Patrick McLoughlin MP is the new Transport Secretary 05 September 2012

Patrick McLoughlin MP is the new Transport Secretary, taking over from Justine Greening, who leaves after just 10 months in office, along with Junior Transport Minister Theresa Villiers.

Word is that Greening's intransigence on the third runway at Heathrow was too much for Prime Minister David Cameron and his Chancellor George Osborne.

McLoughlin will be seen as more even handed, at least inasmuch as he has been silent on transport matters at his former post as Conservative Chief Whip and Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury in the Coalition.

As for his knowledge of transport, it appears he has a mountain to climb. Born in Stafford, the son of a coal mining family, he worked in a farming community back in the 1970s and underground at the Littleton Colliery in Cannock before becoming an industrial representative for the National Coal Board's Western Area Marketing Department.

In the 1980s McLoughlin was a councillor on Staffordshire County Council before coming to parliament as MP for West Derbyshire in 1986.

He served as Parliamentary Private Secretary variously at the Department for Education and Science and then Trade and Industry, before arriving as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Department for Transport briefly in 1992, before moving on to Employment and then the Department of Trade and Industry.

Author
Brian Tinham

Related Companies
Department for Transport

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