Chris Murray (politician)

Chris Murray is a British Labour Party politician who has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Edinburgh East and Musselburgh since 2024. He gained the seat from Tommy Sheppard, a member of the Scottish National Party.

Early life and education
Murray is the son of Scottish Labour politician Margaret Curran. He grew up in Glasgow and attended Shawlands Academy. He then studied French and German at the University of Oxford, later studying at the London School of Economics and attending Harvard University as a John F. Kennedy Fellow.

Early career
Murray began his career as a political assistant to the Labour politician Harriet Harman, holding the role for two years. Harman later supported Murray's 2024 campaign for Parliament and canvassed alongside him in Edinburgh. In 2014, he began working as an attaché at the Embassy of the United Kingdom in Paris. He stayed in the role for four years. He then served as an adviser on economic diplomacy at the OECD.

After leaving diplomacy, he worked as a senior government relations adviser for the charity Save the Children and was a research fellow at the IPPR Scotland thinktank. Murray also volunteered as chair of the Refugee Survival Trust charity and served on the advisory council of These Islands, a thinktank producing research in favour of British unionism.

By May 2022, he was a policy manager for migration at the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities.

Member of Parliament
In July 2024, Murray was elected MP for the Edinburgh East and Musselburgh constituency.

Personal life
Murray is gay.

Political views
In 2019, Murray was a member of the advisory committee for the Labour for a Public Vote group. Following the poor Scottish Labour results in that year's European Parliament election, he called for members of the party to back another Brexit referendum.

In a July 2024 interview with The Student, Murray called for an "immediate and lasting ceasefire" in the Gaza–Israel conflict.