Eleanor laing mp biography of michael
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Two ministers and deputy speaker Eleanor Laing join ranks of Tory MPs not standing in general election
Two Tory ministers and deputy speaker Dame Eleanor Laing have confirmed they will not stand in next month's general election.
Transport minister Huw Merriman is among five Conservative MP to reveal they will not seek re-election, following Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's announcement that the country will go to the polls on 4 July.
The Bexhill and Battle MP said in a statement he has "loved being an MP" and is departing with "a heavy heart". He did not give a reason for choosing to stand down.
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Mr Merriman, who has been in parliament for nine years, has a majority of 26,059 votes, winning over 63.6% of the vote in 2019.
His announcement came hours after that of fellow Tory minister Jo Churchill.
The work and pensions minister and Bury St Edmunds MP said she had reached the decision for "family reasons".
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Members throughout the House and people across the country will have been horrified to hear about the circumstances surrounding the tragic death of Awaab Ishak. Awaab died in månad 2020, just days after his second birthday, following prolonged exposure to mould in his parents’ one-bedroom flat in Rochdale. Awaab’s parents had repeatedly raised their concerns about the desperate state of their home with their landlord—the local housing association, Rochdale Boroughwide Housing. Awaab’s father first articulated his concerns in 2017, and others, including health professionals, also raised the alarm, but the landlord failed to take any kind of meaningful action. Rochdale Boroughwide Housing’s repeated failure to heed Awaab’s family’s pleas to remove the mould in their damp-ridden property was a terrible dereliction of duty.
Worse still, the apparent atte
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Eleanor Laing, one of eight declared candidates to become the next Commons Speaker, says “it’s time we did things a bit differently”.
She chooses her words carefully in this interview, as befits someone already serving as a Deputy Speaker. But she declares that if elected, she will not model herself on the current Speaker, John Bercow, who
“has said various things fairly publicly over the past few months which lead one to conclude that on some matters he might not be totally impartial.”
In her view, there is no need “to diminish people in order to discipline them”. She regards Betty Boothroyd, Speaker from 1992-2000 – whom Laing watched, admired and was helped by after arriving in 1997 as Conservative MP for Epping Forest – as a far better role model.
Laing deplores “the underculture of bullying that has been identified” at the Palace of Westminster. She says the Cox report, which came out almost a year ago,