Caroline Dinenage: Meet the MP who accidently fell into politics after complaining about her local council
In the first of a new series, we meet an profile Gosport MP Caroline Dinenage
For someone who admits they accidently fell into politics after complaining about their local council, it is fair to say that Caroline Dinenage has managed to make a successful job of it.
After 16 years as an MP, she has held two ministerial posts, been an important part of a Conservative-led government as well as being a regular sight in Gosport - with Dame Caroline making sure she does not forget her Hampshire roots.
But were it not for flooding issues near her parents’ home in Hambledon in 1998, the woman who started her own manufacturing company business aged just 19 says she would never have given politics a second thought.
“It started by accident as a result of me being gobby, and everything that's happened has happened as a result of that,” she explained.
Her mum Beverley had pneumonia, and as a result of flooding there were ‘green goddesses’ outside the family home which made it difficult for her to rest as a result of constant noise - something a young Caroline was discussing with one of her ‘dear customers’.
She explained: “I was slagging off the local council and saying how rubbish they were, and how my mum wasn't very well and because of this flooding issue. And he said to me, ‘if you don't like it, why don't you do something about it?’”
And she did just that after discovering the Conservatives were looking for a Winchester District Council candidate for the local elections in a strongly-held Liberal Democrat area. But it was at a time when the Tories were deeply unpopular.
“It's difficult to remember how unpopular it was to be a Tory in 1998,” she mused. “But I thought, well, maybe I'll have a go and one day I'll be able to tell my grandchildren I once stood in an election.
“So I did, and I went out every night after work for about six weeks and I knocked on doors. And when the election came, I won. And I became the youngest ever councillor in Winchester Council's 1,000-year history. I overturned a Lib Dem seat, and I think I was the only Tory gain that night.
“At the time, you remember, it was a year after the big 97 Tony Blair fanfare and I was 26 years old. And that was how it started.”
The road to Parliament
The Hampshire local - daughter of the broadcaster and television presenter Fred Dinenage - was born in Portsmouth, went to school in Wykeham House School in Fareham and Oaklands School in Waterlooville and spent her early working life in and around the area.
And it was her continuing love of the local area which led to her taking a further step into the world of politics after becoming frustrated at the things she was unable to affect in her position as a councillor.
However, she said she would only would consider running for Parliament if it was for a seat in area she had a “genuine understanding and affection for”.
Her first unexpected chance came in the 2005 general election when she was encouraged to apply to be the Conservative candidate for Portsmouth South - with the seat being held at the time by the Lib Dem Mike Hancock.
At the time there were few women in Parliament and since she was seven-and-a-half months pregnant with her first child, Dame Caroline didn’t feel like she had a chance of being selected. But she was, and managed to halve Mike Hancock's majority.
“It was, I think, the 12th biggest swing in the country,” she said. “I learned a lot, but I also decided I didn't want to do that. It was quite a long and tough campaign and I just wanted to go back to running my business for a bit.
“David Cameron had this list of gold candidates, preferred candidates, and people kept asking me if I would come back. I said that if the Gosport seat ever came up then that would be the one I would apply for. It was just the area that I felt I had such a huge affection for.”
Expenses scandal changed everything
Dame Caroline didn’t expect to return to politics any time soon after that and carried on running her business and had a second child, with the then Gosport MP Peter Viggers signing up to run in the next election.
But the 2009 expenses scandal changed all of that when the Daily Telegraph began publishing leaked details of widespread misuse of allowances and claims by MPs. This famously included Mr Viggers’ attempt to claim £1,645 of taxpayer money for a floating "Stockholm" duck house on his pond.
“My predecessor was effectively the pin-up boy of the expenses scandal, so he ended up standing down,” Dame Caroline said. “I put my hat in the ring, but other people did as well. I was selected to fight the seat and was lucky enough to win it.”
And she hasn’t looked back since, spending her time living in, working in and loving her constituency, saying that immersing herself in the community is the only way to be.
