The Critic | written by Michael Collins
Photograph: Harry Bowden, National Portrait Gallery
Even before Harriet Harman married the trade unionist and Labour MP Jack Dromey, she felt the need to tone down her accent.
Born on Harley Street to a barrister mother and doctor father, she was educated at St Paul’s Girls’ School. Her family tree extends from illustrious politicians to the descendants of high-profile peers: Neville Chamberlain is in there, along with numerous countesses and earls; David Cameron is a relative; Boris Johnson’s godmother, Lady Rachel Billington, is her cousin.
Johnson is central to what is likely to be Harman’s last major role as a parliamentarian (our longest-serving female MP is retiring after 40 years) as chair of the House of Commons Privileges Committee investigating “Partygate”. The forthcoming hearing could bury what remains of Johnson’s reputation. Politically, he is the antithesis of everything Harman stands for. Personally, he epitomises all that she abhors about the men in the class she was born into.
Yet in some ways they are each a caricature of the political extremes within that class. He is the Eton-educated, Bullingdon club Tory; she is a variation on those Lady Bountiful socialites of old that embraced socialism and slummed it in posh houses in poor postcodes. Johnson’s rise was fuelled by the belief that he was born to rule, and maybe Harman’s was too, as she has described politics as a “vocation” rather than a career.
Ultimately, he succeeded with a brutal ambition that outweighed his ability and an affability that gave him a common touch that Harman never possessed. In the 2019 election the Tories scooped the lion’s share of low-income voters, and Labour officially became the party of wealthy metropolitan liberals and middle-class graduates — the demographic that Harriet Harman has appealed to since entering parliament in 1982.
Having served in a number of front-bench roles in government and opposition, including leader of the House of Commons, deputy leader of the Labour Party (and acting leader on two occasions), it was expected that Harman might become the first female Labour prime minister. Her reasons for not putting herself forward as party leader vary.
Primarily, she didn’t wish to place herself under scrutiny having taken a “battering” throughout her time in parliament. “I didn’t feel that I could take the Labour Party through that transition from opposition into government,” she later said. “Partly because I’d always been challenging: challenging the press, challenging everybody and demanding progress, and that doesn’t make you very ‘leadershipy’, it makes you more like an outsider and a challenger.” This may also explain why she failed in her attempt to replace John Bercow as Speaker of the House of Commons in 2019.
Grassroots members of the Labour movement never seemed to warm to her. She ascribes this to her campaigning so fervently on women’s issues and equality. Arguably it’s less the issues that were the problem — many of which needed to be addressed — than her manner. Harman maintains she was always a feminist, having grown up with three sisters, but her activism emerged when the women’s movement was in the ascendant in the early 1970s. Here was a marginalised group she could identify with as both heroine and victim.
She may not have the charisma and showmanship that began to define popular politicians from the 1990s, but she possesses the commitment and conviction of many that had gone before; while being adept in the art of prevarication.
Colleagues claim she has a talent for reinventing herself, while critics saw this as a means of distancing herself from policies she had previously supported that are no longer popular. There is that moment when she is seen cheering Ed Miliband’s acceptance speech on being elected Labour leader in which he condemns the invasion of Iraq. David Miliband, his defeated brother, leans towards Harman and says: “What are you clapping for? You supported it.”
Harman studied politics at York university as the student activism of the late 1960s took a further turn to the left. Unlike some fellow radicals of the period, she was smart enough to recognise that the left-wing tradition of refusing to compromise with the electorate was not necessarily a vote winner. This was the Damascene conversion that came to those who, like Harman, blossomed into Blairites.
She says of those years in government: “It sounds rather basic, but it was a big transformation, instead of us waiting for the public to ‘wake up’ because they were just so wrong and so stupid to keep voting Conservative, we were like, ‘hmmm, perhaps the problem is with us, and perhaps we need to change’.”
Yet once New Labour were in government and on a roll, the administration ignored the electorate when it came to immigration and introduced legislation that has contributed to the divisive identity politics now proving detrimental to addressing major concerns affecting the lives of the many rather than the few.
The minority issues that take precedence and the laws introduced to address them have their origins within the Left that Harman was part of in the early Seventies, and the lawyers that saw an opening in civil liberties and human rights.
Harman was an eager, earnest young legal officer at the National Council of Civil Liberties (NCCL, which later renamed itself as the catchier Liberty). Over time the objectives remained, but the nature of human rights and the concept of equality expanded to keep the industry a going concern. Harriet Harman became synonymous with this quango culture, particularly when, as equalities minister she played a part in introducing the Equality Act of 2010. This legislation consolidated previous anti-discrimination laws, shielding groups with protected characteristics from discrimination, harassment and victimisation. The nature of evidence shifted from the concrete and factual, to reliance on how events were interpreted and perceived by the aggrieved.
This has brought us to the age of subjective truth, which features in the inquiry Harman will oversee as part of the cross-party Privileges Committee. The testimonies of witnesses are being sought, along with actual evidence, but in making the case for his defence Boris Johnson maintains his innocence is based on what he believed to be true. In short, his truth.
