“Well there we are,” Emily Thornberry said with a smirk, as she turned David Dimbleby’s thorny remark against him. It was election night, and the esteemed BBC presenter had said that Labour was heading towards “not a coalition of chaos, just chaos”, the shadow foreign secretary reminded him that just as the Tories were still aiming for a majority, so was her own party. Neither party got one in the end, but the short clip – and image of that self-satisfied grin – soon became one of the iconic moments of the night, and cemented Thornberry’s status as an unlikely Labour hero.
The Islington South MP is currently being tipped as a potential future leader, after it was reported that Unite general secretary Len McCluskey would back her in a post-Corbyn contest. While politicians sacked from the frontbench often make it back into the spotlight, Thornberry’s journey from her infamous Rochester tweet in 2014 to shadow cabinet superstar is an interesting one. She isn’t, after all, a long-term ally of Corbyn’s; they might be constituency neighbours but her natural home in the party was always somewhere around the soft left.
Thornberry also doesn’t seem like an obvious choice for a Labour party desperate to hold on to its northern heartlands and working-class support base – she may have grown up on a council estate and gone to a secondary modern, but that was in Surrey, and she is married to a wealthy QC, has a cut-glass accent and owns several houses. What she is, however, is fun: Emily Thornberry has been having the time of her life in the past few months, and isn’t scared to show it.
She was pictured gleefully petting dogs, rabbits and alpacas on the campaign trail; announced the results of a Kylie v Danii contest at gay club Push the Button in Vauxhall, and was spotted behind May and Corbyn during the state opening of parliament, laughing, head thrown back, about heaven knows what.
Even in her daily job, it’s clear to anyone watching that she has been loving every second of it. She gently twisted the knife with Damian Green and David Lidington at PMQs in a way her boss rarely can – and made it look as if she was giving herself an early Christmas present. She also rarely hesitates to be petulant, once replying “No, not really” when asked on Talk Radio if she wanted to respond to some comments made by a Falklands veteran about Labour’s stance on the islands.
Thornberry’s behaviour is refreshing, not because politicians never get to have fun while doing their job, but because women don’t normally get to be seen doing so. A lot of high-profile male MPs get to revel in what Westminster offers them – Boris Johnson is the most obvious example, but other former ministers like Ed Vaizey were always seen as living it up in their role.
Women, on the other hand, have to choose between power and hedonism. Margaret Thatcher was the Iron Lady; Margaret Beckett and Harriet Harman were the caretaker leaders in more ways than one, and the latter is open about her choice to turn feminism into a necessary but stern crusade.
Theresa May is hardly an exception to that rule for women – it is sometimes difficult to understand why she fought so hard to get a job that mostly seems to make her uncomfortable. Thornberry, on the other hand, has apparently decided to cast herself as a charming Lazarus. She may occasionally bumble her way through interviews and have trouble remembering details of her party’s policies, but she’ll never knowingly miss an opportunity to showcase her irreverent cackle.
Having a good sense of humour can be a useful shield against criticism, which might be why she has gained support from people in unlikely corners of the party, but it is unclear what comes next. As Boris Johnson has shown, voters and party members like a class clown until they don’t, and as Emmanuel Macron is currently discovering across the Channel, openly enjoying the act of running a country can be a good way of going abseiling down the polls.
Neil Kinnock also famously struggled with his lighter side as leader of the opposition, and later talked about how attempts to make him appear more statesmanlike always made him – and everyone else – feel uncomfortable. This may well not matter: Jeremy Corbyn will almost certainly lead Labour into the next general election, and given the recent volatility of British politics, any predictions beyond that – even into the next few months – feel futile. But however things turn out, it seems Emily Thornberry will end up having the last laugh.
• Marie Le Conte is a French freelance journalist living in London
