She was forced to resign three years ago, but is now in pole position on the Labour frontbench. Is she the tonic politics needs?

Emily Thornberry was seven when her life went horribly wrong. Her father walked out on the family, leaving her mother to bring up three small children alone and penniless. They lost their home, were raided by bailiffs, and had to survive on free school meals and food parcels. Too poor even for pets, her mother had the family’s cats put down.

“The biggest thing was the cats, you know.” Thornberry isn’t joking. “I was so upset about it. But she just said, ‘It was all too much. It was all too much.’ She was suddenly on her own with three kids, and she had to start claiming benefits and move us into a council house.”

One unexpected consequence of the family crisis, however, was a solution to a conundrum Thornberry would encounter in her career. Her mother signed her up to an after-school choir – probably, she thinks, just to give herself one less child to worry about for an hour a week. But as a young chorister, Thornberry was trained to control her voice, breathe from the diaphragm and thus overcome a problem that has beset every female politician from Margaret Thatcher to Hillary Clinton. Women in public life have always been accused of sounding either too shrill or too robotic to be taken seriously. But when the shadow foreign secretary talks, the star of the show is her voice. Rich and smooth, like salted caramel, it pulls off the trick of sounding simultaneously authoritative and informal. Thornberry is a spellbindingly assured speaker, so much so that it’s easy to forget that only three years ago her political career looked as if it might well be over.

In November 2014, the then shadow attorney general tweeted a photo of a house in Kent draped in flags of St George, with a white van parked outside, for no discernible reason her critics could identify other than snobbish mockery. In the febrile Twittersphere, Thornberry was damned as the worst sort of sneering metropolitan elite – snooty Lady Nugee, a “champagne socialist” married to the high court judge Sir Christopher, looking down on the riff-raff from her multimillion-pound Islington house. It wasn’t a good look, and Ed Miliband forced her to resign.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest With Jeremy Corbyn at this year’s Labour party conference in Brighton. Photograph: Pete Summers/Rex/Shutterstock

Three years on, Thornberry is credited as a key architect of Labour’s comeback, and widely tipped to be the party’s next leader. She deputises for Jeremy Corbyn in PMQs and, as one political commentator put it, “certainly gets how to dominate the session: she’s theatrical, clearly enjoys herself, can think on her feet and has a dry wit.” Her relentless attack on the government’s impression of “sleepwalking” towards no deal on Brexit has been credited with making that a significantly less likely outcome, and she recently had Boris Johnson on the ropes over his carelessness concerning Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s imprisonment in Iran.

“If Boris is going to stay in post, then he has to start to pay attention, and start taking the job seriously,” she says. “And start understanding that what he says means something. When you’ve made a mistake, you have to admit you’ve made a mistake, and correct it. What was it, 12 days? And then to have [Michael] Gove appearing on television. What was he playing at? He was trying to be loyal to Boris, but how can you do that when there’s a young mother languishing in jail. How could he not know? Surely he must know what the true situation is.”

As for Priti Patel’s off-piste adventures, “It just shows a lack of discipline, because there’s no one around to discipline. All the leading people in the Tory party are looking further than Brexit, to their individual futures and their chances of becoming leader. Theresa May is the titular head, but it’s as if she’s crashing around depending on who puts the most pressure on her.”

I would not be fine holding Trump’s hand. I would have pulled my hand away

It is a remarkable turnaround for Thornberry, and part of the explanation is, of course, political. As one of the few frontbench Corbynistas reassuringly familiar to Blairites and Brownites, she cuts a unifying figure within the party. After a 20-year career at the bar as a criminal barrister, she brings a heavyweight’s experience to frontbench politics. But if her resignation ultimately came down to optics – the elusive power of public perception – it seems very clear to me after spending time with Thornberry that optics also play a big part in her success.

We meet at a hotel in Blackpool early one Saturday in early November, where she is about to make a speech to the North West Labour conference. As she is one of the headline names, I expect her to be sequestered away in a room until she is due on stage, but instead find her in the lobby amid the crush of lanyards and polystyrene coffee cups, nursing a hangover after the previous night’s gala dinner.

She opens her speech with a joke about needing aspirin, pays playful tribute to senior colleagues’ karaoke skills and gets a big laugh for calling Donald Trump an “enormous asteroid of awfulness”, before moving on to Brexit, Boris and the currently perilous reputation of British foreign policy. More conversational than oratorical, she finishes to rapturous applause, with large sections of the audience on its feet.

