Maria Colette Caulfield

PATRON OF CFONHS

Maria Colette Caulfield (born 6 August 1973) is a Conservative Party politician and nurse. She was first elected as Member of Parliament (MP) for Lewes in 2015. She was given the role of Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ) Vice Chair for Women on 8 January 2018,
She is a supporter of the European Research Group and is a board member of Blue Collar Conservativism.[5]
Maria Caulfield was born on 6 August 1973 to Irish immigrant parents and grew up on in a working class area of Wandsworth, London. Her father was from a farming family, but after his emigration worked as a builder while her mother was a nurse.
While Caulfield was in her teens, her mother died from breast cancer[6] and after leaving school she became an NHS nurse.She has spoken about her upbringing saying that she “grew up in a run-down area of South London where the only careers advice given to us was the phone number of the local council housing office for when you became a single mum and needed a council flat”.
As a nurse, she eventually specialised in cancer research and moved to the south coast of England where she worked at the Royal Sussex County Hospital and the Princess Royal Hospital and then the Royal Marsden. She became involved with the Conservative Party after joining a campaign to save local hospitals in the Brighton area.
In the 2007 Brighton and Hove City Council election, Caulfield stood as a Conservative Party candidate and became a member of the local city council for the previously safe Labour ward of Moulsecoomb – winning by just one vote. She served in the cabinet of the then Conservative authority and held the Housing Portfolio. In the following 2011 local election she lost her seat to the Labour Party candidate by over 600 votes.
For several years, she held the role of Deputy Regional Chairman for the South East Conservatives and was a Co-ordinator in the NO2AV campaign in the 2011 AV referendum.
In 2013, she was selected for the constituency of Lewes in East Sussex by the Lewes Conservative Association, and at the 2015 general election she overturned a 7,647 majority and defeated the incumbent Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker. She was re-elected at the 2017 general election.