Eleanor Laing

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Eleanor Laing

Eleanor Laing.Portrait.jpg

Name Eleanor Fulton Laing, née Pritchard (born 1 February, 1958)
Politics
Party Conservative
Constituency Epping Forest (1997 - present)
Positions • Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons (October 2013 - presnet)
• Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland (May 2005 - December 2005)
Likes Sunday trading, gay rights (generally), theatre, travel, golf
Dislikes Devolution, 38 Degrees, all-women shortlists
Friends Liam Fox
Enemies ?
Relationships
Partners Alan Laing (1983 - 2003, divorced)
Children Matthew (June 2001)
Personal Attributes
Nationality Scottish
Religion Church of Scotland
Sexuality Straight
Height 5' 5.5"
Eye Colour Brown
Handedness Right
Accent Light Scottish

The lone Tory representative among the Deputy Speakers, Eleanor Laing is known for her booming voice and her floofy ginger hair.

Life and Career[edit | edit source]

Early Life and Pre-political Career[edit | edit source]

Eleanor was born in Paisley, the daughter of a builder, and grew up in the nearby village of Kilmacolm. She went to the local independent St Columba's School and went on to attend the University of Edinburgh, where she became the first female President of the Edinburgh University Students' Association. She graduated with Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Laws degrees.

After uni she became a solicitor in Edinburgh and the City of London. She only practiced law for four years, but she was elected Chairman of the Society of Conservative Lawyers and held that post for much longer.

Early Political Career[edit | edit source]

In 1987 Eleanor stood for Parliament in the safe Labour seat of Paisley North, but her first proper semi-political job was as a professional lobbyist for Sunday trading. When John MacGregor became Secretary of State for Education at the tail end of the Thatcher government, he appointed Eleanor as his spad. She stayed with him throughout his Cabinet career, accompanying him when he became Leader of the House under Thatcher and then following him to Transport under John Major where she advised him on rail privatisation. When he was sacked in 1994 she became a party apparatchik at Conservative Central Office, and remained there until she was elected to Parliament for Epping Forest in 1997.

Parliamentary Career[edit | edit source]

In Opposition[edit | edit source]

One of the growing group of Scottish Tories seeking political asylum in England, Eleanor was sponsored by Malcolm Rifkind and was initially considered a moderate, but as soon as she got to Parliament she threw her lot in with the sane Eurosceptic wing of the party. In the 1997 leadership contest she gave her first preference to Michael Howard and her second to William Hague. Her solid performances in the Commons soon won her a place in the Conservative Whips' Office, and her attacks on the Governments' devolution proposals saw her promoted to the Constitutional Affairs team. After the election she was moved to the Education team, and she was promoted to Shadow Children's Minister in 2003. In 2004 Michael Howard made her Shadow Minister for Women.

Eleanor Laing.Decolletage.jpg

The next year she got a lucky break when the new Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland, fellow Scottish exile James Gray, made the mistake of saying what most Tories were secretly thinking: the Scottish Parliment and its MSPs should be abolished and the 59 Scottish Wesminster MPs should sit at Holyrood for two days a week instead. This was of course political poison back in his native Scotland, and the Scottish Conservative Party went ballistic. Michael Howard was forced to sack Gray only six days after he'd appointed him. Flailing around desperately for a replacement, he remembered Eleanor and she became the new Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland along with her Women and Equality brief.

David Cameron not unreasonably felt that the position should go to someone who actually represented a Scottish constituency, and replaced her with David Mundell in his first reshuffle. But he kept her on as Shadow Minister for Women and Equality until 2007, when he made her a Shadow Justice Minister.

Eleanor was one of the few MPs who voted against making MPs' expenses claims public, and when The Telegraph published its exposé everyone found out why: she'd flipped her homes and sold her Westminster flat for a £1 million profit, avoiding £180,000 in capital gains tax by declaring it her primary residence, after listing it as her second home for years so she could put the mortgage on her expenses. Although according to the labyrinthine expenses rules she'd actually done nothing wrong and the subsequent inquiry cleared her, people were understandably pissed off. The leader of Epping Forest District Council led an attempt in her local constituency association to deselect her, which she managed to survive. She voluntarily repaid £25,000 as a 'moral gesture'.

