Hishammuddin Hussein

Hishammuddin bin Hussein (Jawi: هشام الدين بن حسين; born 5 August 1961) is a Malaysian politician and lawyer who served as Senior Minister of the Security Cluster and Minister of Defence from 2021 to 2022. A member of the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), a component party of the Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition, he has been a Member of Parliament (MP) for Sembrong since 2004, having previously been an MP for Tenggara from 1995 to 2004. Hishammuddin was born in Johor Bahru to Hussein Onn and Suhailah Noah. His father was the third prime minister of Malaysia. He attended Malay College Kuala Kangsar, St. John's Institution, Alice Smith School, and Cheltenham College. He then graduated with a Bachelor of Laws from Aberystwyth University and a Master of Laws from the London School of Economics before working as a lawyer. After making partner at Skrine, he started his own firm, Lee Hishammuddin, which later merged with Allen and Gledhill to form Lee Hishammuddin Allen and Gledhill. On his return from the UK, Hishammuddin joined UMNO. He was first elected to the Dewan Rakyat in the 1995 election, winning the seat of Tenggara. He was later appointed deputy minister and was promoted to full minister in 1999. In 1999, he was elected as UMNO's youth chief, and subsequently as its vice president in 2009. Since then, he has held various ministerial positions until the defeat of BN in the 2018 election. Despite the defeat, he managed to retain his Sembrong seat. At the beginning of the political crisis that started in 2020, Hishammuddin returned to the cabinet as Minister of Foreign Affairs under the Perikatan Nasional (PN) coalition led by Muhyiddin Yassin. Amid the worsening political crisis in July 2021, Muhyiddin appointed Hishammuddin as Senior Minister of Security Cluster to replace Ismail...