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‘It’s a miracle I don’t have PTSD after my early years in parliament,” Harriet Harman writes to me, the week after we meet. She came in on a 1982 byelection in Peckham (now Camberwell and Peckham) when she was 32. The women’s movement, which was united for about five minutes around that time, was trying to make sure there were more women on Labour shortlists. Westminster was absurd: Harman became only the 21st female MP out of 635. “I was supposed to be just the feminist advance guard, expecting the rest of the Labour sisters to surge in at the general election a few months later in 1983,” she says. This encapsulates the feeling so many departing Labour big beasts have described: being absolutely convinced, from the early 80s onwards, that Labour was on the verge of a great victory.
In the event, “the Labour result was so awful that instead of the arrival of the sisterhood en masse, the number of female MPs went up from 21 to only 23. The plan was to do it collectively. The women’s movement was never about individuals. It was about collective endeavour to change what was a shared bad experience of life. And then I found myself on my own.”
Harman and I meet in her office in Portcullis House, one of the corner ones with windows, as befits her status and length of service. Portcullis House was 10 years from being built when she won her seat, but poor facilities were the least of her problems. “It was certainly no feminist advance in ’83. We lost Ann Taylor, Joan Lestor and Shirley Summerskill and gained Edwina Currie and Ann Winterton. Hardly sisters!” (Some context for younger readers: Currie told Jenni Murray on Woman’s Hour that nice married women like Currie – who was having an affair with John Major at the time – didn’t get cervical cancer. Winterton’s gender politics were blown out of the water by an incident of incredible racism.)
My memory of Harman’s election – I was nine, but in a Labour-supporting, single-mother family, so people talked about this stuff – is that her upper-middle-class background was never seen as a problem. She was born in Harley Street in 1950. Her father was an eminent doctor and her mother was a barrister, but she gave up work to look after her four daughters. “Her wig was in our dressing-up box,” Harman says, with rueful indignation. She blames her father: “He wanted her to be at home, cooking.”
Harman went to St Paul’s girls’ school then the University of York. Her family tree reads like Debrett’s (relatives include the Countess of Longford and Neville Chamberlain), but Labour-supporting women were not going to take class gatekeeping from the men who dominated the party. She was, however, viewed with a trace of suspicion for being so good-looking.
She describes being “battered in parliament every single day”. She went back recently to look at Margaret Thatcher’s response to her first question at Prime Minister’s Questions. The courteous thing would have been to welcome her as a new female face. Instead, Thatcher “slapped me down and humiliated me for asking about the difficulties for working mothers with no school-holiday play schemes”.
The Tory MP Tony Marlow called her “a stupid cow” in the chamber. That was during a debate on BSE in 1996, on the eve of a brave new Labour world in which there would be no place for Marlow. No one could be said to have served their time and done their bit to bring that about more than Harman.
Throughout the 80s and 90s, the support of women outside parliament kept her going. “There weren’t that many Labour MPs and a lot of them were octogenarians,” she says. “It was really a no-women type of thing. It didn’t matter what your politics were – if you were a young woman, you were not in the same politics as they were.” She forged her own soft‑left feminist politics in the 80s, ignoring multiple warnings that if she kept banging on about women she would get pigeonholed. “If I’m pigeonholed with half the population, I don’t care,” she says. “Half the population, which is currently excluded from having a view on anything. That says something bad about politics. It doesn’t say anything about feminism.”
She was on the same page as Neil Kinnock politically, she says, but she remembers the day her late husband, Jack Dromey, a renowned trade unionist and later the Labour MP for Birmingham Erdington, piped up while reading Hansard. “Honestly, the idea that Jack used to read Hansard. He said: ‘Have you seen what these guys Gordon Brown and Tony Blair are saying? That’s what you agree with.’”
She is funny on the subject of her marriage. Dromey is widely admired for being a great trade unionist, but domestically? Not so much. “I absolutely did not have a perfect 50/50 division in my marriage. I think that very few women in my generation did. The big advance for men in Jack’s generation is that they espoused the belief that we should be able to do things in our own right and that that would not undermine them.”
In government, some of Harman’s crusades were in areas with which mainstream politics simply hadn’t troubled itself. As the equalities minister in 2010, she overturned the “provocation” rider, whereby infidelity could be used as mitigation to bring a murder charge down to manslaughter. (Men, of course, are much more likely to murder their partners, so they got most use out of it.) Others, such as the extant battle for equal pay, brought her into direct conflict with the unions: “They’d bargained for the family wage and that’s how you got high pay: ‘This man needs to support his wife and children.’ We said: ‘No, we want equal pay.’ That challenged entrenched labour movement realities – they said it was rightwing.”
Other times, she fought on a modernising principle that could be described as equal, but not that helpful. I wasn’t planning to bring up the changes to lone-parent benefit she made as the social security secretary in 1997; it was so long ago and many worse things have happened to benefits since. But Harman raises it. “Lone-parent women weren’t required to be available for work until the youngest child was 16,” she says, explaining the “support” New Labour brought to get women back into work. What this amounted to was a £6-a-week cut and a load of bureaucratic hassle. There was a backlash in the commons; Blair said he “stood by” Harman. But when an ugly row followed with the late MP Frank Field – a fellow welfare minister – she was demoted and he was sacked.
