Mark James Harper, Baron Harper (born 26 February 1970) is a British politician who served in the Cabinet as Chief Whip from 2015 to 2016 and as Secretary of State for Transport from 2022 to 2024. A member of the Conservative Party, he served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire from 2005 until his defeat in 2024.
Harper was born in Swindon and studied philosophy, politics and economics at Brasenose College, Oxford. He was a chartered accountant before his election to Parliament. Under the coalition government of David Cameron he served as Parliamentary Secretary for Political and Constitutional Reform before being promoted to Minister of State for Immigration in the 2012 reshuffle. During his tenure at the Home Office, he devised a controversial campaign in which advertising vans told illegal migrants to "go home". He resigned as Immigration Minister in February 2014, but quickly returned to government as Minister of State for Disabled People in the July 2014 reshuffle.
Harper was promoted to Cameron's cabinet as Chief Whip following the 2015 general election; he served in the role for a year before being sacked by incoming Prime Minister Theresa May in 2016. Harper was a candidate for leader of the Conservative Party in the 2019 leadership contest, finishing ninth out of 10 candidates with 10 votes. During the Johnson premiership, he was the chair of the COVID Recovery Group of Conservative MPs advocating for looser COVID-19 restrictions. After Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, Harper was appointed to the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Transport.
Harper was born and raised in Swindon, Wiltshire, where he had a working-class upbringing: his father was a manual worker and his mother was employed by a book club. He was educated at Headlands Comprehensive School and Swindon College. He read philosophy, politics and economics at Brasenose College, Oxford, where he studied under Professor Vernon Bogdanor.
Upon graduation in 1991, Harper joined KPMG as an auditor. After qualifying as a chartered accountant, he joined Intel Corporation. In 2002, he left Intel to set up his own accountancy practice.
Before entering Parliament, Harper was the treasurer of the Swindon Conservative Association and served as vice-chairman for a year in 1998.
At the 2001 general election, Harper contested the Gloucestershire seat of Forest of Dean but came second to the incumbent Labour Party MP Diana Organ; Harper won 38.8% of the vote.
Organ retired at the 2005 general election and Harper was elected for the Conservatives with a majority of 2,049 votes, similar to the Labour majority at the previous election, and 40.9% of the vote. At the same general election, Harper's wife Margaret stood for election as the Conservative candidate in Worcester, where she finished in second place to the Labour candidate, Michael Foster.
On 24 May 2005, Harper made his maiden speech, in which he advocated giving the parents of children with special educational needs the option of sending their children to a non-mainstream school – an issue of local interest in Harper's Gloucestershire seat and one close to the heart of the then Shadow Education Secretary, David Cameron, whose son Ivan was born with severe learning difficulties. When Cameron was elected leader of the party in December 2005, he made Harper a spokesman on armed forces welfare issues and veterans.
Harper has sat on the Commons Administration Committee and briefly on the Work and Pensions Committee. On matters of foreign policy, he has consistently voted in support of British military intervention overseas. Harper was described in 2015 as a Eurosceptic. Even so, he campaigned to remain in the European Union during the 2016 referendum on ending the UK's membership.
The scandal over MPs' expenses showed Harper to be a frugal parliamentarian: his only significant expenses claim was for a brief period of temporary accommodation occupied on a short-term basis soon after being elected in 2005.
In the reshuffle of July 2007, Harper was made Shadow Minister for Disabled People, a position he held until the general election in 2010.
Junior Minister at the Cabinet Office
At the 2010 general election, Harper was re-elected with an increased vote share of 46.9% and an increased majority of 11,064. Soon afterwards, Harper became Parliamentary Secretary for Political and Constitutional Reform. He worked with Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg on the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act 2011 that changed the voting system for electing MPs (Harper was not enthusiastic about the proposal, which had been a key bargaining chip in the coalition negotiations in May 2010).
In October 2010, the government introduced the Public Bodies Act to the House of Lords, which would allow it to sell or lease public forests in England. Harper supported the bill, describing it as an "exciting opportunity for community ownership." However, the measure was widely criticised by many residents within his Forest of Dean constituency and by politicians with connections to the large oak forest after which Harper's parliamentary seat is named – including Baroness Jan Royall, leader of the opposition in the House of Lords. Following a public meeting – after which Harper had to be rescued by the police from what he described as "a baying mob" – and a sustained national campaign which included the newly formed local Forest of Dean pressure group Hands off our Forest, the government announced it had abandoned its plans and would remove the forestry clauses from the Public Bodies Bill.
Harper worked on the House of Lords Reform Bill, which set out to introduce a smaller second chamber consisting mostly of elected peers. This was a Liberal Democrat policy that had also been mentioned as an aspiration in the Conservative Party's manifesto of 2010. In July 2012, 91 Conservative MPs defied the whips and voted with Labour against the proposals, something which led the coalition government to abandon the planned reform soon afterwards.
In the reshuffle of September 2012, Harper was promoted to Minister of State for Immigration at a time when levels of inward migration were falling but emigration rates were falling faster still, leading to a rise in net migration into the UK.
Over the summer of 2013, Harper trialled a campaign aimed at illegal immigrants that consisted, in part, of lorries with hoardings attached to their load areas driving around London displaying the sign "Here Illegally? Go Home or Risk Arrest" with more information in smaller print on how to contact the Home Office for advice. The scheme was seen as offensive by some and it divided opinion within the coalition's ministerial team. In October 2013, Harper told MPs: "The advertising vans in particular were too much of a blunt instrument and will not be used again". As immigration minister, Harper stated "British citizenship is a privilege, not a right".