Eggar to quit politics in search of new career to pursue
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Your support makes all the difference.Tim Eggar, the Energy Minister, took Westminster by surprise yesterday by announcing that at the age of 44 he was standing down at the next election to pursue a career outside politics.
Mr Eggar, who has built up an impressive reputation among industry insiders as a minister who fought to curb the greatest excesses of the privatised utilities, provoked immediate claims from Labour that his departure was a "vote of no confidence" in the Government.
But Mr Eggar, whose Enfield North seat had a 9,000 majority in the last general election and who is a Minister of State at the Department of Trade and Industry, said he wanted to seek fresh challenges and opportunities in the private sector. He insisted he expected his seat to stay Conservative at the next election.
Mr Eggar declared that his decision was purely a career move with no political implications. "I have done 17 years as an MP, 11 of which have been as a minister," he said. "I am 44 and I have therefore a reasonable chance of another full-time career ahead of me. I have not been offered a job. I have not been approached about a job. I haven't searched for a job."
He has had one of the toughest careers of any minister of state since attaining that level in 1989.
He was caught firmly in the middle of the fiasco over pit closures, and was left coping virtually single-handedly with the political fall-out of the crisis after his boss, Michael Heseltine, suffered a heart attack. Tory sources were quick to suggest last night that despite his competence he had been unlikely to become a Cabinet minister.
He fought hard - and in the end unsuccessfully - to prevent directors of the National Grid last year from taking their share of dividends payable on privatisation instead of allowing them to be distributed to consumers in the form of price cuts. He did, however, secure a rebate for consumers.
He had more success in persuading Hanson and the American giant Southern Electric International to promise to withdraw their shareholdings in the National Grid after they took over two of the regional electricity companies. And he has been active in pressing the industry to do more to expose itself to competition from 1989.
John Prescott, Labour's deputy leader, said yesterday that Mr Eggar's move would take "the spring out of John Major's step". He added: "He has also written off the chances of more than 100 MPs in even more marginal seats."
Mr Eggar, a qualified barrister who worked as a banker before entering Parliament in 1979, said: "I took the decision that it would be wrong for me to search for a job without having announced that I was leaving."
He told his local party: "As a member of the Treasury and Civil Service Select Committee, I have argued strongly and consistently for greater understanding and interchange between Westminster, Whitehall and the private sector. After a lot of thought I have decided to take my own advice."
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