Dame Emily Anne Thornberry (born 27 July 1960) is a British politician who has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Islington South and Finsbury since 2005. A member of the Labour Party, she served as Shadow Attorney General for England and Wales from 2021 until the 2024 general election, and previously from 2011 to 2014. Thornberry has also served in a number of other senior positions on Labour's front bench, namely as Shadow Foreign Secretary from 2016 to 2020, Shadow First Secretary of State from 2017 to 2020 and Shadow Secretary of State for International Trade from 2020 to 2021.
The daughter of a teacher and a diplomat, Emily Thornberry was born in Guildford, Surrey, and attended a local secondary modern school. After graduating from the University of Kent at Canterbury, she worked as a human rights lawyer from 1985 to 2005 and joined the Transport and General Workers' Union.
She was first elected to Parliament in 2005 and served as Shadow Attorney General for England and Wales in Ed Miliband's shadow cabinet from 2011 until she resigned in 2014 after sending a tweet that it was claimed mocked a house with England flags. After Jeremy Corbyn won the 2015 Labour leadership election, she was appointed Shadow Minister of State for Employment in September 2015, Shadow Secretary of State for Defence in January 2016 and Shadow Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs in June 2016. She was a candidate to succeed Corbyn as Leader of the Labour Party in the 2020 leadership election but was eliminated from the race after failing to obtain the number of nominations needed.
Thornberry was appointed to Keir Starmer's shadow cabinet as Shadow Secretary of State for International Trade and Shadow President of the Board of Trade in April 2020. She was appointed Shadow Attorney General for England and Wales in November 2021, but did not receive a ministerial position in Starmer's post-election government formed in July 2024.
In the 2025 New Year Honours Thornberry was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) for political and public service.
Early life and career Emily Thornberry was born on 27 July 1960 in Guildford, Surrey. Her parents were Sallie Thornberry (née Bone), a teacher, and Cedric Thornberry, a professor of international law at the London School of Economics, and later a United Nations Assistant Secretary-General. Due to her father's birth in Belfast she is an Irish citizen and Irish passport holder. When Thornberry was seven, her parents divorced and she left their home with her mother and two brothers. After this, she relied on free school meals and food parcels, and her cats were euthanised to save money. Her mother later became a Labour councillor and mayor (representing Stoke in Guildford from 1983 to 2003), and her father stood as the Labour candidate for Guildford in the 1966 general election.
Thornberry failed the eleven-plus standardized exam; consequently, she attended a secondary modern school. She left to live with her father when she was 15 until he left without warning to work for the United Nations when she was seventeen. She worked as a cleaner and a barmaid in London alongside resitting her O-Levels and taking her A-Levels. She went on to study law at the University of Kent in Canterbury, graduating in 1982, and afterwards led the students' union as an elected full-time officer. She was called to the bar at Gray's Inn and practised as a barrister specialising in human rights law from 1985 to 2005 under Michael Mansfield at Tooks Chambers.
She joined the Transport and General Workers' Union in 1985.
Parliamentary career At the 2001 general election, Thornberry stood as the Labour candidate in Canterbury, coming second with 36.9% of the vote behind the incumbent Conservative MP Julian Brazier.
1st term (2005–2010) Thornberry was selected as the Labour candidate for Islington South and Finsbury for the 2005 general election through an all-women shortlist of prospective candidates. She was elected to Parliament as MP for Islington South and Finsbury 39.9% of the vote and a majority of 484.
Thornberry made her maiden speech in the House of Commons on 24 May 2005. In Parliament, she was a member of the Environmental Audit Committee from 2005 to 2007 and the Communities and Local Government Committee from 2006 to 2009.UK Parliament, "Parliamentary career for Emily Thornberry", accessed 18 September 2026.
In 2006, Thornberry was criticised by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards Philip Mawer for adding a quote from herself into a news release by the Electoral Commission. He found that she had not broken the Parliamentary code of conduct, but that her actions had been "unwise and unfortunate".
Thornberry's main interests since becoming an MP have been in health, housing, the environment and equality. She has also spoken on the need for more affordable housing, particularly in Islington. In 2006, Thornberry introduced the Housing Association Bill, a private member's bill which sought to improve the control of housing association tenants over their landlords, with many of the ideas from this bill were taken up by the Cave Review. On environmental matters, Thornberry worked with Friends of the Earth and World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) to campaign for a Climate Change Bill and a Marine Bill. In 2006, Thornberry won the ePolitix Award for Environment Champion of the Year after being nominated by WWF.
In May 2008, Thornberry supported a change in the law to allow single women and lesbian couples to seek in vitro fertilisation treatment.
In 2009, she was appointed as a ministerial aide in the Department of Energy and Climate Change and attended the Copenhagen Summit in December that year with Joan Ruddock and Ed Miliband.