Afterwards, she tours the lobby stands, chats to delegates, submits to a frenzy of selfies and gives a TV interview, during which she is asked about everything from the northern powerhouse to sexual harassment.

The interviewer looks amazed when she tells him she’s been groped and flashed at in the street. Thornberry finds this bewildering, if not surprising. She later tells me she was once assaulted in the lift of a tower block, and “I remember saying to the police, ‘Well, this sort of thing happens, doesn’t it?’ I started reeling off to the cops, ‘Well, this has happened to me, and that has happened to me, and this’, and I could sense them getting increasingly uncomfortable. I began to realise that they thought I was a little bit crazy and must be making all this up. And yet, when you talk to women, you know it happens to everybody.” She experienced plenty of sexual harassment on arriving in parliament in 2005. “But I just ignored it. It’s about power, and it’s about misogyny. It’s about putting you in your place.”

We catch a train to Liverpool, where she addresses a Labour Students conference, takes questions and poses for a million more selfies. Night has fallen by the time our train arrives back in London; the following morning, she will be up early and back on duty again, doing the rounds of the Sunday politics television shows. The last time Thornberry took a weekend off was in June.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Outside her office in Portcullis House, Westminster, last month. Photograph: Steve Schofield/The Guardian

It is the long, unglamorous slog of opposition, fuelled by KitKats and leavened by the occasional moment of The Thick Of It farce. There is a minor dress emergency before her Blackpool speech, when gaping cleavage sends an aide scurrying for a needle and thread. No dark cotton can be found, so the black dress is hastily stitched up with bright purple thread, which preserves Thornberry’s modesty but looks a little surprising. “Oh well, it was that or bright yellow,” she shrugs philosophically. There is another brief panic before the TV interview begins, when the aide spots that Thornberry’s cardigan has obscured her poppy and dives in to rearrange the outfit and spare her boss the Daily Mail’s wrath. Our photoshoot takes place in her Westminster office on another day; she arrives immaculately groomed in a beautiful silk dress, but before the shoot is over, she is clambering on to a chair and out of the window to smoke a fag on the roof.

All politicians must wrestle with the mysterious and conflicting rules of an electable public image. I have encountered few, if any, however, who find this less problematic than Thornberry. Strikingly tactile and relaxed, when she talks, she leans in closely, her body language almost conspiratorial, creating an instant impression of intimacy – yet her stride is heavy and purposeful, commanding authority without grandeur. When she laughs, which is a lot, her eyes crinkle almost until they close – the very opposite of Clinton’s wide-eyed beam that US voters found so unnerving. The version of herself that Thornberry presents on stage or camera is indistinguishable from the one I see chatting with cab drivers, and she talks to me in the same easy register whether or not the Dictaphone is running. In a political era that prizes authenticity above all else, Thornberry is a natural.

When we meet in her office in Portcullis House, Thornberry’s media adviser, Damian McBride – the infamous spin doctor forced to resign by Gordon Brown in 2009 for plotting to smear senior Tories – is nowhere to be seen. Given the current shadow cabinet’s distrust of mainstream media, I’m surprised when the only aide in evidence leaves us alone.

Thornberry sits at a little table away from her desk and pours tea from a china set. She is heavy with dismay at the government’s belligerent approach to Brexit negotiations. “If I had a row with my husband, it’s not going to work my saying, ‘Right, if you don’t do what I want, I’m going to walk out.’ It doesn’t work on any level. What you do is you go in and you say, ‘I have a problem. You have a problem. Let’s try and sort this out together.’ You don’t come to an agreement with people who you’re falling out with badly.”

Like most of her colleagues, the MP for Islington South & Finsbury was a passionate remainer. Why doesn’t Labour reposition itself as the anti-Brexit party and promise to reverse Article 50, if elected, before time runs out? “I don’t think we should be undermining our democracy. I think there are people who came out to vote in that referendum who hadn’t voted for literally decades, because they thought they weren’t listened to. And then we, the political establishment, turn around and go: ‘Oh, you’re too stupid. We’re not going to listen to you. We’ve actually got a better idea – we’re going to stay’? You just can’t do it. You just can’t do it.”

Labour could, I suggest, offer the country a second referendum once the terms of Brexit are known. “But there isn’t that great shift in the polls, is there?” Thornberry says. “So we just have to look after the country as best we can. We have to look after our democracy, we have to look after our economy, we have to leave, and we have to get the best possible deal. And I certainly hope we have a general election before any more damage is done by this government. We can do things differently and that’s the hope that the Labour party offers. There is another way.”

