03/02/2011

C4 Diversity Boss Elevated To Lords

The woman charged with overseeing diversity at Channel 4 has quit to take up a peerage.

Oona King ran unsuccessfully to be the Labour Party's nomination for the Mayor of London and has now been added to a list of 53 nominees put forward to take up a seat in Parliament's upper house.

She takes her place on the Labour benches alongside 10 new peers, including the broadcaster, Dame Joan Bakewell.

The former Bethnal Green and Bow MP, Lady King, 43, represented the constituency from 1997 until she lost her seat to Respect candidate George Galloway in 2005 in the wake of the Iraq war.

While affirming her allegiance to the Queen, she was supported by Labour peers Lord Alli and Baroness Kinnock of Holyhead.

King, who is mixed race, was born in Sheffield, South Yorkshire to a Jewish mother, social justice activist Murreil Hazel Sterns, and an African-American father, political theorist Preston King.

She is the niece of the medical doctor Miriam Stoppard and her playwright husband Tom Stoppard. Her cousin is the actor Ed Stoppard.

On her father's side, she comes from a line of civil rights activists and successful entrepreneurs and was educated at Haverstock Comprehensive Secondary School on Crogsland Road in Chalk Farm (borough of Camden), London, and was contemporary with David Miliband and his brother, Ed Miliband.

Oona King was previously Head of Diversity at Channel 4 Television and has maintained a high media profile as a journalist and presenter.

(BMcC/GK)

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