Jacqui Smith
Jacqueline Jill Smith, Baroness Smith of Malvern is a British politician, broadcaster and life peer who has been serving as Minister of State for Skills since 2024. A member of the Labour Party, she was Member of Parliament 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; she was also the subject of controversy after it emerged that her husband had used taxpayer money to purchase pornographic videos. 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
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 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 following 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, 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 and Margaret Beckett. 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 also introduced legislation to toughen the prostitution laws of England and Wales, making it a criminal offence to pay for sex with a prostitute controlled by a pimp, with the possibility that anyone caught paying for sex with an illegally trafficked woman could face criminal charges.
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.Drug policy
On 19 July 2007, Smith admitted to smoking cannabis a few times in Oxford in the 1980s. "I did break the law... I was wrong... drugs are wrong", she said. Asked why students today should listen when she urged them not to try the drug, she said that the dangers of cannabis use had become clearer, including mental health issues and the increasing strength of the drug over the past 25 years. Smith's admission was made public the day after Gordon Brown appointed her head of a new government review of UK drugs strategy.In May 2008, against the recommendations of her own scientific advisers, Smith reversed the government's 2004 decision to downgrade cannabis to a class C drug, returning it to the status of class B, with the law change taking effect on 26 January 2009. According to her most senior expert drugs adviser Professor David Nutt, the following exchange took place between Smith and himself:
In February 2009, Smith was accused by Nutt of making a political decision in rejecting the scientific advice to downgrade ecstasy from a class A drug. The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs report on ecstasy, based on a 12-month study of 4,000 academic papers, concluded that it is nowhere near as dangerous as other class A drugs such as heroin and crack cocaine, and should be downgraded to class B alongside amphetamines and cannabis. The advice was not followed; the government saying that it was "not prepared to send a message to young people that we take ecstasy less seriously". Smith was also widely criticised by the scientific community for bullying Professor Nutt into apologising for his factual comments that, in the course of a normal year, more people died from falling off horses than died from taking ecstasy.