Stephen Parkinson, close aide to Theresa May, had senior role in Vote Leave campaign

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

Stephen Parkinson, one of Theresa May’s closest advisers, has benefited more than most from the prime minister’s noted insistence on loyalty, having ascended with her from the Home Office to No 10.

Now a key figure in Downing Street, Parkinson has come to public attention after reporting in the Observer about the official Brexit campaign, Vote Leave, where he was a senior operative.

The Vote Leave campaign has been accused of giving £625,000 to BeLeave, a separate group aimed at younger potential Brexit voters, and directing how the money was spent.

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Parkinson has strongly denied that he was involved, but was accused of maliciously outing whistleblower Shahmir Sanni after he said in a statement on Friday that he had only advised him in the context of a romantic relationship.

Sanni said Parkinson’s statement had forced him to come out to his mother and family and put some relatives in Pakistan in potential danger.

On Monday, May stood by her longstanding adviser, with a spokesman saying she had full confidence in him.

Despite that support, an operative who has long worked out of public view has now been dragged into the spotlight and become the subject of fierce criticism.

Parkinson, like his former colleague and May’s ex-chief of staff, Nick Timothy, has been thought of in Conservative circles as showing potential. Both were placed on the official list of potential parliamentary candidates for the 2015 general election.

Play Video 1:08 'I had to come out to my mother as well as my entire family' says Shahmir Sanni - video

They were removed in late 2014 after refusing to campaign in the Rochester and Strood byelection, reportedly because of concerns that the special advisers’ code of conduct barred them from doing so.

May, in a display of loyalty, intervened on their behalf and secured Timothy and Parkinson a meeting with the then party chairman, Grant Shapps.

Last year, Shapps gave his recollection of that encounter, writing in the Sun that he was “shocked by their sheer arrogance”. He wrote: “At the end of the stormiest meeting I held, they informed me: ‘You will live to regret your decision, chairman’.”

A senior Tory source who has sparred with Parkinson described him as “fiery, with a big sense of self-importance” and suggested he was lucky to survive the fallout from the party’s relatively poor showing at the 2017 election that did for both Timothy and Fiona Hill.

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His rise to No 10 is the product of spending his adult life thus far working for right-of-centre organisations. Parkinson was president of the Cambridge University Conservative Association during his time as an undergraduate and started in Westminster working with the Conservative research department.



He went on to work for Conservative Central Office and later joined the rightwing Centre for Policy Studies thinktank. Like other May advisers, Parkinson has flitted in and out of Westminster in recent years, also spending time working for a communications firm.

And he has loaned his expertise to single issue campaigns, including the NO to AV campaign in 2011. It is his time with the other – Vote Leave – that imperils his position now.