2nd term (2010–2015) At the 2010 general election, Thornberry was re-elected as MP for Islington South and Finsbury with an increased vote share of 42.3% and an increased majority of 3,569.
Thornberry was promoted to Shadow Minister for the Department of Energy and Climate Change soon after the general election. She missed out on a place in Labour's shadow cabinet, then elected by Labour MPs, by one vote. She was instead promoted to the role of shadow care minister under the shadow health secretary John Healey.
In April 2011, Thornberry surveyed all the local government directors of adult social care and highlighted the pressures on care for the elderly by the coalition government's cuts to local authority funds. In June 2011 Thornberry criticised the coalition government's lack of action over failing care home operator Southern Cross, calling for action and that the government put in place a plan B should the operator fail. She criticised the government over the Winterbourne View care home abuse scandal, calling for an investigation into the affair.
In July 2011, Thornberry challenged prime minister David Cameron over his false claims about wages at Islington Council, campaigning against government measures which she said had exacerbated child poverty in Islington, and answering over 1,000 enquiries a month from constituents.
Thornberry was appointed shadow attorney general in October 2011, which allowed her to attend shadow cabinet meetings. She called for action by Dominic Grieve over Applied Language Solutions' failure to provide interpreters for court proceedings.
Thornberry resigned her shadow cabinet position on 20 November 2014, shortly after polls closed in the Rochester and Strood by-election. Earlier in the day, she had received criticism after tweeting a photograph as voting was taking place of a house in the constituency adorned with three flags of St. George, the smaller of which incorporated the colours of West Ham United F.C. and showed the owner's white van parked outside on the driveway, under the caption "Image from #Rochester", provoking accusations of snobbery. She was criticised by fellow Labour Party MPs, including leader Ed Miliband, who said her tweet conveyed a "sense of disrespect", Chris Bryant, who said that it broke the "first rule of politics" and Simon Danczuk, who said that the party had been "hijacked by the north London liberal elite". Prime Minister David Cameron said the tweet was "completely appalling", implying that she was "sneering at people who work hard, are patriotic and love their country", and BBC political editor Nick Robinson said the tweet was "the most extraordinary self-inflicted wound I have seen an opposition party inflict on themselves in many, many years."
3rd term (2015–2017) At the 2015 general election, Thornberry was again re-elected with an increased vote share of 50.9% and an increased majority of 12,708.
Thornberry was one of 36 Labour MPs to nominate Jeremy Corbyn as a candidate in the Labour leadership election of 2015, though she later stated that she would be supporting Yvette Cooper. In September 2015, she was appointed as the shadow Minister of State for Employment by the new Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
She was promoted to shadow defence secretary in January 2016, replacing Maria Eagle. Thornberry advocated spending money on the army rather than on the UK's Trident nuclear programme. On being appointed, Thornberry was interviewed by the British Forces Broadcasting Service, where she defended her appointment, saying she had "quite a lot more experience than people might think I do. I was made an honorary lieutenant colonel when I was doing court-martials [sic] when I was a barrister so I have a certain amount of experience of the military there." During her role as shadow defence secretary, Thornberry conducted a review of defence policy, including the role of the nuclear deterrent, which was delayed following the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum. During a private Labour discussion about the nuclear deterrent, Thornberry asked what "DEFCON One", a status of the United States nuclear defence rating, meant.
Thornberry was promoted to Shadow Foreign Secretary in June 2016 after Corbyn fired Hilary Benn. She held the role of Shadow Brexit Secretary concurrently until Keir Starmer took on the role later that year. She accused Sky News presenter Dermot Murnaghan of sexism after he asked her to name the French Foreign Minister (Jean-Marc Ayrault) and the president of South Korea, which she was unable to do.
In October 2016, Thornberry stated that she opposed Britain's involvement in the Saudi Arabian–led intervention in Yemen against the Shia Houthis. She said that "while Saudi Arabia will remain a valued strategic, security and economic ally in the years to come, our support for their forces in Yemen must be suspended until the alleged violations of international humanitarian law in that conflict have been fully and independently investigated".
4th term (2017–2019) At the snap 2017 general election, Thornberry was again re-elected with an increased vote share of 62.8% and an increased majority of 20,263. Following the election, she was given the additional role of Shadow First Secretary of State, effectively acting as Corbyn's number 2.
In May 2018 Thornberry said support in Syria for the country's president, Bashar al-Assad, had been "underestimated" in the West. In October 2018 Thornberry criticised Theresa May's government's response to Jamal Khashoggi's disappearance as "too little, too late". She said: "Imagine how this government would have reacted if either Russia or Iran had abducted—and in all likelihood murdered—one of their dissident journalists within the sovereign territory of another country".
5th term (2019–2024) At the 2019 general election, Thornberry was again re-elected, with a decreased vote share of 56.3% and a decreased majority of 17,328.