Few Tory MPs have risen so quickly in recent years only to fall into obscurity – and now ignominy – as Grant Shapps.
The youthful-looking 47-year-old minister for international development has bucketloads of chutzpah, but is viewed as something of a maverick by the more fusty elements of the Conservative party.
A thrusting, sharp-elbowed entrepreneurial type, Shapps is a genuine high-flier – he holds a pilot’s licence and lists aviation as a hobby. He is also related to rock royalty. Mick Jones of the Clash is his cousin, as Shapps is fond of mentioning in interviews.
What his famous relation thinks of having a Tory in the family is not documented, but Jones, who met the Clash’s late lead singer Joe Strummer when living in a squat, can at least take comfort from the fact that his cousin is no blue-blooded Shire Tory. Having founded his own printing company at the age of 21, Shapps seemed to bring something new to the Tory party in 2005 when he won the seat of Welwyn Hatfield in one of the biggest swings from Labour to the Conservatives of the general election.
Barely more than a decade later, he had become Tory party chairman and sketchwriters were suggesting that he might one day be prime ministerial material. But Shapps has never been far from controversy – some unfair, some self-generated, much bordering on the bizarre. As a result, fellow ministers have kept him at arm’s length.
The early part of his CV tells a classic self-made man done well story. Born in Hertfordshire in 1968, Shapps was educated in Watford before going on to study business and finance in Manchester, according to his website.
In 1989 he was involved in a “spectacular“ car crash in the US. Upon returning to the UK he founded PrintHouse Corporation, a successful printing business that continues to this day. Tragedy threatened in 1999 when he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. After successfully beating the disease, having undergone chemotherapy and radiotherapy, he was unsuccessful in his first bid to win Welwyn Hatfield in 2001 but triumphed four years later.
His Westminster career soon flourished. In May 2005 he was made a member of the public administration select committee and the same year was appointed a vice-chairman of the Conservative party, with responsibility for campaigning. Two years later he was promoted to shadow housing minister and, following the 2010 election, became housing minister and a privy counsellor. In September 2012 he was appointed chairman of the party and the future seemed his for the taking.
But following this year’s general election, Shapps’s career stalled. He was appointed to the relatively lowly position of minister of state for international development in what was widely seen as a demotion. Some saw it as payback for past controversies.
The Clarke affair is not the first time that Shapps has found himself in hot water. In September 2012 the Observer reported that he had deleted information from his Wikipedia page, including the names of donors to his private office. One of the more peculiar edits was to omit a reference to his studies at Watford grammar school for boys, where it was noted that he “obtained four O-levels including an A in CDT”.
Allegations of Shapps’s tampering with Wikipedia resurfaced in April this year, just weeks before the general election. The online encyclopedia banned a user called “Contribsx” after the site’s administrators found they had deleted unhelpful references to Shapps’s business career, while adding the baffling claim that responsibility for a tweet posted by Shapps, who was accused of denigrating bingo players, lay with Tory party election guru Lynton Crosby and George Osborne.
A Wikipedia administrator told the Guardian that they had concluded that the account was “either run by Shapps directly” or by an associate “under his clear direction”. Shapps denied having anything to do with Contribsx. The account was subsequently unblocked after a vote of Wikipedia’s arbitration committee, and the site administrator who had reported the original concerns was removed from his post.
But perhaps the strangest moment in Shapps’s career was when it emerged that, operating under a pseudonym, Michael Green, he had established a web sales business, HowToCorp, which claimed that clients who spent $200 on its software could “make $20,000 in 20 days guaranteed or your money back”.
The Guardian obtained a recording of Green, made in 2006, in which he boasted his products could make listeners a “ton of cash by Christmas”.
This directly contradicted Shapps’s claim that “I did not have a second job while being an MP”, something that saw him forced to clarify the remark. Now, having kept silent about what exactly he knew of the allegations against Clarke, Shapps has more explaining to do. Only this time around the stakes are far higher. A man has died. Shapps can shake off farce, but not tragedy.
