Dame Emily Thornberry: a life of resilience, a story still unfolding
From a colourful childhood to the criminal courts and the corridors of Westminster, Dame Emily Thornberry has lived an extraordinary life. As part of our Women in Westminster series, we sat down with the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee to talk about overcoming challenges and Britain’s changing role in the world
Emily Thornberry certainly knows how to tell a story.
Ask her about the women who inspired her growing up and, within minutes, you're at a funeral in Guildford, watching a procession of Conservative councillors in their ceremonial robes filing out of church to the strains of The Red Flag.
It's a wonderful image, and one that Thornberry effortlessly conjures up. But it's also a story about her mother, a single parent who went from being evicted with three young children to becoming the town's mayor.
Thornberry explains that when she was seven, her parents separated and the family lost their home. A Labour councillor helped them find somewhere to live, and as her mother gradually rebuilt her life, he encouraged her to become involved in local politics.
“She became secretary of the ward, and eventually he persuaded her to stand for the council and represent the council estate that I'd been brought up on,” Thornberry tells us. “But she changed a lot of people's lives, and she did that because of her empathy and the way that she listened.”
During the time we spent in Thornberry’s company, the stories keep coming. Barbara Castle delivering a speech of such extraordinary force that Thornberry found herself physically overwhelmed. Watching Father Christmas arriving on a camel in Gaza in 1977. A teenage girl finding herself alone in London after her father had, as she puts it, left her “not once but twice.”
The details are vivid, the characters fully formed, and the humour rarely far from the surface. Thornberry, who spent years as a criminal barrister before entering Parliament, understands the power of words and stories. And it's hard to escape the feeling that storytelling isn't simply how she communicates her experiences. It's also how she makes sense of them.
Watching her mother’s journey provided Thornberry with a very practical education in politics, rooted in knowing a community and earning its trust. And perhaps that grounding also helps explain Thornberry's own instinct to always bring arguments to life through the people and experiences behind them.
“You have to keep your feet on the ground,” she tells us. “If you don't, people have got a good way of cutting you down to size. And that's fine. But you also get huge amounts of love back.”
That down-to-earth outlook has been the hallmark of Thornberry’s career inside and outside Parliament. Before becoming an MP in 2005, she worked as a criminal barrister, a grounding that meant Westminster's culture came as less of a shock than it might otherwise have done.
“There were very few women doing crime when I was at the Bar, so I was used to being in these aggressive male environments,” she says. “I was used to the nonsense.”
Thornberry acknowledges that Parliament has changed in the two decades since she first entered the House. The proportion of women MPs has increased, and that has changed both the culture of the Chamber and the topics discussed. However, she is less convinced that the underlying attitudes have disappeared, still detecting them lurking just beneath the surface.
“I think it's become much more subtle. It's changed a bit, but it certainly hasn't gone. There are still other ways of making sure we know our place,” she says. “I think there's less tolerance of individuality amongst women. There's a certain indulgence of men, but I don't think there really is with women. We're not supposed to have rough edges.”
One change that Thornberry highlights is the way female MPs across the House are telling their personal stories more to raise topics that might have previously struggled to find space in discussions. That is something Thornberry herself continues to do as we move on to discuss how she has dealt with some of the more difficult moments in her career, including being left out of government following Labour’s election victory.
“I think the starting point is remembering that I've been through some pretty hard times before I came into politics. Really tough times. And I survived those,” she says. “You may not feel it at the time, but you'll be all right. You haven't been broken yet, and there have been things that were much more likely to break you.”
Thornberry brushed off the disappointment of not being given a ministerial role and successfully stood to be Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee. That, she says, has given her a different kind of political freedom and a new way to make an impact.
“You have to work with your committee. You need them to agree with you, and sometimes you need to go along with what they suggest,” she explains. “But if you can do that, speaking on behalf of the House of Commons on issues when the world is on fire is quite a thing to do.”
Thornberry’s enthusiasm for international affairs is another passion that clearly has its roots in her childhood.
“I had this weird background of quite considerable deprivation, but also a parent who was an internationalist,” she says. “My dad would turn up on our estate and go, ‘We're going to Zambia.’ And you'd think, ‘What?’”
Her experience as Chair of the committee also appears to have given Thornberry a more optimistic assessment of Britain's place in the world.
“We have a much bigger pull than I had quite realised. You have to see it to believe it,” she says. “We have an impact in all kinds of countries and a way of pulling people together because of our historic connections, but also our cultural and soft power.”
By the end of our conversation, you have a strong sense that Thornberry has always been galvanised rather than broken by adversity. Ultimately, the stories that she tells are the ones that have shaped the person that sits in front of us. And it feels like a story that still has several chapters left to tell.
“I'm the big, strong girl I am today because of it,” she adds. “I'm quite chippy. I've always felt as though I have a lot to prove. Even at my great old age now, I still feel like I have to prove them all wrong.”
