Sir Andrew Mitchell’s office, like his politics, is arranged around his long-standing commitment to international development.
Barely have I stepped into the expansive room, once occupied by the leader of the opposition, before Mitchell steers me towards a framed list of names on the wall. The mounted “Roll of Honour” catalogues the Conservative MPs who, in defiance of a three-line whip, voted against the cut in international development spending from 0.7% to 0.5% of gross national income (GNI) on 13 July 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 secretary, Tom Tugendhat. Nusrat Ghani and Caroline Nokes, both deputy speakers in the present parliament, are listed, as are the former cabinet ministers Jeremy Hunt, David Davis, Karen Bradley and Damian Green.
“Very, very good list”, Mitchell says, 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 the overseas aid spending cut. This decision, announced by Rishi Sunak as chancellor of the exchequer the previous November, broke a Conservative manifesto pledge and transgressed the statutory 0.7% target enshrined in law by the 2015 International Development Act.
Mitchell and the rebels now threatened Boris Johnson’s government with its first commons defeat since the 2019 landslide.
But the amendment never came to a vote. On 7 June, 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 rebel streak. “Imagine the extraordinary effect of the legislature overturning the government’s decision to cut aid”, he says. “It would have been absolutely iconic.”
He adds: “I know we would have won had the amendment been put.”
Under pressure from Hoyle, the government granted a vote on its own terms the following month 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 once 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 should not break our promises to the poorest in this terrible way”.
The Labour leader’s reply 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 in advancing it. Successive cuts to aid spending and the demise of DFID have seen to that. The former secretary of state, who headed the development department from 2010 to 2012, is understandably bruised.
In recent time, 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 Labour government would cut international development in this way”, Mitchell remarks. “It was so totally 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 horrified.”
He argues: “Clearly, what Johnson and Starmer did is an absolute ocean-going disaster for Britain because the one undisputed area of British international leadership, which everyone agreed to – arguably even since Suez – was international development.
“We were the world leaders… Britain was a place where expertise came together, and DFID was a quite extraordinary coagulation of expertise. So everyone would come to London and to Britain to work out how they could do international development.”
The costs, he says, will be counted in “lives lost, massively increased malnutrition, disease, particularly amongst young children”, but also in lost prestige. “In Africa most of the bilateral programmes 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 which DFID flourished, might reverse the slide. His ask is pragmatic and carefully pitched to a cash-strapped Treasury. He wants an agency within the Foreign Office, modelled on the Overseas Development Administration that operated “even under Mrs Thatcher”, and the aid budget to rise by 0.05 percentage points a year, restoring the 0.7% target over eight years.
“I know that we haven’t got any money”, he recognises. “But remember, this money is the other side of the coin to defence. It makes us safer and more prosperous because it makes the countries in which we work safer and more prosperous.”
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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 previously left the frontbench in 2012. His appointment raised eyebrows at the time; after all, Sunak was the chancellor who announced the 0.7 to 0.5 aid cut in 2021. In appointing Mitchell, the new prime minister was apparently gambling that collective responsibility could restrain a reliable rebel on matters concerning international development.
Mitchell reads it differently. Sunak, he suggests, appointed him because of his advocacy of overseas aid, not in spite of it. The former prime minister recognised the development side of the Foreign Office was “profoundly suboptimal”.
Mitchell accepted collective responsibility but carried his campaign into government. This included finding “quite ingenious ways” of increasing the money available.
“We did it through guarantees, which the Treasury would allow. We issued something like £6 billion worth of guarantees. We did it through encouraging the insurance industry to work its magic on a whole series of things to the point where the insurance policies were paying out in the Caribbean and indeed 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 more unusual still when David Cameron returned as foreign secretary in November 2023. Mitchell, who ran David Davis’ ill-fated 2005 leadership campaign, served alongside Cameron on the Conservative frontbench for seven unbroken years until 2012. “He and I could literally complete each other’s sentences” when it came to development, Mitchell says.
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 would “be able to make a further contribution to public life”.
Cameron can hardly have imagined that contribution would come in this capacity.
When Cameron’s sensational return to government was announced, Mitchell went up to his new office. “We had a hug”, he recalls fondly.
With Cameron elevated to the House of Lords, Mitchell answered for the department in the commons as deputy foreign secretary. Mitchell says he and “David… did quite a lot to try and make it work” on development as partners in the Foreign Office. But he left his ministerial post in July 2024 reinforced in his view that DFID should be restored. “The D in FCDO remains a silent D.”
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Mitchell is emphatic that he feels at home in Kemi Badenoch‘s Conservative Party.
In the 2024 Tory leadership contest, he backed Badenoch after his erstwhile rebel comrade, Tom Tugendhat, was eliminated. Her “politics are not precisely the same as mine”, he allows, but she is “doing a very good job indeed, and she’s more popular than the party is. So hopefully she will 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 grievance, but they don’t have the answers”. He wonders aloud whether Nigel Farage “will still be in place” at the next general election.
“It’s very important that the Conservatives stick to their conservative roots”, Mitchell says, and “make sure that the offer to the country is a thoroughly Conservative offer. There’s a difference between the Conservatives and the right, and we need 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 that the Conservative Party today is still very much a one-nation party”, he states.
The one nation tradition has been the subject of some debate in recent months, with its relevance questioned most sharply over immigration. Some of the ideas associated with the party’s historically moderate wing, as championed by groups like the centre-right Prosper UK, sit awkwardly beside the harder line now favoured elsewhere in the party.
Mitchell sees no contradiction.
He concludes: “I believe, as a one nation conservative, that anyone who comes across the Channel illegally in a boat and seeks entry into Britain – no one who comes from that route should be allowed to stay here.
“They should either return to their own country if that is possible, or they should be sent to a third country. They should not be allowed to stay here…
“There are areas of policy where people might think there is a split in the Tory Party, but I can assure you that as far as the one nation group is concerned, that absolutely is not it.
“But of course, there must be tolerance within any party.”
