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 adviser. She has been a Conservative member of the House of Lords since 2023, and was the youngest recipient of a life peerage at the time of her appointment.

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. Owen 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 honours degree in politics and international relations.

According to her LinkedIn 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 for a month in Brussels for Jacqueline Foster, the deputy leader of the Conservatives in the European Parliament. She then worked as an intern for strategic communications consultancy Portland Communications for four months in 2016, before working as a constituency intern for Tory MP William Wragg 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.

Owen was then a senior parliamentary assistant to Jake Berry and Johnson for 21 months, before working exclusively for Johnson for 14 months afterwards. In February 2021, she 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 has been controversy about the accuracy of her career history, with claims that Owen 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 LinkedIn 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 advisers published in June 2021, only in the June 2022 report. In the honours 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". Further controversy surrounded 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 deny 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 honours. The decision was criticised, 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".

On 12 July 2023, Owen was created 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 the age of 30, made her the youngest member of the House of Lords. She was the youngest person ever to receive a life peerage since Rupert Mitford, 6th Baron Redesdale, at age 32 in 2000 until Carmen Smith, Baroness Smith of Llanfaes, was appointed at the age of 27 in 2024. Owen was introduced to the Lords on 24 July. She made her maiden speech on 14 November, and said she wanted to use her time in the Lords to scrutinise legislation on new technologies.

Personal life

Owen's late father was born in Urmston in 1930. In her maiden speech to the House of Lords, Owen tells how he recounted an incident when he "went cycling with his brother and they had to jump off their bikes and take cover as a Messerschmitt Bf 109 machine-gunned a passing freight train"; Owen's father also survived the Manchester Blitz, with the windows of his home being blown out by explosions.

Owen's maternal grandparents purchased their council house in Alderley Edge which had been allocated to her grandfather after World War II.

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