In the mid-1990s,Reckless worked for UBS Warburg.[5] In the late 1990s,he worked as a strategy consultant and associate in Financial Services Group at Booz,Allen &Hamilton.[6] Until his election in May 2010,Reckless had been a solicitor at Herbert Smith[7] and had worked on legal matters that had had dealings with private investigators.[8] He was a member of the Kent Police Authority from 2007 to 2011.
Member of Parliament
Between 2002 and 2004,Reckless was a member of the policy unit at Conservative Central Office where he wrote a book on deregulation policy[9] as well as overseeing the development of the policy on directly elected police commissioners.[10] The first police and crime commissioner elections took place on 15 November 2012.
Reckless was elected as Member of Parliament for Rochester and Strood at the 2010 general election.[11] He had a majority of 9,953,having previously contested the Medway constituency in 2001 and 2005,reducing the majority of the incumbent Labour MP to 3,780 in 2001 and 213 in 2005. He had served as a Medway councillor between 2007 and 2011.[12] The UK Independence Party did not run a candidate of their own in Rochester and Strood in 2010,instead endorsing Reckless.[13]
Reckless was elected to the Home Affairs Select Committee in 2010[14] often appearing on Newsnight and other political programmes,arguing for the deportation of clerics Abu Hamza[15] and Abu Qatada.[16] He was one of parliament's most rebellious MPs and was the 13th-most rebellious Conservative MP between 2010 and 2014,casting 56 votes against the whip.[17][18] He was one of only six Conservative MPs to vote against increase of university tuition fees,[19][20] and was a critic of the government's energy policy,arguing that the government's Energy Bill introduced in December 2012 was "a sad retreat for Conservatives".[21]
In July 2010,Reckless apologised for missing a vote on the budget because he was drunk. He said that he "did not feel it was appropriate to take part in the vote because of the amount he had drunk".[22]
He was chair of the all-party parliamentary group on Georgia.[26] The group's aims are "to facilitate greater parliamentary awareness of developments in Georgia".
On 30 September 2014,Reckless applied for the Stewardship of the Chiltern Hundreds and therefore ceased to be an MP. A by-election was called on 20 November,at which Reckless was nominated to stand as the UKIP candidate. He was returned as a member of parliament for UKIP,becoming the party's second elected MP.
European Union budget rebellion
On 31 October 2012,Reckless led a rebellion of 53 Conservative MPs which inflicted the first House of Commons defeat (307 votes to 294) on the coalition government.[27] The Tory rebels voted with Labour MPs to pass an amendment calling for a real-terms cut in the 2014–2020 EU budget multi-annual financial framework. The coalition government supported only a real-terms freeze in the EU budget as a minimum. The amendment was not binding on the government,but damaged prime minister David Cameron's authority on Europe before key EU budget negotiations in November 2012.[28] As a result of leading the successful rebellion,Reckless was voted 'Backbencher of the Year' by the Conservatives[29] and finished third in a ConservativeHome poll of 'Backbencher of the Year',although the site's editor Tim Montgomerie announced that 'if UKIP readers had been included in the poll Mark Reckless would have topped the vote.'[30]
Defection to UKIP
On 27 September 2014,Reckless defected to the UK Independence Party at its party conference in Doncaster,and announced his resignation in order to seek re-election at a by-election.[31] He became the second Conservative MP in the space of a month to defect to UKIP,the first being his close friend Douglas Carswell. In a speech delivered to the conference,Reckless claimed that the Conservative leadership was 'not serious about real change on Europe',and that 'Britain could be better'.[31]
In June 2015,Reckless was made Director of Policy Development by UKIP.
Member of the Senedd
In March 2016,Reckless was announced as UKIP's lead candidate for the regional seat of South Wales East despite having no previous links to Wales.[32] He was elected on 5 May 2016.
On 6 April 2017,Reckless left UKIP to join the Conservative Group;however,he did not rejoin the Conservative Party. This move made the Conservative group the second-largest in the Welsh Assembly. Upon leaving,he said,"I leave UKIP positively,having achieved our joint aim,a successful referendum to leave the EU".[33][34][35][36][37]
On 14 April 2019,Reckless left the Conservative Party Group over the party's failure to deliver Brexit. He then sat as an independent member[38] before joining the Brexit Party the following month.[1]
On 15 May 2019,Reckless stated his intention to form a new Brexit Party political group in the Senedd,along with Caroline Jones,Mandy Jones,and David Rowlands,with himself as the leader of the group.[1] In July 2020,he attracted criticism from pro-devolution Brexit Party volunteers when he stated that he would support the campaign to abolish the Senedd.[39] He then left the party and joined the Abolish the Welsh Assembly Party.[40] He said,since Brexit had been effectively achieved,the work of the Brexit Party was complete.[41] Two weeks later,the Brexit Party was rebranded as Reform UK.[42]
At the 2021 Senedd election,Reckless was the Abolish the Welsh Assembly candidate in Monmouth,where he came seventh,with 1,174 votes (3.3%). He was also his party’s lead candidate on the South Wales East list,but was not elected.
