On a mild morning in December, Emily Thornberry braced herself to confront her packed diary. I went with her. Our day began at Portcullis House, Westminster, where she attended a meeting with the Uzbekistani ambassador to the UK, who asked Thornberry, chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, if she would like to visit the former Soviet republic – an invitation she politely sidestepped. Then to the Commons to attend an urgent question on Ukraine; then to a two-hour select committee session on the Israel-Gaza war; then to the Lords to shake hands with the emir of Qatar on his state visit (this was where I left her, my outfit failing to meet the Lords’ dress code). Later that day, she had a meeting with the GB China Centre, an arm’s-length government organisation. Would she have time to do the rounds at the Westminster Christmas parties that evening, I asked? “I’m triple-parked, mate!” she huffed.
By the time Thornberry and I sat down for tea in her office overlooking Westminster Bridge, two weeks later than planned, she had had enough of 2024. “It’s been so busy that it’s quite difficult to have reflections,” Thornberry, one of Labour’s more effulgent MPs, told me, pouring tea from a pink pot. “I need to stop twirling around, and actually stop for long enough to be able to look at [the year’s events] in the round.”
Labour has fallen six points in opinion polls – and Reform has risen by about eight points – since the election. Thornberry blames a “hysterical media” for contributing to this drop in support. “The establishment is really cross with us,” she said. “They can’t believe we’ve had the audacity to get ourselves elected and become the government. I have never seen a hissy fit like the hissy fit I’ve seen from the Daily Telegraph.” She gesticulated wildly, her eyes widening: “I mean, it’s extraordinary. Extraordinary!” Labour’s transition from opposition to government had been, she conceded, “harder than perhaps people realised”, but she does not see this as a failure. “We’re a good Labour government, doing good Labour things.”
So why did Keir Starmer feel the need, five months into his premiership, to course-correct with a “reset” of the government’s agenda in early December? “You keep saying ‘reset’, and I don’t think there is a reset,” Thornberry retorted. “The policies remain the same and the approach remains the same.” As for the threat from Reform, “nobody can really pretend that we don’t pay attention to the polls. But it’s a long time until the next election, and we need to make sure that we do the job properly, but also that we explain what it is that we’re doing and why we’re doing it, which I think is as important as anything.”
Thornberry – who served as shadow foreign secretary from 2016 to 2020 and shadow attorney general from 2021 to 2024 – was “sorry and surprised”, she wrote at the time, not to have been given a ministerial position when Labour took power last summer. Instead, the role of attorney general went to Richard Hermer KC, a former colleague of Keir Starmer’s. “Nobody gave me any explanation” as to why, she told me. “I won’t go into details of it.” This quiet acceptance seemed out of character from one of Labour’s most forthright politicians. “What’s the point? Decision’s been made.” Then, in a slightly more provocative tone, Thornberry added: “I’d been the longest-serving member of the shadow cabinet. So, I’d had plenty of opportunities, I suppose, to do something wrong and make a mistake, and I don’t believe that I had.”
Emily Thornberry was born in Guildford, Surrey, in 1960. Her mother, Sallie, was a teacher, and her father, Cedric, was a human rights lawyer. When Thornberry was seven she, her mother, and her two younger brothers were made homeless when her father deserted his family. They were helped into social housing by a Labour councillor. A decade later, while Thornberry was living with her father, he went to New York “for the weekend”, joined the United Nations and never returned, later becoming an assistant secretary-general. (Cedric Thornberry died in 2014, aged 77. His blue UN helmet, chipped from use in war zones, sat on a shelf on Thornberry’s office near a Christmas card from the Blairs.)
Thornberry described her background as “odd” in that it was well educated and international, but also deprived. “Both of those things, at the same time.” One of her brothers went on to work in international development, providing aid to countries affected by natural disasters and war. He spent “most of his time burying dead bodies, being shot at, having people try to arrest him and getting airlifted off the top of buildings”, Thornberry said. He and her father “almost seemed to be competing with one another to see who could frighten the bejesus out of me the most… All of us are very committed to peace and to bringing the world together.”
Last September, Thornberry was elected chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee. The committee’s work covers the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, as well as monitoring post-Assad Syria. Thornberry is also concerned by what she sees as the mismanagement of Britain’s international reputation under the Tories. As chair, she wants to help rebuild “people’s good vibes about the UK”. “When I was shadow foreign secretary and I was shadowing Boris Johnson [then foreign secretary], people in the world laughed at us – openly laughed at us. We have to really turn that around.”
In June last year Foreign Secretary David Lammy told the New Statesman: “Our foreign policy has to meet the world as it is.” Thornberry agreed: “If we are realistic and honest about our position as a middle-ranking power with influence, we should know that what we need to do is work with other countries that have the same approach as us.”
This approach will be tested by Donald Trump’s second term as US president. Ahead of his state visit to the UK in 2019, Thornberry described Trump as a “bully”, a “sexual predator” and a “racist”. If he makes another visit, “I don’t think I’m likely to be on a welcoming committee.” She was disappointed at the result of the American election: “I didn’t want Trump to get elected for a number of reasons… Probably top of the list would be that he is unpredictable.”
Though Thornberry believes the UK can influence the new president, her vision of the special relationship sounds more subservient than one of equals. “If [Trump] wants to make deals, if he wants to have a Nobel Peace Prize, if he wants to have a legacy, then we need to align our interests with his and make it clear that the sort of things that [Britain] wants to do are actually the things that he wants to do.” She added: “What you have to do with bullies is you do have to stand up to them… Theresa May was so desperate to get the first meeting with Donald Trump; I don’t think that Britain behaved in a way that gave [us] any more influence than any other country.”
Emily Thornberry would “never say never” to serving in the cabinet if eventually asked. But for now she is committed to being “the best chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee that there’s ever been, because now is the time when… [that person is] needed to do it well and not be distracted. If we’re doing our job properly, the Foreign Office is as good as it can be, which means that Britain’s standing in the world is as good as it can be – which means that Britain can be an influence for good.”
Listen to Harry Clarke-Ezzidio’s interview with Emily Thornberry on the New Statesman podcast
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This article appears in the 15 Jan 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Disruptors