Gainsborough MP Sir Edward Leigh will celebrate 40 years in office this summer, which makes him among the longest serving members of Parliament, both in Lincolnshire and nationally
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He said: “Time passes very quickly, but I have enjoyed every minute of it. Amazingly out of 110 or so Conservative MPs elected for the first time in 1983, there’s only two MPs left in the same constituency with unbroken service. That’s Roger Gale down in Kent and myself. He admitted that Labour “are the favourites” in 2024, adding: “I think it’s going to be very difficult, but I don’t accept that we’re definitely going to lose.”
“Once or twice I’ve come close to it,” he said. “Probably the closest was while I was chair of the Public Accounts Committee when we were in opposition, when actually David Cameron won. “We’ve got to be prepared to have the courage to have radical reforms. I think we’ve got to get the economy moving and we’ve got to start cutting taxes.”He said: “I was critical of the Maastricht Treaty. John Major sacked me as a minister and that probably wasn’t a very pleasant moment, but you live to fight another day. Basically, it’s great fun, representing people and sticking up for them.”
“If you read my inbox, it’s full of hate emails. I find very few people actually attack your arguments, they attack you personally. The abuse MPs receive has got “far worse with social media”, and online debate is “usually just personal abuse.”He said when he does tweet, he tends to ignore replies “because there’s so much hate and abuse”.
“The result of the war in Ukraine and the pandemic, the economy has taken a tremendous hit, and people are paying more in taxes than ever before. They were depressed by the lockdown,” he said. “I mean there are problems with the Northern Ireland Protocol. We can’t have one bit of the United Kingdom separated from the rest. That’s just a poison chalice left by the European Union, but now we have the freedom to do what we like, we’re a self-governing nation.
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