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Jersey’s first female Chief Minister is a 47-year-old former journalist and mother-of-two who has been a States Member for more than a decade.
Deputy Kristina Moore won more votes than anyone else on Wednesday 22 June under the new super-constituency system, topping the poll in St. Peter, St. Ouen and St. Mary.
She attracted 2,730 votes, which gave her a clear mandate for the top job under the new system, despite polling far fewer votes than previous Chief Ministers chosen on an island-wide mandate.
However, the Deputy had strengthened her hand by expressly saying that she wanted to be the next Chief Minister in the run-up to the election.
So, who is Jersey’s fifth and first female Chief Minister?
Born in England, Deputy Moore grew up “in the middle of nowhere” in North Devon, where her father had a dairy farm. Her mother was a dentist, running her practice from the farm.
She went to the local comprehensive school but also spent a year studying in Sydney after her GCSEs as part of a Rotary International exchange.
During her youth, she also worked in a number of hotels and restaurants to gain experience of the hospitality industry.
She studied French at Birmingham University, which included a year studying and working in Nice on the Côte d’Azur.
A fluent French speaker, Deputy Moore says she is keen to strengthen links with our closest neighbour, a relationship that he come under significant pressure since Brexit.
After graduating, she completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Broadcast Journalism.
Pictured: Deputy Moore studied French at the University of Birmingham before completing a Postgraduate Diploma in Broadcast Journalism.
Deputy Moore then became a journalist working for Central News in Nottingham and Radio Victory in Portsmouth.
She moved to Jersey on 4 January 2000 after being offered a job at Channel Television.
Two of her best friends from university were from Jersey and had forwarded her a job advert for a presenter at the broadcaster.
Initially, she wasn’t offered that job but, four months later, having already brought a house in Portsmouth, she was offered the role, and she continued south to Jersey.
She was a reporter and anchor woman at Channel for almost ten years, and also worked at BBC Spotlight CI.
Deputy Moore lives in St. Peter with her husband James, who is an Advocate and co-founding partner of a law firm.
Together they run various property investment companies and have two children: Edward is 17 and Gwilym is 14.
The family have three dogs: Tassie, Tola and Minquiers.
Pictured: Deputy Moore with her husband James and their three dogs.
Her hobbies include walking, cycling, tennis and skiing.
Her States Members’ declaration of interests’ list includes a property in Megève, as well as a flat in London and a share of land in Northumberland.
In 2013, Deputy Moore publicly shared her diagnoses for breast cancer to raise awareness of the disease. She had the tumour removed as well as undergoing chemotherapy and radiotherapy, and fully recovered.
She was first elected to the States in 2011 as Deputy for St. Peter. Over her two terms as parish representative, she helped set up St. Peter’s Community Support Team and chaired the committee overseeing the Queen’s Jubilee Retirement Homes and the Maison Le Marquand residential home.
In the Assembly, she chaired the Health, Social Services and Housing Scrutiny Panel, which included reviewing ‘Health and Social Services: A New Way Forward’ in 2012.
This key document, which was successfully amended by the panel, was the first step in building a new hospital, with a firm proposal to be made by the end of 2014.
Deputy Moore became Home Affairs Minister in 2014 in Deputy Ian Gorst’s second Council of Ministers.
While Minister, she produced a ’20-point action plan’ around the ‘1001 Critical Days’ concept, which identified ways to improve intervention in the first two years of a child’s life.
She also steered the Criminal Procedures Law through the Assembly, updated the Sexual Offences Law and began work on the Domestic Abuse Law, which was finally passed earlier this year.
The Deputy also initiated the Norfolk Police inquiry into allegations of corruption by planning enforcement officers, and ended the Jurats’ role as prison visitors.
Pictured: As head of the Corporate Services Scrutiny Panel, Deputy Moore held quarterly public hearings with the Chief Minister.
In 2018, Deputy Moore stood as a Senator, coming second in the poll with 15,292 island-wide votes, just 226 behind Tracey Vallois.
She campaigned on a platform of continuing as Home Affairs Minister but was overlooked by Chief Minister John Le Fondré, who beat then-Senator Gorst to the job.
Demoted to the backbenchers, Deputy Moore became Scrutineer-in-Chief, not only chairing the key Corporate Services Panel, which reviews policy and laws coming from the Chief Minister and Treasury, but also presiding over the Scrutiny Liaison Committee.
She also led the key ad hoc Future Hospital Review Panel.
Although always polite and parliamentary, the relationship between the Chief Minister and Deputy Moore was never the warmest, and there were occasionally tense moments, particularly during some Scrutiny meetings and in official letters.
In January 2021, Deputy Moore wrote to Senator Le Fondré urging him to release covid-related meeting minutes and criticising his “mismanagement of the pandemic”.
The Chief Minister said it was “purely a politically motivated attack”.
The gulf between the two senior politicians perhaps reached its widest in November 2020, when Deputy Moore lodged a vote of no confidence against the Chief Minister over his handling of the Government CEO Charlie Parker’s second job and consequential resignation.
Pictured: The then-Senator Moore brought a confidence vote against then-Chief Minister John Le Fondré in November 2020.
Although that proposition failed, her successes as a scrutineer included:
increasing the Community Costs Bonus in line with inflation;
securing agreement to remove GST from sanitary products;
raising stamp duty on high value properties; and
amending the Bridging Island Plan to stop La Gigoulande Quarry extending into a nearby field.
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