Oona King

Oona Tamsyn King, Baroness King of Bow (born 22 October 1967) is a business executive and former British Labour Party politician. She was a Labour Member of Parliament for Bethnal Green and Bow from 1997 until 2005. Early life Oona King was born in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, to Preston King, an African-American academic, and his British wife, Hazel King (née Stern), a social justice activist. A maternal aunt is the medical doctor Miriam Stoppard and the actor Ed Stoppard is a cousin. On her father's side, she comes from a line of American civil rights activists and successful entrepreneurs. Her paternal grandfather, civil rights activist Clennon Washington King Sr., and his wife had a daughter and seven sons, including her uncle C. B. King, a pioneering civil rights attorney in Albany, Georgia. King's maternal grandfather was born Jewish, and her maternal grandmother converted to Judaism. Through her grandmother, King is a first cousin, once removed, of Ted Graham, Baron Graham of Edmonton. King was educated at Haverstock Comprehensive Secondary School on Crogsland Road in Chalk Farm (borough of Camden), London. She was a contemporary of fellow Labour politicians David Miliband and his younger brother Ed. In her first year as an undergraduate at University of York, King was briefly a member of the Socialist Workers Party. During her second year (1988–89), she gained a scholarship to the University of California, Berkeley and graduated with a first class honours Politics degree in 1990.