Career
A strong supporter of Margaret Thatcher, Leigh and a colleague, the former MP Michael Brown, went to 10 Downing Street on the morning of Thatcher's resignation as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom to try to persuade her to carry on. Although Charles Powell advised them it was a forlorn task, they were nonetheless granted access to the Cabinet which was in process at the time. Leigh and Brown departed Number 10 and walked down Whitehall back to the House of Commons reputedly with "tears in their eyes". After Thatcher resigned, in the ensuing leadership election, Leigh supported Michael (now Lord) Heseltine, under whom he had served at the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), preferring to support someone who had stabbed Mrs Thatcher in the front to those who had stabbed her in the back.
Leigh served as a Minister in John Major's Government but was sacked in May 1993 over the stance he took opposing the Maastricht Treaty. Whilst in office at the DTI he was a keen advocate of privatisation of the Post Office, a debate which is still ongoing. In the following Conservative leadership election, Leigh supported John Redwood.
In October 2006, Leigh was vocal in stating that after David Cameron had become Leader of his Party core supporters were drifting away from voting Conservative. Nonetheless, despite being on the losing side in successive party leadership elections, his appointment as Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee led to the rejuvenation of his parliamentary career.
Early in 2008, as Chairman of the PAC, he was embarrassed by relying on flawed Department for Transport statistics to attack motorcyclists for tax evasion. He accused 38% of motorcyclists of evading vehicle excise duty. He later apologised for this following the admission by the Department for Transport that 95.5% of motorcycles are entirely legal.
Leigh is President of the socially conservative Cornerstone Group, which represents the views of over 40 Conservative Members of Parliament. He was author of the group's inaugural pamphlet "Faith, Flag and Family" in 2005.
At the end of 2010 Leigh was offered but declined the British Ambassadorship to the Holy See. Leigh also supports Boris Johnson's call to George Osborne for lowering the rate of taxation in the UK in order to assist its economic recovery following the Credit crunch. Leigh, a qualified barrister and an Assembly Member of the Council of Europe, opposes further human rights legislation, as proposed by the European Court of Human Rights.
In 2012, Leigh, together with a record number of fellow Conservative MPs, including numerous Privy Counsellors, successfully voted against the Government's attempted railroading of House of Lords reform by limiting time for meaningful parliamentary debate on this major constitutional issue.
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Famous quotes containing the word career:
““Never hug and kiss your children! Mother love may make your children’s infancy unhappy and prevent them from pursuing a career or getting married!” That’s total hogwash, of course. But it shows on extreme example of what state-of-the-art “scientific” parenting was supposed to be in early twentieth-century America. After all, that was the heyday of efficiency experts, time-and-motion studies, and the like.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“I restore myself when I’m alone. A career is born in public—talent in privacy.”
—Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962)
“The problem, thus, is not whether or not women are to combine marriage and motherhood with work or career but how they are to do so—concomitantly in a two-role continuous pattern or sequentially in a pattern involving job or career discontinuities.”
—Jessie Bernard (20th century)