Mark Reckless

Mark John Reckless (born 6 December 1970) is a British lawyer and former politician who served as a Member of the Senedd (MS) for South Wales East from 2016 until 2021, having previously served as Member of Parliament (MP) for Rochester and Strood from 2010 to 2015.

In the mid-1990s, Reckless worked for UBS Warburg.

In the late 1990s, he worked as a strategy consultant and associate in Financial Services Group at Booz, Allen & Hamilton.

He had a majority of 9,953, having previously contested the Medway constituency in 2001 and 2005, reducing the majority of the incumbent Labour MP to 3,780 in 2001 and 213 in 2005.

Between 2002 and 2004, Reckless was a member of the policy unit at Conservative Central Office where he wrote a book on deregulation policy as well as overseeing the development of the policy on directly elected police commissioners.

After university, he trained as a barrister at the College of Law, gaining an LLB, and was called to the Bar in 2007.

He was a member of the Kent Police Authority from 2007 to 2011.

He had served as a Medway councillor between 2007 and 2011.

While a member of the House of Commons, Reckless was noted for his rebelliousness; he cast 56 votes against the whip between 2010 and 2014, making him the 13th most rebellious Conservative Party MP in the period.

He led a rebellion of 53 Conservative MPs on the EU budget, which inflicted the first House of Commons defeat on the coalition government.

From November 2010, he served as a member of the Home Affairs Select Committee.

Until his election in May 2010, Reckless had been a solicitor at Herbert Smith and had worked on legal matters that had had dealings with private investigators.

Reckless was elected as Member of Parliament for Rochester and Strood at the 2010 general election.

The UK Independence Party did not run a candidate of their own in Rochester and Strood in 2010, instead endorsing Reckless.

Reckless was elected to the Home Affairs Select Committee in 2010 often appearing on Newsnight and other political programmes, arguing for the deportation of clerics Abu Hamza and Abu Qatada.

He was one of parliament's most rebellious MPs and was the 13th-most rebellious Conservative MP between 2010 and 2014, casting 56 votes against the whip.

In July 2010, Reckless apologised for missing a vote on the budget because he was drunk.

He said that he "did not feel it was appropriate to take part in the vote because of the amount he had drunk".

In 2011, he abstained on the military intervention in Libya.

A Eurosceptic, Reckless is also a critic of the European Court of Human Rights, saying it erodes "British freedom and democracy".

He was chair of the all-party parliamentary group on Georgia.

The group's aims are "to facilitate greater parliamentary awareness of developments in Georgia".

The first police and crime commissioner elections took place on 15 November 2012.

He was one of only six Conservative MPs to vote against increase of university tuition fees, and was a critic of the government's energy policy, arguing that the government's Energy Bill introduced in December 2012 was "a sad retreat for Conservatives".

On 31 October 2012, Reckless led a rebellion of 53 Conservative MPs which inflicted the first House of Commons defeat (307 votes to 294) on the coalition government.

Initially a member of the Conservative Party, he crossed the floor to join the UK Independence Party (UKIP) in September 2014.

He has since changed parties a further three times.

After crossing the floor, he won re-election as a UKIP MP in a by-election held in November 2014 but lost his seat to the Conservatives at the 2015 general election.

On 30 September 2014, Reckless applied for the Stewardship of the Chiltern Hundreds and therefore ceased to be an MP.

A by-election was called on 20 November, at which Reckless was nominated to stand as the UKIP candidate.

He was returned as a member of parliament for UKIP, becoming the party's second elected MP.

The Tory rebels voted with Labour MPs to pass an amendment calling for a real-terms cut in the 2014–2020 EU budget multi-annual financial framework.

The coalition government supported only a real-terms freeze in the EU budget as a minimum.

A Eurosceptic, Reckless was elected to the National Assembly for Wales, later known as the Senedd, in 2016.

He campaigned to leave the European Union in the 2016 EU membership referendum.

He subsequently left UKIP to join the Conservative group in the National Assembly before joining the Brexit Party in 2019 when he was appointed its leader in the National Assembly by Nigel Farage.

On 19 October 2020, Reckless joined the Abolish the Welsh Assembly Party; the party lost both of its seats in the 2021 Senedd election.

Born in London, Reckless was educated at Marlborough College before attending Christ Church, Oxford, where he read philosophy, politics and economics.

He then pursued postgraduate studies at Columbia Business School in the United States, receiving an MBA.

At Columbia he studied alongside writer Jacob Appel, and is the subject of several thinly-veiled anecdotes in Appel's satire The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up.