Tributes to Baroness Boothroyd

John Spellar Excerpts

Tuesday 28th February 2023 Commons Chamber

[John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)]

I was sitting in this spot, behind Betty Boothroyd, when she was elected as Speaker. A picture of that day has gone round, which unfortunately reminds me that a lot of colour has gone out of both my hair and beard in the meantime. Imagine having to share a borough and the local media with an international star!

It is sad to lose a long-standing good friend, but really we should be celebrating an extraordinary groundbreaking life. She brought the Speaker’s role into the modern world. She respected tradition, as has been said, but did so with style. It was a role made for the televising of this House. One could almost have described it as traditional values in a modern setting.

Betty controlled this place with firmness and humour, but without either patronising or belittling colleagues—a tradition, I am pleased to see, Mr Speaker, that you have restored. With that mixture of charm and toughness, she was a mailed fist inside a stylish velvet glove. That served her well inside the Labour party, where she was a formidable figure in restoring the Labour party to common sense, battling away, hour after hour, in national executive and committee meetings. She provided the venue for the moderate group’s pre-meeting before the NEC meeting. Food and drink may have been involved as well. I am not sure whether my right hon. Friend the Member for Derby South (Margaret Beckett) or your father, Mr Speaker, were on the invitation list for those gatherings. That was all good training for her time in the Whips Office, during the years recently recreated in the play “This House”.

We also have to consider how she even got to this place. The battle for a seat—a number of seats—was enormously difficult for a working-class woman without some of the resources that were available to trade union candidates, for example, in those days. She fought in Leicester South East, Peterborough, Nelson and Colne and Rossendale before becoming the Member for West Bromwich.

Betty showed that perseverance and grit can win through. She broke barriers so that others who followed would not have the same struggles. She was one of a kind and a real pioneer. West Bromwich, Sandwell, the Labour party, the wider west midlands, Parliament and the public will miss her, but will remember how she changed this Parliament and this country for the better. May she rest in peace.