Sarah Teather - Member of Parliament

Member of Parliament

Teather first contested an election on 7 June 2001 in the seat of Finchley and Golders Green. On 3 May 2002 she was elected to Islington London Borough Council as one of the three councillors representing Hillrise Ward. She was then appointed by the council to serve as a school governor at Ashmount School.

In 2003 she was selected as the party's candidate in the Brent East by-election, which was called after death of the Labour MP Paul Daisley.

The by-election took place during the early stages of the Iraq War, in which Britain's involvement had proved a controversial decision with voters and dented support for the Labour government. The Liberal Democrats came from third place behind Labour and the Conservatives, with a 39.12% share of the total and 1,118 majority. At 29, Teather was the youngest Member of Parliament in Britain at the time.

The by-election was Labour's first by-election defeat in 15 years. Teather was the youngest member of the House, informally known as the Baby of the House.

Subsequent to her first election as an MP she resigned from Islington Council, resigned as a school governor at Ashmount school and withdrew as a candidate for the Greater London Assembly seat in North East London.

She successfully defended her seat in the 2005 general election, increasing her majority to over 2,700. On 6 May 2010, Sarah Teather defeated Labour's Dawn Butler, a former Brent MP, by over 1,000 votes in the new Parliamentary constituency of Brent Central. In May 2009, she was listed by The Daily Telegraph as one of the "Saints" in the expenses scandal. However, in September 2010 The Sunday Times reported that she had been accused by several Members of Parliament of lobbying her boss, the Education Secretary Michael Gove, for two schools in her constituency to be spared from the government's plans to cancel refurbishment projects on over 700 schools nationwide. The plans for refurbishment of the two schools, which had been previously cancelled, were reinstated.

As of February 6, 2012 Teather was part of a ministerial working group together with Tim Loughton and justice minister Jonathan Djanogly that has been asked to come up with proposals within two months on how the law should be changed regarding how to amend the Children Act of 1989. According to newspaper The Guardan of February 3, 2012 that working group is aimed to include in the new Children Act one "presumption of shared parenting" for children's fathers and mothers after cases of divorce or spousal break up.