Certain Tories have objected to Harman as chairperson, citing bias as the reason. (She previously tweeted that Johnson appeared to have misled the Commons.) Like much of the criticism that has come her way, this is deflected and dismissed. The writer and fellow feminist Joan Smith once offered a succinct take on Harman’s reaction to criticism. “She has a patrician testiness,” she wrote, “which doesn’t respond to being challenged.”
Harman managed to evade many of the charges that have been levelled at her, including those little hypocrisies associated with the privileged Left when it comes to exercising socialism in their personal lives; notably the education of their children.
Having attended a comprehensive school in the constituency that Harman represents in Camberwell and Peckham, I was keen to see where her priorities lay when it came to the education of her own children years later, in the 1990s. She opted for schools in Kent, and the London Oratory in Knightsbridge where Tony Blair’s son was a pupil, and which has been investigated for operating an entry policy based on “social selection”.
It was an odd yet inevitable move from someone so opposed to the private education she herself had benefitted from; someone so enamoured with the diversity that summarises the place she represented and where she lives — albeit a postcode in which she once chose to wear a stab vest when going walkabout among her constituents.
A more serious charge emerged in 2014, with the Daily Mail exposé referred to as “Paedogate”. Harman denied she had been an apologist for the advocacy group the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE), which was rallying for changes in the law when the Campaign for Homosexuality made headway in the 1970s, and PIE became affiliated with the NCCL. Jack Dromey was chairman of the NCCL when Harman started there in 1978. She said PIE had been marginalised by that point, and that Dromey had been influential in bringing this about. Yet PIE was an affiliate until 1983, and it was endorsed at the NCCL’s 1978 AGM, on the grounds of defending the principle of free speech.
A recommended amendments to the 1978 child protection bill, declaring “images of children should only be considered pornographic if it could be proven the subject suffered”. Harman defended herself by arguing that she was protecting parents from being charged for photographing their children in swimwear. (It is telling that actual proof should be essential here, when it comes in a poor second in contemporary laws relating to discrimination and hate crimes.) On her webpage, she added: “We also proposed that the definition of indecent was too wide and instead proposed ‘obscene’ as indecent was very broadly defined.”
The problems that arise from different interest groups muscling in on minority rights has led to fragmentation rather than solidarity, as is evident with the Harman-steered Equality Act, the first to give trans people explicit protection against discrimination. Harman maintains she anticipated the conflict between those demanding women-only spaces and the transgender rights that might encroach on them. But she was clearly unprepared for the fallout that ensued.
Many feminists feel the rights being eroded are those fought for in the nascent days of the women’s movement of which Harman was a part. She has given her backing to trans women (without gender recognition certificates) standing as prospective Labour MPs on all-women shortlists. Having been vocal on women’s issues she — like many female Labour party MPs — has been uncharacteristically reticent on the subject of biological women.
When Harman arrived in the House of Commons in 1982 there were only 19 other women MPs. It was the third year of Margaret Thatcher’s tenure as prime minister. Thatcher, like Harman, attempted to change her accent and remove herself from the class she was born in so as to fit in with those that shared her political beliefs. But to feminists such as Harman, Thatcher was the wrong type of woman, with the wrong views.
Harman believes the rise in the number of female MPs has been among the most significant changes she has witnessed in her political career. The reason the Labour Party has not yet elected a female leader is because Labour women are more subversive than those on the Tory benches, she has said on numerous occasions.
It’s a weak argument but not a surprising one, as she has followed it by demanding the next Labour leader be female. That this should be paramount, rather than ability and merit, is hardly surprising from someone who — unwilling to stand herself — nominated Diane Abbott in the 2010 leadership election.
Her decision to retire as an MP may have less to do with age — she is 71 — than the death of her husband in January this year. Having made several attempts to become an MP, Dromey succeeded in 2010 and landed a Commons office next door to his wife. The pair met on a picket line in the 1970s and married the year she entered parliament. It seems an uncharacteristically conventional relationship for one who has cast herself as the maverick outsider, but one that resulted in a longevity and loyalty that doubtless makes her loss a particularly difficult one.
Harriet Harman’s achievements have been impressive in terms of the roles she has held, including the first Minister for Women. She also championed the identitarian politics responsible for the divide between traditional working class Labour supporters and the metropolitan liberal class now synonymous with the party. She began her career within an organisation so intent on defending free speech it permitted a paedophile pressure group to be one of its affiliates, but ultimately brought about a Britain where people are censored, cancelled and demonised for their views.Commendably, Harman set about changing a parliamentary system that was dominated by men, many with a background as privileged as hers. But she has been instrumental in replacing it with another form of privilege where protected identity status takes precedence. Ironically, in owing so much to quotas and shortlists, the next generation of Labour MPs might not necessarily have the same commitment, conviction, or calling as the retiring “Mother of the House”. But they will be women, and the right kind of women — with the right views — even if some of them are biologically male.