Matt Cavanagh (born 1971) is a British political adviser and author.^[1][2] He was a special adviser in the UK Labour government (2003–10).^[1] He worked for Home Secretary David Blunkett;^[3] for Chancellor Gordon Brown;^[4] for Defence Secretary Des Browne;^[5] and for Gordon Brown again as Prime Minister from June 2007 to May 2010.^[1][6] Subsequently, he was an associate director at the Institute for Public Policy Research, working on UK immigration policy.^[7] He now works in the private sector as Director of Government Relations for Prudential plc.^[8]

Matthew Cavanagh was born in 1971.^[9] He was educated at Bedford Modern School^[10] and Balliol College, Oxford, where he read PPE, and then took a BPhil and DPhil in Philosophy.^[1] From 1996 to 2000 he was lecturer in Philosophy at St Catherine's College, Oxford.^[1] From 2000 to 2003 he was a strategy consultant for the Boston Consulting Group.^[1]

Cavanagh is the author of Against Equality of Opportunity a controversial work of 2002 that criticises conventional understandings of the doctrine of equality of opportunity.^[11] It gained positive reviews across the political spectrum, including in the Times Educational Supplement^[12] and in The Spectator.^[13] Other reviews were mixed, including Jeremy Waldron in the London Review of Books^[14] and in the Guardian.^[11]

Two years later in 2004, with Cavanagh now working as a special adviser, the Guardian returned to the book with a front-page story arguing that his views on race and equal opportunity made him unfit to work in government.^[15] This led to widespread calls for Cavanagh to be sacked, with questions tabled in Parliament, and the affair rumbled on for a few days. The Guardian letters page carried a balance of letters for and against Cavanagh.^[16]

In 2009 he was briefly in the news again, when he was accused of putting pressure on NHS statisticians to release statistics on knife crime prematurely.^[17] The UK Statistics Watchdog reprimanded Downing Street, and again there were calls for his sacking, including from the Public Administration Committee.^[18]

Cavanagh has written on Afghanistan and other subjects for Prospect^[19] and The Spectator^[20] magazines. He is a regular contributor to a number of blogs including the New Statesman,^[21] The Spectator,^[22] and Labour Uncut.^[23]

He was the British national champion at Rugby fives in 2004 and 2006, and has since been a veteran winner.^[24][25]