Nick Hawkins
Encyclopedia
Nicholas John "Nick" Hawkins (born 27 March 1957) is a lawyer and politician from the United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

. He was a Conservative Party
Conservative Party (UK)
The Conservative Party, formally the Conservative and Unionist Party, is a centre-right political party in the United Kingdom that adheres to the philosophies of conservatism and British unionism. It is the largest political party in the UK, and is currently the largest single party in the House...

 Member of Parliament
Member of Parliament
A Member of Parliament is a representative of the voters to a :parliament. In many countries with bicameral parliaments, the term applies specifically to members of the lower house, as upper houses often have a different title, such as senate, and thus also have different titles for its members,...

 from 1992-2005.

Hawkins was educated at Bedford Modern School
Bedford Modern School
Bedford Modern School is a British co-educational independent school in the Harpur area of Bedford, in the county of Bedfordshire, in England.Bedford Modern comprises a junior school and a senior school...

 and Lincoln College, Oxford
Lincoln College, Oxford
Lincoln College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. It is situated on Turl Street in central Oxford, backing onto Brasenose College and adjacent to Exeter College...

, and called to the Bar at the Middle Temple
Middle Temple
The Honourable Society of the Middle Temple, commonly known as Middle Temple, is one of the four Inns of Court exclusively entitled to call their members to the English Bar as barristers; the others being the Inner Temple, Gray's Inn and Lincoln's Inn...

 in 1979.

Hawkins became a Member of Parliament representing the constituency of Blackpool South
Blackpool South (UK Parliament constituency)
Blackpool South is a borough constituency in Lancashire, represented in the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It elects one Member of Parliament by the first past the post system of election, and was created in 1945.-History:...

 in 1992. Prior to the 1997 general election, with polls predicting that the Conservatives had no chance of retaining the Blackpool South seat, Hawkins applied and was selected to contest the newly-created constituency of Surrey Heath
Surrey Heath (UK Parliament constituency)
Surrey Heath is a county constituency represented in the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It elects one Member of Parliament by the first past the post system of election. Since the 2005 general election the MP has been Michael Gove, a senior figure in the Conservative Party...

, which was predicted to be one of the safest Conservative seats in the country. He duly won the seat with a majority 16,287, the second-largest Conservative majority of in the country that year (after John Major
John Major
Sir John Major, is a British Conservative politician, who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1990–1997...

 in Huntingdon
Huntingdon (UK Parliament constituency)
Huntingdon is a county constituency represented in the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It elects one Member of Parliament by the first past the post system of election....

). Hawkins was re-elected in 2001 with a reduced majority of 10,819.

Hawkins served in Prime Minister John Major's government in 1995-97, first at the Ministry of Defence
Ministry of Defence (United Kingdom)
The Ministry of Defence is the United Kingdom government department responsible for implementation of government defence policy and is the headquarters of the British Armed Forces....

 and then at the then Department of National Heritage. In opposition he was appointed and promoted in a series of shadow ministerial jobs by four different Conservative Party leaders. Among other roles, he was Shadow Solicitor-General in 2003, a Shadow Home Office Minister on national security issues and drugs policy, Shadow Legal and Constitutional Affairs Minister, and Shadow spokesman on gambling twice (2000-01 and 2003-04).

In April 2004, Hawkins was deselected as the Conservative Party candidate for Surrey Heath following a ballot of party members in the constituency. He was asked by the Party Leader and Party Chairman to stand again for a different constituency, but decided instead to return to the law. Surrey Heath members believe that their money ought to be able to buy a future prime minister, The Daily Telegraph, 27 June 2004 He remained a Member of Parliament until the 2005 general election. Michael Gove
Michael Gove
Michael Andrew Gove, MP is a British politician, who currently serves as the Secretary of State for Education and as the Conservative Party Member of Parliament for the Surrey Heath constituency. He is also a published author and former journalist.Born in Edinburgh, Gove was raised in Aberdeen...

, a journalist at The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...

newspaper, was selected as the new Conservative candidate for Surrey Heath in his place, and won the seat.

After leaving parliament, Hawkins returned to his previous career as a corporate lawyer; he had previously been a barrister on circuit from the late 1970s. He had also worked as in-house corporate counsel in banking, insurance, financial services and credit in the 1980s and early 1990s, was elected chairman of the corporate barristers' national organisation BACFI, and elected to serve on the Bar Council for six years and on its "inner cabinet", the GMC, for two years.
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