Claire Coutinho: The UK’s chancellor-in-the-wings?

LONDON — Late summer 2023. Claire Coutinho, a junior minister at the Department for Education and a rising star in the U.K. Conservative government, is enjoying a quiet morning at home when her phone rings.

The caller has a message from one of Coutinho’s oldest friends in politics, a pal whose career has outstripped even her own.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is reshuffling his Cabinet — would Coutinho, his former special adviser, parliamentary private secretary and a long-time ally, like to come to Downing Street and discuss another big promotion?

“I was at home,” she said, sounding slightly nonplussed when POLITICO asked her last year about the moment she got the call. “It’s pretty boring, sorry. It was eight in the morning.”

But Sunak had just handed Coutinho one of the knottiest jobs in government — a seat at the Cabinet table as energy secretary, steering the U.K. to hit net zero carbon emissions by 2050, a legally binding target, while convincing her fraught and splintered party to get on board.

That task has taken on sharper political edges in the months since, first when the PM ditched a series of interim green targets to try to drive a wedge with the Labour opposition, and then when Labour U-turned on their own net zero spending promises.

Yet in Whitehall, gossip has already turned to Coutinho’s possible next job, this one right next door to Sunak. 

Among those in the know, she is often cast as the PM’s chancellor-in-the-wings.

Fitting the bill

Their thinking is that, with the party split and straggling in the polls — and with a number of Cabinet heavy hitters including current chancellor Jeremy Hunt on track to lose their seats — Sunak will want his best performers and staunchest allies in top posts.

Pressed in January on whether Hunt would stay as chancellor until the election, Sunak said that he would (but only after trying to duck the question.) But two former No. 10 aides told POLITICO that Downing Street’s ultimate plan is to fight the general election with Coutinho installed at the Treasury.

“A fresh face would grab headlines and steal Labour’s thunder as first female chancellor,” one told POLITICO.

“Can you see a world in which Jeremy Hunt doesn’t stand again and maybe leaves government ahead of the next election given his length of service, his age and all that kind of stuff? Yeah,” said a former colleague who worked with Coutinho in government. 

“And would she fit the profile of someone that he would want to replace him? Absolutely, yes.”

One MP who has worked with Coutinho added that she would be a “better chancellor” compared with the energy brief, which they argued is not her first love.

All four figures, like many of the more than two dozen who spoke to POLITICO, were granted anonymity to discuss Coutinho’s career and ambitions.

The naysayers

Coutinho herself has provided a vivid non-denial, telling POLITICO that constant speculation over what politicians might do next is a “Westminster sickness.”

And not everyone is convinced that Coutinho, elected only in 2019, is being readied for yet another rapid promotion.

One senior minister said they would be “absolutely astonished” if Sunak planned to make Coutinho chancellor. “I don’t think he, nor she, thinks it’s likely,” they said. 

“She would have to be a very good media performer and all over the brief, otherwise economics journalists would quickly expose the gaps in her knowledge,” another Cabinet minister said. 

“It’s such an important role. You need the best person on the pitch,” they added, saying Coutinho is sometimes “found wanting” or “speared” by her colleagues around the Cabinet table.

My mate Rishi

If she was appointed chancellor, Coutinho would be wound even closer into Sunak’s inner circle. She already helps him prep for the weekly Commons joust that is Prime Minister’s Questions, and Sunak is quick to lean on her for advice, insiders say.

And it’s not the first time she’s had his ear.

“​​It was kind of accepted [that] she would be close to him when she was his SpAd,” says a former colleague who worked with Coutinho at the Treasury. “I think that, when he became chancellor, the resentment grew — because she was just the PPS and she was getting more face time than ministers, and certainly had more influence.”

Coutinho, one of dozens of new Conservative MPs swept into the Commons under then premier Boris Johnson, got her first ministerial role as disabilities minister in September 2022, courtesy of Johnson’s successor Liz Truss. 

Within a month, Truss was gone, Sunak was in, and Coutinho was moved to become minister for children, families and wellbeing. Ten months later, aged 38, she was off to lead the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, replacing Grant Shapps when he was moved on to Defense.

Sunak has “gone on and done rather well for himself … She was attached to his coattails,” said the former colleague quoted above.

Green warrior

At DESNZ, Coutinho’s ministerial red box of paperwork spills over with big decisions.

