Helen Grant

Helen Grant (née Okuboye; born 28 September 1961) is a British politician who has served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Maidstone and The Weald since 2010. A member of the Conservative Party, she succeeded Ann Widdecombe, who was first elected in 1987. Grant was the first black woman of mixed heritage to be elected as a Conservative MP and selected as a candidate to stand for a Conservative-held parliamentary seat. She first served in government as jointly Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Women and Equalities (2012–2015) and Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (2012–2013). She also became Minister for Sport and Tourism in 2013, a post she held until after the 2015 general election. In January 2021, she was appointed as Special Envoy of UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Girls' Education. Early life and career Grant was born in Willesden, now in north London to an English mother (Dr Gladys Spedding) and a Nigerian father (Dr Julius Okuboye) who was an orthopaedic surgeon. Grant's mother was a nurse at a hospital in Newcastle who became pregnant at 21 to a doctor at the hospital. She grew up in a single-parent family after her parents separated and her father emigrated to the United States; Grant did not form a relationship with her father until she was 16. She was raised in Carlisle where she lived on the city's Raffles council estate with her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother. In a 2010 interview, she spoke fondly of her childhood and the house in which she grew up. "I had happy memories in that house and it gave me a good start in life, [...] There was deprivation around, there was certainly need, there was some domestic violence and there were some fights. But my memory of the square where we lived is that there was pride in people."