Researching David Cunliffe

After the defeat of the Labour Party in the 2008 general election, and the resignation of Helen Clark as the party leader, Cunliffe was appointed the party's finance spokesman and number three on the front bench. After Labour lost the 2011 general election and Phil Goff stood down as party leader, Cunliffe ran for the leadership, but narrowly lost to David Shearer.

On 26 August 2013, Cunliffe announced a second leadership bid after David Shearer's departure from the leadership and was elected on 15 September 2013. Following Labour's defeat at the general election in September 2014, he resigned as leader of the Labour Party.

Born in the outer London village of Cheam, David Cunliffe became interested in drama while attending Tiffins High School in Kingston upon Thames. This interest led to his winning, at age 16, a Queen's Scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) after which he worked for several years in repertory theatre around England until he became, in his mid-twenties, one Granada Television's directors during Coronation Street's earliest years. Over the succeeding decades he accumulated a very large body of work as a director, producer-director or executive producer, much at Yorkshire Television, in such programmes as 1962's Before My Time, 1965's The Man in Room 17, the 1969 and 1970 programmes, Great Performances, Ryan International and Dr. Finlay's Casebook, 1971's Kate, 1972's The Onedin Line, 1973's Warship, 1974's Fall of Eagles and Good Girl, 1975's The Main Chance, 1976's Hadleigh, Forget Me Not and Dickens of London, 1977's Raffles and Beryl's Lot, 1979's Flambards and The Sandbaggers, 1981's The Good Companions and Get Lost!, 1982's Airline and ITV Playhouse, 1984's Sorrell and Son and Killer, 1985's The Beiderbecke Affair, 1986's Love and Marriage, 1989's A Bit of a Do, 1995's Oliver's Travels, 2001's Victoria & Albert, 2006's The Shell Seekers and many others.

Several of the TV series and other productions which David Cunliffe directed or produced were also broadcast in the United States. The Onedin Line achieved considerable popularity when it was broadcast by stations of the non-commercial PBS network. Two years after its original showing, Fall of Eagles was transmitted on cable/satellite station TBS and, in 1990, was shown on another cable/satellite station, Bravo which, at the time, was operating as a high-quality, non-commercial outlet devoted to the arts. One of the productions on which he worked, The Attic: The Hiding of Anne Frank, a 1988 Telecom Entertainment/Yorkshire Television film, shown by CBS, won a Primetime Emmy Award for its writer, William Hanley, as well as a number of nominations for other achievements, including acting, directing and producing, with David Cunliffe receiving a nomination as co-executive producer...one of the nine executives who were nominated for overseeing the production.