Michael Dugher

Early life and career

Born and raised in Edlington, South Yorkshire, where he was educated. He also attended school in Doncaster and read Politics at the University of Nottingham. He was national chairman of Labour Students in 1997.

He was the Head of Policy of the Amalgamated Engineering and Electrical Union in 2000 to 2001.

From 2001–2002, Dugher was a special adviser to Transport Minister John Spellar at the Department of Transport, Local Government and Regional Affairs. After this, he worked as a special adviser to Geoff Hoon from 2002–2008. Hoon was successively the Secretary of State for Defence, the Leader of the House of Commons and the Government Chief Whip. During 2006–2007, Dugher worked as a corporate lobbyist for American multinational Electronic Data Systems (EDS), one of the government's largest IT contractors.

Dugher worked at 10 Downing Street from 2008–2010 as the Chief Political Spokesman for Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Parliamentary career

Before his election at the 2010 general election as the MP for Barnsley East, Dugher stood unsuccessfully for Skipton and Ripon, then held by the Conservative David Curry, at the 2001 general election.

Dugher was a Shadow Minister of Defence before becoming the Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition. In 2011, he was promoted to Ed Miliband's Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Minister without Portfolio, a role in which he co-ordinated shadow ministers' responses to the government.

In November 2012, Miliband appointed Dugher to the position of Labour Party Vice Chair with responsibility for communications strategy.

In the October 2013 reshuffle, he became Shadow Minister for the Cabinet Office and in November 2014 was appointed Shadow Secretary of State for Transport replacing Mary Creagh. As Shadow Secretary of State for Transport, Dugher told the New Statesman that he wanted to see "more public control of the railways" under a Labour government.

Dugher has been an Executive Committee member of the British-American Parliamentary Group.

In the Labour leadership election of 2015, he was campaign manager for Andy Burnham. He was also a supporter of Tom Watson for the deputy leadership election.

In September 2015, Dugher replaced Chris Bryant as Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. However, in January 2016, he was sacked from the position in Jeremy Corbyn's first reshuffle, as announced by Dugher himself via Twitter. Dugher did not take telephone calls from Corbyn the previous day. Several shadow cabinet ministers publicly supported Dugher, with Andy Burnham saying that "Michael Dugher is Labour to the core & has served our Party with distinction". Dugher said that Corbyn did not like an article he had written for the New Statesman, saying "I took a decision to speak out and I paid a price for it". Dugher described his article "I said despite all the stuff you’ve read in the newspapers: I don’t think Jeremy Corbyn is a man motivated by revenge, I didn’t think he’ll do these mass sackings as an act of revenge over Syria that we’ve read about every day, every week, for several weeks. I was defending Jeremy and I was defending the 'new politics'".

Political views

Dugher has held the post of Vice-Chair of Labour Friends of Israel (LFI). He has criticised the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, saying "Boycotting Israeli institutions is ignorant, wrong and counterproductive to peace. We should be building bridges and furthering dialogue".

He gave a keynote speech at the 'We Believe in Israel’ conference, where he said "Each time I visit Israel, my admiration for that great country grows".

Following the 2015 general election, Dugher said Labour mishandled its relationship with the Jewish community through a combination of neglect and incompetence. He criticised Labour's response to the 2014 Gaza conflict and called the then Labour leader Ed Miliband’s decision to whip Labour MPs to vote for a motion recognising the State of Palestine as "catastrophic". Dugher abstained in the parliament vote on this matter, despite a three line whip and being a shadow cabinet minister.