Jacqui Smith peerage

[Westfacing]

AIBU to be perplexed by Smith being given a peerage and made a minister for education?

I understand that Labour have to increase their number of peers and am in full agreement with Vallance and Timpson but J Smith, why?

She was briefly Home Secretary under Gordon Brown but I don't recall her being associated with Education, nor was she particularly distinguished as a politician.

Am I missing something?

YABU in my opinion.

I’m a big Jacqui fan and I love her podcast with Iain Dale. It’s very funny and brilliant to have an older women commenting on politics rather than all the ‘centrist Dad’ podcasts.

I think it’s great that an older female experienced politician is returning to Government.

This Labour Government despite planning HoL reform needs more Labour peers to get legislation through.

Jacqui has been very active in helping other women to get elected through Labour women’s network and has done a lot of media for Labour on eg GMB and other daytime shows.

There are also inaccuracies regards the expenses scandal.

I think it’s more nuanced. The expense scandal arose partially due to the system.

As I understand it her husband ran her constituency office and did heavy lifting parenting to allow her career to progress. It was ‘normal’ for the political wife to do this and there were no rules against employing family members. Her ex- husband drafted the expense claims and included the full broadband bill which had the porn films on it by mistake - this cost her her career.

With regards to the house I looked into the report on this - she co-owned with her sister and at one time Ministers were told it it was accepted/recommended that their London home was their primary residence. It seem that unlike a lot of male MPs who are Dads Jacqui made big efforts to go back to her constituency after late nights when it would have made more sense to stay in London- juggling being a working Mum. This made a difference when the number of nights spent in each was totted up.

(Set my account up again to post this as felt sad at a lot of the posts on here. I genuinely have nothing to do with Labour nor do I know Jacqui!)

Aye I bet the grooming gangs did as well.
Free rein to rape young girls
What's not to like?

All I can say about Jacqui Smith is that she is incredibly nice. I worked with the extended Labour party including through the referendum and she was one of few people who listened, looked out for younger colleagues and had a warmth about her. I'm not surprised to learn that she was a teacher.

Glad to hear she is divorced from whoever it was - I hadn't realised that was Jacqui Smith, but I can see why she will be valuable at education starting now, as they have to sign off on the teacher's pay review.

Oh dear. If this had been a Tory, every Labour cheerleader on MN would be shouting about corrupt Tory scum. Usual double-standards from Labour. They’re really not any better than any other party when it comes to honesty and decency.

i remember Smith’s time in government well. She was useless. Her downfall was cheating expenses. The husband’s porn film thing wasn’t a mistaken expenses claim IIRC but a leak from within the cable company. That’s the one thing I was on her side about: that was private information that should never have been published.

Did that memos existance ever get proven? It was alleged at a Tommy Robinson rally. Then later on it was repeated by Nazir Afzal, who had a problem with the link to the men being Muslim and also opposed the new proposals to hold terror suspects for 42 days, as well as similar proposals. He did say that the alleged language was out of the ordinary. It all seemed very confused. So have they now shown that the allegations were true?
Also Vallance refused to say that the lock down breaking by the Tories, the meeting up with the bit on the side, the car journey etc was wrong. I suppose it makes him a useful puppet, with credible qualifications.

There may be, but that's not the point. It's about inexperience in government and needing to hit the ground running.

🙄