Who is the wife of new Defence Secretary Grant Shapps and who is his punk pioneer cousin?

A cabinet reshuffle within the Conservative Party is underway, as Rishi Sunak looks to move MPs around after the resignation of former defence secretary Ben Wallace. The reshuffle so far has seen Claire Coutinho enter the cabinet as energy secretary and Grant Shapps are the new defence secretary. 

It becomes Shapps's fifth cabinet post in a year - having been transport secretary under Boris Johnson, having a brief stint as home secretary under Liz Truss, and being business secretary before his current energy role under Sunak.

Shapps also entered the Conservative leadership race in 2022 when Boris Johnson resigned as Prime Minister but stood down in order to offer his support to Rishi Sunak during his first bid to become England’s premier - which he lost to Liz Truss, and ultimately ended up earning the role in a second leadership race. 

The new defence secretary also found some infamy after it was discovered he was operating a web sales business, HowToCorp, which claimed that clients who spent $200 on its software could “make $20,000 in 20 days guaranteed or your money back. Shapps operated the business under the pseudonym “Michael Green.”

Shapps denied having used a pseudonym or having a second job after entering parliament, threatening a constituent on Facebook with legal action over the allegations, but ultimately having to admit that he did have a second job while being an MP, stating later he had “over-firmly denied” having a second job.

Who is Grant Shapps' wife and children?

Grant Shapps' wife is Belinda Shapps, whom he met in 1995 in a pub in Leeds while Shapps was attending Leeds Metropolitan University. Though, according to The Sun, initially Belinda didn’t see the attraction in him, she ultimately contacted him a few weeks later - and having moved to London then married Grant in August 1997. 

Belinda supported Grant when he was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma in 1999, undergoing chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Before undergoing the treatment, Grant froze his sperm and through IVF treatment, had three children together: a son named Hadley, and twin sister and brother named Tabytha and Noa. 

She worked for the clutter-to-cash website AuctionGirl.co.uk in 2009, however, a look through Companies House shows that she had registered “Belinda Shapps” in 2022, leading to the conclusion that Belinda Shapps advertising herself online as a “humanistic integrative therapist” is indeed Grant’s wife.

Explaining her change in careers, Shapps writes on her website “My working life has stemmed from being in the corporate world to running my own business. After raising a family, I made a decision to do something new. So, with a great deal of life experience and almost four years of training, I qualified. 

“The beauty of this work is that the learning is ongoing and being part of an accredited organisation means making that commitment to ongoing learning. This may be anything from keeping up-to-date with new research in mental health to neuroscience and understanding how the brain works. All of which helps to inform my own practice.”

Which member of The Clash is Grant Shapps related to?

That would be The Clash bassist Mick Jones, who would go on to record as Big Audio Dynamite and Big Audio Dynamite 2 after the dissolution of the band. B.A.D had a hit in the ‘90s with the song “Rush,” though punk purists regard his work alongside Joe Strummer in the seminal London punk outfit as his best work.

Jones has rarely commented about his thoughts regarding his cousin being a Conservative MP, given that during the heyday of The Clash, the band were left-leaning (for that era) regarding social activism and political reform.