Jane Patricia Griffiths (b. 17 April 1954, London) is a United Kingdom politician and linguist. She was Labour Member of Parliament for the Reading East parliamentary constituency until 2005. In 2004 it was announced that her constituency Labour Party had deselected her, and would replace her with local councillor Tony Page . This was the first deselection of a sitting MP in the United Kingdom for ten years. The press reported soon afterwards suggested that she might defect from the Labour Party to the Conservative Party, but she did not.

Biography

Jane Griffiths was born to John and Pat Griffiths. She was educated at the Cedars Grammar School , Leighton Buzzard and St Mary's College, University of Durham. She has a BA in French and Russian. She is married to fellow former councillor Andrew Tattersall and has two children, Martha and Toby.

From 1977 to 1984, Griffiths worked as a linguist at GCHQ, the United Kingdom electronic intelligence operation in Cheltenham. From 1984 until 1997 she worked as a foreign news editor for BBC Monitoring and the BBC World Service in Reading. Besides her native English, she speaks Russian, French, Japanese and Korean. She is the only MP who speaks Japanese or Korean.

From 1989 to 1999, Griffiths was a Labour councillor on Reading Borough Council, holding various senior positions. In the general election of 1997, she was elected as member of Parliament for the Reading East parliamentary constituency, a position she retained in the following general election in 2001. She stepped down at the 2005 general election.

External links

• Jane Griffiths' official web site
• BBC article about deselection