Log In Register now My account. By Nigel Morris Political Editor. Sign up to get Paul Waugh's daily politics email, with exclusive analysis every weekday evening Email address is invalid Thank you for subscribing! Sorry, there was a problem. More from News. Over the years, such attacks as these have been counterproductive. Whatever problems other women in the party had with Harman, they could see how unfairly she was treated.
And for the next generation, her resilience in the face of endless brickbats was inspiring. But the year-old says this misses the point.
Like we are using limes now, it feels like we always had coconut milk in our lives, and now people like us can make curries. So now I get to have a cocktail. One of the most interesting questions to ask anyone in Labour is this: is Harriet Harman funny?
Half of those you ask will say that she is. Yet others see someone who has learned to smother her humour for fear of being misinterpreted or dismissed. The other criticism is that Harman is robotic — that she is typical of the control-freakery of the New Labour era, in which ministers were discouraged from thinking for themselves.
Being loyal to the point of repetition has firmly gone out of fashion. That loyalty has led to situations she now finds it uncomfortable to discuss. Soon afterwards, the prime minister revealed that — having refused to make Harman deputy PM despite her being deputy Labour leader — he had, in effect, given the job to Peter Mandelson, making him first secretary of state.
I ask Flint how she felt about the incident. Is Harriet Harman the most successful left-wing politician of her generation? The Equality Act , passed in the dying gasps of the Brown government, made significant demands on employers.
They were no longer allowed to bar workers from comparing their pay; laws were brought in against age discrimination; positive action was allowed to increase the recruitment of minorities. In other words, the public sector would have to take class into account in everything it did.
Their faces were full of horror and disbelief. Yes, like Nigel Farage, she is the product of a comfortable home — her father was a doctor and her mother was a lawyer — and attended private school. But during her early career, she challenged the male dominance of parliament, the Labour Party and lobby journalism. She tells me early on in our conversation that she has a challenge she wants to throw down: Labour should publish its gender pay gap.
By contrast, Alan Johnson — whom she beat by less than 1 percentage point for the role — wrote in his memoir that she was the better candidate. It is hard to recall, now that feminism is so mainstream, but during the s Harman was regarded as a dull, single-issue crank. Her maiden speech in the House was on childcare. When she returned to work after her first maternity leave, one of her colleagues reported her to the serjeant-at-arms for taking the baby through the division lobby under her coat.
Her book is clear on the highs and lows of politics. The lows include her sacking from her first cabinet job, and the highs include the back-room role of solicitor general, improving the conduct of domestic violence and rape trials.
Harman admits she has struggled throughout her career with the idea that she was a bad mother, though the culture of parliament did little to help. In , she took her son to the cinema at half-term, only to receive a pager message asking her to stand in for the shadow health minister Robin Cook in the Commons. For most of the decade from until , when Neil Kinnock was party leader, the only female member of the shadow cabinet was Jo Richardson — as minister for women, inevitably.
In the rules were changed: MPs now had to vote for at least three women in shadow cabinet elections. Harman says male MPs called this the Assisted Places Scheme and tried to sabotage it by spreading their votes so no woman would get a respectable number, or by deliberately voting for someone supposedly so hopeless that the scheme would be discredited.
But soon constituencies were scrabbling not to be made to choose a woman. Despite the resistance, this policy undoubtedly changed the House of Commons: the number of Labour women MPs jumped to in the landslide of Labour men were elected. Many of the women felt equally uncomfortable, and Clare Short made herself scarce when she realised Blair had turned up. But nothing short of all-women shortlists seems to lift the number of female MPs significantly.
Shirley Williams tried to convince the Lib Dems to introduce them. There were 67 Conservatives elected in , up from 17 in It was Ed Miliband. Other ministers were unhappy with her seeming to interfere with their business in her other role as minister for women and equality. David Blunkett, for example, thought childcare the remit exclusively of the department of education.
Harman says she should have insisted that Blair sack Field and should have refused to make the cuts to benefits for lone parents that Brown was demanding. Little did I realise that the way they found through it was to pitch me out of government. She set herself to take defeat well, not to plot, or complain to journalists about her treatment, but to work loyally from the backbenches, and after the election she was brought back into government as solicitor general — not a cabinet job.
She set herself to ensure better treatment within the criminal justice system for victims of domestic violence, making changes to the way the Crown Prosecution Service and the courts handled cases and getting the Home Office to sponsor new legislation. In the law was finally changed to stop the provocation defence being used in domestic homicide cases. In , after Gordon Brown finally became prime minister, she decided to stand as his deputy. When she became shadow social security secretary in , there was a row over how best to allocate money to pensioners, and Harman wanted to use her conference speech to explain why targeting would help the poorest pensioners, often women; Brown thought she should make that argument in private to those, like Barbara Castle, who were opposed to what they saw as means-testing.
The section on targeting was missing: Brown had rewritten the speech while she was sitting on the platform waiting her turn. The pattern … was never to change. Castle had had a similar problem in the late s when she went to Canada with her boss, Harold Wilson, when he was president of the Board of Trade.
I am his PPS. When Brown resigned after losing the election she replaced him as interim leader and was perceived by the party to have done well. A couple of episodes late on in her front-bench career make one wonder if, had she won which seems unlikely , she would have acted with the feminist militancy that is the only thing that really distinguishes her from any other New Labour apparatchik.
This was at the very least a misjudgment; worse, it seems to have been a reward to the DUP for its support on day detention earlier that year.
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