“It makes such a difference,” she said. “My kids have been in the local schools and they have been in the local sports teams.
“I use the same shops, I use the same doctor services, I use the same local facilities. And so it's remarkable how much casework you pick up just by living. The number of times I'm driving around and I see something and I get home and I'm immediately on the phone to my office asking them to ‘find out why that’s happening’ or ‘what’s happened there’ or ‘why is that missing’.
“And people stop me virtually every time I am in the supermarket and tell me something I need to know. It's all very nice being in Parliament and the more political aspect of it is fine, but my favourite part of being an MP is my constituency.”
Fighting for Gosport
Over the years Dame Caroline has seen lots of change across her constituency, but says one of the biggest things which still impacts on the area is the fact the “constituency was effectively nationalised by our armed forces 200 years ago”.
“You cannot swing a cat in Gosport without knocking down half a dozen areas that have historic military uses. As those industries and facilities have diminished, so have the life chances of the people who live here.
“Successive governments have failed to back them up with anything meaningful and so the result is that we have an area where is insufficient work. There is less half a job per working adult on the Gosport peninsula, so people simply have to out commute on inadequate roads. So we have deprivation and the lack of opportunities that people need.
”My whole time here as an MP has been about trying to right the opportunities for jobs, the opportunities for skills, the opportunities for investment. It all started with the Daedalus site which was a disused military airfield and has now got 3,500 jobs, it's got a skills centre with 900 engineering students, it's got huge national companies like Eaton and Bristow building huge hangers there.
“As a result we were able to get money to build roads and things. Back in the early 2000s John Prescott said we would never have a major road going into Gosport because we were strategically unimportant and I’ve set about trying to make us strategically important.
“We have an enterprise zone, and that’s how we got the money for the Stubbington bypass. It is a very long process because we are trying to overcome decades and decades of underinvestment. We fight against the fact that successive governments have looked at the south of England, and Hampshire in particular, and thought of us as leafy and affluent. And yet you can take Portsmouth and Gosport and place them in north of England, and they would not look out of place.
“They are industrial, with very deep rooted military history. When the iron and steel industry, or the coal industry, was ripped out of the heart some of our northern and midlands areas governments back-filled that with investment opportunity. They didn’t do the same when the military heartlands were diminished in the same way.”
Key sites doing nothing
One of her biggest frustrations has been at the redundant and empty MoD buildings which are “rotting at public expense” instead of being brought back into a different use for the benefit of the local area.
She said: “A lot of time is trying to ungrip the cold hands of government off of some of these sites, and then try and find the money to get them regenerated. One example is what was what they called the retained area of Old Clarence Yard which is the area where the rum store is. It took years to get the Defence Infrastructure Organisation, the MoD, to sell that off. It was just sat there.
”So many times I’ve said I really want to the rum store to be back and being used for something meaningful for the Gosport constituency as it used to do when it was in its heyday. We finally managing to get the DIO to sell it, UK Docks came in and bought it and have just made such a success of it. It is full of small businesses, and staff and skills.
“We also managed to get all of that Levelling Up funding to restore the Rum Store, and UK Docks have matched that funding, so it can be done but it takes so much energy and relentless nagging.”
Fighting for the defence community
As well as dealing with the legacy of Gosport’s historic links with the military, Dame Caroline also speaks passionately about the Royal Navy of today. She was also instrumental in the decade-long campaign to secure a Arctic Star campaign medal for Second World War Arctic Convoy veterans, which was also backed by The News.
She said: “One of my themes as an MP has been for people to try and understand that it is not Portsmouth which is the home of the Royal Navy, it is Portsmouth Harbour - and we are just as much a part of that as the other side.
“Gosport has the highest proportion of veterans of any constituency in the UK, we have got very large patches of married quarters and military accommodation, we have got so many military sites here HMS Sultan, HMS Collingwood, the Institute of Medicine. Fort Blockhouse was also still open but not doing very much when I was first elected.
