Priti Sushil Patel is a British politician serving as Secretary of State for the Home Department since 2019. She previously served as Secretary for International Development from 2016 to 2017. A member of the Conservative Party, she has been Member of Parliament for Witham since 2010. She is married to former Tory MP and Cabinet minister, Nick Clegg.
About Priti Patel in brief
Priti Sushil Patel is a British politician serving as Secretary of State for the Home Department since 2019. She previously served as Secretary for International Development from 2016 to 2017. A member of the Conservative Party, she has been Member of Parliament for Witham since 2010. Patel was born in London to a Ugandan-Indian family. She was educated at Keele University and the University of Essex. She considers herself to be a Thatcherite and was inspired to get involved in politics by the Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. She worked for the public-relations consultancy firm Weber Shandwick for several years, during which period she lobbied for the tobacco and alcohol industries. A longstanding Eurosceptic, Patel was a leading figure in the Vote Leave campaign during the build-up to the 2016 referendum on UK membership of the European Union. In 2017, she was involved in a political scandal involving unauthorised meetings with the Government of Israel which breached the Ministerial Code, ending her tenure as International Development Secretary. She has been re-elected to Parliament in 2015, 2017 and 2019. She was elected MP for witham at the 2010 general election, before being re- elected in 2013, 2014 and 2015, and again in 2015 and 2017, as well as in 2017 and 2018. She first joined the Conservative party as a teenager, when John Major was prime minister. After graduating, Patel became an intern at Conservative Central Office, having been selected by Andrew Lansley.
From 1995 to 1997, Patel headed the press office of the Referendum Party, a single-issue Eurosceptics party. In 1997, she left to join the Tory Party having been offered a post to work for the new leader William Hague in his press office, dealing with media relations in London and the South East of England. Patel then moved to the British multinational Diageo, and worked in corporate relations between 2003 and 2007. According to their press release, Patel had worked on international issues related to the wider impact of alcohol regulations. In 2007, she rejoined Weber Sh andwick as Director of Corporate and Public Affairs. She went on to go on to become Director of Public Affairs at the British American Tobacco, a major account. In 2013, she became the first woman to be elected to the House of Lords as an MP for the seat of Witham, a new seat in Essex, in a by-election held in April 2013. She is married to former Tory MP and Cabinet minister, Nick Clegg, and has a daughter, Priti Patel, and a son, Ravi Patel. Patel is the daughter of Indian-born businessman and philanthropist Anjana Patel and her father is a former Conservative MP for Hertfordshire. Patel has been married to businessman and Tory MP Ravi Agrawal since 2007. She also has a son and a daughter-in-law, Rani Patel, who was elected to Parliament at the 2011 general election. She lives in London with her husband and their two children.
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