Junior ministerial offices 1999‍–‍2006

Minister of State for Schools and Learners
In office 6 May 2005 – 5 May 2006
Prime Minister	Tony Blair
Preceded by	Stephen Twigg
Succeeded by	Jim Knight
Minister of State for Industry and the Regions
In office 13 June 2003 – 6 May 2005
Prime Minister	Tony Blair
Preceded by	Brian Wilson
Succeeded by	Alun Michael
Deputy Minister for Women
In office 13 June 2003 – 6 May 2005
Prime Minister	Tony Blair
Preceded by	Barbara Roche
Succeeded by	Meg Munn
Minister of State for Health Services
In office 11 June 2001 – 13 June 2003
Prime Minister	Tony Blair
Preceded by	John Denham
Succeeded by	Rosie Winterton
Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education and Employment
In office 29 July 1999 – 10 June 2001
Prime Minister	Tony Blair
Preceded by	Charles Clarke
Succeeded by	John Healey

Member of the House of Lords
Lord Temporal

Incumbent

Assumed office
18 July 2024
Life Peerage

Member of Parliament
for Redditch

In office
1 May 1997 – 12 April 2010

Preceded by

Constituency established

Succeeded by

Karen Lumley

Personal details

Born

Jacqueline Jill Smith

3 November 1962 (age 62)
Malvern, Worcestershire, England

Political party

Labour

Spouses

Richard Timney

(m. 1987; separated 2019)

Children

Alma mater

Hertford College, Oxford (BA)
Worcester College of Higher Education (PGCE)

Jacqueline Jill Smith, Baroness Smith of Malvern, PC (born 3 November 1962), is a British politician, broadcaster and life peer who has been serving as Minister of State for Skills and Government spokesperson for Equalities since 2024. A member of the Labour Party, she was Member of Parliament (MP) for Redditch from 1997 to 2010. Smith previously served as Home Secretary under Gordon Brown from 2007 to 2009 and was the first woman to hold the position.

Smith was born and raised in Malvern, Worcestershire. She attended Hertford College, Oxford, before training to become a teacher at Worcester College of Higher Education and having a career as an economics and business studies teacher. She was elected for Redditch at the 1997 general election. She joined the government in 1999 and served in a series of ministerial positions under Prime Minister Tony Blair. In the 2006 cabinet reshuffle she was promoted to Chief Whip.

Following the formation of the Brown ministry in 2007, Smith became the first female Home Secretary. She resigned as Home Secretary in June 2009 following her involvement in the parliamentary expenses scandal in which she had falsely claimed that a room in her sister's house was her main home. Smith, one of the highest profile figures involved in the scandal, then lost her seat as MP for Redditch in the 2010 general election. Between leaving the House of Commons and rejoining the government in 2024, she remained in public life as a political pundit and took up roles in various other sectors, such as health and media.

Early life and career
Political career
After politics (2010–2024)
Return to politics as a member of the House of Lords
Personal life
Honours
See also

Early life and career

Smith was born in Malvern, Worcestershire. She attended Dyson Perrins High School in Malvern. Her parents were teachers, and both Labour councillors, although her mother briefly joined the Social Democratic Party. Her local MP, Conservative backbencher Michael Spicer, recalled in Parliament in 2003 how he had first met her when he addressed the sixth form at The Chase School, where her mother was a teacher; he joked: "So great was my eloquence that she immediately rushed off and joined the Labour Party." Smith obtained a place to study philosophy, politics and economics at Hertford College, Oxford.

After graduating, she moved to London and worked as a researcher for Labour MP Terry Davis.

Deciding she wanted a career outside politics, Smith moved out of London and gained a Postgraduate Certificate in Education from Worcester College of Higher Education. Working as a school teacher, she taught economics at Arrow Vale High School in Redditch from 1986 to 1988 and at Worcester Sixth Form College, before becoming head of economics and General National Vocational Qualification co-ordinator at Haybridge High School, Hagley in 1990. During this time Smith held positions in the local Labour party and campaigned on behalf of the party.

