Laura Kyrke-Smith

Laura Elizabeth Kyrke-Smith (born September 1983) is a British politician, academic and charity worker who has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Aylesbury since 2024. A member of the Labour Party, she is the first Labour MP for Aylesbury as well as the first female MP to represent Aylesbury in the House of Commons.

Since 2013, Kyrke-Smith has served as UK Executive Director of the International Rescue Committee. In the 2024 general election, she gained the Aylesbury seat from Rob Butler, a member of the Conservative Party. Her victory ended a century streak of Conservative and Unionist MPs in Aylesbury, starting in the 1924 general election.

Biography
Kyrke-Smith was born in September 1983 to Peter St. L Kyrke-Smith, son of BHS Kyrke-Smith of Penbedw estate near Nannerch in Wales, and to Lyndsay Madeleine Pelly, daughter of Peter Jeremy Pelly and his wife Dorothy Joan Hill. On her maternal side, through her grandfather her four-times great grandfather was the Hudson's Bay Company governor Sir John Pelly, 1st Baronet, and through her grandmother her three-times great-grandfather was Sir Robert Keith Alexander Dick-Cunyngham, 7/9th Baronet.

Kyrke-Smith attended Robinson College, Cambridge, from 2002 to 2005, where she read history and volunteered with the charity Student Action for Refugees. She then went on to study for an MSc in international relations at the London School of Economics (LSE), graduating in 2007. She was chair of the socialist society Labour Campaign for International Development from 2013 to 2017, and also worked at Portland Communications and in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office as a policy analyst. In 2019 she became the UK Executive Director of the International Rescue Committee. From 2021-2024 she was on the Board of the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC). She previously worked as an assistant to Professor Charlie Beckett at the Polis media project at the LSE.

She is credited as a reader-contributor to the 3rd edition of Lonely Planet's Tanzania and 2nd edition of The Rough Guide to Tanzania guidebooks.

In the 2021 Buckinghamshire Council elections Kyrke-Smith ran for Labour in the Little Chalfont & Amersham Common ward coming 8th out of the eleven candidates with 448 votes.