Craig Mackinlay is back on the frontline of politics (Image: Jonathan Buckmaster)
Craig Mackinlay received a hero’s welcome when he returned to the House of Commons after losing his hands and feet to sepsis.
He strode into the chamber last year on his prosthetic legs, looked up at his wife and daughter in the gallery above him and won loud cheers as people from every political tribe jumped to their feet.
As political comebacks go, this takes some beating. But it was only the beginning of a new chapter in the life of this veteran Brexiteer who today talks with pride of walking 18,000 steps in a single day.
He is now in the Lords and is determined to make life difficult for a Government he warns is endangering and risking disaster with its rush to achieve net zero carbon emissions.
The 58-year-old peer also wants to end the postcode lottery so people in all parts of the country who need prosthetic limbs can benefit from the latest technology instead of being handed “something out of early medieval times”.
Craig is a man who relishes missions. The former Ukip deputy leader never doubted that the British people would vote to leave the if they could get the chance, and he displayed ferocious resolve when he took his first unaided steps just 10 weeks after his amputations.
He even dreamed of going on a secret mission during the 16 days he spent in the “land of nod” after being put into a coma to save his life.
“My most unusual dream was I with a couple of MP colleagues and we’d been sent to Iran to sink their new fleet that had been provided by the French,” he remembers with a smile. “We were successful – mission accomplished!”
Craig Mackinlay with his wife Kati and daughter Olivia (Image: Craig Mackinlay)
He credits his pharmacist wife, Kati, with saving his life. When he suddenly took ill she spotted the warning signs for sepsis and insisted he was taken to hospital and then transferred to the expert care available at St Thomas’, directly across the river from the Houses of Parliament.
Craig acknowledges how close he came to death.
“Within about half an hour of going to hospital I had that full septic shock, went a total blue colour and was then put into a coma. If I had been at home with a paracetamol I probably would have just simply died.”
When he woke up from his coma he saw that his arms up to his elbows and his legs up to his knees were black and “like plastic”.
“I just knew they were dead,” he says.
Kati visited him every day and he took joy from when his daughter, Olivia, then four, came to his bedside. dropped in for “good chats” and being in hospital did not stop him attending to constituency matters; he even hosted a meeting of the European Research Group, Parliament’s most ardent group of Brexiteers.
“I had the beauty of watching just about everything on you ever wanted to watch,” he adds.
He admits that life is “tough” but he seems devoid of a shred of self-pity. Instead, he looks to the future with excitement, anticipating the next revolution in prosthetics.
Gesturing with hands, he says: “These are okay but you know in five years’ time they are going to be better.”
He now enjoys going for family walks. Not long ago he thought there was “not a chance” of that ever happening again.
And he burns with a sense of purpose.
“The main game in town is to get this wretched Labour party out of Government,” he says.
Craig Mackinlay says Rishi Sunak gave him a ‘great gift’ when he made him a peer (Image: Jonathan Buckmaster)
In particular, he plans to use his position in the Lords to “battle against net zero madness”.
Setting out his worries that the drive to get to net zero will wipe out energy-intensive industries, he says: “I am very fearful we will have power cuts and we will have such extortionately expensive electricity.”
Energy Secretary Ed Miliband, he claims, put existing Conservative plans for net zero “on steroids”.
“I see it as one of the policies that could actually bring this Labour Government down,” he says. “It’s that serious.”
The Conservative peer is also keeping a close eye on the rise of Reform UK.
He cautions fellow against thinking that “when Labour goes horribly wrong” voters will “come running back to us,” and wants to see an agreement between the two parties.
Arguing that his party should have struck a deal with “a few years ago,” he says: “The second best time is now.”
Splitting the Right of centre vote again would be “very dangerous”, he insists, because “we’ve seen what a newly resurgent socialist Labour looks like and it is very ugly to the country”.
Craig Mackinlay visited in hospital by daughter Olivia and wife Kati (Image: Mackinlay family photograph)
Alongside politics, he continues to work as an accountant. And a further priority is ensuring that NHS patients get the hi-tech prosthetics which allow him to live a full life.
He fumes: “If you go into A&E with a wound on your arm, they don’t give you a 1920s hot bread poultice, they give you up to date antibiotics… So why are they giving amputees per-Victorian prosthetics? It’s that bad.”
Despite his status as a veteran Brexiteer and net zero sceptic, his fortitude and warmth has won him respect and affection across party lines.
He is not in denial about the challenges each day brings and describes dreaming that his limbs are intact and then waking up to discover “they’re not there”. But he lives with the confidence that “every day gets better”.
“Tomorrow will be better than today,” he says. “I’m still getting better ever day.”
Craig Mackinlay on the day he returned to the Commons (Image: UK PARLIAMENT/AFP via GettA handout photograph released by the UK Parliament shows Britain’sy Images)