Anne-Marie Trevelyan

Anne-Marie Belinda Trevelyan (née Beaton; born 6 April 1969) is a British Conservative Party politician serving as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Berwick-upon-Tweed since 2015. She has served as Secretary of State for International Development since February 2020. She will remain as Secretary of State at DFID until September 2020 when the department will be abolished and merged into the Foreign Office. An outspoken Eurosceptic, she resigned as a Parliamentary Private Secretary in November 2018 over the Government's draft EU withdrawal agreement.

Trevelyan was born in London on the 6 April 1969, the daughter of Donald Leonard Beaton and Katherine Beaton (née Bougarel). Trevelyan was privately educated at St Paul's Girls' School, Hammersmith. She subsequently studied Mathematics at Oxford Polytechnic.

She qualified as a chartered accountant with Price WaterhouseCoopers in London and worked in PwC's corporate finance department before moving to Northumberland in 1996. She is a former Governor of Northumbria Healthcare Trust and of Berwick Academy. Reports prepared by Trevelyan's "Dual the A1 Campaign" were submitted to the consultation to make the road a dual carriageway.

She unsuccessfully stood as the Conservative candidate in the Morpeth North ward of Castle Morpeth Borough Council in 1999, finishing last with just under 5% of the vote. She subsequently stood as the Conservative candidate in the Hartburn ward of Castle Morpeth Borough Council in 2003, but failed to get elected.

Trevelyan unsuccessfully stood in the 2010 general election as the Conservative candidate for Berwick upon Tweed, achieving a swing from the Liberal Democrats to Conservatives of 8.3%. In so doing, she reduced Sir Alan Beith’s majority from 8,632 to 2,690.

At the 2015 general election, Trevelyan was elected as the MP for Berwick-upon-Tweed, gaining the seat for the Conservatives with a 9.6% swing, after the sitting MP Alan Beith stood down. She was re-elected with an increased majority in the 2017 general election.

In June 2015, Trevelyan was appointed Vice-Chairman of the newly created All-Party Parliamentary Group on Forestry. In Parliament, Trevelyan served on the Public Accounts Select Committee between July 2015 – May 2017.

In November 2015, she was appointed to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. In January 2018, Trevelyan was appointed as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Gavin Williamson in the Ministry of Defence.

In January 2016, the Labour Party unsuccessfully proposed an amendment in Parliament that would have required private landlords to make their homes "fit for human habitation". According to Parliament's register of interests, Trevelyan was one of 72 Conservative MPs who voted against the amendment who personally derived an income from renting out property. The Conservative Government had responded to the amendment that they believed homes should be fit for human habitation but did not want to pass the new law that would explicitly require it.

In May 2016, it was reported that Trevelyan was one of a number of Conservative MPs being investigated by police in the United Kingdom general election, 2015 party spending investigation, for allegedly spending more than the legal limit on constituency election campaign expenses. In May 2017, the Crown Prosecution Service said that while there was evidence of inaccurate spending returns, it did not "meet the test" for further action.

She has campaigned for improving rural broadband, dualling the A1 road, bringing investment to the county, and for promoting the armed forces covenant, as well as for reducing plastic packaging. She opposes the ban on fox hunting and supports fracking, including voting in support of fracking under Northumberland National Park.

In April 2018, Trevelyan was criticised by the Alnwick Labour Party in the wake of the Poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal over claims that a Russian businessman gave almost £50,000 to fund her 2015 General Election campaign. The Labour Party questioned why the Conservative Party was accepting large donations from such sources. Trevelyan stated that the man in question was now a British citizen who had invested significantly in the region, while she had personally not received any funds from Mr Temerko, with funds going to the Berwick-upon-Tweed Conservative Association.

In November 2018, Trevelyan referred Labour Shadow Minister Kate Osamor to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, on the grounds that Osamor's behaviour "failed to uphold" the code of conduct for MPs after Osamor continued to employ her son, Ishmael Osamor, as a senior communications, despite her son pleading guilty to possession of drugs valued at £2,500. Osamor denied any wrongdoing and called the referral "politically motivated".

On 15 November 2018, Trevelyan resigned from her post as a Parliamentary Private Secretary over Theresa May's draft EU withdrawal agreement.

On 27 July 2019 she was appointed Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Defence in Boris Johnson's administration. She was promoted to Secretary of State for International Development in February 2020 to succeed Alok Sharma, who became Business Secretary. Prior to her appointment, Trevelyan expressed apparent scepticism about the value of foreign aid on a number of occasions. Her department will be merged with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in early September 2020, and Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab will assume responsibility for a new department named the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

Euroscepticism

In June 2015, Trevelyan joined the Conservatives for Britain group, a Eurosceptic group within the Conservative Party which has since moved closer to outright opposition to British membership of the European Union. She subsequently joined the European Research Group – the primary Eurosceptic lobbying group within Parliament. Trevelyan advocated a vote in favour of Brexit for the 2016 EU membership referendum. In March 2018, she attended a protest in London organised by the 'Fishing for Leave' group against proposed access to British waters for EU fisherman up to 2021. The event included the UKIP MEP Nigel Farage. The Independent reported that Trevelyan faced calls for her sacking as a Ministerial Aide for attending the event in defiance of an order from Conservative whips for party MPs not to take part.

Anne-Marie lives in her Northumberland constituency. She is divorced with two teenaged children.

In October 2017, she said that her teenage son might not have voted for her if he had been old enough to vote. She took part in the Singing for Syrians concert at Westminster in December 2017.