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Rachel Sylvester

Times columnist

There is a black-belt karate expert, a female football coach, a Mormon, a former television presenter and a bestselling author who has had the film rights to his life bought by Brad Pitt. A total of 232 new MPs were elected for the first time on May 6, 2010, including 147 Conservatives, 67 Labour members, 9 Liberal Democrats and the first representative of the Green Party, Caroline Lucas, who won in the Brighton Pavilion constituency.

They are the novices in the Virgin Parliament, the new boys and girls who were swept into Westminster on the wave of public revulsion that followed the expenses scandal in what was widely perceived to be a House of Whores. Some were elected purely as a result of the swing away from Labour to the Tories that came after 13 years of one party having been in power, but many replaced MPs who had either resigned or been voted out by an electorate angry about the duck houses, moats and mortgages. The turnover at the last election was unusually high. The result is that more than a third of those now sitting on the green benches in the House of Commons are innocent about the wiles of the whips, ignorant of parliamentary tricks and unequipped by the now-abolished John Lewis List. Half the Tory MPs have just been elected for the first time. The Class of 2010 is the physical embodiment of “a new politics”. They are younger on average than in 1997, the last time power changed hands: 34 per cent of the new MPs are aged in their thirties. There are more black and Asian faces on the green benches than ever before: 26 MPs from ethnic minorities and marginally more women. Three Muslim women were elected, including the bright and beautiful Rushanara Ali, who regained Bethnal Green for Labour from the Respect party’s George Galloway.

Matthew Hancock, a former economist at the Bank of England who was an adviser to George Osborne before being elected Tory MP for West Suffolk at the election, says: “I’m 31 and I don’t feel particularly young. There’s a feeling of a huge generational shift.”

Michael Dugher, a former aide to Gordon Brown who is now Labour MP for Barnsley East, agrees. “People are very keen to learn the lessons of the past,” he says. “We are going to do things differently now. It is noticeable that the new MPs are hanging around with each other rather than the old hands. There is a togetherness about the new generation.”

As the new arrivals gathered for training sessions on parliamentary procedure, security and the expenses regime at the start of the new session, it became clear that whatever their party allegiances they were united by a determination to represent a clean break with the dirty past. Nicholas Boles, the new Conservative MP for Grantham and Stamford, who until recently worked for Boris Johnson and is seen as one of the party’s smartest policy brains, says: “Everybody is obsessed about not getting caught up in another expenses scandal. It is not that we are a bunch of selfrighteous men and women in white suits but there is an overwhelming feeling that that was terrible, that we are at the beginning of our careers and the last thing we want to do is to have even the slightest hint of anything improper.”

Among the new Tory and Liberal Democrat MPs there is a sense of excitement about the possibilities opened up by the coalition Government. One session of the induction course took place in the chamber and the two parties’ members drifted to the Government side and sat among each other, intermingled. “We chatted very easily and got on in a way that would have been much more difficult for the old guard on either side,” one Conservative member says.

The Class of 2010 is more professional than previous generations. About 20 per cent of the new MPs are defined as having come into the Commons from politics, having worked either as advisers or councillors, 15 per cent from business, 12 per cent consultancy, 12 per cent law and 10 per cent financial services. Only 6 per cent have come in from charities, 5 per cent from the education sector and 5 per cent from the media.

According to an analysis by the Sutton Trust, an educational charity, 35 per cent of MPs in the new Parliament went to independent schools. More than half of Conservative MPs were educated privately and 20 out of the 306 on the Tory benches went to one school – David Cameron’s alma mater, Eton. On the Labour side, it is rather different. “There are a lot of regional accents, most of us are working class-made-good,” says one new MP. Several union officials won seats, after a successful operation by Unite.

