House of Commons

Touhig contested the Richmond and Barnes constituency at the 1992 general election, but reached third-place behind the Conservative and Liberal Democrat candidates. Following the resignation of Neil Kinnock, former Leader of the Opposition and Leader of the Labour Party, he was elected to succeed him as MP for Islwyn at the by-election on 16 February 1995.

From 1996 to 1997, Touhig was a Member of the Welsh Affairs Select Committee. He served as Parliamentary Private Secretary (PPS) to Gordon Brown, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, from May 1997 to July 1999. He had to resign as PPS in 1999, when he confessed to receiving a leaked Social Security Select Committee report on Child benefit.^[2] He was later suspended for three days from the Commons.^[3]

He was appointed to serve as an Assistant Whip from November 1999 to June 2001. He was a junior minister at the Ministry of Defence, with special responsibility for veterans, but left government in the May 2006 reshuffle.^[4] He was made a Member of the Privy Council on 19 July 2006.

In Paul Flynn's 1999 book Dragons and Poodles, he was described as being the "seamstress-in-chief of stitch ups", that he could be "ambitious" and "can be pompous".^[5]

On 29 January 2010, Touhig announced that he would stand down at the 2010 General Election.^[6]

House of Lords

On 28 June 2010, Touhig was made a life peer in the House of Lords as Baron Touhig, of Islwyn and Glansychan in the County of Gwent.^[7]

He was appointed to the opposition front bench as a Whip and Shadow Spokesperson for Defence in September 2015, serving as a Whip until September 2016 and a Defence Spokesperson until October 2017. He returned to the defence brief from April 2020 to May 2021.