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, whom 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.”
