Victoria Atkins might not have the public profile of cabinet peers, but her appointment as health secretary caps several years of steady, if unshowy, handling of briefs in junior ministerial roles. An MP since 2015 and a backer of Rishi Sunak in the 2022 Conservative leadership contest, her elevation has been warmly welcomed by colleagues in the centrist wing of the Conservative party, who also emphasised what they regarded as her competence. “Victoria is an incredibly able and hardworking minister,” said the south London MP Elliot Colburn. “She has a record of getting things done and I think she’s going to demonstrate that in her new role.” Labour MPs opposite spoke of someone they have been able to work with, contrasting her with other more polarising figures. For the past 12 months she has been financial secretary to the Treasury – a role in which she was working to simplify taxes – having previously led the Ministry of Justice’s work on youth justice and tackling violence against women and girls. Other ministerial work included overseeing the government’s Afghan resettlement programme and, after she was appointed by Theresa May, taking charge of safeguarding policy.
But she has still taken flak. As minister for women, she was condemned by transgender campaigners for saying that young people are having their gender reassigned as “an answer to questions they are perhaps not asking themselves”. As drugs minister, she was accused of hypocrisy in 2018 over her husband Paul Kenward’s involvement in a legal cannabis farm when he was managing director of British Sugar, a company licensed to grow nonpsychoactive cannabis. The Home Office pointed out that Atkins, who had previously spoken out against the Class B drug, declared the interest when she was appointed minister. Last year she was among ministers who resigned from Boris Johnson’s government, telling him in a letter: “Values such as integrity, decency, respect and professionalism should matter to us all. I have watched with growing concern as those values have fractured under your leadership.” A barrister by profession who focused on fraud, she takes over at health from Steve Barclay at a time when a resolution to the industrial action by doctors hangs in the balance. Atkins will be well acquainted with the needs of at least one section of the population with health concerns, having been diagnosed at the age of three with type 1 diabetes, a subject on which she has campaigned. A Cambridge graduate who was privately educated, she is the daughter of Sir Robert Atkins, a Tory MP in the 1970s and 80s and later an MEP, and Dulcie Atkins, a Tory councillor and mayor. As the MP for Louth and Horncastle in Lincolnshire, Atkins is defending a majority of 28,868, making her one of the Conservatives who can afford to breathe a little more easily than others ahead of the general election. In the past, she has campaigned locally for the recruitment of more GPs.