About Oliver Letwin
Sir Oliver Letwin (born 19 May 1956) is a British politician, Member of Parliament (MP) for West Dorset from 1997 to 2019. Letwin was elected as a member of the Conservative Party, but sat as an independent after having the whip removed in September 2019. He was Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer under Michael Howard and Shadow Home Secretary under Iain Duncan Smith. He was Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster from 2014 to 2016. Following the 2015 general election Letwin was given overall responsibility for the Cabinet Office and became a full member of the Cabinet in the Conservative government. Previously he had been the Minister of State for Government Policy from 2010. During the Second May ministry in 2019, Letwin rebelled against leading Eurosceptics within the Conservative Party by tabling a cross-party motion to hold "indicative votes", allowing MPs to vote on several Brexit options in order to establish whether any could command a majority in the House of Commons; it transpired that none of them could. Letwin sought to extend Article 50 through passing the Cooper–Letwin Act. In August 2019 he announced that he would stand down at the next election. On 3 September 2019, he lost the Conservative party whip and sat as an independent MP after that. Letwin won the historically safe Conservative seat of West Dorset at the 1997 general election, achieving a majority of 1,840 votes over the next candidate. Following Michael Howard's decision to stand down as Conservative Party leader after the 2005 election, Letwin publicly backed the youngest candidate and eventual winner David Cameron. His thesis, Emotion and Emotions, earned a PhD awarded by the Cambridge Philosophy Faculty in 1982.
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