When you know my background, you know I’m not looking down on people. I was brought up on a council estate

As foreign secretary, she would pursue a very different kind of diplomacy, she says. “I think that Boris’s temptation to show off and make jokes is not helpful. I don’t think you negotiate with people by going around telling them that they’re like Nazi guards or it’s all about prosecco. It’s all good fun and so on, but this isn’t a dinner party. This is representing your country and looking after the country’s interests. I mean, people don’t take him seriously. People I’ve spoken to say that they laugh at Britain. I hate that.”

She would certainly take a different approach towards the current White House. “What I’m trying to do is make our friendship closer with America, but not necessarily Donald Trump. We’re capable of independent thought in a way that the current government doesn’t seem to be in relation to America.” Had she been in Theresa May’s shoes when the president held the prime minister’s hand, “I would have pulled my hand away. His wife can do it,” she chuckles, “why can’t anybody else? But, seriously, yes, I would have.

“I would not be fine being seen holding his hand, because I don’t want to hold his hand. I don’t want anybody to think that I have any agreement with him, or any sort of close relationship with him. I think that he’s a danger and I don’t think that he’s temperamentally suited to be president of the United States. The thing that worries me most is that he has a nuclear button. How do we make sure that there are checks and balances to make sure that he doesn’t, in a fit of pique at three in the morning, decide: ‘That’s it’?”

She genuinely worries about Trump blowing up the world? “Yes, I do.” As a real and present danger? “I think it is. I think it would be complacent for us to think otherwise.”

To hear a shadow foreign secretary talk about the US president in such terms is without precedent. “I agree, but he is not the United States. I don’t have a problem with America, but I do have a fundamental problem with Donald Trump.”

Does she think he will be impeached? “It’s part of the complete uncertainty. We don’t know whether he will serve the full term. Will he just decide one morning he doesn’t want to do it any more? I mean, who knows?” I suggest Trump’s vanity would rule out walking away. “I don’t know. His vanity might also say, ‘Well, if you don’t want me, I’m off.’”

I put the question another way: does she hope he is impeached? She looks conflicted. “I do want America back in the mainstream. But then, obviously, the other side of it is that the American political system can seize up if there’s an impeachment. It can suck all the oxygen out of the American political system, just like Brexit does in Britain.”

Thornberry says she spends a lot of time building relationships with both Democrats and Republicans in Washington, “so that they know where we’re coming from”. Yet I’m struck during our visit to the north-west by how few people in this country appear to know who she is. Inside the conference venues, her presence ignites a flurry of celebrity thrill, but the moment we step outside, she becomes anonymous. Only once does anyone appear to recognise her. “You look,” a ticket conductor tells her, “like that Labour politician.” At first I take her invisibility to indicate she still has a long way to go, but I change my mind as the day wears on. It’s quite a skill to blend in seamlessly on a rickety old train to Preston, and look equally congruent amid the lofty splendour of Westminster.

This ambidextrous class identity is probably not a coincidence. When I ask if Ed Miliband had been right to fire her for the England flags tweet, she points out that her own brother was a van-driving builder. “When you know my background, if you think about it, I’m not looking down on people. I was brought up on a council estate in a house that was very similar.” She often cites the poverty of her childhood in her defence against the charge of snobbery. But although very real, this hardship is not quite the full story.

***

She was the third most abused politician online this year. ‘But I want girls to look up to me, not feel sorry for me’

Thornberry was born in Guildford in 1960, the eldest of three children, to middle-class, politically active parents. Her father was an Oxbridge-educated barrister, academic, foreign correspondent and international human rights lawyer, before later joining the United Nations, where he became assistant secretary general.

When he left the family for another woman, Thornberry was plunged into an unfamiliar new life of domestic distress and free school dinners. “We had to queue up for lunch separately, with different coloured tickets. It was shaming.” In photographs of her and her two younger brothers taken around the time their parents split up, “our eyes are very, very deep. Sort of black eyes, big rims under them. We were quite badly disturbed kids.” She remembers sitting at the back of the class one day, “and the teacher stood behind me throughout the lesson, while she taught, and combed my hair, because my hair was such a mess.” It doesn’t sound as if her mother could cope. “She used to sit up late with me and drink whisky and talk to me about how terrible my dad was and how unfair things were.”

Thornberry failed her 11-plus and went to the local secondary modern, where she “didn’t really fit in” and was badly bullied. “The school was on the edge of our estate, and I used to go home through a hole in the fence, and they used to wait for me. It was in the days when kids wore platform shoes, and I used to get really quite badly beaten up. They tried to force a sanitary towel down my throat.”

