Helen Grant

Grant was opposed to Brexit prior to the 2016 EU membership referendum.

On 12 May 2015, following the general election, Grant was removed from her position as Sports Minister and was replaced by her neighbouring MP and colleague Tracey Crouch.

On 7 October 2013, Grant was appointed Sports and Equalities minister succeeding Hugh Robertson. She is a former judo champion, and told The Independent newspaper that sport was "very much in my DNA". However, the following month when quizzed by her regional news television station ITV Meridian, she failed to answer a single question correctly on the subject.

Grant was the first black woman of mixed heritage to be elected as a Conservative MP and selected as a candidate to stand for a Conservative-held parliamentary seat. She first served in government as jointly Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Women and Equalities (from 2012 to 2015) and Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (2012 to 2013). She also became Minister for Sport and Tourism in 2013, a post she held until after the 2015 general election.

On 4 September 2012, following a Government reshuffle, Grant was appointed as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice, and Women and Equality. She has been described as the 'Minister for Victims' of crime, and states her role as to 'look after the interests of victims and witnesses of any crime, including domestic violence, sexual violence and rape.'.

Grant attracted controversy in November 2012 when an edition of the Channel 4 documentary series Dispatches reported that she was according to published records claiming the full £1,666.67/month under MPs expenses – the maximum allowed within the IPSA rules – for a flat in London, when she has a home in Kingswood, Surrey, near Reigate. Kingswood is located within a zone around London in which MPs cannot claim expenses for a London rental, but it is allowed in her case because she represents Maidstone and the Weald, which is outside the exclusion zone. At that time Grant used a base bordering her constituency, where her mother lives and her son also lived while at school in Maidstone until 2013. IPSA confirmed that Grant was entitled to a second-home allowance on Parliamentary expenses because her constituency was outside London, and her claim was within the rules. However, Labour MP John Mann, a long-standing campaigner on MPs' expenses, described the minister's actions as "outrageous" and a "farce":

Grant was born in Willesden, north London to an English mother and a Nigerian father, who was an orthopedic surgeon. She grew up in a single parent family after her parents separated and her father emigrated to the United States. She was raised in Carlisle where she lived on the city's Raffles council estate with her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother. In a 2010 interview she spoke fondly of her childhood, and the house in which she grew up. "I had happy memories in that house and it gave me a good start in life, [...] There was deprivation around, there was certainly need, there was some domestic violence and there were some fights. But my memory of the square where we lived is that there was pride in people."

Grant was elected as the Conservative MP for Maidstone and The Weald at the 2010 general election on 6 May 2010, achieving a reduced majority of 5,889. Her election made her the Conservative Party's first black woman MP. In June 2010, she was elected to the Justice Select Committee, a House of Commons select committee which oversees the policy, administration, and spending of the UK's Ministry of Justice.

At St Aidan's County High School (since 2008 the Richard Rose Central Academy) she was captain of the school tennis and hockey teams, and represented Cumbria in hockey, tennis, athletics, and cross-country. She was also an under-16 judo champion for the north of England and southern Scotland. She studied law at the University of Hull, after which she planned to take specialist legal qualifications. When it appeared unlikely that her local education authority would fund a place at her preferred college, her local MP Willie Whitelaw championed her cause, and she took a place at the College of Law in Guildford.

In 2006, Grant worked with Iain Duncan Smith's Centre for Social Justice in the formation of Conservative policy to deal with family breakdown. Grant was one of the authors of the Social Justice Policy Group Report 'State of the Nation – Fractured Families' published in December 2006, and the follow-up solutions report 'Breakthrough Britain' published in July 2007.

Grant applied to become a parliamentary candidate, and was approved as a candidate in May 2006. She was selected by the Conservative Party as the prospective candidate for Maidstone and The Weald in January 2008, as the candidate to succeed longstanding MP Ann Widdecombe who had announced that she would be stepping down at the next general election. She was the first black woman to be selected to defend a Conservative seat, which at the time had a majority of 15,000. She was selected as an A-List candidate and, although she was publicly supported by the sitting MP, Widdecombe criticised David Cameron's policy of ensuring 50% of the Conservatives' A-list candidates were women—a policy thought to have helped Grant win the nomination. This was quickly followed by revelations from a Sunday newspaper regarding her previous membership of Labour.

Grant was a non-executive director of the Croydon NHS Primary Care Trust from January 2005 to March 2007 before stepping down to concentrate on her political career.

Grant joined the Labour Party in 2004 and was asked by a senior local party figure to consider becoming a local councillor, but she rejected the idea. She offered the local party the use of her company's telephones in late 2004 prior to the 2005 general election. She claimed, however, they showed little interest, and that this left her feeling disillusioned with Labour. She joined the Conservatives in 2006, and later said of her membership of Labour: "It was almost looking in the biscuit barrel, not liking the look of the biscuits, and slamming the lid shut".

Grant undertook her articles of clerkship at Cartmell, Mawson & Main solicitors in Carlisle, where she qualified as a solicitor. She then joined a legal practice in Wimbledon specialising in family law. She established her own practice, Grants Solicitors, in 1996, which also specialises in family law. She has subsequently said that as a practising lawyer she saw a 'huge amount' of domestic violence, and that it had a 'huge effect' on her subsequent Ministerial role.

Grant met her husband, Simon, in 1990, and the couple, who married in 1991, have two sons, one of whom was serving in the Royal Marines in April 2013. They have a home in Kingswood, Surrey and in the constituency in Marden, Kent.

Helen Grant (born 28 September 1961) is a British Conservative Party politician. She has served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Maidstone and The Weald since 2010, when she succeeded Ann Widdecombe.