FIVE REASONS TO SUPPORT MARGOT JAMES
- We need MPs with experience outside politics
Margot set up and ran her own business for fifteen years. A PR business specialising in pharmaceuticals and healthcare, it reached the top of its field and won awards for being best consultancy three years running.
In addition to her business career Margot has a twenty year record of charitable and public service. Margot worked on a voluntary basis as a trustee of Abantu, an African development charity, as a mentor with the Prince’s Trust, as a director of an NHS Trust, and as a mental health manager for the same NHS Trust. Margot has also been a local councillor in London where she was that Borough’s Older People’s Champion.
Margot has considerable personal, as well as professional, experience of the health and social care service; having shared the responsibility for the care of four family members over a ten year period.
- Margot will bring leadership and integrity to politics
“Ms James is beyond reproach in terms of strength of character and moral integrity. Indeed, it is these qualities that made her leadership so remarkably effective, as reflected by her firm’s reputation and the loyalty of the staff there”
Director of WPP four years after having acquired Margot’s company
- Margot champions Stourbridge and comes from the West Midlands
Margot was born and raised in Coventry. She went to school in Leamington Spa and then attended Millfield and the London School of Economics before returning to work for her family’s business in Coventry. Her father started his business with a single lorry delivering coal from the Black Country across the Midlands. Within a few years Maurice James was delivering coal nationwide for the National Coal Board, he later diversified into waste disposal, car transporting, engineering and industrial property. Margot was the first member of her family to go to university.
After she was selected as Parliamentary Candidate for Stourbridge in 2006 Margot moved to Stourbridge. She has lived in Oldswinford for two years and has spent many hours listening to residents across the constituency. Margot has campaigned for older people, for young people and on the issues people care about namely health, crime, education, the town centre and the state of the roads. Margot attends residents, police and council meetings regularly across the constituency and she is a governor of both Redhill School and Stourbridge College.
- Margot’s success in her career outside politics is widely acknowledged
In 1998 Margot was awarded the pharmaceutical industry ‘Communicator of the Year award’. Judges said she “led her company to the top, kept them there and expanded their vision beyond traditional PR to address the industry’s key strategic issues”. In 2008 Margot was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the pharmaceutical industry.
- Margot reaches beyond Conservative supporters
“The truly interesting thing is that she's a new type of woman in the Tory party. One who has read Monica Ali's Brick Lane and Andrea Levy's Small Island. Who can quote Helena Kennedy on the experience of women in prison. Who speaks with warmth about Clare Short, Barbara Castle and Tony Benn. She's neither a nanny nor a gorgon in a party that has specialised in both. I reckon the Tories are lucky to have her”.
Liz Hoggard – interview in the Guardian
