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Sir Andrew Mitchell’s office, like his politics, is organized around his long-standing commitment to international development.
I have barely stepped into the expansive room once occupied by the Leader of the Opposition before Mitchell directs me to a framed list of names on the wall. The assembled “Roll of Honour” catalogs the conservative MPs who, in defiance of a three-line whip, voted against the cut of international development spending from 0.7% to 0.5% of gross national income (GNI) on July 13, 2021.
It is a highly distinguished rogues gallery. The record names 24 conservative rebels, including a former prime minister, Theresa May, and the shadow foreign minister, Tom Tugendhat. Nusrat Ghani and Caroline Nokes, both deputies in the current parliament, are listed, as are former cabinet ministers Jeremy Hunt, David Davis, Karen Bradley and Damian Green.
“Very, very good list,” says Mitchell, with some satisfaction.
Mitchell led the 2021 rebellion, and it very nearly succeeded.
In June 2021, Mitchell tabled a surprise amendment to the Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill, potentially forcing a showdown over foreign aid spending. This decision, announced by Rishi Sunak as Chancellor last November, broke a conservative manifesto promise and exceeded the statutory 0.7% target enshrined in the 2015 International Development Act.
Mitchell and the rebels have now threatened Boris Johnson’s government with its first Commons defeat since the 2019 landslide.
But the amendment never came to a vote. On June 7, Commons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle told a sparsely populated, pandemic-era chamber that the new clause was “outside the scope of the bill.”
Mitchell, a former chief whip, is proud of this rebellious streak. “Imagine the extraordinary effect of the legislature on the government’s decision to reduce aid,” he says. “It would have been absolutely iconic.”
He adds: “I know we would have won if the change had been put in place.”
Under pressure from Hoyle, the government next month conceded a vote on its own terms on an unamendable motion outlining the conditions for returning to 0.7%. It was approved by 333 votes to 298. Mitchell and 23 fellow Conservatives voted against – alongside every opposition party.
Mitchell again played a leading role. As the Commons debated the motion, he intervened during Leader of the Opposition Keir Starmer’s speech. He asked if Starmer agreed that “we really shouldn’t be breaking our promises to the poorest in this terrible way”.
The Labor leader’s answer was unequivocal: “Yes, it was not ambivalent in the manifestos, and it was not conditional, it was clear.”
Few politicians this century have been so defined by a single cause, or faced greater obstacles to advance it. Successive cuts to aid spending and the demise of DFID have ensured this. The former secretary of state, who headed the development department from 2010 to 2012, is understandably devastated.
In recent times, the most significant setback to Mitchell’s international development cause came in February 2025, when Starmer, now the Prime Minister, announced that spending would be cut again, to 0.3% of GNI from 2027.
“I just couldn’t believe that a Labor government would cut international development in this way,” says Mitchell. “It was so completely out of character, and I never really saw Keir Starmer in the same light again…
“I’m not really sure what Keir Starmer actually believed, but I was totally appalled.”
He argues: “Clearly, what Johnson and Starmer have done is an absolute ocean disaster for Britain, because the one undisputed area of British international leadership that everyone agreed on – probably even since Suez – was international development.
The Suez armistice comes into effect after the political crisis
“We were the world leaders … Britain was a place where expertise came together, and DFID was a very extraordinary coagulation of expertise. So everyone would come to London and to Britain to find out how to do international development.”
The costs, he says, will be counted in “lost lives, massively increased malnutrition, disease, especially among young children”, but also in lost prestige. “In Africa, most of the bilateral programs have been shredded. And who will fill the void? It will be China and Russia.”
Mitchell is hopeful that Andy Burnham, a veteran of the Blair and Brown governments under whom DFID can flourish, will reverse the slide. His request is pragmatic and caring for a cash-strapped treasury. He wants an agency in the Foreign Office, modeled on the Overseas Development Administration, which operated “even under Mrs. Thatcher”, and that the aid budget will increase by 0.05 percentage points per year, restoring the target of 0.7% over eight years.