She is the ultimate arbiter of plans to overhaul the U.K.’s electricity system, expanding pylons and substations across the country to make sure new, clean energy sources can come online. Decisions about huge, sometimes unpopular infrastructure projects such as solar farms and nuclear plants end up on her desk. Climate campaigners keep suing her department.

DESNZ has also ditched interim green targets for phasing in clean boilers and electric vehicles, after Sunak recalibrated the government’s approach on the environment shortly after Coutinho arrived in office.

Colleagues are united about her work ethic, which stands out even in workaholic Westminster, describing her as “tremendously hard working” and “zealous in the way in which she wants to fulfill her role.” Allies point to achievements in office including forcing through higher grants to help households buy climate-friendly heat pumps and swift action to reform the department’s ailing system for auctioning renewables contracts.

She also enjoys a reputation for being, well, extremely decent.

“I never saw her raise her voice with anybody,” says former minister Seema Kennedy, who was PPS to then Prime Minister Theresa May at the height of the Brexit wars, around the time Coutinho worked in the Tory Whips’ Office. “[I] can’t remember [her] ever saying anything rude about anybody, which was pretty amazing because it was a very tense period in the parliamentary party,” Kennedy added. 

One former official familiar with her work in government described spotting Coutinho laughing and joking with her civil servants in parliament’s committee corridor. “There’s that old saying that your character is built by the person you are when people aren’t watching. That’s the impression I got of her,” they said.

Coutinho, who is currently single, told POLITICO: “I am, I think, one of the youngest people to have ever done this job. So if I have grandchildren — which are mostly theoretical at this point — they would be alive in 2150, and I want to make sure that they have the environment that they’re due.”

Like Sunak, she has also turned political fire on Labour, accusing the opposition of “blind ambition” in its pledge to decarbonize the U.K.’s power grid by 2030 (although the government’s own target is just five years later.) In February, Coutinho chalked up a win when Labour dropped its totemic pledge to spend £28 billion a year on green tech if in government. The shadow frontbench was “taking families and the country for fools,” she said.

“It seemed like she was put there as — no offense to her — a patsy for Rishi to drive through a net zero vision of his own, and water down whatever he wanted to water down,” said a government official with knowledge of the department’s thinking. 

Other colleagues don’t buy this interpretation, arguing it does a “disservice” to her political skills

“She’s been helped by her boss becoming chancellor and then prime minister and bringing her along with him — but he hasn’t done that with everyone, so there’s a reason she’s managed to make it,” said the first former colleague quoted above.

“She’s got an inner steel which is not really seen in a public manner. I wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of her,” said the senior minister. “She’s a tough and resilient character who knows where she’s going.”

“It is just sexist to argue that Claire has been put into cabinet based on her relationship with Rishi, rather than on merit. She was one of the few Rishi supporters who was given a ministerial job under Liz Truss,” said one close ally of Coutinho.

“She is more than capable of forming her own views,” they added, arguing Coutinho’s net zero pitch — and her instinct not to “clobber” people with expensive climate policies — comes from her previous work with disadvantaged families. Coutinho also sees the political need to move carefully, after being spooked by the levels of climate skepticism she encountered on a trip to Paris just weeks into the job, the ally said. Shown polling indicating growing French ambivalence towards the green agenda, she was determined to balance ambition with realism to stave off a similar drift in the U.K.

Indeed, Westminster’s green campaigners point to a longer-term embrace of climate policy.

Coutinho was one of the first of the 2019 intake to join the Conservative Environment Network (CEN), a parliamentary caucus. “As a backbencher, she did use her platform to promote environmental issues, and … [from] all the conversations that I’ve had with her, I think she does feel strongly about the importance of handing on to the next generation a healthier environment,” said Sam Hall, CEN’s director.

But how does the drive to protect the environment stack up with loosening the U.K.’s green message or backing hundreds more oil and gas licenses in U.K. shores? “Even the Climate Change Committee acknowledges that oil and gas will be part of our energy mix when we reach net zero in 2050,” Coutinho told MPs in November. Sunak put the same view more strongly when he said the U.K. would “max out” North Sea oil drilling as part of that green transition.

Fighting an election on toning down green commitments is a tough sell, though, experts say, mainly because, while some people are unpersuaded by the green agenda, the issue isn’t likely to sway their votes.

Rob Ford, a political science professor at the University of Manchester, told POLITICO: “The kinds of voters who are more skeptical on the environment don’t emphasize the environment as an issue. The form that skepticism takes is often [that] there are more important things to worry about.”