She spent the early 00s in the lower-profile roles of solicitor general, constitutional affairs minister and justice minister. Still, she is very collegiate about that era and the efficacy of the Blairite project. “Look, Tony was a very different sort of Labour politician than your normal Labour MP,” she says. “A lot of people found that quite reassuring: they could safely vote for him because it didn’t feel like it was full-fat Labour.
“But he wasn’t that different: he was trebling the money going into the NHS and bringing in the national minimum wage, the Human Rights Act, the Freedom of Information Act, devolution for Scotland. There was a huge amount from the trade union cupboard of policy demands. There was masses done that was traditional Labour.”
She also defends, stoutly, the war in Iraq. She believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction because Blair believed it: “I’ve never taken the view that it was a cynical plot by Tony Blair to hoodwink us all when he knew something different.”
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When, in 2007, Harman stood for deputy leader, it was very much in answer to the question: where are the prominent women in this supposedly feminist party? (She describes Labour as “the political wing of the feminist movement”.) It was perplexing when Brown decided, upon her election in a runoff against Alan Johnson, to decouple the role from deputy prime minister; he went without a second-in-command for his whole three years. Looking back, the optics were terrible. She tore into him about it in a speech in 2014, asking: “If one of the men had won the deputy leadership, would that have happened? Would they have put up with it? I doubt it.”
She is still trenchant about sexism in Westminster, but she is no longer beefing with anyone in particular and is tactful to a fault about the party and everyone in it, angling squarely towards optimism. “What’s not depressing at all is to be leaving politics with a real sense of hope in the air that Labour is going to get in. After being in opposition since 2010, that is thrilling. I know it might not seem thrilling to a lot of people. I think a lot of people don’t remember what it was like to suddenly have your own values in No 10 – not terrible, divisive values, but progressive, Labour values. I feel like that again.”
She says a July election is evidence that “Sunak thinks the economic news is going to get worse, otherwise he would wait till November. He’s lost control of the politics. He kept being buffeted by byelection results, every week Tory MPs announcing they were standing down, defections. Although he had a big working majority, he couldn’t really lead.” Still, she is not tempting fate. Of Keir Starmer and his team, she says: “They’re positive, they’re determined, but they’re absolutely not complacent. There’s a mountain to climb. It’s all very well looking at the polls, but there’s so much to be done.”
The way she describes it, she has been hostage to the party’s misfortunes in recent years: “I would have quit earlier but for the fact that I felt that the party was in such a rocky state. I felt I should stay and operate as ballast.” She has a great deal of shuddering anti-nostalgia from being in opposition: “It’s awful. Powerlessness, if you’ve got a cause, is a terrible thing.”
Those two formative experiences – fighting sexism on one hand, always losing on the other – created a fundamental tension in her political identity: being simultaneously an unswervable idealist and a Blairite pragmatist who would swerve at the first whiff of an opinion poll. It led to some decisions that looked frankly weird to people outside parliament’s bubble.
In 2015, while acting leader of the opposition, she whipped Labour MPs to abstain from, rather than vote against, the welfare reform bill, which subsequently passed and brought in many of George Osborne’s sweeping benefit cuts. She says now that she had to prove to voters that Labour wasn’t the spendthrift statist party the Tories had portrayed it as for the previous five years. “I did contest that narrative every flipping waking hour, every single day. The only people who were listened to were the ones in the leadership election [which Jeremy Corbyn won]. My little squawking assertions that we’d been marvellous [meaning New Labour] were drowned out.”
She also reversed Labour’s opposition to the EU referendum, saying at the time: “There just does not seem to be the public appetite for us to man the barricades against a referendum that appears [is] inevitably going to happen.” She says now: “There was just no right way to deal with that. I did see Brexit coming.” Everywhere she went, “people were rejecting economic arguments in favour of ‘taking back control’”. She had to meet the voters where they were, she says.
Nevertheless, I feel sure that if Cameron had wanted a referendum on abortion, she wouldn’t have asked about “public appetite” before she told him where to stick it. Realists, of course, would argue that telling someone where to stick it doesn’t make any difference when you are the opposition. It’s the eternal conundrum that seems only to afflict the Labour party: do you sacrifice everything to win power and then remember your values? Or do you win only when you give a straightforward account of who you are?
I remember a hustings organised by the National Health Action party, in the Peckham Liberal Club, in Harman’s constituency, before the general election in 2015. Unexpectedly, at least 200 more people showed up than the venue could accommodate. There was mayhem outside. Relaxed, authoritative, reasonable, Harman addressed those who were excluded. She didn’t want a riot; she wanted a meeting. Everyone took her point and dispersed. She is very popular locally and, indeed, generally – a constructive, consensus-building politician in a destructive and riven age.
She is leaving Westminster to chair the Fawcett Society, “supporting women and our male allies in parliament to be as powerful as they possibly can”, working for “progressive things that will change women’s lives. Everybody thinks that when you’re in, you just pull the levers and it happens. It doesn’t.”
