‘It was a shock’: Emily Thornberry on her demotion from Starmer’s Labour frontbench
Emily Thornberry has never been afraid to speak her mind, even if doing so sometimes lands her in trouble,As the only frontbencher to have been entirely dropped from Keir Starmer’s ministerial team when Labour entered government, the MP for Islington South and Finsbury is beginning a new chapter in her political career, as the head of the foreign affairs select committee,But as she does so, Thornberry, 64, has an outspoken warning for her younger colleagues, some of whom were elevated to ministerial level immediately after being elected for the first time,“We have some amazingly experienced and talented new ministers who have not been MPs before,” she tells the Guardian from her office overlooking the River Thames, the kind of plush modern room that party whips reserve for more experienced MPs,“The last thing I want – and maybe I’ll be proved wrong – I don’t want them to be set up to fail.
Hopefully I’ve got it wrong, but I think it would make their life much easier if they had been MPs for a while first, before they became ministers.”Thornberry, who was a barrister for 20 years before entering parliament in 2005, adds: “I found it very hard when I was first elected.And I certainly wouldn’t have been up for doing anything other than just being an MP for the first couple of years.”Thornberry’s unexpected omission from the government frontbenches – her spot as attorney general was taken by Richard Hermer, a longtime legal colleague of Starmer – was not the first time she had lost a frontbench role.In 2014 she resigned as shadow attorney general after tweeting a photograph of a house adorned with three England flags under the caption “Image from #Rochester”: a tweet that some viewed as patronising.
This time the blow was especially painful given that Labour was entering government and Thornberry had not done anything in the role that suggested she was about to lose it.Starmer had made a virtue of keeping people in their posts for extended periods of time, and she had not expected to be moved.“I was very disappointed,” she says, reflecting on her demotion five months afterwards.“Keir used to say to people in the shadow cabinet: ‘You’re not going to be moved jobs, you had better get used to it.You’re going to be in cabinet, in these jobs.
’ Nobody really told me I wasn’t going to be … It was a shock, and it has been hard,”After finding herself on the backbenches, a role leading a select committee was an obvious career choice,As the daughter of a diplomat and a former shadow foreign secretary, she decided to run to lead the powerful foreign affairs select committee, narrowly beating her 38-year-old Labour colleague Dan Carden to become its chair in September,“My dad was in the UN,” she says, pointing to his old blue helmet, which sits on a bookshelf in her office,“Throughout my childhood, we would be living on this council estate and, and dad would turn up and go: ‘We’re going to Zambia.
’“I do have a genuinely international background, and a kind of confidence – I don’t get intimidated.”Her confidence extends to saying things about foreign leaders from which senior Labour politicians would shy away.She stands by her view that Donald Trump is a “racist sexual predator” but adds: “He’s going to be the president of the United States, and we need to work with him.”On China, she warns Labour ministers not to get swept up by the promise of billions of pounds of financial investment and ignore human rights concerns.Speaking before recent revelations about the alleged Chinese spy Yang Tengbo, she says: “We need to tread a careful path between the government’s stated priority, which is for growth, and being consistent with our values as a country, which is a commitment to human rights.
”Thornberry says her committee, the majority of whom were first elected this year, is still getting up to speed, and so has taken on the relatively uncontroversial issue of the BBC World Service as its first inquiry.But one issue she does want to raise in her new role is that of British citizens detained abroad, who she says are being badly treated by the Foreign Office.“The Foreign Office is not great about this,” she says.“Other countries will get their people out, and Britain doesn’t.“The foreign secretary has said that he wants to have someone at ambassadorial level whose responsibility will be to ensure that we get our people out, but when is this happening?”Would she want to help enact such policies from back within government? “I’m doing this fantastic job, and I want to do it as well as anyone has ever done it,” she says.
But she also adds: “Never say never,”
British factories suffer winter chill as government ‘dampens confidence’ – business live
And across the Channel: Britain’s manufacturing sector also reported declining output.The UK manufacturing purchasing managers’ index (PMI) fell to an 11-month low of 47.0 in December, down from 48.0 in November and below the earlier flash estimate of 47.3, according to S&P Global
UK house prices rise for fourth month in a row, says Nationwide
House prices rose for a fourth consecutive month in December, ending 2024 on a “strong footing”, Nationwide said, with the cost of an average home hitting £269,426.The building society’s monthly tracker found prices in December rose 0.7% on the previous month and were up 4.7% on an annual basis.This marks the strongest rate of annual price inflation since Nationwide recorded 7
If smart AI is so scary, why even develop it? | Brief letters
Prof Geoffrey Hinton claims “we’re going to develop AIs that are smarter than people. And that’s a very scary thought” (‘Godfather of AI’ shortens odds of the technology wiping out humanity over next 30 years, 27 December). The obvious response to this is: if something is “very scary”, why do it?Máire DaviesLondon Geoffrey Hinton seems to think humans are, so far, the most intelligent beings. To willingly contrive to get ourselves into this predicament suggests otherwise.Neil BlackshawAlnwick, Northumberland Delighted that the King’s daughter has been honoured with an MBE – Dawn Astle, that is, daughter of Jeff Astle, the King of the Baggies, rewarded for her work campaigning for research into head injuries in football (Report, 30 December)
Halal tech: how Muslim-friendly websites and apps blossomed in 2024
Amany Killawi made a breakup playlist every time she was dumped, three in all. The playlists, which feature songs such as Gotye’s Somebody That I Used to Know and Apologize by OneRepublic, would make good soundtracks to romantic splits, but that’s not what they were. The playlists came together after Killawi was told by three different banks and payment processors they would no longer work with LaunchGood, the crowdfunding platform for the Muslim community she co-founded.Stripe said it was restricting its work in the crowdfunding space after five years of working with LaunchGood. Stripe also told the company it didn’t want to do any more international humanitarian work – a prerequisite for a crowdfunding platform that caters to the Muslim community
The end comes quickly for India’s fading champions ahead of Test series finale | Geoff Lemon
Australian tours have a habit of making or breaking Test careers. VVS Laxman and Rahul Dravid destroyed Australia’s world-record winning streak at Kolkata in 2001, overcoming one of the greatest teams and its champion bowlers Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath. By 2012, Australia’s home grounds ended Laxman and Dravid, four Tests across the country returning a pair of half-centuries and bringing two fine careers to a deflating close against the more modest threat of Ben Hilfenhaus and Nathan Lyon.Sachin Tendulkar and Virender Sehwag were two more declining champions who creaked through that tour and were managed out of the side by the following year. The only player who fell into the make rather than break category was a young Virat Kohli, who scored his first century in Adelaide of a tally that he has now taken on to 30
A quarter of a century on: what we got right and wrong about sport’s future
From VAR to the rise of women’s sport, the media’s finest were hit and miss in predicting how things would developImagine tumbling back in time to 1 January, 2000. You pick up the 70p Saturday Guardian, with its spectacular photograph of Earth from space and a headline that hails the dawn of the new millennium. Soon you are reading a host of predictions for how the 21st century will play out – across science and sport, lifestyle and life itself – many of which oscillate between the fantastical and the terrifying.By 2010, a newborn will have a robot pet, you learn from Andy Beckett’s brilliant essay Born to be Wired. By 2030 they will be “in brain-to-brain contact, via electronic implants, without needing to speak with family members, lovers and friends”
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