Down the stone steps in a tucked-away corner of Westminster Hall, the Conservative backbencher Miriam Cates can occasionally be found on a weekday lunchtime playing piano at a chapel service for Christian MPs. But this week, she has been preaching to the converted, delivering a keynote address at the National Conservatism conference. Cates was the first main speaker, tasked with firing up hundreds of activists at the event that pushed a socially conservative agenda and piled pressure on the Tory party to take a stricter stance on everything from immigration to family values. While cabinet ministers stole the limelight, it was also the forum for backbenchers such as Cates – who supporters see as a rising star of the right – to put pressure on the government. Despite having only been an MP since the last election, Cates was unabashed about what she identified as the most pressing policy issue of the generation: the UK’s birthrate. She rallied against falling reproduction, as well as what she described as the mass indoctrination of young minds and a lack of family-friendly tax policy.
It was a significant platform – but her speech went down like marmite among colleagues. One of her closest political allies, the fellow 2019er Danny Kruger, called Cates “the darling of the party” and insisted: “She is the mainstream.” But a government frontbencher said she had “tried to drag the party back to the dark ages on morality issues” and done a “tremendous job” in uniting fellow MPs against her cause. As one of the few new intake of MPs who has not taken an unpaid job as parliamentary private secretary – viewed as the first step on the ladder to becoming a minister – she is able to remain an outspoken backbencher. “Miriam is one of the few people who’s willing to go over the top,” said a minister. “What she’s saying is what many of us believe.” Cates, who is a former biology teacher, garnered interest and outrage for her opposition to extending rights to transgender people on the basis of self-identity, and backing moves to end a Covid-era law that allowed abortions pills to be sent to people at home. Her work with the Common Sense Group, and co-founding the New Social Covenant Unit to promote family-friendly policies, have seen some label Cates an unashamed culture warrior. She has amassed a tight-knit group of supporters, many of whom contacted the Guardian to offer their support after she was approached for an interview. Kemi Badenoch, the equalities minister and trade secretary, said she was “particularly impressed” with a project spearheaded by Cates to review sex and relationships education in schools. They credited Cates with having “convinced the PM that it needed serious reform” and running “a coordinated campaign … which shows her ability to muster people to her cause and the support she has across parliament”. Andrea Leadsom, the former Commons leader, praised Cates’s “fantastic” work supporting children in early years education, while the veteran Brexiter Bill Cash called her “one of the most diligent MPs I have come across in my 39 years in the House”. Cates has been held up as the poster-woman for would-be female Tory MPs – having been invited as the star speaker to a Women2Win event this week encouraging more women to stand for office. She is fiercely protective of time spent with her family, ensuring she travels back home to her South Yorkshire seat of Penistone and Stocksbridge every Wednesday evening to do the school run for her three children twice a week. “Miriam’s a mum first, a northerner second and politician third,” said an ally. As well as being devoted to her role as a mother, Cates is also deeply religious. “Faith was part of everything we lived and breathed,” she recalled of her upbringing, on a podcast hosted by the faith group Theos in August 2021. Cates met her husband at their church in Sheffield and sits on parliament’s ecclesiastical committee, which scrutinises the Church of England. She has been likened to Kate Forbes – the SNP politician who ran for the party leadership but whose fervent religious views were viewed as out of date by most of her party. When Forbes came under fire, Cates called her “incredibly brave”. The Tory MP also cited Tim Farron, the former Liberal Democrat leader who was criticised for suggesting gay sex was a sin, in an interview with the Christian Institute. “I get so many emails from Christians and many others thanking me for taking a stand on these things and that does really keep you going,” she told the group last month.
As one of the “red wall” of northern Tories likely to be jittery about keeping their job at the next election given current polling, Cates is only likely to press harder for the Conservative party to embrace a socially conservative agenda in an attempt to save her seat. But in doing so, she will alienate those colleagues already uncomfortable with her arguments. A senior Tory warned: “We don’t represent the values of modern people if we carry on down that route.” Cates may discover it is dangerous to polarise colleagues so early in her career.