Jack Straw

Jack Straw (born August 3, 1946, Essex, England) British Labour Party politician who held numerous government posts, including home secretary (1997–2001), foreign minister (2001–06), leader of the House of Commons (2006–07), and lord chancellor and secretary of state for justice (2007–10).

Straw studied law at the University of Leeds and then received training as a barrister in London at the Inns of Court School of Law (now The City Law School, part of City University London). He served (1971–74) on the Inner London Education Authority and was its chair in 1973, before working as a special adviser to Labour Party cabinet ministers Barbara Castle (1974–76) and Peter Shore (1976–77). After a brief stint as a television researcher, Straw entered Parliament in 1979 as MP for Castle’s former seat of Blackburn, Lancashire. He rose steadily through Labour’s ranks and was elected to the party’s opposition shadow cabinet in 1987. During the party’s internal ideological conflict in the 1980s, he moved from being a traditional left-winger to becoming a more centrist modernizer. He was the first leading member of the Labour Party to propose that it repeal its socialist commitment—Clause IV of the party’s constitution—to the state control of industry. In 1994 Straw managed Tony Blair’s successful campaign to be elected party leader, and one of Blair’s first acts on becoming leader was to win the party’s agreement to rewrite Clause IV.

Following Labour’s election victory in 1997, Straw was appointed home secretary. He quickly established his progressive credentials by setting up an inquiry into charges of racism in the London police force, promoting the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into British law, and refusing to allow the former Chilean head of state, Augusto Pinochet, to return home following Pinochet’s October 1998 arrest in London. (The arrest followed a request by the Spanish government that Pinochet be extradited to Spain to face charges of murder. He was allowed to return to Chile in March 2000 when a panel of doctors advised that he was unfit to face trial.) Straw upset many progressives, however, by initiating legislation to withdraw the right of some defendants to be tried by a jury, introducing stricter requirements for people seeking political asylum in Great Britain, diluting Labour’s pre-1997 election promise to establish a freedom of information law, and resisting calls to decriminalize the consumption of so-called “soft” drugs, such as marijuana.

In a 2001 cabinet reshuffle, Straw received the foreign and Commonwealth affairs portfolio. As foreign minister, Straw supported the invasion of Iraq as well as the expansion of the European Union (EU). Despite the latter position, however, Straw was a known skeptic of the euro, the EU’s single currency. Shortly after Labour’s poor showing in the May 2006 local elections, Blair overhauled his cabinet, and Straw was removed as foreign minister and made leader of the House of Commons. Later that year he caused controversy when he stated that Muslim women should not wear full veils. After Gordon Brown became prime minister in 2007, Straw was named justice secretary and lord chancellor, thereby becoming the first member of the House of Commons to take up the latter post. The following year he outlined potential reforms to the House of Lords, which included the election of a certain percentage of members and a reduction in the number of lords. In 2009 he sparked debate after stating that oil deals with Libya had played a “very big part” in the decision to release Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi—a Libyan convicted of bombing Pan Am flight 103 in 1988—from a Scottish prison. In the general election of 2010 Straw easily retained his Blackburn constituency but lost his cabinet position when Labour was ousted from office. In February 2015 Straw temporarily resigned from the Labour Party after allegations surfaced of his involvement in an influence-peddling scandal that resulted from a sting investigation conducted by Channel Four and The Daily Telegraph. Having already announced in 2013 that he would not stand for reelection, Straw retired from the House of Commons in 2015.