Sir Chris Bryant MP - Who is the former vicar?

Sir Chris Bryant has been the Labour MP for the Rhondda in South Wales since 2001. He was reelected with a majority of 11,440 in 2019.

He currently serves as Shadow Minister for Creative Industries and Digital, having been appointed to the role in Keir Starmer’s September 2023 reshuffle.

The South Wales constituency of Rhondda in the Rhondda Valley was for many years the safest Labour seat in the UK. The Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats lost their deposit here in 2001, with both parties polling below 5%. A former mining area, it covers the towns of Porth, Tonypandy, Trehebert, Treorchy, and Tylorstown. Although this area was once represented in the Welsh Assembly by Plaid Cymru, it remains a safe Labour seat at Westminster.

Bryant previously served as Chair of the Commons Select Committee on Standards, before he resigned his role upon his return to the frontbench responsibilities in September 2023.

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He served as Under Secretary of State at the Foreign Office between 2009 and 2010, and later in the Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Leader of the House and Shadow Culture Secretary.

He resigned in 2016 in protest against Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, warning in his resignation letter that Corbyn would be remembered as the man who “broke the Labour Party”.

In 2019, he came second to Sir Lindsay Hoyle in the election to replace John Bercow as Speaker of the House of Commons.

Sir Chris Bryant was born in 1962 and brought up in Cardiff, Spain and Cheltenham. He read English at Mansfield College Oxford and Theology at Ripon College, Cuddesdon, before being ordained in the Church of England in December 1986.

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Bryant spent two and a half years as curate at All Saints, High Wycombe, before becoming Youth Chaplain to the diocese of Peterborough. Bryant left the Church in 1991 to start work for the Labour Party.

He was knighted in the 2023 New Year Honours List

Bryant was a Hackney Councillor between 1993 and 1998.

He has also written biographies of Stafford Cripps and Glenda Jackson and a history of Christian Socialism (Possible Dreams). From 1998-2000 he was Head of European Affairs at the BBC.

He is a former Chair of the Christian Socialist Movement, and between 2002 and 2007 was Chair of the Labour Movement for Europe.

He speaks fluent Spanish and good French. He entered into a civil partnership with Jared Cranney in 2010.

In 2022, he told ITV’s Good Morning Britain that he was regularly touched inappropriately by other MPs when he was first elected to the House of Commons. He claimed there were several MPs who felt entitled to just be able to touch me up in the division lobby, saying, “I knew that I, and others knew, that because of the system of patronage and power that happens in parliament, it’s much more difficult to report about someone in a senior position.”