Coalition Era[edit | edit source]

When the Coalition was formed Eleanor was bumped from the frontbench to make room for the Lib Dems. With her ministerial career cruelly cut short, she turned her attentions back to her old interest of devolution and started making a name for herself on the backbenches. She joined the Political and Constitutional Reform Select Committee and was elected chair of the 1922 Committee's influential Home and Constitutional Affairs Committee.

In 2013, she had another lucky break thanks to the career-ending misfortune of another Conservative colleague. Tory Deputy Speaker Nigel Evans was accused of sexual assault by a staffer and had to stand down, and there was an election to replace him. Eleanor decided to stand. Chris Bryant whipped the Labour vote on her behalf, and she won by seventeen votes.

In 2015, she stood again for Deputy Speaker in the new Parliament and was elected unopposed.

Eleanor Laing.Hansard.jpg
Full List of Appointments
• Opposition Whip (10 February, 1999 - 1 July, 2000)
• Shadow Spokeswoman for Constitutional Affairs, Scotland and Wales (1 July, 2000 - 1 July, 2001)
• Shadow Spokeswoman for Education (1 July, 2001 - 1 July, 2003)
• Shadow Minister for Children (1 July, 2003 - 1 December, 2003)
• Shadow Minister for Women (March 15, 2004 - 2 July, 2007)
• Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland (19 May, 2005 - 7 December, 2005)
• Shadow Minister for Women and Equality (7 December, 2005 - 2 July, 2007)
• Shadow Minister for Justice (3 July, 2007 - 6 May, 2010)
• Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons (16 October, 2013 - present)

Personal Life[edit | edit source]

Eleanor and Matthew touring a constituent's garden.

Eleanor has one son, Matthew, who was born a week after the 2001 general election.

Her ex-husband Alan, the millionaire CEO of a computer company, began cheating on her in 1997 and moved in with his mistress in 1999, but the Laings pretended to be happily married for years to keep up Eleanor's Tory family values image. Alan would show up to all her constituency events, hug and kiss her in front of her local Conservative Association, and then disappear again. To the bafflement of their friends, the unhappy couple somehow produced baby Matthew during this period, but the sham marriage eventually collapsed and they finally divorced in 2003.

Ideology[edit | edit source]

I have thought about my own brand of Christianity. It is a simple, Church of Scotland brand based on what I believe, which is what my grandmother taught me: "You should do unto others as you would have them do unto you." It is a very simple outlook on life and there is no place in it for discrimination.~ Eleanor Laing

Rightwing on political issues but leftwing on social policy, Eleanor has an intriguingly mixed record. She opposes the European Union and devolution and has consistently voted for leadership candidates like William Hague, IDS and Liam Fox. She also takes a dim view of all-women shortlists, a slightly dissonant stance from a former Shadow Minister of Women and Equality.

But she's repeatedly stood up to the retrograde Christianist tendency within the Conservative Party. In 1998 she defied her party whip to sponsor the motion that equalised the age of consent for homosexual sex and spoke eloquently on its behalf. She strategically absented herself from the vote on abolishing Section 28 (as a shadow minister she would have had to vote to preserve it or resign), and again defied her whip to vote for the right of trans people to legally change their gender and for the 2007 Equalities Act. She also defended abortion rights and human embryology research. When the General Synod of the Church of England voted against women bishops, she said that since it deliberately set itself against the values of the society it claimed to represent, it called into question the CoE's position as the established church.

Eleanor abstained on the 2013 Same Sex Marriage bill, saying that "social change should come about by evolution, not by diktat from the top of government" (it's quite unclear how this evolution was meant to express itself in law, if not through the votes of the people's elected representatives in the House of Commons), but on the whole her record on social issues has been one of quiet courage, as long as standing up for human rights doesn't interfere too much with her career progression.

Portrayal[edit | edit source]

In the Media[edit | edit source]

When the story of Eleanor's intriguing personal arrangements came to light in 2002, the tabloids naturally descended on her collapsing marriage like vultures. They picked all the meat off the carcass and then left her alone again until the expenses scandal, when they swooped back in to pillory her as a crook.

The Mirror ships her with Liam Fox.

In Fanon[edit | edit source]

Eleanor has a low fandom profile, as she appeared in the Speaker's Chair too late to have much impact on the RP or the meme.

Meme[edit | edit source]

To date, Eleanor's adventures on the meme have been limited to three short femmeslash fics with her fellow deputy speaker Dawn Primarolo: