John Spellar

Who is John Spellar?

John Francis Spellar is a British Labour Party politician, and the Member of Parliament for Warley. He served as a Minister of State at the Northern Ireland Office, before returning to the backbenches in 2005. Spellar was Comptroller of the Household and the third most senior whip in the Whips' Office between October 2008 and May 2010.

Spellar was educated at Dulwich College and St Edmund Hall, Oxford and worked as a trade union official.

He was a councillor in the London Borough of Bromley between 1970 and 1974. He was first elected to Parliament in 1982 for Birmingham Northfield, but lost at the 1983 General Election, he stood again in the 1987 General Election but was again unsuccessful. He returned to the House of Commons in the 1992 General Election representing Warley West and was appointed an opposition whip. He became an opposition spokesman for Northern Ireland in 1994, moving to shadow Defence ministers in 1995. When Tony Blair formed his government in 1997, Spellar was appointed Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Ministry of Defence, being promoted to become Minister of State for the Armed Forces in 1999. He was appointed to the Privy Council in 2001 when appointed as Minister of State for Transport in the Department for Transport, Local Government and the Regions with rights to attend Cabinet. After the 2002 reshuffle, he became Minister of State at the Department for Transport, and moved to the Northern Ireland Office in 2003. He left the front benches in 2005, but in 2008 rejoined the government as a whip, in which role he served until Labour entered opposition in May 2010.