Samuel Phillip Gyimah ( /ˈdʒiːmɑː/; born 10 August 1976)[1] is a British politician and banker who served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for East Surrey from 2010 to 2019.

[3][4][5] He served as the Minister for Universities, Science, Research and Innovation from January 2018 until he resigned on 30 November 2018 in protest at Theresa May's Brexit withdrawal agreement.

[8] When he was six years old, his parents split up and his mother returned to her native Ghana with Gyimah and his younger brother and sister while his father remained in the UK.

Gyimah returned to the UK to sit GCSEs and A-levels at Freman College, a state school in Buntingford, Hertfordshire.

[8] On graduation, Gyimah joined Goldman Sachs as an investment banker, leaving the company in 2003 to set up Clearstone Training and Recruitment Limited with fellow future Conservative MP Chris Philp.

[17] He also began to take an active part in debates on education and employment and in some local campaigns to protect the green belt in Surrey.

[17] In 2011, Gyimah produced a report with the think-tank NESTA, "Beyond the Banks: the case for a British Industry and Enterprise Bond",[18] in support of non-bank alternatives for businesses seeking finance.

[25] Supporters of the bill disputed this, as they proposed conditions for a pardon which included the act being consensual and that it would not be contrary to present-day British law.

[26][27][28] He instead supported an amendment proposed by the government to existing legislation, in which only dead men convicted of such offences were automatically pardoned, while those who were living would have to apply to the Home Office through a "disregard" process[28][29] whereby the Secretary of State must be satisfied that the conduct is no longer criminal.

[32] He called on Higher Education leaders to prioritize student mental health, and spoke of his own financial struggles as an undergraduate.

[33][32] Gyimah has warned that "there's a culture of censorship in some of our universities" and that threats to freedom of speech were not "some right-wing conspiracy theory that had been made up".

Some of the examples he has mentioned included a professor at King's College London who was allegedly reported for hate speech after teaching a history class, and a university's safe-space policy that took twenty minutes to read.

In both cases, the universities in question reported that these things did not happen, and the Department for Education clarified later that Gyimah had merely relayed students' anecdotes.

He called May's withdrawal agreement "a deal in name only" with many unresolved issues that would leave the UK at the mercy of the European Union with no leverage for many years to come.