48 Facts About Clare Short

Clare Short was born on 15 February 1946 and is a British politician who served as Secretary of State for International Development from 1997 to 2003.

Clare Short resigned from the cabinet over the Iraq War.

Clare Short resigned the party whip in 2006 and served the remainder of her term as an independent politician, leaving parliament at the 2010 general election.

Clare Short was born in Birmingham in 1946 to Irish Catholic parents from County Armagh, Northern Ireland.

Clare Short attended St Paul's School for Girls in Birmingham.

Clare Short was later supportive of peaceful Sinn Fein initiatives, but never a supporter of IRA violence, some of the worst of which was inflicted in a 1974 bombing of her home city of Birmingham.

Clare Short is a paternal cousin of Canadian actor Martin Clare Short.

Clare Short gained some notoriety shortly after her election in 1983 when she implied the government's Employment minister Alan Clark was drunk at the despatch box.

Clark's colleagues on the government benches in turn accused Clare Short of using unparliamentary language and the Deputy Speaker, Ernest Armstrong, asked her to withdraw her accusation.

Clark later admitted in his diaries that Clare Short had been correct in her assessment.

In 1986, Clare Short introduced a Private Members Bill in the House of Commons which proposed banning Page 3 photographs of topless models featured in The Sun and other British tabloid newspapers.

Clare Short stated they were pictures of somebody else's body with her face superimposed.

Clare Short gave a definitive account of her attitude towards tabloid nudity and the negative role that pornography plays more generally in society in her introduction to the book Dear Clare Short, which presents a selection of the many letters of support she received from women in response to her campaign.

Clare Short supported John Prescott in the Labour Party deputy leadership election in 1988, leaving the Socialist Campaign Group, along with Margaret Beckett, as a result of Tony Benn's decision to challenge Neil Kinnock for the party leadership.

Clare Short supported Margaret Beckett for the Labour leadership in 1994 against Tony Blair and John Prescott.

Clare Short called for the withdrawal of British troops from Northern Ireland.

Clare Short became Shadow Minister for Women, Shadow Transport Secretary and Opposition Spokesperson for Overseas Development.

Clare Short was a member of Labour's National Executive Committee from 1988 to 1997 and Chair of the NEC's Women's Committee.

At the 1995 Labour Party conference, Clare Short denounced Liz Davies as "unsuitable" after Davies had been selected as a Parliamentary candidate by a constituency Labour Party in Leeds North-East.

However, in 1996, Clare Short was moved to the Overseas Development portfolio, a move which she saw as a demotion.

Clare Short retained this post throughout the first term of the Labour government, and beyond the 2001 general election into the second.

In December 1997, Clare Short signed the UK into the Ottawa Convention, banning the production, handling and use of anti-personnel mines.

Clare Short approved of the 1999 NATO bombing of the headquarters of Serbian state television, in which sixteen media workers were killed and sixteen others wounded, because the station was, as she put it, "a source of propaganda".

On 9 March 2003, Clare Short repeatedly called Tony Blair "reckless" in a BBC radio interview and threatened to resign from the Cabinet in the event of the UK Government going to war with Iraq without a clear mandate from the United Nations.

Clare Short remained in the Cabinet for two months following her decision to back the 2003 Iraq War.

On 26 February 2004, Clare Short alleged on the BBC Today radio programme that British spies regularly intercept UN communications, including those of Kofi Annan, then Secretary-General.

However, in the same interview with Jonathan Dimbleby, Clare Short backtracked on her claim about British agents bugging Annan.

Clare Short admitted that the transcripts she saw of Annan's private conversations might have related to Africa and not to Iraq.

In December 2004, Clare Short was reportedly critical of US efforts to dispense aid to countries devastated by a tsunami caused by a massive earthquake in the Indian Ocean.

Clare Short was quoted as stating that the formation of a group of countries led by the United States for this purpose was a challenge to the role of the United Nations, which she believed was uniquely qualified for the task.

Clare Short has expressed support for a boycott of Israel, stating at the 2007 United Nations International Conference of Civil Society in Support of Israeli-Palestinian Peace that "The boycott worked for South Africa, it is time to do it again".

Clare Short told the conference that Israel is "much worse than the original apartheid state" and that Israel "undermines the international community's reaction to global warming".

Clare Short said her trip had been registered with Commons authorities and that the visit allowed her to see how reconstruction in southern Lebanon was proceeding after the country's conflict with Israel in 2006.

On 12 September 2006, Clare Short announced that she would not be standing at the next general election.

Clare Short received a written reprimand from Labour's Chief Whip shortly before the news of her resignation of the party whip was announced.

On 2 February 2010, Clare Short appeared before the Chilcot Inquiry into Iraq.

Since 2006, Clare Short has been a member of the Cities Alliance Policy Advisory Board and subsequently chaired the Policy Advisory Forum, described as a "platform for public discussion, debate and knowledge sharing" on urban poverty and the role of cities.

In January 2011, Clare Short expressed an interest in becoming a candidate for the Mayor of Birmingham, pending the outcome of a referendum on the creation of a directly-elected mayoralty in the city.

Clare Short spoke of the need to end the "throw-away society".

Clare Short considered the changing conception of the world since the 1960s and emphasised the need for us to consider the consequences of today's environmental concerns for the generations of the future.

Since 2018, Clare Short has collaborated with public artist Martin Firrell.

The Union City series included Clare Short's observation that 'Socialism Is A Moral Idea'.

Clare Short was briefly married to a fellow Keele University student at 18 after they had a baby when she was 17.

Clare Short then discovered that her son, Toby, was a Conservative supporter who worked as a solicitor in the City of London, and had three children.

In 1981, Clare Short married Alex Lyon, a Labour MP and minister she had worked with whilst at the Home Office.

In 1993, Clare Short was called away from the Labour party conference to hear that her husband was very ill and likely to die.

Clare Short gradually fell out with family and friends and stayed home with our St Bernard called Fred and would deal with no one but Fred and me.

In June 2009, Clare Short received an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws from the University of Ulster in recognition of her services to international development.