Reckless is a grandson of Henry McDevitt, who served as a Fianna FáilTD for Donegal East in Dáil Éireann, the Irish parliament, from 1938 until 1943.[50] His mother emigrated to the UK when she was 17 to train as a nurse; however, Reckless has said that he does not see his mother as an "immigrant" and stated "I don't consider myself to have an immigrant background".[51]
In May 2015 Catriona Brown-Reckless was elected as a UKIP Councillor for Strood South in Medway. She resigned in September 2016.[55] In May 2022 she was elected as a Conservative Councillor for the ward of Pentyrch and St Fagans in Cardiff.[56]
The UK Independence Party is a Eurosceptic, right-wing populist political party in the United Kingdom. The party reached its greatest level of success in the mid-2010s, when it gained two members of parliament and was the largest party representing the UK in the European Parliament. The party is currently led by Neil Hamilton.
John Douglas Wilson Carswell is a British former politician who served as a Member of Parliament from 2005 to 2017, co-founded Vote Leave and currently serves as president and CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.
Rochester and Strood is a constituency in Kent represented in the House of Commons of the UK Parliament since 2015 by Kelly Tolhurst, a Conservative. Since 2022, she has served as Government Deputy Chief Whip and Treasurer of the Household.
Darren David Millar is a Welsh Conservative politician who has served as the Member of the Senedd (MS) for Clwyd West since 2007.
Andrew RT Davies CBE is a Welsh politician serving as Leader of the Welsh Conservative Group in the Senedd since 2021, previously holding the position from 2011 to 2018. He has been a Member of the Senedd (MS) since 2007.
Craig Mackinlay is a Conservative Party politician and businessman. Since May 2015, he has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for South Thanet.
This article lists the election results and representation of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) with respect to the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, Scottish Parliament, Senedd, Northern Ireland Assembly, London Assembly, European Parliament and local authorities.
Since 2009, the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom has experimented with the use of open primaries to select some parliamentary candidates.
On 9 October 2014, a by-election was held for the UK parliamentary constituency of Clacton in Essex, England. The by-election was triggered by the Conservative MP for Clacton, Douglas Carswell, defecting to the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and subsequently resigning his seat to seek re-election as its candidate.
A by-election was held on 20 November 2014 for the UK parliamentary constituency of Rochester and Strood in Kent, England. The sitting Member of Parliament (MP) Mark Reckless called it on joining the UK Independence Party (UKIP), from the Conservatives. He resigned his seat.
Kelly Jane Tolhurst is a British politician who has served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Rochester and Strood since 2015. A member of the Conservative Party, she served as Minister of State for Schools and Childhood from September to October 2022.
The Abolish the Welsh Assembly Party, or in Wales, simply Abolish, is a registered single issue political party in Wales. It campaigns for the abolition of the Senedd, formerly known as the "National Assembly for Wales", the devolved legislature of Wales. Abolish advocates that devolved powers be returned to the Secretary of State for Wales within the UK Central Government and the Parliament of the United Kingdom at Westminster.
David John Rowlands is a Welsh politician, who was a Member of the Senedd (MS) for South Wales East from 2016 to 2021. Elected as an MS for the UK Independence Party (UKIP), Rowlands joined the Brexit Party in 2019. He later joined the Independent Alliance for Reform group in the Senedd in October 2020.
This is a list of Assembly Memberselected to the fifth National Assembly for Wales at the 2016 election. In May 2020, the representatives were renamed to Members of the Seneddin the fifth Senedd, they would be known as the fifth Senedd for the remainder of their term. From the 2021 election members would be elected under this new title of Senedd. There are a total of 60 members elected, 40 were elected from first past the post constituencies with a further 20 members being returned from five regions, each electing four AMs through mixed member proportional representation. In between elections, members of the legislature may not necessarily be of the same party or the same candidate elected in 2016.
The 2021 Senedd election took place on Thursday 6 May 2021 to elect 60 members to the Senedd. It was the sixth devolved general election since the Senedd was established in 1999. The election was held alongside the Scottish Parliament election, English local elections, London Assembly and mayoral election and the Hartlepool by-election.
Mandy Jones is a British former politician and farmer who was a Member of the Senedd (MS) for North Wales from 2017 to 2021. Jones was elected for the UK Independence Party (UKIP) but sat as an independent politician within the Senedd from early January 2018 until May 2019, when she joined the Brexit Party. In October 2020 she joined the Independent Alliance for Reform group.
Reform UK is a right-wing populist political party in the United Kingdom. It was founded by Catherine Blaiklock with support from Nigel Farage in November 2018 as the Brexit Party, advocating hard Euroscepticism and a no-deal Brexit. It was a significant political force at the 2019 European Parliament election, but failed to win any seats at the 2019 general election. After the UK's withdrawal from the European Union (EU) on 31 January 2020, it was renamed to Reform UK, and it became primarily an anti-lockdown party during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since 2022, the party has campaigned on a platform of broader right-wing populist issues, chiefly surrounding illegal migration and the government’s Net Zero energy policy.
In the run-up to the 2021 Senedd election, various organisations carried out opinion polling to gauge voting intentions. Results of such polls are displayed in this list. Most of the pollsters listed are members of the British Polling Council (BPC) and abide by its disclosure rules.
↑ Cowley, Philip; Stuart, Mark. "The Four Year Itch"(PDF). University of Nottingham. p.49. Archived from the original(PDF) on 29 September 2020. Retrieved 1 October 2014.
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