Harriet Harman - from Sloane to class warrior

Anne McElvoy
28 Jan 2010

Harriet Harman is still flushed from a skirmish when I pop in to see her in her Commons office.

She was thrust into Prime Minister's Questions at short notice, when Gordon Brown didn't make it back in time from Northern Ireland yesterday. "And people kept texting me all night to tell me about it, which wasn't very refreshing."

Still, the deputy leader looks perky and modestly well-groomed in a neat purple jacket with a butterfly brooch and standard Labour black trousers of indefinite cut.

Frankly yesterday wasn't her best day in the Commons, and she looks a bit dissatisfied when I mention her PMQs performance.

Her encounters with William Hague, when the two deputise for Brown and Cameron, have the edge of a meritocratic grammar school boy taking on a product of St Paul's girls school.

Her background is pukka - niece of Lord Longford and closely related to the political aristocracy of the Jays. She's even distantly intertwined with David Cameron's family, by virtue of an aunt's marriage.

Tactfully, I remind her of TV footage showing her on the picket line in the 1976 Grunwick dispute, sounding frightfully posh. She winces: "I know! I sounded like Lady Diana - and I was so docile and polite and terribly reasoning. I've given that up."

So did she set out to change her Pauline accent to get on in the People's Party? "I think it was just part of a general trend - you don't hear that kind of 1950s cut-glass accent now. I didn't consciously change it, but I agree, I lost it somehow. Looking back to the way I was then, it must have seemed even more odd to people that I was with Jack."

Jack Dromey is her trade union leader husband. I ask if the cross-class marriage caused consternation in her circle. "Yes, but I didn't care," she says crisply.

Class does seem to haunt our Harriet, though. In an era when so many politicians prefer the bland, reassuring nostrums of the classless society, she's the one pushing ahead, to the discomfiture of some of her own colleagues, with a wide-ranging bill aimed at closing the pay gap and imposing a duty to promote greater equality on public- sector employers.

"The gap between the richest and poorest is shockingly wide and it isn't good for us as a country," she says firmly. She's furious about Cameron saying the wealth gap matters less than warm, stable families. "Does he want to give them a hug," she enquires acidly. "Is that his solution? In what world are the Tories living? Of course material wealth makes a huge difference to a child's life chances."

Then she launches into the things she says the Conservatives would attack in power - child tax credits, Sure Start centres. It sounds like government by the Gradgrinds.

None of her dire predictions are actually Tory policy, I note. "Well, they will scale everything back," she says, passion replacing exactitude.

It is worth pointing out that the huge report she has just published on British inequalities concludes that three terms of Labour government hasn't reversed the trend of the Thatcher years. "We have stopped the gap growing," she parries.

She blames high top-end salaries for exacerbating the problem, and you can hear the Blairites wincing in the wings. Unlike Lord Mandelson, Harman is clearly not "intensely relaxed" about people getting filthy rich.

Does she think of herself as a class warrior? "Nooo. Do I look like a scary class warrior? I just think that societies with fewer extremes of inequality are better because the rungs of opportunity are closer together. It has to be better than a patriarchy where everyone knows their place."

It is a good 20 years since I have heard the word "patriarchy" used by a senior Labour politician. You cannot entirely take the early 1980s out of Harriet.

Having once told me she spent only £50 on her handbags - "Oh God, that caused Handbag-gate ..." - she motions to a smart black leather one, which looks like it cost a bit more.

With the Iraq inquiry hanging like a large storm cloud over Labour and the bruising revelations of legal doubts about the war being quashed, she sticks firmly to the official line.

"The Attorney General's advice is in the end the advice that the Prime Minister takes." Did she, a QC no less, harbour any doubts at all on the war's legality? "That wasn't for me to decide. The Attorney General gave the advice he did."

She can stonewall with the best of them. Famously, she chose to educate her three children in different faith or selective schools.

So, I ask, if one of her children were discriminated against on applying to university, to allow a candidate with poorer grades to have the place, how would she feel? Lord Mandelson's recent proposals emphasise that admissions tutors should consider potential as well as actual achievement for applicants from poorer homes.

"I'm not going to answer that on personal terms. But we do have to think about able people who are losing out. That's what I joined the Labour Party to do: redress unfairness."

She is "Harriet Harperson" to her detractors. Surely the tag must get a bit wearisome?

"I'm not daunted, if that's what you mean. I suppose they need to find a caricature. I think if you suggest women should advance, men always think you're somehow attacking them. If you wait long enough, it's seen as common wisdom."

She's befriended the Speaker's wife Sally Bercow, who revealed in the Standard her youthful drink and sex excesses. "Don't you think she would have been differently treated if she was a man? I admire her for speaking up about how she conquered her drink problem and got her life on track. Mrs Bercow is now fighting a very Tory Westminster ward for Labour. I'll certainly go canvassing with her, though it's fair to say we have an uphill struggle."

Harman's personal reputation is mixed: female colleagues say she is fantastically loyal. "You absolutely need her on your side in a shit-storm," says one minister.

But in Peter Watt's new book on his fall from grace as Labour General Secretary, he paints her as a Machiavellian player. "Pompous and difficult," he tells me. "We used to call her 'the Queen'."

Still, for someone whose image is of a prickly Labour worthy, she can be irreverent about herself.

"I'm not getting enough culture," she moans at one point. "I must get a life. What should I go to? Don't make it too difficult, though, because I am out of practice."

So would she think a future leadership contest should have a woman candidate? She considers this elephant trap for a full three seconds and goes on about the "dim and distant future" in which they might consider another life beyond Gordon. "I'll talk to you about it then but not before."

Dear me, Harriet, you're not going to leave it all to the boys to fight over the spoils, are you? "I have been talking about gender and politics since the 1970s and I'm not going to stop now. I don't believe we should have all-men leadership teams and I have made that clear and I won't change that view."

When she views TV debates consisting of three male leaders, what does she think? "I think it puts politics in a bad place, because it makes us look as if a lot of what we do is not about women's lives. Having women's voices involved in politics is a way of telling women that they are represented and it is very important."

That's a pretty large hint that she intends to be a player, when Labour finally faces its post-election reckoning. She is, after all, the only serious player who could be on the future "leadership team" - in the top job or, she appears to suggest, hanging onto her role as deputy leader.

The media don't get off lightly either. She's proud to have prodded BBC bosses to appoint more older on-screen women recently. "But in big, serious roles, there's not exactly a critical mass of women on the airwaves. They've finally allowed women to do some presenting on election night. Well hurrah. But the Today programme only has one woman. It's not a comfortable position."

Surely there must be some advantages to being an exotic woman among the suits?

"Well, I think when I came to the deputy leadership, I was underrated," she says, sudden steel in her voice. "Some people predicted a mega-flop. They said, 'She'll come last'."

A rich chortle follows. "Being underestimated can turn out to be a great strength."

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