Gloria De Piero

Early life

De Piero was born in Bradford, Yorkshire and is of Italian descent. She lived in the working class area of south-west Bradford known as Wibsey, traditionally a Labour-voting area. She attended Marshfields Primary School in Little Horton then Priestman Middle School on Thornton Lane in Little Horton until 1986. From around the time De Piero was 10, neither of her parents were in employment owing to her father's ill-health.

She attended the Roman Catholic Yorkshire Martyrs Catholic College on Westgate Hill Street. She completed her A Levels at Bradford and Ilkley College, and joined Socialist Organiser and the Labour Party at 18. De Piero then went to the University of Central England, where she served an annual term as President of the Student Union, before graduating as a BA in Social Science from the University of Westminster in 1996. She was involved in the Labour Student campaign of 1996–97 at the national base. She later obtained an MSc in Social and Political Theory from Birkbeck, University of London in 2001.

Career in journalism

De Piero began her career in journalism as a researcher on Jonathan Dimbleby's television programme from 1997 to 1998. She then moved to the BBC where she worked at On the Record from 1998 to 2002, The Politics Show from 2002–03 and BBC Radio 4's Westminster Hour, where she produced and reported on the Palace of Westminster.

From 2003 to February 2010, she was political correspondent and a relief newsreader for GMTV.

De Piero has also been an occasional presenter on the Weekend Breakfast and Weekend News programmes on BBC Radio 5 Live. In 2009 and 2010, De Piero acted as a guest presenter on the Five magazine show Live from Studio Five, in the absence of presenters Kate Walsh and Melinda Messenger.

Parliamentary career

In February 2010, De Piero resigned from GMTV to seek selection as the Labour Party's candidate for the Ashfield constituency in the 2010 general election. The candidacy became vacant following the announcement that the constituency's Labour MP, former Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon, would be stepping down at the election. On 20 March 2010, De Piero was selected by the local Labour Party as its candidate.

De Piero was elected by a narrow margin to the seat with a majority of 192 votes (compared to 10,213 in 2005) after a 17.2% swing to the Liberal Democrats' Jason Zadrozny – the second largest such swing in the 2010 election. At the 2015 general election, De Piero held Ashfield with an increased majority of 8,820 and the Liberal Democrats pushed into fourth place, but her majority fell to 441 in the 2017 general election.

Shadow minister

In October 2010, Labour leader Ed Miliband appointed De Piero as a shadow culture minister. In the 2011 reshuffle, De Piero became Shadow Minister for Crime Prevention, and in 2013, she was promoted to the shadow cabinet as Shadow Minister for Women and Equalities.

In 2015, De Piero was elected to the Labour Party's Conference Arrangements Committee with 109,888 votes, a high margin above unsuccessful candidates. In new Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn's first shadow cabinet, De Piero was made Shadow Minister for Young People and Voter Registration, a new shadow cabinet-level role. On 3 July 2016, De Piero published an anti-Corbyn article in The Sun, "begging" readers to join the Labour Party in order to vote for "a leader who recognises that the Labour Party was founded to be a Party of Government". She resigned her shadow cabinet position on 26 June 2016, among dozens of her colleagues, believing Corbyn couldn't lead the party to a general election victory.

On 3 July 2017, De Piero accepted a place in Jeremy Corbyn's shadow front-bench team as Shadow Justice Minister.

Personal life

De Piero's husband is James Robinson, formerly a media correspondent at The Guardian, media editor at The Observer and an employee at PR firm Powerscourt, who became director of communications for Tom Watson's campaign for Labour deputy leader in June 2015, and has continued in the role since Watson was elected.

In 2010, The Mail on Sunday reported that De Piero had posed for topless photos aged 15. The issue re-emerged on 17 October 2013 when De Piero accused and objected to an unnamed news agency of attempting to acquire the photos for a national newspaper. Former Conservative MP Louise Mensch said on the Today (BBC Radio 4) programme: "Women in particular, I think, will be cheered by her refusal to be cowed by this quasi-sexual or moralistic assault on her behaviour as a 15-year-old girl". It later emerged that the photos had been purchased by The Mail on Sunday in 2010. De Piero became aware of this after the 2013 purchases attempt and at her request the paper sent the photos and negatives to De Piero along with a letter of apology.