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Barry Strachan Gardiner (born 10 March 1957) is a British politician who served as Shadow Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change and Shadow Secretary of State for International Trade from 2016 to 2020. A member of the Labour Party, he has been Member of Parliament (MP) for Brent North since 1997. The son of an Olympic footballer, Gardiner was born and educated in Glasgow before being moved to Hertfordshire to be educated at Haileybury and Imperial Service College. After studying at the University of St Andrews, he worked in the Student Christian Movement and considered a career in the Episcopal Church. He then studied philosophy at Harvard University and researched the subject at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He became involved in local government in Cambridge and was the youngest person to be elected mayor of the city in 1992. Leaving local government in 1994, he worked in marine arbitration before being elected for Brent North at the 1997 general election. Gardiner served in Tony Blair's New Labour government from April 2004 to June 2007 as a junior minister in the Northern Ireland Office, Department of Trade and Industry and Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs respectively. After holding junior positions on the Official Opposition frontbench under Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn, Gardiner served in Corbyn's Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Energy and Climate Change Secretary from June to July 2016. He subsequently served as Shadow International Trade Secretary and Shadow Minister for International Climate Change until returning to the backbenches in April 2020.
