Who are the least rebellious Tory MPs?

By Jonathan Isaby

For a while now I have regularly been identifying the most rebellious Conservative MPs, so it seems only right to consider who are the least rebellious MPs as well.

The "payroll vote" of 63 Ministers, 14 Whips, 39 PPSs and 1 party deputy chairman are expected always to vote in line with the party whip, so are not included in the calculations.

Excluding them, there is a total of 188 backbenchers.

Believe it or not, no fewer than 164 backbenchers have rebelled on at least one occasion, using my broad definition of at some point voting in a lobby without a single government minister or whip for company.

Many of those are included because they voted either way for the Ten Minute Rule Bill on the smoking ban (on which the payroll abstained) or for Rebecca Harris's Private Member's Bill on Permanent Daylight Saving Time (on which the one minister voting cast a vote against).

Even if you exclude the 50 whose only rebellions were on one or both of those Bills, you still get the figure of 114 backbenchers having rebelled at some point.

But who are the MPs with the completely unblemished records?

There are 24 Tory backbenchers who have only ever voted in a lobby when a government whip or minister has been there too (although some of these have abstained on certain votes, eg both Tracey Crouch and Lee Scott abstained on the crunch votes on tuition fees).

The 24 are (2010 intake marked with an asterisk*):

1. Dan Byles*
2. Alun Cairns*
3. Neil Carmichael*
4. Tracey Crouch*
5. Nadine Dorries
6. Lorraine Fullbrook*
7. Helen Grant*
8. Simon Hart*
9. Sir Alan Haselhurst
10. Kris Hopkins*
11. Jonathan Lord*
12. Stephen McPartland*
13. Jesse Norman*
14. Guy Opperman*
15. Mark Pritchard
16. Sir Malcolm Rifkind
17. David Ruffley
18. Lee Scott
19. Nicholas Soames
20. Mark Spencer*
21. Gary Streeter
22. Julian Sturdy*
23. Heather Wheeler*
24. Nadhim Zahawi*