Smith worked as secretary of the National Organisation of Labour Students and describes herself as having a "feminist background". She served on Redditch Borough Council from 1991 to 1996, where she chaired the development committee. Smith was unsuccessful in an attempt to be elected as (Labour) MP for the safe Conservative seat of Mid Worcestershire in the 1992 general election, despite achieving a 4.9% swing. In early 1997 she was identified by The Independent as a potential future cabinet member.

Political career

Member of Parliament

Smith was selected through an all-women shortlist as the Labour candidate for Redditch, a new constituency created after a boundary review. She won the seat in the 1997 general election, as part of a then-record number of female MPs elected to the House of Commons.

Smith entered the Government in July 1999, as a Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department for Education and Employment, working with the Minister for School Standards Estelle Morris. She then became a Minister of State at the Department of Health after the 2001 general election. She was appointed as deputy Minister for Women in 2003, working alongside Secretary of State Patricia Hewitt. In this role she published the government's proposals for same-sex civil partnerships, a system designed to offer same-sex couples an opportunity to gain legal recognition for their relationships with an associated set of rights and responsibilities.

In the 2005 general election Smith had a majority of just 2,716 (6.7% of the vote), owing to boundary changes.

Minister for Schools

Following the 2005 general election, Smith was appointed Minister of State for Schools at the Department for Education and Skills, replacing Stephen Twigg who had lost his seat. Teacher trade union sources stated that Smith "talked to us on our level".

Chief Whip

In the 2006 cabinet reshuffle Smith was appointed as the government's Chief Whip. In a period when supporters of Gordon Brown were pushing Prime Minister Tony Blair to resign, she was successfully able to calm the situation down. The BBC's political editor Nick Robinson described her as being effective at "making peace between the warring Blair and Brown factions".

Smith was regarded as a loyal Blairite during Tony Blair's premiership, a position reflected in her voting record, and she was brought to tears by Blair's farewell appearance in the House of Commons.

Home Secretary

In Gordon Brown's first cabinet reshuffle on 28 June 2007, Smith expressed interest in becoming Secretary of State for Education, but was appointed Home Secretary. She became the first woman to hold the position and the third woman to hold one of the Great Offices of State, after Margaret Thatcher (Prime Minister) and Margaret Beckett (Foreign Secretary). Just one day into her new job bombs were found in London, and a terrorist attack took place in Glasgow the following day.

On 24 January 2008, she announced new powers for the police, including the proposal to permit law enforcement services to hold terrorist suspects or those linked to terrorism for up to 42 days without charging them. In the same month Smith said that she would not feel safe on the streets of London at night. Critics suggested her statements were an admission that the government had failed to tackle crime effectively.

Smith introduced a crime mapping scheme to allow citizens of England and Wales to access local crime information and how to combat crime. As Home Secretary, she was able to announce that minor crime dropped year-on-year under the Labour government, and continued to do so in 2008.

Smith managed to pass the 42-day detention law plans in the House of Commons, despite heavy opposition. The House of Lords voted overwhelmingly against the law, with some of the Lords reportedly characterising it as "fatally flawed, ill-thought-through and unnecessary", stating that "it seeks to further erode fundamental legal and civil rights". In March 2009, Smith published the first ever public Counter Terror Strategy.

When Conservative MP Damian Green was arrested in his Commons office, Smith stated that she was not informed of the impending arrest. The Metropolitan Police said that Green was "arrested on suspicion of conspiring to commit misconduct in a public office and aiding and abetting, counselling or procuring misconduct in a public office". A junior Home Office official, Christopher Galley, was later arrested regarding the same alleged offences as Green, and was released on bail. He was not charged, but he was suspended from his Home Office job while the investigation continued. He was later dismissed from his position for gross misconduct. Green did not dispute having dealings with the Home Office official.

In March 2009, at the height of the expenses furore, a leaked poll of Labour Party members revealed that Smith was considered to be the worst performing member of the Cabinet, with only 56% of her party believing she was doing a good job.

