Tributes to Baroness Boothroyd

Angela Eagle Excerpts

Tuesday 28th February 2023 Commons Chamber

[Dame Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

I speak as a current serving Member of Labour’s NEC who has some insight—more from history than personal experience—of the kinds of times that Betty went through when she was a servant of the Labour party NEC. I also speak as someone whose first vote in this House was actually in that Speaker’s election, so I started off pretty well in the 1992 to 1997 Parliament with a win, but I do not think that we won a single vote after that for the length of the Parliament.

Betty was, as we have heard, born to a working-class family of textile workers in Dewsbury, the daughter of a millhand and a weaver. She later said:

“I came out of the womb into the Labour movement.”

Her mum and dad, Mary and Archie, were both members of the Labour party and the textile workers union when she was born. Despite being a fun-loving teenager, she was—perhaps inevitably, given that background—always serious about her politics. She said that her parents were politically minded because they were mill workers in Dewsbury during the depression years.

Betty was famously a keen dancer, as we have heard, and a chorus girl who, rumour had it, even performed at the pantomime. But in the end, she chose Parliament, and she persisted so that, finally, Parliament also chose her. She did not become an MP easily, as we have heard—no woman did back then. It took her five attempts over 16 years before she was finally successful as the 95th woman ever elected to this House of Commons. During that struggle, she even began referring to herself as

“the girl most unlikely to succeed”,

but on 24 May 1973, she was successfully elected in a by-election, and she served her voters faithfully in the constituency of West Bromwich, and its successor constituency, West Bromwich, West, until 2000. I certainly do not envy my right hon. Friend the Member for Warley (John Spellar), who had to try to get local coverage in the newspapers with Betty also vying for that space.

The Parliament that Betty entered in 1973 was almost entirely bereft of women. When she first came to this place, only 4%, or 19, of the 635 MPs were women. That figure was to fall even lower in the February 1974 election—of which today is the anniversary, by the way—which returned 23 women, of whom 13 were Labour and, of course, Betty was one. Three other women were elected in that election and I think we ought to remember them. Maureen Colquhoun was of the same generation as Betty, and although she had a very different parliamentary career, hers was equally as important. Jo Richardson was also returned, as was Audrey Wise. They were all formidable Labour women. It just shows what you had to be in that time to get anywhere near this place.

When I was elected to Parliament in 1992, my first ever vote was in that historic Speaker’s election, which was only the third in a century. As we have heard, Betty was the first—and, so far, the only—woman to be elected Speaker in 700 years of parliamentary history. It is a tribute to her personal qualities and the regard in which she was held that she broke that glass ceiling when women made up less than 10% of that House of Commons. It is perhaps why she appealed in this place, when we were all listening, for people to vote for what she was and what she represented rather than for how she was born. That was, I think, a pitch to the 90% of people in this place, during that election, who were not women.

Betty was not John Major’s choice or the Conservative choice in that election—as we have heard, Peter Brooke was—but 72 Members of the governing party voted for her, which just shows her reach. When John Major realised that his pitch for Peter Brooke had failed, and that, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Derby South (Margaret Beckett) said in her tribute, people were very happy about it, he was extremely graceful in his tribute to her. He observed that she had “made history”, and said to her:

“The House trusts you. It believes that you enjoy in abundance the qualities necessary to protect and sustain the House, and to safeguard its rights.”—[Official Report, 27 April 1992; Vol. 207, c. 20.]

She repaid that trust in spades in the eight years during which she presided.

Betty was, as has been referred to in some tributes, the owner of a famously loud voice, which, of course, you need if you are in the Chair, Mr Speaker. She stamped her personality on the role and became a national treasure. She got rid of the wig, rightly assuming that her abundant shock of impeccably sculptured grey hair was a suitable alternative. She presided with, I think, great authority, wit and charm over some very difficult periods—not least the trench warfare over the Maastricht treaty. She was probably the nearest thing to regal that any non-royal could be, which befits the highest commoner in the land, which of course our Speaker is. She was always impeccably fashionable, as perhaps befits the daughter of textile workers. She was clear in interviews that her dress sense had come directly from the expectations of her father for her to be presentable as she was growing up.

Betty was, in private, an astute observer of the political scene, personally kind and thoughtful, and good at putting new Members at their ease while keeping them on the straight and narrow as far as procedure went. She was a stickler for tradition and a staunch protector of the rights of the House, as we have heard. There was a moan of great shock when she announced her resignation in 2000. Nobody had expected it. I was in the Chamber when she announced it, and there was dismay around the place, which forced her in the end to stop speaking from her prepared notes and just say, “Be happy for me!” She had decided to go at a time of her choosing after feeling that she had served the House to the best of her ability for as long she wished to do so.

Betty regarded herself as a democrat. She was pro-EU, as I think the hon. Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) said in his remarks. She was a child of the Labour party. She was a Labour icon. She was, as I mentioned, one of that group of formidable women who came into the House in the 1970s. She was, above all else, a servant of Parliament. We will not see her like again, but those who knew her know what a privilege that was and what a magnificent and unique parliamentarian we were lucky enough to know and work alongside.