Who is Ashley Dalton, the government’s new health minister after Gwynne row?

The government has announced its new health minister after Andrew Gwynne was dismissed following a row over offensive WhatsApp messages.

Gwynne, the MP for Gorton and Denton, had served as public health and prevention minister but was sacked and suspended from the Labour Party after the Mail on Sunday alleged he made a number of offensive remarks about constituents and fellow Labour MPs Diane Abbott and Angela Rayner.

In a post on social media, he said he deeply regrets the “badly misjudged comments” and apologised for the offense caused.

Gwynne’s replacement is Ashley Dalton, who has served as the MP from the nearby constituency of West Lancashire since 2023, following the resignation of Rosie Cooper.

Dalton, brought up in Leyland in South Ribble, worked in local government in Southend for 17 years and had previously been selected as Labour’s candidate in Rochford and Southend East in the 2017 and 2019 general elections.

Since becoming an MP, she served as shadow minister for women and equalities until the general election in July, when she was re-elected with 50.5 percent of the vote.

Her website describes her as a “mum, a carer, a cancer survivor and a proud Lancashire lass”.

It also features a campaign video from 2023. She talks about not only facing breast cancer herself, but losing her husband to kidney cancer at 51 in 2018. She said his cancer was “caught too late”.

She talks about her backstory too, with her mother working in the NHS, and her father working at a Leyland Motors factory.

Dalton’s appointment comes just over a month after she announced she had been diagnosed with breast cancer for a second time.

She told constituents she had undergone surgery in July for metastatic breast cancer, which had removed all detectable cancer cells, and insisted she was working “business as usual”.

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