Saturday 4th April 2020 signified an inevitable but significant change within the Labour Party as Sir Keir Starmer was elected as leader with a 56.2% victory on the first ballot. The result was anything but a surprise as the tide seemed to settle towards a Keir victory fairly early on in the contest. However, no real indications about his shadow cabinet came out before his formal appointment apart from vague promises about unity. However one thing that has become clear since his victory is Starmer’s desire for a clean slate to begin with. Over the weekend, his full shadow cabinet has been announced and one shock promotion came through the appointment of Nick Thomas-Symonds to Home Secretary. Much is already known about the fellow prospective holders of the Great Offices of State in case of a Labour victory, however not much is known about the former Shadow Minister of State for Security.

Nick Thomas-Symonds was born in 1980 within the Welsh borough of Torfaen which he has represented in Parliament since the 2015 General Election. His pre-Parliamentary career was impressive and wide-spread as he first served as a chancery and commercial barrister at Civitas Law after being called to the bar in 2004. Alongside this, he served as a lecturer of politics at his former college of St. Edmund Hall in Oxford. As an interesting aside, Harold Wilson is the only other person who has ever been appointed as a don at Oxford at the young age of 21. Perhaps most interesting of all, he was also a political biographer writing Nye: The Political Life of Aneurin Bevan and Attlee: A Life in Politics. Writing biographies about arguably the two most famous and popular British socialists of the 20th Century will go a long way to alleviate fears from the hard-left of the party about a sudden shift to the centre. His motivation to become an author originated after a meeting with ex-Labour leader Michael Foot as a teenager in which Foot encouraged the young Thomas-Symonds to write a biography on Bevan, after Foot himself had wrote one years earlier.

It was with this impressive resume that he was selected as the prospective Labour parliamentary candidate for Torfaen on 7 March and subsequently won the seat in the General Election on 7 May 2015 with a 44.6% plurality. This seat has remained a Labour safe seat since its creation in 1983. He used his Maiden Speech to bring up his inspiration from the Labour Government from 1945–1951 using the quote from Prime Minister Attlee that “Democracy is about government by discussion but it only works if you can stop people talking”. This seemed to be a strong influence in his future career as he often stresses the importance of maintaining your values yet implementing change in an effective way that benefits the public. Furthermore, he also shared an interesting anecdote about his time doing work experience for former Torfaen MP Paul Murphy in 1997 in which he was wrote a reference suggesting he would end up with a ‘top job’. Little did Murphy know Thomas-Symonds would end up replacing him in that very role after Murphy’s retirement.

Within the Shadow Cabinet, he first took the role of Shadow Minister of State for Pensions from 17th September 2015 before a quick promotion to Shadow Employment Minister on 11th January 2016. This happened after he had been named as “Member to Watch” in the Welsh Political Awards 2015. However, on the 27th June 2016 he resigned from the role as part of the mass resignation from the shadow cabinet in protest at Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. Following a theme that seems to follow Thomas-Symons’s career, the reasoning was that he thought “Labour needs a leader to unite it going forward and to give the party the best possible chance of doing well in a General Election”. This was further followed up in his resignation letter with the claim that that he felt “There is now a very real risk of the Labour Party splitting without a change of leadership. A split would make a Conservative government far more likely in the future, which would be a disaster for my constituents in Torfaen.” Whilst this mass resignation has been remembered as highly controversial and a hugely contentious talking point among the party’s members, it is important to share that Corbyn trusted him enough to give him the role of Shadow Solicitor General following Corbyn’s victory in the 2016 Labour Leadership Contest. Thomas-Symonds however did support his former boss, as Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Owen Smith, who comes from the neighbouring constituency of Pontypridd, for Labour leader in 2016 in his ultimately unsuccessful campaign.

Most recently, Thomas-Symonds moved into his current cabinet team of the Shadow Home Office on 5th July 2017, as Shadow Minister of State for Security, where he has remained until his recent succession of Dianne Abbot as Shadow Home Secretary. Another interesting role he has managed, even since gaining an additional role in the Home Office, has been to respond to Attorney General Geoffrey Cox during statements in the Commons due to Labour’s opposite, Shami Chakrabarti, sitting in the House of Lords. This led to Thomas-Symonds playing a key role in pressuring Cox to release the full government legal advice on the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement that had not been shared with MPs. The reluctance of the government to complete this action ultimately lead to the historical vote of the Government being found in contempt in Parliament for the first time ever.

An interesting note from Thomas-Symonds was when asked about standout Labour figures from his lifetime, he noted Gordon Brown as “a giant of the times” and stated “History will look very kindly on Gordon Brown’s response to [the 2008 economic crash]”. This ties in well with Gordon Brown’s endorsement of Keir Starmer for Labour leader and highlights a shared platform on the so-called ‘soft-left’ of the party.