Alan Johnson | Biography & Facts (2024)

Alan Johnson (born May 17, 1950, London, England) is a British Labour Party politician who served as secretary of state for health (2007–09) and home secretary (2009–10) in the cabinet of Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Orphaned at age 12, Johnson was raised by his older sister in a government housing project. He left school at 15 to work as a stock boy at a grocery store. In 1968 he took a job as a postman and became active in the Union of Communication Workers (UCW). Johnson remained an active trade unionist over the following years, and by 1987 he was working for the UCW full-time, brokering national contracts for some 100,000 postal workers. In 1992 he was elected general secretary of the UCW, becoming the youngest person in the history of the union to hold that position.

Johnson’s political career began in 1995, when he served on the Labour Party’s national executive committee. Two years later he was elected a member of Parliament (MP), representing the constituency of Hull West and Hessle, in part of the Labour landslide that swept the Conservative Party from power. Although Johnson was a relative newcomer to the party, his trade union experience won him a position on the trade and industry committee. He rose quickly through the ranks, emerging from the backbench to work as an aide for the financial secretary to the treasury and, later, as an aide to the paymaster general. In 1999 he received his first ministerial post, overseeing competitiveness for the department of trade and industry.

After the 2001 election, Prime Minister Tony Blair reshuffled his cabinet, and Johnson was given the portfolio of employment relations. Two years later he moved to the education ministry, where he oversaw higher education and lifelong learning. In 2004 Johnson was promoted to secretary of state for work and pensions, becoming the first onetime trade union leader in a generation to sit in the cabinet. He took office in the midst of a crisis afflicting the civil service pension program and boldly stated that Britons would have to save more or work past the traditional retirement age of 65. After he easily won reelection in 2005, Johnson was tapped to head the department of trade and industry. After a cabinet reshuffle the following year, Johnson was named secretary of state for education and skills. The most notable achievement of his tenure in that position was the Every Parent Matters initiative, which emphasized the importance that home life plays in a child’s eventual success in school.

In the massive reorganization that followed Blair’s resignation in 2007, Johnson initially campaigned to become deputy party leader, a position held for the previous 13 years by John Prescott, but he was narrowly edged out by longtime Labour stalwart Harriet Harman. When Brown took over as prime minister, he appointed Johnson to his cabinet as secretary of state for health. Johnson performed ably in that role, lauding the strengths of the National Health Service under Labour and orchestrating the British response to the H1N1 influenza epidemic.

In 2009 the British government was rocked by charges of widespread expense account abuse by MPs, and there were calls for Brown’s resignation. Johnson emerged from the scandal relatively unscathed, and in the ensuing cabinet reshuffle he was elevated to home secretary. One of his first acts in office was to scuttle a mandatory identity card scheme that had been a cornerstone of the Brown antiterrorism policy; the identity cards, which were opposed by civil liberties advocates and trade unions, would instead be offered on a voluntary basis at a cost of £30.

In the general election of 2010 Johnson retained his seat but lost his cabinet position when Labour was ousted from office. In October he was named shadow chancellor by Labour leader Ed Miliband, but Johnson resigned from the post in January 2011. In 2015 Johnson was reelected to represent Hull West and Hessle in Parliament. When Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May called a snap election for June 2017, Johnson chose not to contest his seat, indicating that he preferred to retire at that point rather than at the next regular scheduled election in 2022, when he would be in his 70s.