Maidenhead is a constituency in Berkshire represented in the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Since its creation at the 1997 general election, the seat has been held by Conservative Member of Parliament Theresa May who served as Home Secretary from 2010 to 2016 and as Prime Minister from 2016 to 2019. It is considered a safe seat for the Conservative Party. History The constituency was first drawn shortly after the 1992 general election. The electorate of Maidenhead and Windsor was becoming too large, so the Boundary Commission for England separated the seats for the next election, due in 1996 or 1997. It was formed from parts of the abolished safe seat of Windsor and Maidenhead and the constituency of Wokingham. It was first used in the 1997 election. Theresa May, Prime Minister from 2016 to 2019, has held the seat since its creation. In 1995, May, a former London councillor at the time working at the Association for Payment Clearing Services and as a Foreign affairs advisor, was selected to contest the new seat, defeating her future Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, in the selection process. (Hammond was later selected for the nearby seat of Runnymede and Weybridge). May won the seat in the 1997 election, in which over 100 Conservatives lost their seats, and the party obtained its lowest share of seats in 91 years. At the 2010 general election May achieved the 9th highest share of the vote of the 307 seats held by a Conservative. The closest election in the seat was in 2001, in which May's majority was cut from almost 12,000 votes in 1997 to just 3,284 votes ahead of the Liberal Democrat candidate. The Labour candidate in that election was activist and comedy writer John O'Farrell, whose campaign was the subject of a BBC documentary entitled Losing My Maidenhead. Due to their strong performance in 2001, the seat was one of several targeted by the Liberal Democrats in 2005 as part of a 'decapitation strategy' to deprive senior Conservatives of their seats; as with similar efforts in Haltemprice and Howden and West Dorset, however, this strategy was unsuccessful: May retained her seat with almost double her 2001 majority. Since then, she has held it with majorities of at least 30%. Constituency profile Housing is, in the Wokingham district part, at the northern end of a belt where more