Jonathan Djanogly - Political Career

Political Career

Djanogly was elected as a councillor for Regents Park ward in the City of Westminster in 1994 and re-elected in 1998. He unsuccessfully contested the safe Labour parliamentary seat of Oxford East at the 1997 General Election where he was defeated by the sitting Labour MP Andrew Smith by 16,665 votes. Before the 2001 General Election he was selected as Conservative candidate for the very safe seat of Huntingdon, following the retirement of sitting MP and former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Sir John Major. Djanogly resigned his council seat early in 2001 shortly before the general election campaign.

At the 2001 election Djanogly held the Huntingdon seat comfortably with a majority of 12,792 and has remained an MP since. He made his maiden speech on 2 July 2001. Djanogly held the Huntingdon seat (with revised boundaries) again in 2005 and 2010 with majorities of 12,847 and 10,819 respectively.

He served on the Trade and Industry Select Committee from 2001, was promoted to the frontbench by Michael Howard as an opposition spokesman on Home Affairs in 2004, and served as Shadow Solicitor General between May 2004 and May 2010. In 2005 Djanogly was also appointed a shadow Business Minister in the team shadowing the Department of Trade and Industry (United Kingdom) (now the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills) where until the 2010 General Election he worked on corporate governance and business regulations.

In the 2009 United Kingdom Parliamentary expenses scandal it was suggested that Jonathan Djanogly improperly claimed expenses for a "cleaner" who was actually a childminder. In response Djanogly stated that the person in question was employed as a cleaner although “there would clearly have been times during evenings when she would have been there with a child alone, but this was not her job or what she was paid to do” and acknowledged that the person received no other payment for any services provided. In May 2009, The Daily Telegraph disclosed that Mr Djanogly claimed almost £5,000 on his parliamentary expenses for the installation of gates at his large constituency home. The MP installed the gates following security fears, after he helped constituents threatened by animal rights activists. Djanogly voluntarily repaid £25,000 but the repayment was not, he maintained, acknowledgement that his arrangements had been improper, but rather in recognition of his part in Parliament’s collective failure to address the expenses system.

In September 2010 it was revealed that Djanology had hired private detectives in 2009 to uncover the source of leaks to media about his parliamentary expenses. Following a complaint to the UK Information Commissoner's Office by John Mann MP in connection with Djanogly's hiring of private detectives, on 27 July 2011 the Information Commissioner said that he would not be investigating Mr Djanogly for breaches of the Data Protection Act.