Tuesday, February 7, 2023

Hello, Lucy

Lucy Frazer, the 12th Culture Secretary in 13 years, was educated at the private Gateways School for Girls in Leeds, then Leeds Girls' High School, before winning a place to read law at Newnham College, Cambridge. She was a member of the BBYO, a Jewish youth movement. 

At Cambridge, she was elected President of the Cambridge Union, and in 1993, she invited Michael Gove to debate the motion "This House prefers a woman on top"; Mr Gove was then a reporter at the BBC, but felt comfortable enough saying Ms Frazer was “actually capable of tempting me into bed with her”; that she had a “preference for peach-flavoured condoms”; and that she had done “remarkably well” to come from “the back streets of the slums of Leeds”.

In her maiden speech as an MP in 2015, she paid tribute to her mother, "a teacher who taught in a state primary school in a very deprived area in Leeds"; she didn't mention that her grandmother, Yetta, the first female member of the Leicester Bar, helped with her school fees, or note that her father had been a  successful lawyer. 

In 2004, the FSA began investigating Fox Hayes, the Leeds legal firm where Lucy's father was a partner. In 2009 it decided that the firm had used its status to approve promotional material for what turned out to be a £15m 'boiler room' fraud affecting 670 investors. The firm collapsed, but the partners were still liable for £950k fine. Lucy, then a barrister specialising in insolvency cases, acted unsuccessfully in challenging her father's share in front of a Chancery Tribunal in 2010.  In 2013, she became a QC. 

Also in 2013, as Deputy Chairman, Membership & Fund Raising with Hampstead & Kilburn Conservatives, she was selected in a four-way contest to represent SE Cambridge, a process not without controversy. 

Husband is David Leigh, who Lucy met at Cambridge. He is currently CEO of AMS, a recruitment organisation with substantial government connections. 

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