Charlotte Owen, Baroness Owen of Alderley Edge

Charlotte Kathryn Tranter Owen, Baroness Owen of Alderley Edge (born 10 May 1993), is a British life peer and former special advisor. A Conservative member of the House of Lords, she is the youngest recipient of a life peerage since they were introduced in the Life Peerages Act 1958.

Early Life and Education

Charlotte Owen was born on 10 May 1993 to Michael and Kathryn Owen. Owen's mother works for her brother's forklift truck company. She grew up in Alderley Edge, Cheshire, and attended Alderley Edge School for Girls, a private school. She graduated from the University of York in 2015 with an upper-second-class honors degree in politics and international relations.

According to her Linked In profile, Owen worked as an intern for Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne for a month in 2011 before later working in his constituency office in Tatton in 2012. This was disputed by a senior source who worked in Osborne's office at the time.

She was a member of Conservative Future and the local Conservative Association.

Career

In 2015, Owen worked in Brussels for Jacqueline Foster, the deputy leader of the Conservatives in the European Parliament, for one month. She then worked as an intern for strategic communications consultancy Portland Communications for four months in 2016, before working as a constituency intern Tory MP William Wragg for one month in January 2017. Later that year, Owen worked as a parliamentary intern to Boris Johnson for six months, before becoming a parliamentary assistant to Alok Sharma for seven months.

Following this, for 21 months, Owen was a senior parliamentary assistant to Jake Berry and Johnson, before exclusively working for Johnson for 14 months afterwards. In February 2021, she then reportedly became a special adviser to Johnson within the Number 10 Policy Unit.

She was retained in this role following the formation of the Truss ministry in September 2022.

Under the Truss government, Owen's role was split evenly between Prime Minister Liz Truss and the chief whip and parliamentary secretary to the Treasury, Wendy Morton. She was not retained in her post by Truss's successor, Rishi Sunak, following his appointment as Prime Minister in October 2022.

There is controversy about accuracy of her career history, with claims that Owens exaggerated both her position and the length of time that she worked in 10 Downing Street. It has been claimed that she never worked in the Policy Unit. On her Linked In profile, Owen stated that she was a special advisor from February 2021 to October 2022, but she was not listed in the annual report on special advisors published in June 2021, only in the June 2022 report. In the honors list announcing her life peerage, she was described as "Former Special Adviser to the former Prime Minister Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP." Commenting on Owen's career to date, Liz Bates of Sky News said it was "not an illustrious political career by any stretch." However, senior sources refute this, stating she was part of Conservative Future. Further controversy surrounds Owen's claims to have interned for George Osborne while he was chancellor in David Cameron's Cabinet, senior sources who worked in Osborne's Tatton Street office refute this, stating she was a member of the local party association and part of Conservative Future, a forerunner to the Young Conservatives.

House of Lords

On 9 June 2023, it was announced that Owen would receive a life peerage in Johnson's resignation honors. The decision was criticized, as Owen was perceived to be inexperienced and not to have contributed significantly to British politics or society. Two former 10 Downing Street members of staff told Tortoise Media that her appointment to the peerage was "completely staggering-her peerage is one of the most strange and hardest to explain because she was so extraordinarily junior." A Whitehall source said that she was the "most egregious" on Johnson's list of peerages. The source described her appointment as "impossible to defend, even as somebody who broadly thinks the current peerage system is right." Others defended the decision and described some of the criticism as sexist; Tory MP James Duddridge, who previously worked with Owen, wrote: "I wonder if she was a middle age fat male she would be criticized in this way." In an opinion piece for the i, Simon Kelner said the coverage around the decision had been "sexist, condescending and prejudiced."

On 12 July 2023, Owen was made Baroness Owen of Alderley Edge, of Alderley Edge in the County of Cheshire. She sits in the House of Lords as a Conservative peer. Her appointment, at age 30, made her the youngest member of the House of Lords and the youngest person ever to receive a life peerage. She was introduced to the Lords on 24 July.

Title

12 July 2023 The Right Honorable The Baroness Owen of Alderley Edge

(https://en.wikipedia.org)