Sir David Michael Davis (born 23 December 1948) is a British Conservative Party politician who has served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Goole and Pocklington, previously Haltemprice and Howden and Boothferry, since 1987. He served as Shadow Home Secretary from 2003 to 2008 and Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union from 2016 to 2018. Davis was sworn of the Privy Council in the 1997 New Year Honours, while serving as Minister of State for Europe, a role he held from 1994 to 1997.
Brought up on the Aboyne Estate, a council estate in Tooting, south-west London, he attended Bec School. Later he earned an MBA from London Business School and worked for Tate & Lyle. He was a close personal friend of former leader of the Scottish National Party and First Minister of Scotland Alex Salmond. Having entered Parliament in 1987, he was appointed Europe Minister by Prime Minister John Major in July 1994. He held that position until the 1997 general election. He was subsequently Chairman of the Conservative Party and Shadow Secretary of State for the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister under Iain Duncan Smith.
Between 2003 and 2008 he was the Shadow Home Secretary in the Shadow Cabinets of both Michael Howard and David Cameron. Davis had previously been a candidate in the 2001 and 2005 Conservative Party leadership elections, coming fourth and second respectively. On 12 June 2008 Davis unexpectedly announced his intention to resign as an MP and was immediately replaced as Shadow Home Secretary; this was in order to force a by-election in his seat, for which he intended to seek reelection by mounting a specific campaign designed to provoke wider public debate about the erosion of civil liberties in the United Kingdom. Following his formal resignation as an MP, he became the Conservative candidate in the resulting by-election, which he won a month later.
In July 2016, following the Brexit referendum, Davis was appointed by the new prime minister, Theresa May, to the new Department for Exiting the European Union (DExEU) as Secretary of State, with responsibility for negotiating the UK's prospective exit from the EU. He was sidelined mid-way through the talks, with the Prime Minister's Europe Adviser Olly Robbins taking charge of negotiations. Davis resigned from his government position on 8 July 2018 over May's Brexit strategy and the Chequers plan. Following his resignation, the DExEU junior minister Steve Baker and the Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson also resigned.
Since 2018, Davis has remained active in the House of Commons as a backbencher, using parliamentary privilege to criticise various issues, including the Scottish Government's investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct by Alex Salmond, doubts about the conviction of Lucy Letby, and the scandal surrounding Peter Mandelson's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. He was appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (KCB) in the 2023 Political Honours for public and political service.
David Davis was born on 23 December 1948 in York to a single mother, Betty Brown. He was initially raised by his grandparents. His maternal grandfather, Walter Harrison, was the son of a wealthy trawlerman, but was disinherited after joining the Communist Party; he led a "hunger march" to London shortly after the more famous Jarrow March, which did not allow Communists to participate. His father, whom he met once after his mother's death, was Welsh. After his mother married Ronald Davis the family moved to London, where they lived initially in a flat in Wandsworth, which Davis has described as "a terrible little slum". Later, after his half-sister was born, the family moved to a council estate in Tooting, his stepfather being a shop steward at Battersea Power Station.
Davis went to Bec School in Tooting, and when he left, his A-level results were not good enough to secure a university place. He subsequently worked as an insurance clerk and became a soldier in the Territorial Army's 21 SAS (Artists) to earn the money needed to retake his examinations. After doing so he won a place at the University of Warwick, where he graduated with a BSc Joint Hons in Molecular Science and Computer Science in 1971. While at Warwick he was one of the founding members of the student radio station, University Radio Warwick. While a student, Davis was active in the Federation of Conservative Students, becoming national chairman in 1973. He studied for an MBA at London Business School from 1971 to 1973. Davis worked for Tate & Lyle for 17 years, rising to become a senior executive, including restructuring its troubled Canadian subsidiary, Redpath Sugar. He wrote about his business experiences in the 1988 book How to Turn Round a Company.
Davis was first elected to Parliament in the 1987 general election as the MP for Boothferry, when he was elected with 55.7% of the vote and a majority of 18,970. At the 1992 general election, Davis was re-elected as MP for Boothferry with a decreased vote share of 54.8% and a decreased majority of 17,535. Davis's constituency of Boothferry was abolished in 1997 and replaced with the new constituency of Haltemprice and Howden. At the 1997 general election, Davis was elected as MP for Haltemprice and Howden, winning with 44% of the vote and a majority of 7,514.
In 1999, Davis presented the Parliamentary Control of the Executive Bill to the House of Commons, in which he proposed to transfer ministerial exercise of the royal prerogative to the Commons in the following areas: the signing of treaties; the diplomatic recognition of foreign governments; European Union legislation; the appointment of ministers, peers and ambassadors; the establishment of Royal Commissions; the proclamation of Orders in Council unless subject to resolutions of the Commons; the exercise of the powers of the executive not made by statute; the declarations of states of emergency; the dissolution of parliament.
At the 2001 general election, Davis was re-elected as MP for Haltemprice and Howden with a decreased vote share of 43.2% and a decreased majority of 1,903. He rejected a shadow ministerial position under William Hague, opting instead to chair the Public Accounts Committee. Davis used his first interview as Shadow Home Secretary in November 2003 to state his personal support for a reintroduction of the death penalty for people convicted of multiple murder "where there is clear evidence and no doubt" surrounding the offender's guilt, citing the Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe and Moors Murderer Ian Brady as examples of offenders who would fall into that category. This interview came almost 40 years after the abolition of the death penalty for murder.
At the 2005 general election, Davis was again re-elected, with an increased vote share of 47.5% and an increased majority of 5,116 votes. Davis believed that once the true cost and unreliability of the ID card scheme was explained to the general public they would turn against it. He was also credited by some commentators with "claiming the scalps" of two Labour ministers, David Blunkett and Beverley Hughes, after both were forced to resign.
At the time of the 2005 Conservative leadership contest, Davis was Shadow Secretary of State for the Home Department. His campaign manager in the contest was Conservative MP and Davis's deputy as Shadow Home Secretary, Andrew Mitchell (who in 2010 became Secretary of State for International Development in Prime Minister David Cameron's cabinet). Davis was initially the front runner in the contest, but after a poorly received speech at that year's Conservative Party Conference his campaign was seen to lose momentum.
Referring to a Conference speech by the party's former leader, campaign manager Andrew Mitchell said: "William Hague made a great speech which many people will judge to be better than all the other leadership candidates put together. What that tells you is that being absolutely brilliant at being able to make a speech at conference is not the be-all-and-end-all of leadership. There are other things as well." He was photographed at the conference alongside two women wearing T-shirts emblazoned with "It's DD for me" which was viewed by some women as being patronising to them.