oxford university and then working at an investment bank in the City of London.
Both are aligned on key political issues, including the UK’s departure from the EU. Like Sunak, Coutinho backed the Leave campaign in the 2016 EU referendum and has previously said that she entered politics to get Brexit done “from the inside”.
A maths and philosophy graduate, Coutinho shares Sunak’s belief in the importance of boosting maths and science in schools and industry.
“She’s very mathematics-orientated. She’s also very engaged on the growth question — how you get the economy moving,” said one ally, describing her as “detail-heavy”.
MPs say Coutinho is popular inside the often-competitive Tory parliamentary party, with her appointment especially welcomed by its social justice wing.
After leaving bank Merrill Lynch and setting up a food group, she worked at the Centre for Social Justice, a think-tank co-founded by former Tory leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith.
There she focused on education, financial inclusion and the regeneration of deprived communities, noting in 2020 that she had taken an 80 per cent pay cut in quitting the City to work in public policy.
Coutinho’s appointment places her at the centre of a raging internal Tory party war between green campaigners and net zero sceptics.
One Tory colleague predicted that Coutinho would take an “uber-pragmatic” approach to helping the UK meet its legally binding target to reduce carbon emissions to zero by 2050.
“She’s not anti-net zero stuff, she’s not a headbanger, but she is quite Treasury-minded. So that will mean, when it comes to key decisions, she’ll think: ‘What works now?’,” he said.
Some environmental campaigners cautiously welcomed Coutinho’s appointment, citing her maiden Commons speech in which she expressed pride in her East Surrey constituency for having “helped to pioneer . . . the renewable energy sector in the 17th century”.
But Ed Miliband, who will shadow Coutinho for Labour, said having six energy secretaries in less than four years was a sign of government energy policy in turmoil.