“I know we don’t have any money,” he admits. “But remember, this money is the other side of the coin for defense. It makes us safer and richer because it makes the countries we work in safer and richer.”
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Mitchell served in Rishi Sunak’s cabinet for the duration of his time as prime minister – an unlikely second act for someone who had previously left the frontbench in 2012. His appointment raised eyebrows at the time; after all, Sunak was the chancellor who announced 0.7 to 0.5 aid cuts in 2021. In appointing Mitchell, the new prime minister was apparently gambling that collective responsibility will restrain a reliable rebel on issues related to international development.
Mitchell reads it differently. Sunak, he says, appointed him because of his advocacy for overseas aid, not in spite of it. The former prime minister acknowledged that the development side of the Foreign Office was “deeply sub-optimal”.
Mitchell accepted a collective responsibility, but brought his campaign to the government. This also includes finding “pretty brilliant ways” to increase the money available.
“We did it through guarantees, which the Treasury allowed. We issued something like £6 billion in guarantees. We did it by encouraging the insurance industry to work its magic on a whole range of things to the point where insurance policies are paying out in the Caribbean and also in Africa…
“Don’t tell the Treasury,” he adds, “but in the last year of the Tory government we spent 0.6.”
Mitchell’s position became even more unusual when David Cameron returned as foreign secretary in November 2023. Mitchell, who ran David Davis’ ill-fated leadership campaign in 2005, served alongside Cameron on the Conservative front bench for seven unbroken years until 2012. “He and I could literally finish each other when it came to sentences.”
That partnership came to an abrupt end in 2012 when Mitchell resigned as chief whip following the “Plebgate” row. In his letter responding to Mitchell’s resignation, the Prime Minister wrote that he hoped he could “make a further contribution to public life”.
Cameron can hardly imagine that the contribution would come in this capacity.
When Cameron’s sensational return to government was announced, Mitchell went to his new office. “We had an arm,” he fondly recalls.
With Cameron elevated to the House of Lords, Mitchell answered for the department in the Commons as Deputy Foreign Secretary. Mitchell says that he and “David … did quite a lot to try to make it work” on development as partners in the Foreign Office. But he left his ministerial post in July 2024, firm in his view that DFID should be restored. “The D in FCDO remains a silent D.”
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Mitchell stressed that he feels at home in Kemi Badenoch’s Conservative Party.
In the 2024 Tory leadership contest, he backed Badenoch after his former rebel colleague, Tom Tugendhat, was eliminated. Her “politics aren’t exactly the same as mine,” he allows, but she “really does a very good job, and she’s more popular than the party. So hopefully she’ll pull the party up.” Leading the Tories in opposition, he adds, “is one of the most difficult jobs in the world”.
Of the Conservative Party’s rival on the right, he says Reform UK is “very good at articulating grief, but they don’t have the answers”. He wonders aloud whether Nigel Farage “will still be there” at the next general election.
“It is very important that the Conservatives stick to their conservative roots,” says Mitchell, and “to make sure that the offer to the country is a thoroughly conservative offer. There is a difference between the Conservatives and the Right, and we have to camp on that.”
Mitchell maintains that the One Nation Conservative tradition with which he is closely identified remains alive and well in the parliamentary party.
“I think the Conservative Party is still very much a one-nation party today,” he says.
The One Nation tradition has been the subject of debate in recent months, with its relevance most sharply questioned over immigration. Some of the ideas associated with the party’s historically moderate wing, as championed by groups such as the centre-right Prosper UK, sit uncomfortably alongside the hard line now favored elsewhere in the party.
Mitchell sees no contradiction.
He concludes: “I believe, as a conservative of a nation, that anyone who comes across the Channel illegally in a boat and seeks Britain – no one who comes from that route should stay here.
“They should either return to their own country, if possible, or they should be sent to a third country. They should not be allowed to stay here…
“There are areas of politics where people think there is a split in the Tory party, but I can assure you that as far as the One Nation group is concerned, there is absolutely not.
“But of course there must be tolerance within each party.”
