KNOWN for putting her views across fearlessly, Claire Coryl Julia Coutinho has been a rising star in a field that did not interest her once - politics.
As the minister for children, families and wellbeing, her current role allows her to work on social issues that she has always been passionate about. She is clear about her vision - “children in care deserve the same love and stability as everyone else”.
Born in London in 1985 to an Indian-origin couple - anesthetist father Winston and GP mother Maria - she is the only member of her family who is not a doctor.
Privately educated in Dulwich at all girls school, having studied at Exeter College, Oxford, she worked with the emerging markets equity team at the investment bank Merrill Lynch for nearly four years. But she left her City job for a career in social justice policy, focusing on issues ranging from financial inclusion to the regeneration of deprived communities.
After a stint with the accounting firm KPMG as a corporate responsibility manager, she became a special adviser at HM Treasury and then an aide to Rishi Sunak who was the chief secretary to the treasury at that time.
She received a real break in 2019 when she won the East Surrey constituency which has been a Conservative stronghold for more than a century. Later, unhappy about then prime minister Boris Johnson’s leadership, she quit her job as parliamentary secretary in July last year and endorsed Sunak to take over the reins of the party.
As parliamentary under-secretary of state, now she is a widely heard-about member of the Sunak government while also taking care of her constituency where the opposition leader Keir Starmer grew up.
On her entry into politics, she once told her local media outlet, limpsfieldsurrey.com: “As a young adult, I have to confess I had no interest in politics!”
Because of her social justice concerns, she decided to take the plunge into politics although it meant an 80 per cent pay cut. The Maths’ nerd (she read Mathematics and Philosophy at Oxford) moved into social justice policy.
According to Coutinho, her experience in the government made her realise she wanted to take more of a frontline role.
She is an avid reader - she co-founded the literary-themed supper club the Novel Diner. But Maths has always been close to her heart since her childhood.
She captained her Maths team at school and went on to obtain her master’s degree in the subject along with philosophy.
She hopes to promote the uptake of Maths, as she believes it is “vital for the high-paid, innovative jobs of the future”. (Broken quotes, the quote marks go inside the full stop – it is a full quote, then a full stop inside the quotation marks).
She feels Algorithms (which is a way a computer reads data and analyses it and then imposes a pattern on it) “are in fact tremendously useful and I hope to play a small part in us falling back in love with Maths as a country,” says the Conservative politician who supported Brexit.
Coutinho’s various social media posts point to her love for nature, particularly the Surrey Hills and its greenery.
During the pandemic-induced lockdowns, she took solace in the environmental treasure chest of East Surrey, which “really helped refresh my spirits”.
Coutinho’s parents emigrated from India in the late 1970s. With her roots in Goa, she belongs to a family of early risers and she always thought they “must have descended from farmers.” Her day usually begins at 5.45am checking news and emails.
She has always been candid about what she thinks, whether it is about Dominic Cummings’s 260-mile controversial trip from London to County Durham during the lockdown or being a 'big fan' of Tories’ deputy chair Lee Anderson whose stance on the death penalty is well-known. She is clear that divergent ideas can harmoniously coexist.
She thinks it is “really important that we have people who have lots of different opinions” in the Conservative Party.
“We are very good at living alongside each other even when we disagree,” she tells LBC.
She explains why: “It takes a broad range of viewpoints to make up a society and we can still get along.”
Supporting the local economy in her constituency and protecting the environment are among her local priorities. She set up the East of Surrey Local Economic Taskforce to bring decision-makers across Surrey together to drive the local economic strategy.
Her interests are diverse and she appeared on Channel 4’s cooking game show The Taste.
