Emily Thornberry interview: Labour's shadow foreign secretary discusses bike crash, Boris Johnson and... Brexit

The question is,” says shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry. “Do we want What’s Going On or not?” She is preparing her DJ set for the Labour Party conference, shouting out song titles as we wait for our coffee to brew at her constituency office in Islington South. Will she play 1997 Labour anthem Things Can Only Get Better? “Nah,” she dismisses it with a deep laugh — she has been smoking “a lot” recently. “The main thing is I stay sober. I have important meetings with donors the next day and usually I turn up either hungover or still drunk.”

The challenges of DJing have been a cheerful distraction from the speech she is giving on Monday and the conference where the party will, she says, “thrash out” its Brexit policy. This week, leader Jeremy Corbyn reiterated that a Labour government would offer voters a choice between Remain and a deal negotiated by Labour. However, many party members and MPs have called for Labour to commit to campaigning for Remain.

Thornberry, aged 59, is loyal to Corbyn — there is an old photo of him pinned to her notice board and his driver gives her lifts home from Parliament; they jokingly call his car the paddy wagon, slang for police car. “Jeremy and I are both democrats,” she says, straightening her gold necklace. “We are offering a way through, which is a second referendum, and we will abide by the results of that.”

But why should people believe Labour is going to negotiate a good deal if they support Remain? “The point is this, it won’t be for us to decide if we remain or leave. We will put two decent and credible choices to the people, and we will negotiate. At the moment no-deal is not a proper choice. It is quite possible that we will end up leaving and if we do then fine, we will do as we are told. But we need to make the deal as good as possible because it is an insurance policy.”

Is this enough when the Liberal Democrats are riding high as the Remain party, saying they would revoke Article 50 and taking support and MPs from Labour? In May’s European Parliament election Labour lost its majority to the Lib Dems in Thornberry’s constituency. “I was upset about that,” she says. “I felt we hadn’t got our message out clearly enough. We needed to be clearer with the lines that we took so that we cut through and people got what it was that we were.” While she admits that her party made mistakes, she won’t be specific. “I’m trusted because I don’t talk about stuff like that. There are things I would have done differently.”

Criticism doesn’t ruffle her, she says: “I’ve been in politics a long time and the only way you survive is by getting the hide of a rhino.” Still, she is more at ease critiquing the Lib Dems and repeatedly refers to herself and Corbyn as democrats. “Even the most ardent Remainers in my constituency don’t think we can overturn the result of the referendum by revoking. The Lib Dems think they are going to win an election — how do you say that with a straight face? The only way they will do it is if the country became a four-way marginal and they won on the basis of 30 per cent of the vote. Then they would go against the wishes of the whole country and revoke? I don’t think that is right.

“The problem with the Lib Dems is they try to be everything to everybody [to pick up support from both sides]. I’ve always thought the Lib Dems fill a vacuum if we let them.” Is this happening now? “It depends on conference, but on Europe Labour is offering a way through, a second referendum. I don’t think it should ever be too much to try and hold the country together.

“Statespeople have an obligation to do that and not play to extremes. Labour is fundamentally a Remain party but it is in our interests to negotiate as good a deal as possible. We are not like the Liberal Democrats, we are not going to say we don’t care what the majority of the country says and stay in the EU. We are democrats. We are putting it to the people.”

Would she like Labour to come out as a Remain party? “Yeah. I would always vote Remain and campaign

for it. It’s up to conference. Remain is not just a London view. Polling shows that the vast majority of Labour members, 80 per cent, think we should remain in the EU. But we can only do that with the permission of the public, which means a second referendum. Ideally before an election, but I find it difficult to imagine the circumstances in which that would happen.

“I’m afraid some of us have very big pieces of paper where we have mapped out what could happen. If we ended up with Boris not behaving like a seven-year-old child and doing what the law has told him he has to and calling for an extension if he can’t get a deal, the rush for a general election will be strong.

“The concern then is that the election will be just about Brexit and we won’t have had a general election about just one subject since the Boer War. We should have an election about the people sleeping on streets and how we can hold up our head high as a country once more.” She is willing to discuss nationalisation “where there’s a failure of the private sector model, like railways or the Royal Mail” but doesn’t believe in, “just some position to be that we nationalise everything — that would be ludicrous.”

She digresses, telling us how Tory infighting led to this. David Cameron’s autobiography is on her reading list. And Thornberry knows Johnson — he used to live in her constituency and they would often cycle home from Parliament at the same time. “He’d always beat me, but he’d always skip red lights,” she reports. “He once asked me to stop people in Islington booing him.” She impersonates him in a petulant voice. “I told him I wouldn’t, he deserves it.” Corbyn gave her a lift home the night that Johnson’s adviser Dominic Cummings allegedly accosted him drunk in a corridor. “Jeremy didn’t say a word about it, he’s zen.”

She became used to “arrogant” former public school boys like Johnson when she was training as a lawyer. “It made me not be sure I wanted to be a barrister”. Now she’s used to them, although she states the importance of women looking out for each other. “I only ran as shadow minister because Harriet Harman embarrassed me into it. Women need to be asked and then asked again.”

As someone who describes herself as “a Labour girl”, the accusations of anti-Semitism in her party were upsetting.“We didn’t acknowledge the concerns of the community early enough.” She is sanguine about reports of bullying at deselections. “Everybody gets paranoid about deselections. I do.”

If Tony Blair is on one side of what Labour is now and Corbyn on the other, where is she? “I’m the heart of Labour,” she says. “My mum was a Labour councillor, I was sticking leaflets through doors as soon as I could reach the letter boxes, my photo was on leaflets. I’ve not been part of a faction, everything about me has just been Labour.”

She has been catching rides with Corbyn since July, when she was knocked off her bike after colliding with a taxi outside Parliament. “I hit the ground hard,” she says. “I remember a flashing light. I thought I was dead. I was lying in a puddle and all these people were making a fuss — they thought I’d broken my neck.” Luckily, she hadn’t, but she still has bruises and a cut on the back of her head which she has covered with, “a Trump comb over, which my press officer’s job is to make sure is working”. Just before we met she rode her bike again for the first time since the accident. “I took my dry cleaning in on it and I wore my helmet, which I didn’t when I had the accident because I’d just been to the hairdresser and didn’t want to compromise my style. Obviously then the blood did that,” she laughs.

At home there is so much else going on that Brexit fades into the background. Her husband, Sir Christopher Nugee, a High Court judge, makes her breakfast in bed every day. He also buys her presents, including a bottle of pinot noir called Madam Sass. “It’s not an exaggeration to say that meeting Chris was the making of me,” she states. “I was 22 and we played bridge together at Bar School. I was a pushy, ambitious player; he’d be kind and clever and he had these big blue eyes. We realised we’re different early: we’d both been to Greece and I’d been skinny dipping and going clubbing; Chris had been trailing around ancient sites. But we have a huge mutual respect.

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“We aren’t one of those couples who do things as a partnership,” she continues. “I’ve never even ironed a shirt for him.” He’s surprised her with tickets to see The Doctor at The Almeida after our interview. When she was in her twenties, she and its lead Juliet Stevenson had mutual friends and went on holiday to Wales together. With a sigh, she says she’s looking forward to the play but she has a lot of work to get through first

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