Chris Mole

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Christopher David Mole, known as Chris Mole, (born March 16, 1958, Bromley) is the current member of Parliament for Ipswich in eastern England, and a member of the ruling Labour Party. He won the seat in the 2001 by-election held after the death of Jamie Cann and was re-elected in the General Election held in May 2005.

Mole read for a degree in electronics from the University of Kent and moved to Ipswich in 1981 to work at the BT Laboratories at Martlesham Heath. During that time he served as Branch Secretary of the Research Branch of the white collar BT-only union then called the STE. It is now a cross industry union called Connect [1]. He was first elected to Suffolk County Council in 1985 and represented a central Ipswich division for 18 years. He was Deputy Chair of EEDA, the regional development agency for the East of England, from 1998 and was Leader of Suffolk County Council, named Council of the Year 2001, until his election as Member of Parliament.

In the 2001 parliament, Mole served as a member of the Select Committee that scrutinised the work of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, the Deregulation and Regulatory Affairs Select Committee and the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments. He steered his Private Member's Bill onto the Statute Book where it became the Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003, extending the concept of legal deposit to electronic records; the Bill was strongly promoted by the British Library.

Mole was appointed in June 2005 to the position of Parliamentary Private Secretary PPS to the Local Government Minister Phil Woolas MP. He resigned from this position on 6 September 2006 after signing a letter calling on Prime Minister Tony Blair to step down [2].

He lives in East Ipswich with his wife Shona, a systems analyst for BT in Ipswich, and their two sons Ted, aged 14, and Tom aged 11. Their sons go to local state schools and Chris was a school governor for over ten years.