Neil O'Brien

Neil John O'Brien (born 6 November 1978) is a British politician who was appointed Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Primary Care and Public Health in September 2022. He was elected Member of Parliament (MP) for Harborough in 2017. A member of the Conservative Party, he was previously a special adviser to Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne from 2012 to 2016 and Theresa May during her tenure as Prime Minister.

Early life and career

O'Brien grew up in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire. He was educated at All Saints High School and Greenhead College, both in Huddersfield, before taking a first in philosophy, politics and economics at Christ Church, Oxford. Prior to entering politics, he conducted outreach work with homeless people and was a chair of school governors.

Between 2000 and 2003, O'Brien worked for the 'No' campaign against Britain joining the Euro. He led the "Vote 2004" group which campaigned for a referendum on the EU's proposed constitution. Between 2005 and 2008, he was director of Open Europe, a think tank working for free market reform in Europe. He was appointed director of the centre-right Policy Exchange in August 2008, succeeding Anthony Browne and Nick Boles in this role.

In 2009, O'Brien was ranked at number 14 in a ''Total Politics'' poll of the top 50 political influencers in Britain, named in ''The Daily Telegraph'' as one of the "Top 100 Most Influential people on the Right", described in the '' Sunday Times'' as one of the "New Political Elite" and listed in the ''Evening Standard'' as one of the "Power 1000 of London's New Influentials".

O'Brien served as a special adviser to George Osborne from November 2012 to July 2016, in relation to Osborne's role as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Subsequently, O'Brien was made a special adviser to Theresa May on the economy and industrial strategy upon her appointment as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

Parliamentary career

Before standing for Parliament, O'Brien stood as the Conservative Party candidate for Limpsfield in a Tandridge District Council by-election in 2016, losing to the Oxted & Limpsfield Residents Group.

O'Brien was elected as MP for the safe Conservative-held seat of Harborough in 2017, with a majority of 12,429.

In 2018, he founded the new think tank Onward, together with Will Tanner and Nick Faith. It is chaired by Daniel Finkelstein, the Conservative peer and columnist for ''The Times''.

Between August 2018 and July 2019, O'Brien was Parliamentary Private Secretary (PPS) to ministers at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. In August 2019, he was appointed as PPS to Justice Minister Robert Buckland.

A co-founder of the hawkish China Research Group, on 26 March 2021, it was announced that O'Brien was one of five MPs to be sanctioned by China for spreading what it called "lies and disinformation" about the country. He was subsequently banned from entering China, Hong Kong and Macau, and Chinese citizens and institutions are prohibited from doing business with him.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, O'Brien has been highly critical of several commentators in the UK who were, in his opinion, playing down the impact of the virus. He has also been a vocal proponent of lockdowns in order to suppress the coronavirus. However, he also promoted the UK government's " Eat Out to Help Out" scheme during summer 2020, which was subsequently labelled "epidemiologically illiterate" by some epidemiologists.

During 2021, O'Brien and a number of other lockdown proponents authored a website they described as attempting to fight misinformation put out into the public debate by lockdown sceptics styling themselves as 'information warriors'. The website denigrated claims by journalists such as Julia Hertley-Brewer and scientists such as Sunetra Gupta that, for example, UK Government data on Covid-19 deaths included many people who had died with Covid-19 rather than of Covid-19 and labelling them 'covid deniers'.

In May 2021, O'Brien was appointed as Prime Minister Boris Johnson's adviser on levelling up the UK. In September 2020 he produced a detailed report setting out the case for levelling up.

On 17 September 2021, O'Brien was appointed Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, during the second cabinet reshuffle of the second Johnson ministry. The role, working under Secretary of State Michael Gove, will focus on the government's Levelling Up policy.

On 6 July 2022, O'Brien resigned from the government, citing a lack of confidence in the leadership of Boris Johnson. He resigned in a joint statement with Kemi Badenoch, Alex Burghart, Lee Rowley, and Julia Lopez.

Publications

In March 2010, O'Brien co-authored with Ross Clark a wide-ranging book called ''The Renewal of Government''. It was praised by Michael Gove, then Shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, and later Secretary of State for Education, who said that it "lays down with admirable clarity and form a set of radical policies ... which in the field of education I think are peerless".

In June 2018, O'Brien published a report on reforming housing and planning policy, "Green, Pleasant and Affordable". The report argued that reforms to planning law are needed to change where new homes are built, avoid piecemeal development, and ensure that developers pay more towards the costs of the infrastructure that is needed to support new development. It also proposed a new form of affordable rented housing for young people in work.

In January 2019, together with Will Tanner and Guy Miscampbell, he published a report on reform of higher education, "A Question Of Degree". It proposed that graduate repayments should be halved, with the cost of this funded by reducing the number of students on what the report called "low value" courses - courses from which graduates do not earn enough of a premium to repay the cost of their study. The BBC
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