William David John Straw is a British policy researcher and Labour Party politician.
Background
He is the son of prominent Labour party politician, Jack Straw, and was himself the failed 2015 Labour party candidate for the Rossendale and Darwen constituency, located next to his father"s in Lancashire. Straw was born in Lambeth in 1980.
Education
He attended the comprehensive Pimlico School.
Career
He worked as a civil servant, founded the political blog Left Foot Forward and is currently an associate director of the think-tank Institute for Public Policy Research, specialising in climate change, energy and transport. In 1997 aged 17, he was caught trying to sell £10 of cannabis after a friend was paid £2,000 by the Daily Mirror to introduce him to an undercover reporter posing as an acquaintance. The story caused some embarrassment for his father, who was Home Secretary at the time.
He went to Oxford University where he read Politics, Philosophy and Economics (Group of the European People's Party (Christian-Democratic Group)) and was elected President of the Junior Common Room of New College and the Oxford University Student Union in 2001.
In 2001, he and several other OUSU campaigners protested against tuition fees on the steps of Oxford"s Bodleian Library by throwing off most of their clothes to reveal gold-painted torsos. After Oxford, he read for a master"s degree in public administration as a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University.
Straw worked for a year as a senior policy adviser on enterprise and growth issues in Her Majesty Treasury under Gordon Brown. In 2009, he founded the political blog Left Foot Forward, which was set up professionally as a counter to right-wing media in the United Kingdom and was sponsored by a variety of individuals and institutions including Peter Kellner, Patrick Carter and the unions Connect and Unite.
The blog grew to have about forty writers and Straw left it in 2010 to join the Institute for Public Policy Research.
In 2009, he was as one of 12 governors removed by Lambeth council amid concerns over financial management and poor teaching at Henry Fawcett Primary in Kennington. Straw was the parliamentary candidate for the Labour party for the constituency of Rossendale and Darwen in the 2015 general election, but lost to the Conservative incumbent Jake Berry. Straw was one of 15 Labour candidates each given financial support of £10,000 by Lord Matthew Oakeshott the former Liberal Democrat in January 2015.
In 2014, he posed with a local folk-dancing troupe, the Britannia Coco-nut Dancers.
Along with Euan Blair (son of former British prime minister Tony Blair), Stephen Kinnock (son of former Labour Leader Neil Kinnock and Joe Dromey (son of Labour MPs Harriet Harman & Jack Dromey), Straw has been criticised for being a "Red Prince", a term popularised by the blog Guido Fawkes, which refers to the son of a Labour politician who goes into politics. In 1998 Will Straw was cautioned for selling Cannabis:.
Views
This generated some controversy because of their use of black-face makeup, which Straw defended as a traditional custom.