Baroness Finn
Conservative peer Simone Finn, former Downing Street deputy chief of staff.
Baroness Finn, the Conservatives' shadow Cabinet Office minister, was among frontbench peers WHO argued in the Lords on 14 September 2026, at Second Reading of the Representation of the People Bill, that new donation rules must not reach back to gifts legal when given.
Last refreshed: 7 October 2026
Timeline for Baroness Finn
Mentioned in: Peers table four caps on party donors
UK Local Elections 2026Background
Baroness Finn is a Conservative member of The House of Lords. She has spoken for her party on the Cabinet Office from the opposition front bench since November 2024, a few months after the Conservatives lost power.
As Simone Finn she worked as special adviser to Francis Maude at the Cabinet Office from 2010 to 2015, and she became a life peer in 2015. She returned to Downing Street as deputy chief of staff under Boris Johnson from February 2021 to September 2022.
Her frontbench brief covers the machinery of government, which brings electoral law and party funding into her REMIT. That is the role in which she spoke against retrospective donation rules.
Finn opposes reaching back to past gifts
From the Conservative front bench, Finn made the case on 14 September 2026 that any new limit on party donations should bite only on money handed over after it becomes law. Her side's argument was that a gift legal on the day a party banked it should stay beyond the reach of later rules.
As drafted, the four CAP amendments now queued for committee already work that way, so the Conservative position matches their text rather than fighting it. The open questions are the size of any CAP, from £100,000 every five years to £5m a year, and when the committee will sit. On 5 October no date had been set.