Sir Chris John Bryant (born 11 January 1962) is a Welsh politician and former Anglican priest who has served as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland since 2026. A member of the Labour Party, he has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Rhondda and Ogmore, and previously Rhondda, since 2001.
Born in Cardiff, Bryant was privately educated at Cheltenham College before studying English at Mansfield College, Oxford. After graduating with a further degree in theology, he served as a Church of England priest until 1991. He worked for Common Purpose from 1994 to 1996 and at the BBC from 1998 to 2001. Bryant was elected to Hackney Borough Council in 1993, representing Leabridge ward and serving until 1998. After his unsuccessful candidacy at the 1997 general election for the Wycombe constituency, Bryant was elected for the Labour safe seat of Rhondda at the 2001 general election. He was reelected at the 2005 general election and called for the resignation of Prime Minister Tony Blair in 2006. Bryant became the Parliamentary private secretary (PPS) to Charlie Falconer and later Harriet Harman, before joining the government frontbench as Deputy Leader of the House of Commons in 2008 under Gordon Brown. He later served as Under-Secretary of State for Europe and Asia from 2009 to 2010.
Following Labour's defeat at the 2010 general election, Bryant became the shadow europe minister. He unsuccessfully stood for the shadow cabinet in the 2010 election, and subsequently became a shadow home and justice minister under Ed Miliband. He held various junior shadow portfolios between 2010 and 2015. Following Labour's defeat at 2015 general election, Bryant was promoted to the Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Culture Secretary. He became Shadow Leader of the House of Commons in 2015 under Jeremy Corbyn, before resigning in protest at Corbyn's leadership in 2016. On the backbenches, he served as the chair of several select committees, and stood in the 2019 Speaker of the House of Commons election but was defeated by Lindsay Hoyle. He returned to the frontbench as a shadow culture minister under Keir Starmer in 2023.
Following Labour's victory in the 2024 general election, Bryant returned to government as Minister of State for Creative Industries, Arts and Tourism and Minister of State for Data Protection and Telecoms under Starmer. In the 2025 government reshuffle, he was appointed Minister of State for Trade. After Andy Burnham became Prime Minister in July 2026, Bryant was promoted to cabinet as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland.
Early life and career Chris John Bryant was born on 11 January 1962 in Cardiff, to a Scottish mother and a Welsh father. He grew up in Cardiff, where his father worked for five years, in Spain for five years in the 1960s, which led him to speaking fluent Spanish, and in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. He was educated at Cheltenham College, an independent school for boys.
He studied English at Mansfield College, Oxford, and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree in 1986. He was initially a member of the Conservative Party and an elected office-holder in the Oxford University Conservative Association. He joined the Labour Party in 1986.
From 1983 to 1986, after completing his first degree, Bryant trained for ordained ministry at Ripon College Cuddesdon in Oxfordshire. During this time, he also studied theology at Oxford. He was ordained in the Church of England as a deacon in 1986 by Richard Harries and as a priest in 1987. The first service he led after his ordination was the funeral of Michael Croft, the founder of the National Youth Theatre. Bryant later alleged that he had been sexually abused by Croft when he attended the drama group in London at the age of 16.
He served his curacy at the Church of All Saints, High Wycombe, from 1986 to 1989. He was then a youth chaplain in Peterborough, and travelled in Latin America. In 1991, Bryant left the ordained ministry after deciding that being gay was incompatible with being a priest. Statements made by Bishop of Oxford Richard Harries also influenced his decision.
Early political career (1992–2001) After leaving the priesthood in 1991, Bryant made a career move and began work as the election agent to the Holborn and St Pancras Constituency Labour Party, where he helped Frank Dobson hold his seat in the 1992 general election. From 1993, he was Local Government Officer for the Labour Party; he lived in Hackney and was elected to Hackney Borough Council in 1993, representing Leabridge ward and serving until 1998. He became Chairman of the Christian Socialist Movement. From 1994 to 1996, he was London manager of the charity Common Purpose.
In 1996, Bryant became a full-time author, writing biographies of Stafford Cripps and Glenda Jackson. At the 1997 general election, Bryant was the Labour candidate for Wycombe, winning 35.4% of the vote and coming second behind the incumbent Conservative MP Ray Whitney.
From 1998 until his election to Parliament in 2001, Bryant was the Head of European Affairs for the BBC.
Parliamentary career
Early career (2001–2007) Bryant's selection for the very safe Labour seat of Rhondda in South Wales in 2000 surprised many people given his background – gay, a former Anglican cleric, and someone who had been a Conservative as a student. He says of his surprise selection, "I fell off the chair, and my opponents certainly did". Fifty-two people applied for the candidature and a local councillor was the favourite to win. Bryant was elected as MP for Rhondda at the 2001 general election with a majority of 16,047 and 68.3% of the vote.
From 2004 until 2007, Bryant was chairman of the Labour Movement for Europe.
At the 2005 general election, Bryant was re-elected with a decreased vote share of 68.1% but an increased majority of 16,242.