Sometimes she would visit her father, who had moved to west London with his beautiful new partner. “I remember there was a photograph that my dad had taken of her nude, which was a lovely picture, but I was quite shocked.” Was his world bewilderingly bohemian for a Guildford council house girl? “Yes, yes. He was terribly glamorous. But he wasn’t terribly interested in us.”

He was, though, ambitious for his children. “From Dad, there was, ‘You’re bright, anything is possible, get on with it.’ From Mum, it was much more kind of taking the mickey out of us, you know, undermining our confidence.” The mixed signals were confusing, and she became an angry, lonely teenager.

As she grew, though, so did her father’s influence. “I was going out with a squaddie and he said, ‘Don’t worry about all of this. When you get to 16, we’ll get married.’ And I just thought, oh my God, no. A lot of my friends from school were thinking in those terms. But there seemed to be a big disconnect between my dad and the way we lived.”

At 15, she fell out with her mother and went to live with her father; but when she was 17 he went to New York “for the weekend”, joined the UN and never came back. Alone in London, she resat her O-levels, took A-levels and won a place at the University of Kent, followed by bar school. “I was poor, but I was ambitious and driven and chippy.”

She and her husband met at bar school while playing bridge. Public school-educated and unambiguously posh, “he just loved me. He loved me unconditionally, and he has done for 35 years. I seriously think the big turning point in my life was meeting my husband. To be fair, his mum has said that his meeting me was the making of him, too.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘He loved me unconditionally, and he has done for 35 years’: with her husband, the high court judge Sir Christopher Nugee. Photograph: Andrew Parsons/i-Images

Were there cultural or class tensions? “There was quite a lot of that when we first met, and it was a challenge,” she chuckles. “His family were quite surprised. What did his mother call me? A prickly little thing.” His grandmother was even doubtful about the name Emily. “It’s all very well,” she told her grandson, “but a bit below stairs.”

“So it was a bit intimidating, yes. But they were so kind to me and so welcoming and affectionate, they really were, always.” A smile spreads across her face. “It must have been a bit of a shock for them, you know.” In her early career, working for a firm of solicitors, she spent six months sleeping on a friend’s sofa before being rehoused in an east London council flat. “It was on the top floor, faced north-east, and it was freezing. We had a shallow end and a deep end in the lift, because people used to piss in it. His parents came to visit, and it must have been a bit of a surprise for them.”

There is a dauntless quality about Thornberry that she attributes in part to the security of her happy marriage. Her husband is “very protective” and finds the bruising intrusions of her public life much harder than she does. He “loathes” journalists, she says, which I see for myself when he greets her off the train at Euston. He accepts my hand reluctantly, won’t meet my eye and coldly turns his back; I am not so much greeted as dismissed. In a subsequent phone call, she apologises for his hostility, but says the years of being doorstepped in the family home, where they live with their three grown-up children, have taken their toll.

Thornberry herself is so inured by now to the rough and tumble of political life, she says she barely notices when anyone is rude to her. She was the third most abused female politician online in the country this year, after Diane Abbott and the SNP’s Joanna Cherry, “But I don’t talk about it. I don’t want to be a victim and I’m not a victim. I have other things I want to talk about.” Does she worry about her personal safety? She shoots a meaningful look. “Oh, yes. But I don’t talk about that. I want young girls to look at me as a role model – someone they might want to be. I don’t want them to feel sorry for me.”

The only thing that does intimidate her, Thornberry says, apart from “very cultured, well-read people – you know, intellectuals”, is standing in at PMQs. “Yes, that does make me a bit nervous,” she laughs. But I suspect she secretly loves it, and I find her self-confidence mesmerising. It’s very rare for an opposition politician who has never held office to look so convincingly like a minister in waiting, but then, as she says, “The government could collapse literally any day now. And it could be on something that nobody anticipates – and that will be it.”

The one and only time I see Thornberry look uneasy is when I ask if she shares the view of many of her colleagues that the next Labour leader must be a woman. She evades the question repeatedly, and I think I can guess why, but ask anyway.

“Oh, God,” she sighs heavily. “I don’t want to open this whole stuff up. I don’t want it to be that I’m quoted in the paper saying, ‘Oh, the next leader of the Labour party should be a woman’ and then there’ll be all this, ‘Oh, why’s she saying that?’ Jeremy is the leader, and I really hope that I will be the next foreign secretary. That’s what I want.”

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