Jones was born in Nottinghamshire and is the son of a coal miner. He attended Portland Comprehensive School in Worksop and Newcastle Polytechnic and the University of Southern Maine, gaining a BA (Hons) in Government and Public Policy. Before becoming an MP, he was a Newcastle upon Tyne councillor from 1990 to 2001 and Chairman of the Development Committee as well as an elected officer of the GMB Union.[1]
He was re-elected to the North Durham seat in the 2005 general election, with a majority of 16,781. He polled 64.1% of the vote. His campaigning on behalf of people who had coal health compensation payments deducted by unscrupulous claims handlers influenced the Compensation Act 2006[3]
Jones was appointed Parliamentary Under Secretary of State and Minister for Veterans at the Ministry of Defence in October 2008.[4]
In August 2009 he was accused of briefing against the Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Richard Dannatt, who had been an outspoken critic of the government's record on equipping troops.[5][6] A series of FOI requests had been made[7] concerning Dannat's expenses, and blogger Guido Fawkes 'outed' Jones as the culprit, although he did not provide any evidence that directly connected Jones to the requests. Jones, who had tabled Parliamentary questions on Army officials' spending before becoming a minister,[5] denied the allegations and said he had a good working relationship with Dannatt.[8]
Jones publicly apologised to Joanna Lumley in March 2010 after he had accused her of "deathly silence" over misleading advice being given to some Gurkhas following Lumley's successful campaign to allow more Gurkhas to settle in the UK
He became a member of the special Select Committee set up to scrutinise the Bill that became the Armed Forces Act 2011.[12] He was also a member of the Public Bill Committee for the Defence Reform Act 2014[13]
In December 2015 Jones made public his strong criticism of the new Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, in particular after Corbyn opposed military intervention in the Syrian Civil War. Jones stated "because of [Corbyn's] incompetence, the Tories are getting away with things that are not being properly scrutinised and the people who are suffering are the ones that we represent."[14]
Jones supported the Saudi Arabian-led intervention in Yemen.[15]
He is Treasurer of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Industrial Heritage
He later supported Owen Smith in the failed attempt to replace Jeremy Corbyn in the 2016 Labour Party (UK) leadership election
In 2012, in a debate in Parliament on mental health issues and their taboo, Jones spoke about his own battles with depression, alongside Conservative back-bencher Charles Walker, who spoke about his own 30-year battle with obsessive–compulsive disorder.
Jones stated that he had suffered with depression since 1996. Jones and
Walker were both later praised for their speeches by Time to Change, a
mental health anti-stigma campaign run by charities Mind and Rethink Mental Illness
In November 2015, after the appointment of the former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone to co-chair the Labour Party's review of whether to replace the Trident nuclear missile
system, Jones, a Shadow Junior Defence Minister, told the PoliticsHome
website he was not sure Livingstone knew anything about defence and his
appointment would only damage credibility among those who care about
defence. In response, Livingstone told the Daily Mirror
and others that Jones was "obviously depressed and disturbed" and
"should see a GP". Jones responded that the remarks "belong in the dark
ages" and that mental health should not be used to attack political
differences.[21] Livingstone eventually apologised, only doing so unreservedly via Twitter after intervention by Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn.[22]
It was later noted in passing that Jones had himself in 2010 ridiculed a
political viewpoint by reference to "the nearest lunatic asylum
