Emma Dent Coad

Emma Dent Coad MP

Kensington was the final constituency to declare in the UK/2017 General Election which Labour's Emma Dent Coad won by a margin of 20 votes.

Londoner

Emma Dent Coad was born in Chelsea as the youngest of six in an Anglo-Spanish family, and has lived in North Kensington since 1986. She was elected to Kensington and Chelsea London Borough Council in 2006, representing Golborne ward. She is a member of the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority and was a council-appointed board member of Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation from 2008 to 31 October 2012.

She is studying for a PhD at the University of Liverpool's School of Architecture on "Constructing Modern Spain: Architecture, Politics and Ideology under Franco, 1939-1975", which she has put on hold for a period on being elected.

Member of Parliament

Emma Dent Coad was elected MP for Kensington in the 2017 General Election after she defeated the former Conservative Party MP Victoria Borwick with a majority of 20, overturning a 7,020 majority. The announcement was finally made at around 9pm on 9 June 2017 after three recounts.

Grenfell Tower fire

The residents of the Grenfell Tower block destroyed by fire on 14 June 2017 have been failed and betrayed by the local council, Kensington's new MP Emma Dent Coad said, expressing fury at the way Kensington and Chelsea had treated its social housing tenants.

She said residents made homeless by the fire were increasingly concerned that they would be rehoused outside of the borough, in cheaper places far from London such as Hastings or Peterborough where the council has tried to rehouse tenants previously.

Having campaigned against poor social housing in the borough for decades and documented the poor quality of estate redevelopment schemes, she said:

“I can’t help thinking that poor quality materials and construction standards may have played a part in this hideous and unforgivable event.

“People in Grenfell Tower have been complaining that the aesthetic refit hadn’t helped them at all. It was more about making it look better for the people who want to regenerate the estate.”

 

A Quote by Emma Dent Coad

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Marjorie Thompson

“Another Labour figure who has had an experience with the BAP is Emma Dent Coad who was the party’s first ever MP for Kensington, serving from 2017-19, and is now leader of the Labour Group on the borough’s council.  She told Declassified that a friend who was a senior official in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) tried to recruit her to the BAP in the 1980s. Coad later found out this person “worked with the CIA”.  At the time, the US government had, according to an official memo leaked to the Washington Post, initiated a "propaganda exercise in Britain, aimed at neutralising the efforts of CND". “In the late 80s, I was a journalist working in design and architecture and very busy at the time, travelling around a lot and writing for various magazines,” Coad told us. “At the time, a local friend who was senior in CND started talking to me about this project that she was involved in." "She basically said that if I was able to go to Washington and give a talk about the work I was doing, I’d have a lovely dinner, it would all be paid for, and then I’d be part of this international group who were just trying to improve life," Coad added. “Then I would be part of that group forever and I’d be invited to things periodically, and it would give me a really good profile." Coad thought about it and discussed it with her then husband. "But I just felt there was something a bit smelly about it frankly,” she says. “It didn’t ring true, something so generous just for me being there, so I politely declined."  “Later I found out what the British-American Project was all about," she adds. “Then I found out a couple of years later that this friend – who had by then moved out of the area and I’d lost contact with her – worked with the CIA, and I was absolutely appalled." Coad says she was good friends with the husband of the alleged CIA operative, and that he told her she was working for the agency as soon as he found out.  "There was something not quite right. I was just a jobbing journalist really, in a faintly glamorous environment, why would I be of interest to this international group?" But Coad can understand why she was a target. "I’ve always been a socialist, I always had those values from school,” she says. “I was political at college, at university, I had roles in the unions, I’d always been political. So clearly she knew that." She adds: “I started writing a book on Spanish design architecture, so I was busy, and I think my stock was rising at the time. The recruiter was very prominent in CND, which I supported.” After Coad was told about the CIA connection "it began to drop into place," she says. Coad then looked up the recruiter who had moved on from CND to PR firm Saatchi & Saatchi, which has funded the BAP.  “I thought, ‘that’s interesting, a bit of a leap from what they were doing before’. I thought it was very strange that they would go from CND to working for a right-wing advertising agency, so it rang true, and I believed it.””

 

Related Quotation

Page	Quote	Author
Marjorie Thompson	“Another Labour figure who has had an experience with the BAP is Emma Dent Coad who was the party’s first ever MP for Kensington, serving from 2017-19, and is now leader of the Labour Group on the borough’s council.  She told Declassified that a friend who was a senior official in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) tried to recruit her to the BAP in the 1980s. Coad later found out this person “worked with the CIA”.  At the time, the US government had, according to an official memo leaked to the Washington Post, initiated a "propaganda exercise in Britain, aimed at neutralising the efforts of CND". “In the late 80s, I was a journalist working in design and architecture and very busy at the time, travelling around a lot and writing for various magazines,” Coad told us. “At the time, a local friend who was senior in CND started talking to me about this project that she was involved in." "She basically said that if I was able to go to Washington and give a talk about the work I was doing, I’d have a lovely dinner, it would all be paid for, and then I’d be part of this international group who were just trying to improve life," Coad added. “Then I would be part of that group forever and I’d be invited to things periodically, and it would give me a really good profile." Coad thought about it and discussed it with her then husband. "But I just felt there was something a bit smelly about it frankly,” she says. “It didn’t ring true, something so generous just for me being there, so I politely declined."  “Later I found out what the British-American Project was all about," she adds. “Then I found out a couple of years later that this friend – who had by then moved out of the area and I’d lost contact with her – worked with the CIA, and I was absolutely appalled." Coad says she was good friends with the husband of the alleged CIA operative, and that he told her she was working for the agency as soon as he found out.  "There was something not quite right. I was just a jobbing journalist really, in a faintly glamorous environment, why would I be of interest to this international group?" But Coad can understand why she was a target. "I’ve always been a socialist, I always had those values from school,” she says. “I was political at college, at university, I had roles in the unions, I’d always been political. So clearly she knew that." She adds: “I started writing a book on Spanish design architecture, so I was busy, and I think my stock was rising at the time. The recruiter was very prominent in CND, which I supported.” After Coad was told about the CIA connection "it began to drop into place," she says. Coad then looked up the recruiter who had moved on from CND to PR firm Saatchi & Saatchi, which has funded the BAP.  “I thought, ‘that’s interesting, a bit of a leap from what they were doing before’. I thought it was very strange that they would go from CND to working for a right-wing advertising agency, so it rang true, and I believed it.””	Marjorie Thompson Emma Dent Coad Matt Kennard

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