Gisela Stuart

The constituency, which had once been held by former Conservative Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (1937–40), had returned only Conservative MPs for 99 years.

The sitting Conservative MP at the time, Dame Jill Knight, was retiring after 31 years.

Gisela Stuart, Baroness Stuart of Edgbaston (née Gschaider; born 26 November 1955) is a British-German politician and life peer who served as Member of Parliament (MP) for Birmingham Edgbaston from 1997 to 2017.

A former member of the Labour Party, she now sits as a crossbencher in the House of Lords.

Gisela Gschaider was born in Velden, Bavaria, West Germany on 26 November 1955 to Martin and Liane Gschaider.

She attended the Staatliche Realschule in Vilsbiburg.

Born and raised in West Germany, Stuart moved to the United Kingdom in 1974.

After doing an apprenticeship in bookselling, she moved to the UK in 1974 in order to improve her English and to do a Business Studies course at Manchester Polytechnic.

She was deputy director of the 1983 London Book Fair.

Stuart subsequently relocated to the Midlands.

She graduated from the University of London with an LLB in 1993, having studied through the University of London External System.

She began researching for a PhD in trust law (ownership of pension funds) at the University of Birmingham while she also lectured Law to AAT students at Worcestershire College, but did not complete her PhD and instead went into politics full-time.

In 1994, as Gisela Gschaider, Stuart contested the Worcester and South Warwickshire seat at the European elections for Labour.

She lost by 1,000 votes.

In 1995, Stuart was selected as Labour's parliamentary candidate for the Birmingham Edgbaston constituency.

Elected for Birmingham Edgbaston at the 1997 general election, she was chair of the Vote Leave Campaign Committee and was one of its most high-profile figures, along with the Conservative MPs Boris Johnson and Michael Gove.

On 1 May 1997, Stuart was elected as the first-ever Labour MP for the constituency, making it one of a succession of traditional Conservative seats to fall to Labour control in a landslide victory for the party.

Stuart's victory was the first televised Labour gain of the evening.

During the First Blair ministry, Stuart served on the Social Security Select Committee and in 1998 as PPS to Home Office Minister of State Paul Boateng, before joining the government in 1999 as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health.

Stuart left this post in the reshuffle that followed after the 2001 election.

Between 2001 and 2010, Stuart also served as a member of the House of Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs.

She subsequently expounded these views in a 2004 Fabian Society pamphlet, The Making of Europe's Constitution.

Consequently, she argued in favour of British withdrawal from the European Union, becoming one of the leading Eurosceptic figures in the Labour Party.

These views were countered in a rebuttal by the European Parliamentary Labour Party spokesman on EU constitutional affairs published on-line by the Fabians and in a pamphlet publihed by the Labour Movement for Europe

In October 2004, she became the only Labour MP who openly supported the re-election of George W. Bush at that year's U.S. presidential election, arguing "you know where you stand with George and, in today's world, that's much better than rudderless leaders who drift with the prevailing wind".

She wrote that a victory for Democratic Party challenger, John Kerry, would prompt "victory celebrations among those who want to destroy liberal democracies. More terrorists and suicide bombers would step forward to become martyrs in their quest to destroy the West".

She retained her seat at the 2005 election but her majority was halved in both percentage and numerical terms.

Despite the predictions of the pundits, Stuart went on to retain the seat at the 2010 general election, against a national tide of Labour defeat.

The election resulted in the first hung parliament in 36 years, with the Conservatives having the most seats.

It earned her the title of Survivor of the Year at The Spectator magazine's 2010 Parliamentarian of the Year awards, which was presented to her by the new Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron.

Her election agent in that election was John Clancy, who became Leader of Birmingham City Council in 2015.

In Blair's second ministry, Stuart was appointed as one of the UK Parliamentary Representatives to the European Convention, which was tasked with drawing up a new constitution for the European Union.

In this capacity, Stuart also served as one of the thirteen members of the Convention's Presidium – the steering group responsible for managing the business of the Convention and which drafted the text of the constitution then approved by the full Convention.

After the draft Constitution emerged, Stuart became one of the most trenchant critics of the proposal, stating that it had been drawn up by a "self-selected group of the European political elite" determined to deepen European integration.

The Vote Leave campaign was successful in achieving its goal at the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum of winning a majority of votes for Leave.

From 2016 to 2020, she served as chair of Vote Leave's successor organisation, Change Britain.

After she had left Parliament, Stuart was appointed by the Conservative government as chair of Wilton Park, an executive agency of the UK Foreign Office dedicated to conflict resolution in international relations, in October 2018.

She is a member of the Steering Committee of the Constitution Reform Group (CRG), a cross-party organisation chaired by Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 7th Marquess of Salisbury, which seeks a new constitutional settlement in the UK by way of a new Act of Union.

The Constitution Reform Group's new Act of Union Bill was introduced as a Private Member's Bill on 9 October 2018.

Baroness Stuart was appointed as the First Civil Service Commissioner in March 2022.