On 5 September 2006, with Siôn Simon, he coordinated a prominent letter which was signed by 15 Labour backbenchers calling for Tony Blair's immediate resignation.
Phone hacking scandal
On 11 March 2003, as part of an inquiry into Privacy and Press Intrusion by the Commons Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport, he asked Rebekah Wade (now Brooks) whether she had ever paid police officers for information. Seated beside Andy Coulson, the editor of the News of the World, she said 'yes'. Bryant had his phone hacked later that year by the News of the World, a fact which became known to the Metropolitan Police when they seized material from the private investigator Glenn Mulcaire. Bryant, along with John Prescott and Brian Paddick, sought judicial review of the Metropolitan Police in an attempt to force them to contact all the victims of phone hacking by the News of the World. The Metropolitan Police accepted their liability and he won damages of £30,000 from News International in 2012.
Bryant called for and led the parliamentary debates on referring the phone hacking scandal to the Standards and Privileges Committee on 9 September 2010, and the Emergency Debate on whether there should be a judge led enquiry on 6 July 2011 which led to the setting up of the Leveson Inquiry.
Brown government (2007–2010) Bryant was the Parliamentary private secretary to the Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs Charlie Falconer. In Gordon Brown's autumn 2008 reshuffle, Bryant was promoted from his role as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Harriet Harman to the ministerial position of Deputy Leader of the House of Commons otherwise known as Parliamentary Secretary to the House of Commons. This was followed by another move in the June 2009 reshuffle, when he moved to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office as the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. On 13 October 2009, he was also appointed Minister for Europe.
Expenses scandal
Bryant claimed over £92,000 in expenses over the five years leading up to the 2009 scandal over MPs' expenses. During that time he flipped his second home twice. He claimed mortgage interest expenses that started at £7,800 per year before rising (after flipping) to £12,000 per year. He also claimed £6,400 in stamp duty and other fees on his most recent purchase, and £6,000 per year in service charges.
In opposition
Miliband shadow frontbench (2010–2015) At the 2010 general election, Bryant was again re-elected, with a decreased vote share of 55.3% and a decreased majority of 11,553.Rhondda BBC Election – Rhondda
In October 2010, Bryant stood as one of 49 candidates for election to the 19 places in the Shadow Cabinet in the internal Labour Party poll, receiving 77 votes, 29th position on the list.
In October 2010, Bryant described the coalition government's housing benefit reforms as poorer people "being socially engineered and sociologically cleansed out of London". The use of the term "cleansing" was criticised by members of the coalition, including deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, who called Bryant's comment "offensive to people who had witnessed ethnic cleansing in other parts of the world".
In 2011, in the House of Commons, he criticised the then Prince Andrew for a number of alleged indiscretions.
Bryant won the Stonewall Politician of the Year Award in 2011 for his work to support equality for lesbian, gay and bisexual people.http://www.lesbilicious.co.uk/ Stonewall 2011 He was given a score of 100% in favour of lesbian, gay and bisexual equality by Stonewall. On 5 February 2013, he voted in favour in the House of Commons Second Reading vote on same-sex marriage in Britain.
Following the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, Bryant told the Commons 'I am afraid that the international response... has thus far been pitiful and spineless. People have even trotted out in this Chamber the argument that most of the people in Crimea are Russian speaking and wanted to join Russia in the first place. Can Members not hear history running through the decades?... There has been little honour in the way that Britain, France and the United States, having signed up to the Budapest memorandum, which guaranteed the territorial integrity of Ukraine, now make lots of great speeches but introduce the measliest level of sanctions and targeted interventions against Russian individuals... A Russian friend of mine says that Putin is not yet mad. That may be true, but what will our surrendering and our appeasement do for his sanity?'
In December 2014, Bryant was moved from Shadow Minister for Welfare Reform to Shadow Minister for the Arts. In this position, he suggested in January 2015 that too many successful artists such as "James Blunt and their ilk" had been educated at private schools, and that he wanted to see more encouragement for the arts for people from a variety of backgrounds, even though Bryant himself attended a private school. Blunt said that Bryant was a "narrow-minded 'classist gimp' who was motivated by the 'politics of jealousy'"; Bryant responded by claiming that Blunt should not be "so blooming precious" and that he was not "knocking [his] success" but attempting to draw attention to the lack of diversity in the arts.
Shadow cabinet (2015–2016) At the 2015 general election, Bryant was again re-elected with a decreased vote share of 50.7% and a decreased majority of 7,455. On 8 May 2015, he was promoted to the shadow cabinet as Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport in the Second Harman shadow cabinet.
In September 2015, following Jeremy Corbyn's election as Labour Party leader, Bryant was appointed Shadow Leader of the House of Commons. He resigned from this position on 26 June 2016, along with other shadow ministers after the Brexit vote.
Return to the backbenches (2016–2023) Bryant supported Owen Smith in the failed attempt to replace Jeremy Corbyn in the 2016 Labour leadership election. He supported Remain in the EU referendum in June 2016 and voted against the triggering of Article 50 in February 2017.