The social justice warrior 

Coutinho’s route into high Conservative politics — private school (via a scholarship), then Oxford University, work as a special adviser, and a spell in the City — is a well trodden one.

But some of the items on her CV are more unusual, including voluntary work helping other kids with literacy on weekends while still at school. Allies stress that she is shaped by a social mission, exemplified by a stint between 2013 and 2015 at the Centre for Social Justice, the center-right think tank established by former Conservative Leader Iain Duncan Smith.

The CSJ gig was more fulfilling to Coutinho than her stint in the City, as an associate at the financial services firm Merrill Lynch, says one former colleague who worked with her at the think tank.

“If there are solutions standing out or to be had, I think like any human [she] doesn’t like to see injustice. But if you’re in a position to do something about it, I think that she’s quite passionate about having a go,” they said. 

“She’s a huge advocate for listening particularly to the small voices, to those that are off the beaten track,” said Andy Cook, the CSJ’s chief executive, who first met Coutinho through the think tank’s charity awards. 

A third former colleague described her work at the CSJ as “formational” for her politics once she was elected.

“Quite often, you were talking about a political issue and she would come back to people that she met when she was working for the Centre of Social Justice or in schools policy or something like that,” they said. “She would remember people that she had met or worked with, or things that she had come across.”

People who know Coutinho won’t be drawn into deeper questions behind that passion, but one person who has worked with her did suggest it is very personal. “I think she was a witness to some tough things,” they said, referring to her younger years.

Coutinho grew up in London. Her parents had emigrated there from India to work for the NHS with a net worth of around £200, she told the Spectator. Her parents were part of a “well trodden, self-starter immigrant tale,” she said.

She credited her grandmother in her maiden speech as the “single greatest emblem of Conservative values that I know.”

Coutinho’s way 

Coutinho’s other claim to fame — inside Westminster and elsewhere — is culinary. 

In 2012, she co-founded the catering company The Novel Diner, preparing literary-themed meals for private parties (apparently including grub inspired by the blood-spattered Bret Easton Ellis novel “American Psycho.”) The firm closed several years ago, but that was not the end of her passion.

“I can definitely attest to the fact that she knows how to make food,” said one former colleague quoted earlier, who said Coutinho gifted them some homemade sauce one Christmas. “I’m a feeder,” said Coutinho cheerfully in her Spectator interview.

She even had a crack at “The Taste,” a Nigella Lawson reality TV cooking show, back in 2015. This was less stellar than her political career. Coutinho was booted off after two episodes when she flunked a dish of braised beef and mashed potato. The writing was on the wall — judges had already scorned her steak tartar as “watery” in week one.

What Claire did next

If one road between now and the election sends Coutinho to the Treasury, the other may involve a big legacy achievement at DESNZ. She is planning to make a “vision speech” in the coming months, according to the ally quoted above.

And she may have only months to land that legacy — polls consistently show the Conservatives heading for a crushing victory this fall.

“Let’s assume for the sake of argument that Labour gets in next time, [which] doesn’t seem unreasonable — I would be thinking about how can I create a substantive legacy to ensure that my brief time at the department has had an impact?” said Adam Bell, a former government head of energy strategy and now a director of policy at the Stonehaven consultancy.

That means looking at policies which bring in much-needed green investment, as well as tackling industrial decarbonization, Bell said.

“I’d be looking more specifically about how the department thinks about policy development and how it thinks about attracting capital,” said Bell. “[That] means, ‘How do I help start developing instruction frameworks that create long term certainty?’”

Beyond 2024

There is one more Westminster parlor game in which Coutinho’s name crops up consistently. If the Conservatives are beaten in a few months, who will end up at the top of the Tories in opposition — and who will be the power brokers?

Rightwing favorites Kemi Badenoch and Suella Braverman are more likely to emerge as opposition leader than a Sunak loyalist right after a Sunak-led defeat. But Coutinho might be wise to bide her time.

“Whoever gets the leadership would be pretty crackers to do so because I think it’s going to be a pretty difficult job as [there will be] a very divided Conservative party to manage. She’s not someone who’s expressed a lot of ambition towards that at the moment,” said one former No. 10 official.

“But in future she may think differently. Others may encourage her to run,” they added. “Who knows?”

Additional reporting by Emilio Casalicchio, Charlie Cooper, Annabelle Dickson and Esther Webber.