Pat McFadden (British politician)

Patrick Bosco McFadden (born 26 March 1965 in Paisley) is a Labour Party politician in the United Kingdom, who has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Wolverhampton South East since 2005. He was briefly Shadow Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, and from October 2014 to January 2016 was Shadow spokesman on Europe under Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn.

McFadden is the son of Annie and James McFadden, both native Irish language speakers from the Falcarragh area of northern County Donegal in Ireland. He went to Holy Cross RC Primary School on Calder Street and Holyrood Secondary School in Crosshill, south-east Glasgow. McFadden studied Politics at the University of Edinburgh, gaining an MA in 1988, and was chair of Scottish Labour Students in 1986–87 before becoming a researcher in 1988 for Donald Dewar, then Labour's Scottish Affairs spokesman. In 1993 he left this role to become a speechwriter and policy adviser to the Labour leader John Smith.

Prior to becoming an MP he worked in several advisory roles for Tony Blair, both in opposition and government, and was the Prime Minister's Political Secretary from 2002.

McFadden was elected at the 2005 general election, after Dennis Turner retired. In the 2006 reshuffle he was appointed as a Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Social Exclusion at the Cabinet Office. In the 2007 reshuffle he was promoted to Minister of State in the then newly created Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform with responsibility for Employment Relations and Postal Affairs. In October 2008, when Lord Mandelson replaced John Hutton as Business Secretary, McFadden took on duties as his deputy in order to represent the department in the House of Commons as Mandelson is a peer and can only address the Lords. McFadden was contemporaneously appointed to the Privy Council.

Following Labour's defeat in the 2010 election and the resignation of Gordon Brown, McFadden was named in interim leader Harriet Harman's shadow cabinet as Shadow Business Secretary. After Ed Miliband's election as Labour leader in September 2010, McFadden announced his decision to stand in Labour's shadow cabinet election but was not elected. However, when he reshuffled his Shadow Cabinet in 2014, Miliband appointed him as shadow minister for Europe. He retained his post when Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader but was sacked in January 2016.

According to McFadden he was sacked for comments in the debate on the Paris bombings which condemned "the view that sees terrorist acts as always being a response or a reaction to what we in the west do". The Labour leadership said that he had been sacked for "disloyalty", with John McDonnell saying that McFadden's remarks on terrorism were an example of McFadden undermining the leader's view. Jonathan Reynolds and Stephen Doughty expressed support for McFadden in their resignation letters the following day.

He is part of Open Britain (a British pro-European campaign group) and defended Tony Blair's pro-European speech on February 2017.

McFadden and his wife, Marianna, have a son and a daughter. He is a supporter of Celtic Football Club. As a child he regularly visited Donegal, where his parents came from.