Phil Wilson, Baron Wilson of Sedgefield

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Philip Wilson, Baron Wilson of Sedgefield (born 31 May 1959) is a British Labour politician. He served as the Member of Parliament for Sedgefield from a 2007 by-election until 2019, and he has lived in the area all his life. He grew up in County Durham, the son of a coal miner, and attended Trimdon Secondary Modern and Sedgefield Comprehensive. Before politics, he worked as a shop assistant, a civil service clerical worker, and a lay trade‑union official, and later worked as a gambling lobbyist for Gala Coral and as a director at Fellows’ Associates. He was one of the “Famous Five” who helped Tony Blair get selected for Sedgefield in 1983 and later worked for Blair in his constituency office, the Labour Party, and a PR company.

In Parliament, Wilson was a Labour Assistant Whip from 2010 to 2015 and joined the Progress strategy board in 2012, where he faced criticism over a blog post accused of plagiarism. In 2013, a letter from Conservative MP John Glen alleged improper declarations of donations from Hitachi; Glen later apologized, saying the letter had been drafted on his behalf and he had not read it. Wilson has described bringing a Hitachi Rail factory to Newton Aycliffe as his proudest political achievement. In the 2017 general election his leaflet suggested he did not back Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, and he supported Owen Smith in the 2016 Labour leadership contest. In 2018 he called for a second referendum on Brexit and later backed the idea of joining the European Economic Area to ease the impact of Brexit. In his constituency, 59.4% voted to Leave in the 2016 referendum.

Wilson was nominated for a life peerage by Prime Minister Keir Starmer in late 2024 and was created Baron Wilson of Sedgefield, of Trimdon in the County of Durham, on 16 January 2025. He was introduced to the House of Lords on 20 January 2025 and appointed as a lord-in-waiting, a government whip, on 10 February 2025.