I first met Glenda Jackson in 2003. I was a young, impressionable university student and she had come to speak at our local Labour party meeting. The hot topic of the day was the war in Iraq. Glenda was unashamedly against the war and wasn’t mincing her words about Tony Blair. She was under a huge amount of pressure to vote for the war, but she told us that her conscience wouldn’t allow her to do so.
It has been two decades but I clearly recall Glenda impressing us with her powerful oratory, her independent spirit and her strong sense of social justice. It was a theme throughout her political career for 23 years as my local MP for Hampstead, and the example she set as a good constituency MP inspired me.
I remember rebelling against the Welfare Reform bill when I had only been an MP for a few months and overhearing the Labour whips – who are responsible for party discipline in parliament – groaning and muttering that they had another Glenda on their hands. I rang Glenda that evening to tell her what the whips had said and she burst into a series of expletives and told me never to listen to them!
After the local Labour meeting was over, I nervously approached her. I remember feeling intimidated by this woman who had won two Oscars (but hadn’t bothered to turn up to receive them because she thought awards were a waste of time). What struck me immediately was her lack of affectation. Anyone who knew Glenda wouldn’t describe her as warm. She was blunt, efficient and called a spade a spade. But she had no pretentions and no ego, and that’s highly unusual in politics as the subsequent 20 years of work in local politics and parliament has taught me.
Glenda took a keen interest in me when I said I was studying literature and asked what books I was reading. She told me that books had dominated her childhood. American writers such as Sinclair Lewis had made a huge impression on her along with other authors who were putting forward the case for a politics that represents and supports the working class.
Glenda became more and more animated as she described how she read constantly and was a regular fixture at her public library. She reminisced about seeing a B-movie called A Tree Grows in Brooklyn as a schoolgirl and remembering the plot exactly – a girl who lived in a very poor part of Brooklyn and worked her way alphabetically through her local library. Glenda was always very proud of her working-class roots and referenced growing up in poverty frequently, but she never asked for sympathy or praise. When she told me that she had been lucky to “somehow” get a place at Rada, I had to hold back a smile – I knew you needed more than just luck to land a place in the most prestigious acting school in the world, but it wouldn’t have been Glenda’s style to boast about it.
Though Glenda was always civil towards me, I wouldn’t say we were particularly close. It was only after I became the Labour candidate for Hampstead and Kilburn in 2013 that I started to get to know her properly. About a year after I was selected, one of her office aides whispered to me that I had won her respect because, in her words, I “worked bloody hard”.
With that encouragement, I felt brave enough to ask her why she embarked on a political journey when she had the glitz of Hollywood at her fingertips.
After telling me off thoroughly because “Hollywood is not glamorous, it’s hard work”, she told me that she had not known any MPs when she first came to parliament in the early 1990s with a group of people from the arts world. It was for a meeting in the House of Lords and there was a big argument about funding for the arts. In Glenda’s words: “God … they were all very parsimonious. I suddenly felt so ashamed that I had never set foot in the Houses of Parliament before. I’m turning up here and saying that something needed to be done but this is only the first time I’ve been here. I needed to do something.”
Glenda was not someone who could just sit at home and enjoy retirement. She felt she needed to work, which is why she went back on stage after she left politics in 2015.
However, she did tell me that she was happy to do lots of acting because she enjoyed it, though putting on makeup and dressing up was “an absolute pain in the backside”. That sentiment summed up Glenda – someone who didn’t care about appearances but cared about the quality of her work, whether it was fighting for her constituents or playing King Lear.
Glenda was a woman in love with social justice, a politician with a touch of class, the queen of Hampstead and my inspiring mentor. I will miss her and so will our local community.