National identity legislation

In May 2009, Smith announced that the cost of introducing the National Identity Card project, had risen to an estimated £5.3 billion, and that it would first become compulsory for foreign students and airport staff. It was planned that the cards would be made available from high-street shops at an estimated cost of £60. Smith defended her decision to use high-street shops, and stated that the hope was to make enrolment in the scheme a less intimidating experience and to make the cards easier to access. She claimed, despite evidence to the contrary, that the majority of the population was in favour of the scheme. In another privacy-related issue, Smith said she was disappointed at the European Court of Human Rights' decision to strike down a law allowing the government to store the DNA and fingerprints of people with no criminal record; in December 2008 an estimated 850,000 such DNA samples were being held in England and Wales. Her compromise was to scale down the length of time that data could be kept, with a maximum limit of 12 years. This went against the spirit of the Court's decision.

Exclusion list

On 5 May 2009, Smith named 16 "undesirable individuals", including convicted murderers and advocates of violence, who were to be banned from entering the United Kingdom over their alleged threat to public order. Controversially, the exclusion list included outspoken American talk radio host Michael Savage, who instructed London lawyers to sue Smith for "serious and damaging defamatory allegations".

A Home Office spokeswoman said: "The home secretary has made it clear that if such a case was brought that any legal proceedings would be robustly defended." Smith defended the choice of individuals by declaring, "If you can't live by the rules that we live by, the standards and the values that we live by, we should exclude you from this country and, what's more, now we will make public those people that we have excluded." The Guardian criticised Smith's actions.

Leaving Parliament

In the general election on 6 May 2010, Smith lost her seat as MP for Redditch to Karen Lumley of the Conservative Party, who won the seat with a majority of 5,821 votes. Smith said that she had been "immensely honoured" to serve Redditch. Smith wrote an open letter to the new Conservative home secretary Theresa May, advising her that the post was often seen as a "poisoned chalice".

After politics (2010–2024)

She regularly appeared on This Week and Question Time, and was also a regular weekly commentator on Sky News' Press Preview. She also contributed to The Purple Book in 2011, putting forward new ideas on crime and policing.

On 24 August 2011 it emerged that Smith had arranged for two prisoners on day-release to paint a room in her house, when they were supposed to be undertaking work to benefit the community. The Ministry of Justice launched an internal investigation into the matter, and Smith made a donation to the charity overseeing the scheme. The episode was condemned by Matthew Elliot of the TaxPayers' Alliance, who stated: "It's a disgrace that a former home secretary has used prisoners as her personal handymen".

Smith previously co-hosted a weekly show on talk radio station LBC alongside former Conservative cabinet minister David Mellor – she took over from Ken Livingstone after he left to contest the London mayoral race of 2012. She became chair of University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust in December 2013, though in 2020 she stepped down from this role temporarily to perform in Strictly Come Dancing.

Smith publicly supported the campaign for the UK to remain in the European Union in the 2016 EU referendum, and continued to argue for a second referendum on the issue until the 2019 general election.

Since 2017, Smith has co-hosted a weekly political and current affairs podcast, entitled For The Many, alongside LBC broadcaster Iain Dale. She has appeared on Good Morning Britain on ITV. She is also the chair of both the Jo Cox Foundation and the Sandwell Children's Trust.

In September 2020, it was announced that Smith would compete in the eighteenth series of Strictly Come Dancing. She was partnered with Anton Du Beke, and became the first celebrity to be voted off the show.

In 2021 she was appointed as chair of both Barts Health NHS Trust and Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust.

Return to politics as a member of the House of Lords

Following Labour's victory in the 2024 general election, Prime Minister Keir Starmer appointed Smith Minister of State for Skills; a life peerage was conferred on her to allow her to hold the position. She was ennobled on the 17 July 2024 with the title Baroness Smith of Malvern, of Malvern in the County of Worcestershire.

Smith was introduced to the House of Lords on 18 July 2024. She made her maiden speech in the Lords on 19 July during a debate on the King's Speech.

Personal life

Smith married Richard Timney in October 1987 and they have two sons. While an MP, Smith employed her husband as her parliamentary aide on a salary of £40,000. In January 2020, she and Timney announced they had ended their marriage.

Honours

2003: Appointed to the Privy Council of the United Kingdom, giving her the honorific title "The Right Honourable" for life.
2013: She was recognized as one of the BBC's 100 women.

Jacqui Smith facts for kids

Contents