In Government (1988–1997) In the
1987 general election, Arbuthnot was selected to contest the safe Conservative
seat of
Wanstead and Woodford, as the sitting MP,
Patrick Jenkin, was standing down. Arbuthnot won the seat and increased the Conservative majority by over 2,000 to 16,412. In 1988 he became the
parliamentary private secretary (PPS) to
Archie Hamilton at the
Ministry of Defence, and in 1990 became the PPS to the
Secretary of State for Trade and Industry,
Peter Lilley. He entered the
John Major government after the
1992 general election when he was made an assistant government
whip. He was promoted in 1994 as the
parliamentary under-secretary of state at the
Department of Social Security. The following year he was promoted to
Minister for Defence Procurement, where he remained until the end of the
Major government in 1997.
In Opposition (1997–2010) Arbuthnot's seat of Wanstead and Woodford was abolished at the
1997 general election, when he was selected for the new seat of
North East Hampshire. In Opposition, he was a member of
William Hague's
Shadow Cabinet as the Conservative Party's Chief Whip until the
2001 general election when he returned to the
backbenches. He was sworn of the
Privy Council in 1998. Arbuthnot returned to the Shadow Cabinet under
Michael Howard as
Shadow Trade Secretary in 2003, but stood down following the
2005 general election. Since that election he served as the chairman of the influential
Defence Select Committee and was Chair of the Special Select Committee set up to scrutinise the Bill that became the Armed Forces Act 2011. He was also a member of the
Top Level Group of UK Parliamentarians for Multilateral Nuclear Disarmament and Non-proliferation, established in October 2009. In the 2009
expenses scandal, Arbuthnot apologised and repaid the public money he had claimed for his swimming pool to be cleaned. Later that year, he was further criticised in the press for £15,000 of expenses he claimed for upkeep at his second home, including tree surgery and painting his summer house.
In Government (2010–2015) In June 2011, Arbuthnot announced that he would not contest the
next general election. On 16 January 2015, he publicly declared his
atheism, stating "the pressure on a Conservative politician, particularly of keeping quiet about not being religious, is very similar to the pressure that there has been about keeping quiet about being gay"; he later clarified that he is not gay. Arbuthnot has played a pivotal role in helping the subpostmasters affected by the
British Post Office scandal to seek justice after the Post Office wronglyand, it has been alleged, knowinglysought and obtained convictions for theft, fraud and false accounting against a large number of them. In September 2023, he supported the £600,000 "take it or leave it" Government compensation for those wrongly convicted saying on
The World Tonight on
BBC Radio 4, it was "a choice", and that "for some it will be a good way of putting this behind them and getting on with their lives". Arbuthnot was portrayed by
Alex Jennings in
Mr Bates vs The Post Office, an
ITV dramatisation of the scandal. ==Personal life==