“I've done a lot of work campaigning on everything from the standard of living accommodation, the service family accommodation, opportunities for veterans, all the way through to discounted travel for veterans on the Gosport Ferry, and campaigning for better accommodation on our sites.
“I have brought successive defence ministers down to our patch so they can see the state of the accommodation our sailors are living in at Collingwood and Sultan, and that's really important to me. I just think that this area has just such a proud record of service in the defence of our nation, and that's not just those that have served and fought, it is their families and the support networks that have been there as part of that.
“I am married to a soldier, I was previously married to a sailor, and I know what it is like to be a forces family and the sacrifices that forces families make in the line of duty.”
Things to be proud of
Dame Caroline told The News that her time as an MP has given her many proud moments, including the creation of the Daedalus Enterprise Zone which came about after she set up the Daedalus Strategy Group that conceived it.
But she said the ability to help people in her constituency has been the most rewarding.
She said: “Whether that’s a continuing care package at the end of someone’s life so that they can see out the end of their days without worrying about who is going to pay for it, or someone who has been ripped off £1,000 by a fraudster and the banks are not helping them get that money back. These are game-changing things in people’s lives.”
She also said that the thing which had touched her most as a time as an MP was her work with Charlotte Fairall, the founder of Sophie’s Legacy which has resulted in the creation of specialist guidance and work relating to children in the government’s new 10-year cancer plan.
The MP explained: “Charlotte came to see me a couple of weeks after Sophie had died. She talked me through the experience that she and Sophie had and been through. I thought that maybe they had just been really unlucky in the experience that they had had and what they'd gone through, and then but I decided to try and find out.
“The more I found out about that the more I realized that their experience was actually the norm, and that's why we decided to throw everything at it. The proof will be in the way that the government delivers the 10-year cancer plan, but I genuinely feel that we have had an opportunity to change the dial on how we treat and care for children with cancer and their families in the UK. And that will be a remarkable legacy.”
Modern politics
Much has changed over the years for politicians, with the increasing influence of social media throwing up new ways of communicating with constituents - as well as criticism, with MPs often criticised for appearing in photos for visits they have made.
Dame Caroline said: “For every thing that I am at where is a photo opportunity, there are five other things that I am doing that don’t get photos taken.
“Communication has also changed. My predecessor tended to communicated in long handed letters to constituents but these days it is different. We get I’d say 400 emails a week.
“I have a very dedicated team of staff, they are hard working, they are bright and it is like running your own small business.”
She described today’s politics as “a very confusing picture” with no political party having a decisive lead in the polls despite the massive Labour majority in Parliament, and the ongoing changes around Reform UK.
She said: “It is really hard for people sometimes to cut through the noise and sort between who is going to deliver and who can just talk a good game. My motto is always actions speak louder than words and judge me on what I do.
“There’s a lot of populist parties out there promising the earth, and the danger is that people have lost trust. A lot of people have lost trust in politics and politicians who have promised things they were not able to do. It terrifies me that it could destroy the last vestiges of trust that people have in politics if we are not really careful.
“I just focus on my day job which is to represent the people of Gosport, fight its corner and help the people who come to me with their problems.”
Dame Caroline’s constituency is also largely surrounded by MPs from other parties, and she says that is important that party politics is put aside for the good of the local area so they can work together on local issues.
“I think it is so important that we work collaboratively with other people,” she said. “I have a good relationship with all my neighbouring MPs like Amanda (Martin) and Stephen (Morgan) in Portsmouth. It helps that that we are all from this neck of the woods and we all have the best interests of the area in our DNA.”
She also chairs the sports select committee, made up of all political parties, which she said also “shows Parliament at its best” with MPs working together to hold the government to account and scrutinise important issues.
But despite her pride in “earning the trust of people from all sides of the Houses of Parliament” to be chosen for that role, her heat and her focus remains on what she believes is the most important - Gosport.
“For me, my priorities have always been local,” she said. “It's always important to put your local area first.”
Editor’s note - this interview was carried out before the recent migrant landing at Fort Blockhouse