When it comes to Jews, Bury St Edmunds doesn’t exactly have a rosy history: 57 were massacred in the East Anglian town in 1190.
On 4 July, however, a new chapter was written. A Jewish – and much more shockingly for many – Labour MP was elected for the first time.
Peter Prinsley, a 66-year-old ear, nose and throat (ENT) surgeon, was one of the surprise victories on the night of his party’s historic landslide.
He defeated Conservative former Downing Street special adviser Will Tanner in what was considered the rock-solid, true-blue constituency of Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket.
Prinsley told the JC that “no-one was expecting Labour to win” when he was first selected as his party’s candidate.
“I think Mr Tanner probably thought that this was a very safe seat for the Tories. I was told it was something like the third most difficult seat for Labour to win in the whole of England!”
His campaign team drove round in an “old post office van with a big picture of me in my surgical scrubs on the side saying, ‘vote Labour.’”
Peter Prinsley MP (second on the left) with activists during the general election. Credit: Peter Prinsley/ Twitter
Voters on the doorstep liked the idea of a representative with a medical background, he said. “Almost everybody had a hospital story to tell – whether it was a good one or a bad one. That meant that I could really make a personal connection with voters and, if you do enough of that, I think you get a lot of votes.”
Sitting in Portcullis House, the newer glass-roofed building on the parliamentary estate, Prinsley revealed a little booklet given to MPs which contains the name, faces and constituencies of all members, to help them familiarise themselves with each other.
Have many of his 411 fellow Labour parliamentarians started asking him for medical advice?
“Oh, they do all the time!”
“It's very noisy. I think a lot of people can't hear what's going on and quite a lot of people have hoarse voices from shouting. So, I think there'll be plenty work for me as a part time ENT surgeon in Parliament,” he joked.
Prinsley said he has come to the House of Commons “to be an advocate for the National Health Service (NHS).”
Healthcare is something of a family calling. “My dad was a medic in the RAF, joining the new NHS when it was founded in 1948. I've got a son who's an A&E registrar and a sister who's a nurse,” he said.
As important to him as the NHS is his Judaism, which is “a central feature” of his life.
Norwich Hebrew Congregation celebrated the 40th anniversary of the consecration of its building. At the celebratory dinner were, from left: Clive Roffe, Peter Prinsley, Marian Prinsley, Rev. Malcolm Weisman, Alex Bennett and Sandy Bennett : null : Out and About: November 2009
An active member of Norwich Synagogue, he grew up in Middlesborough in the north east of England. His “experience of Judaism really is that of small communities.”
It is something he is keen to speak up about. “I think a lot of people probably don't realise quite how many Jewish people do, in fact, live in small communities. There's this temptation to think that all the Jews live in North London, Manchester and Leeds. But something like a quarter of all the British Jewish population don't live in these large Jewish congregations.”
His favourite Jewish food? His wife’s fish balls.
He credited his wife, Dr Marian Prinsley, who served as Sheriff of Norwich between 2019-2021, with getting him more actively involved in frontline politics. “When she became Sheriff, I then became her consort. And when you're the consort, you go around and have a great time schmoozing. I met a lot of the local councillors and that’s how I got interested.”
Prinsley is “very optimistic about the future of the country now that we've finally got a Labour government,” and was particularly pleased to see the Holocaust Memorial Bill return to Parliament as part of the measures unveiled during the King’s Speech, which will see the construction of a new memorial next to Parliament.
Although, he did acknowledge the difficulty his party had in winning back the trust of Jewish voters, “Labour used to be the natural home for British Jews and was always the party that my family going back many generations voted for. I do understand why that changed.”
Under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, Jewish Labour members had two choices, he claimed, “you could leave in disgust, or you could stay and try and change things. And I decided to stay.”
He insisted things are different under Starmer, “we've now got a prime minister that we all respect. I think he's got a good insight into the problems that Jewish people have in this country.”
Despite the criticism the Labour leader faced by some in the Jewish community over his decision to restore funding to controversial Palestinian UN agency Unrwa, Prinsley insisted that “this Labour government is not going to throw Israel under the bus”. He added that Starmer was able to come to nuanced positions on Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians.
He said: “you can have a problem with the political philosophy of the government of the State of Israel, but you can be an ardent supporter of the state of Israel.”
But while the destruction in Gaza was “terrible” he didn’t want to be an “armchair general” criticising the Israeli government which faces “some hard decisions”.
Prinsley said he was dismayed at the behaviour of some pro-Palestinian activists during the general election towards “some really decent Labour MPs who either nearly lost their seats or indeed lost their seats.”
While he hoped to see an agreement to free the hostages and eventually a Palestinian state alongside Israel, there was a dose of realism needed by some when it came to what is achievable from the green benches of the House of Commons.
“Not even the President of the United States has been able to stop the fighting. So, the chances of a British Prime Minister are slim.”
