Jack Straw

John Whitaker Straw (born 3 August 1946) is a British politician who served in the Cabinet from 1997 to 2010 under the Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. He held two of the traditional Great Offices of State, as Home Secretary from 1997 to 2001, and Foreign Secretary from 2001 to 2006 under Blair. He was a Member of Parliament (MP) for Blackburn from 1979 to 2015.

Straw was born in Essex and privately educated both at Oaklands School, where his mother worked as a teacher, and later at Brentwood School. He studied Law at the University of Leeds before having a career as a barrister. He served as an adviser to cabinet minister Barbara Castle and was selected to succeed her as MP for the Blackburn constituency when she stood down at the 1979 general election.

From 2007 to 2010, he served as Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain and the Secretary of State for Justice throughout the Brown ministry. Straw is one of only three individuals to have served in Cabinet continuously during the Labour governments from 1997 to 2010; the others were Brown and Alistair Darling. After the Labour Party lost power in the 2010 general election, he briefly served as Shadow Deputy Prime Minister and Shadow Secretary of State for Justice, with the intention of standing down from the frontbench after the subsequent 2010 Labour Party Shadow Cabinet election.

Straw was born in Buckhurst Hill in Essex, the son of (Walter) Arthur Whitaker Straw—an insurance clerk and salesman and former industrial chemist born at Worsbrough near Barnsley, and raised in Woodford Green—and Joan Sylvia Gilbey, a teacher at the independent Oaklands School, whose father was a Loughton bus mechanic and shop steward, and who was distantly related to the gin-making family. After his father (with whom, by the time of his death, Straw and his siblings were reconciled) left the family, Straw was raised by his mother on a council estate in Loughton. Known to his family as John, he started calling himself Jack while in school, in reference to Jack Straw, one of the leaders of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. Straw is of 1/8th Jewish descent (his maternal grandfather's mother came from an Eastern European Jewish family). He himself is a Christian.

Straw was educated at the school at which his mother taught, Oaklands, and when she left there, at Staples Road Primary School, Loughton, then Brentwood School and the University of Leeds. He graduated with a second class degree in Law.

In 1966, he was in a group of 20 student leaders sent to Chile by the Fund for International Student Co-operation, a body led by Meta Ramsay and subsequently alleged to be a Central Intelligence Agency front. While the official purpose of the visit was to help build a youth centre on behalf of the British Council, the students were received by the CIA-backed Christian Democratic president Eduardo Frei Montalva and showed interest in the Socialist opposition leader Salvador Allende, with whom Straw managed to arrange a personal meeting (later denied by himself). The British ambassador to Chile Alexander Stirling reported Straw to the Foreign Office for allegedly attempting to discredit the anticommunist leadership of the National Union of Students (NUS) through a "minor scandal" in British-Chilean relations, and described him as a "troublemaker acting with malice aforethought".

Straw was then elected president of the Leeds University Union, during which time he reluctantly supported a sit-in lasting four days in June 1968. At the 1967 NUS Conference, he unsuccessfully ran for office in the union. In April 1968 he stood unsuccessfully for election as NUS President, but was defeated by Trevor Fisk. However, he was elected as NUS President in 1969, holding this post until 1971. During his tenure he remained under MI5 surveillance as an alleged Communist sympathiser. In 1971, he was elected as a Labour councillor in the London Borough of Islington, a position he held until 1978.

Straw qualified as a barrister at Inns of Court School of Law, practising criminal law for two years from 1972 to 1974. He is a member of The Honourable Society of the Inner Temple and remains active in lecturing to fellow members and students. Between 1971 and 1974, Jack Straw was a member of the Inner London Education Authority, and Deputy Leader from 1973 to 1974. He served as a political adviser to Barbara Castle at the Department of Social Security from 1974 to 1976, and as an adviser to Peter Shore at the Department for the Environment from 1976 to 1977. From 1977 to 1979, Straw worked as a researcher for the Granada TV series World in Action.