Anthony James Holland Mangnall (born 12 August 1989), is a British Conservative Party politician,[1] who served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Totnes from 2019[2] to 2024. After minor boundary changes,[3] Mangnall stood for the re-named seat of South Devon in 2024 and become the first Conservative to lose the seat since 1923.[4]
Joining Braemar ACM's Singapore office in 2012, Mangnall trained as a shipbroker chartering small tankers.[10] In 2014 he returned to London with Poten & Partners establishing himself in the West Africasmall tankersmarket, thus gaining experience in evaluating national fuel security levels.
Appointed Private Secretary to William Hague in 2016,[8][11] Mangnall then managed Lord Hague's private and public interests including working on the closure of the UK’s domestic trade of ivory. A passionate conservationist, he also helped to establish a Transport Taskforce directed at eradicating the movement of illegally poached goods.[12]
Since his election to Parliament in 2019 Mangnall has been a regular contributor in debates on Bills regarding fishing, farming, international trade, development, foreign policy and defence. He briefly served as a Member of the Regulatory Reform Committee between March 2020 and May 2021, then the Procedures Committee between March 2020 to July 2020, before joining the International Trade Select Committee in November 2020.[16][17] The Department for International Trade (DIT) and the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) merged to form the Department for Business and Trade, Mangnall joined the Business and Trade Committee.[18]
Mangnall has voted against the Government in 10 votes out of 889, that is 1.1% of his votes.[19] He was the first of the 2019 Conservative intake to defy the Government Whip during the Telecommunications Bill which proposed that Huawei provide the UK's telecommunication infrastructure network.[20] The Government then reversed its position after this vote and blocked Huawei from building the UK's 5G network. Mangnall was a vocal opponent of the cut to Foreign Aid believing the UK's role in international development to be globally leading and in the national interest. Despite failing to win this vote on Foreign Aid, the then-Chancellor Rishi SunakMP agreed to return the Foreign Aid budget to 0.7% when the independent Office for Budget Responsibility’s fiscal forecast stated that, on a sustainable basis, the UK is not borrowing to finance day-to-day spending and underlying debt is falling.[21]
Mangnall's work on the International Trade Committee has established his reputation as a vocal contributor about the need for Parliament to have greater scrutiny over UK trade deals. He has gained cross-party support in the House of Commons for all new free trade deals to be given significant debating time before a vote. Despite having supported UK's departure from the European Union, Mangnall has claimed to be a strong proponent of free trade and in 2020 he co-authored a paper with right-wing think tank Policy Exchange on the benefits of UK membership of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership.[22]
In February 2022 Mangnall declared that he had submitted a letter of no confidence in the then-Prime Minister, Boris Johnson MP, to the 1922 Committee. He asserted that "standards in public life matter", concluding that Boris Johnson's behaviour had fallen short of the mark expected by the British public. Mangnall gave one interview to the Daily Telegraph journalist Chris Hope outlining his reasons.[23]
Mangnall is Chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Action on Conflict and Global Britain, Vice-Chairman of the APPG on Photonics and Quantum and of the APPG on Shellfish Aquaculture, and a member of the APPG on Ukraine. He was formerly the Chairman of the APPG for the UK's Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative. He also co-chairs the Conservative Friends of International Development.[24][25] In 2020 he co-authored a paper for the One Nation Conservatives exploring how to spend Aid more effectively.[26] Mangnall is also an Ambassador for the HALO Trust.
In 2020, Mangnall introduced a Private Member's Bill to the Commons called the "Recall of MPs (Change of Party Affiliation) Bill" intending to create a recall process should a Member of Parliament voluntarily change party affiliation without mandate from the electorate. The bill did not progress beyond its second reading in the Commons.[27][28]
^The Totnes constituency was renamed "South Devon" at the 2024 general election, with minor boundary changes.
References
^Brunskill, Ian (19 March 2020). The Times guide to the House of Commons 2019 : the definitive record of Britain's historic 2019 General Election. HarperCollins Publishers Limited. p. 363. ISBN978-0-00-839258-1. OCLC1129682574.
^"Members Sworn". parliament.uk. 17 December 2019. Retrieved 26 February 2020.