There does, though, also seem to be a hereditary principle at work in the House of Commons across the board. At least nine children of politicians were elected in 2010. They include Zac Goldsmith, the new Conservative MP for Richmond Park, who is the son of the late Referendum Party leader, Sir James Goldsmith; Ben Gummer, elected in Ipswich, the son of John Gummer, the former Tory Cabinet minister; and Anas Sarwar, who took over as Labour MP for Glasgow Central from his father, Mohammed Sarwar. Harriet Harman’s husband, Jack Dromey, joins her in Parliament as MP for Birmingham Erdington and Valerie Vaz, Labour MP for Walsall South, is the sister of Keith Vaz, the longstanding Labour MP for Leicester East. Jacob Rees-Mogg, the son of the former Times Editor Lord Rees-Mogg, was elected in Somerset North East.

The new Conservative members are generally socially liberal and supportive of David Cameron’s modernisation of their party. A few days after the election, the Tory leader held a meeting of all his new MPs and was rather astonished by the attitude he found. “The general mood of the group was that, if anything, we had not gone far enough on modernisation,” one of those present says. “David said afterwards how remarkable it was, he was quite taken aback.”

Like Mr Cameron, most of the new Conservative MPs, are also pretty Eurosceptic. According to George Eustace, the former campaign director of the anti-euro “no” campaign, who is now MP for Camborne and Redruth: “Most think we should be taking powers back from the EU, but the new intake is also very committed to the idea of social enterprises, charities and voluntary groups being involved in public services. The Iain Duncan Smith agenda is where traditional right-wing Conservatism can come together with the more liberal modernising wing of the party.”

Other high-profile Tories include Rory Stewart, in Penrith and the Border, a former deputy governor of Iraq and bestselling author. He once walked across Afghanistan and also spent a summer as a tutor to Princes William and Harry. It is his life story that has been snapped up by Brad Pitt. Dan Byles, the new Tory MP for Warwickshire North, is almost as adventurous – he has rowed across the Atlantic and skied to the north pole with his mother.

Mr Goldsmith, the brother of Jemima Khan, will add a touch of glamour to the green benches, but could also clash with the leadership over green issues. Tracy Crouch, Tory MP for Chatham and Aylesford, is the qualified football coach. David Rutley, a former banker who represents Macclesfield, is the House of Commons’s first Mormon. Helen Grant, in Maidstone and the Weald, is the first black woman Conservative MP. Dominic Raab, Tory MP for Esher and Walton, a lawyer by training, has represented Britain at karate.

On the Labour side there is a fighting spirit as well. Those to watch include Tristram Hunt, the television historian who has just been elected in Stoke-on-Trent Central, and Chuka Umunna, the new MP for Streatham, a former lawyer who has been described as a potential British Barack Obama. Rachel Reeves, in Leeds West, is a former Bank of England economist with a reforming zeal, and Gloria De Piero, who was until she became MP for Ashfield a GMTV presenter, is certain to attract plenty of attention. Two former ministers under Tony Blair who lost their seats in 2005 also returned to Parliament: Stephen Twigg in Liverpool West Derby and Chris Leslie in Nottingham East.

One new MP says: “It is nothing like 1997, when lots of people got in who never expected to. Everyone here now has got black under their fingernails from having scraped their way up. They are quite a brutal, hard-headed bunch. They don’t look at the world through the prism of Blair-Brown or Left versus Right. They look at the world through the prism of Labour’s defeat.”

Whatever their party affiliation, those elected this year also look at the world through the prism of the MPs’ expenses scandal. There is the possibility of a really quite dramatic change of culture, brought about by a younger, more independent-minded intake who are all too aware of voters’ anger with politicians. Some of the Conservatives have been chosen in open primaries, which may make them less willing to toe the party line. Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs have used the election campaign to make clear their determination to alter the way in which politics is done. Across the board, the new intake is generally more receptive to constitutional reform, including changes to the voting system, than their parties’ older grandees.

Just as the Blair Babes transformed how the House of Commons looked in 1997, bringing flashes of feminine colour to the rows of grey suits, so the Class of 2010 could alter for ever the way in which politics is conducted. One new Tory MP says: “We get the scale of the public’s anger over the expenses scandal in a way that those who were in Parliament when it broke do not really get. We understand just how much change is needed.”