Raised on benefits, secondhand clothes and food parcels, Emily Thornberry joined the Labour party at the age of 17 because she believed that “it wasn’t fair that things had been so hard”.
She went on to become a human rights lawyer and in 2005 a member of parliament, when she was elected by a majority of under 500 votes to represent Islington South and Finsbury, a north London constituency with large disparities in wealth which has sometimes been seen as a metaphor for New Labour.
While her mother was a teacher and her father an international lawyer who taught at the London School of Economics, Thornberry has described a far from comfortable childhood after they divorced when she was seven and she and her siblings moved to social housing in Guildford with her mother, who later became a Labour councillor and mayor.
After reading law at Kent University, where she met her husband, Christopher Nugee, Thornberry started work in a clerkship and eventually joined the chambers of Michael Mansfield.
Her first electoral run, in Canterbury in 2001, was unsuccessful – she has described it as “a pretty bleak time: I’d come across the dinosaur tendency in the party”. Then she was selected to fight Islington and Finsbury after Chris Smith retired from parliament in 2005.
On the ground in her constituency on the day after the misjudged tweet which resulted in her resignation as Labour’s shadow attorney general, there were mixed views among members of the public about their MP’s troubles.
“That’s politics isn’t it,” said Terry Edwards, a florist on Islington’s Essex Road. “MPs are supposed to think before they speak.”
But he didn’t believe Thornberry’s tweeted picture of a white van and St George’s flags at a house in Rochester was a sackable offence.
“She was trying to suggest that the people in the house weren’t educated, but she’s entitled to her opinion. It’s a shame you’re not allowed to be proud to be English any more.”
Kate Rushbrook, who works as a carer, told the Guardian: “For an MP to do that is silly, but offensive stretches it too far. A lot of what goes on in the media is exaggerated and people who don’t really think about it take it as real, and it’s not real. If you read between the lines, it’s not as bad as people make out.”
However, Tom Hadkiss, who works for a local web design company, said that the tweet demonstrated a lack of respect for voters, before adding that he believed it was a shame that the St George’s flag was so associated with the National Front and football hooligans: “I’d say it was a bigger debate about the George flag and what that represents.”
Kim Follett, a receptionist, thought Thornberry had no choice but to resign and that the tweet “absolutely wasn’t appropriate”. “She was obviously trying to be clever and it backfired. We all knew what she meant [by tweeting the picture].”
“There was nowhere to go after that,” said Follett, “because she’d made her feelings clear about the people she was making fun of and the people she was making fun of are probably the people that would – or possibly would – vote Labour.”
Patricia Fernandez Reid, a transport consultant, said she did not see how the tweet was snobbish, but added: “Even if it was, maybe she deserved a hand-slap or something, but I don’t think she should resign over something like that.” Fernandez Reid did not think the story was important enough to make the front pages: “I think it has distracted from the issue at hand basically, [which is] what happened at Rochester.”
Working-class voters of the kind Thornberry is accused of mocking are not in short supply in Islington. Despite being caricatured by some commentators as the home of the intelligentsia, it remains the 14th most deprived borough in England and the fifth most deprived in London. Of the area’s children, 41% live in poverty, giving it the second-highest level of child poverty in the country, compared with a national average of 20%.
That said, at least one constituent had the area’s sky-rocketing property prices in mind when they saw the funny side of the debacle. “I understand she was so excited to see a three-bedroom terrace worth under £2m that she just had to tweet about it,” one man quipped, before running away without giving his name.
