Dame Cheryl Gillan

Politician

DAME CHERYL Gillan, who has died at 68, was the former Welsh Secretary and an outspoken campaigner against the proposed HS2 high speed rail project.

As acting joint chair of the influential 1922 Committee of backbench MPs from May to September 2019, she found herself centre stage of Tory politics when she helped preside, along with Charles Walker

MP, over the Tory leadership contest to elect a successor to Theresa May – a contest won by the current Prime Minister.

She served as Welsh Secretary from 2010–2012, having earlier opposed the setting up of the Welsh Assembly. Shortly afterwards, she took on thethen Transport Secretary Chris Grayling, demanding to know whether he had done his homework before awarding lucrative HS2 contracts to the outsourcer Carillion, six months before it collapsed. The debacle led her to campaign for the whole project to be abandoned.

One of her final contributions in Parliament was her legislative bid to make it easier to test offenders in prisons for new forms of drugs. Her Prisons (Substance Testing) Bill is still progressing through the House of Lords, having cleared the Commons last month.

She was unable to participate in its final stages in the Commons in March due to illness.

Born in Cardiff, her father was a former Army officer and the director of a steel company who later moved the family to Sheffield. She held various roles in business, including a marketing executive role at Ernst & Young, and became MP for Chesham and Amersham from 1992. Her husband, Jack Leeming, died in 2019.