Margaret McDonagh, Baroness McDonagh of Mitcham and Morden, died this week, far too young at 61, from a ferocious brain tumour. You may not be familiar with this Labour grande dame, despite the many obituaries published about her. But if you delighted in Tony Blair winning the election in 1997 and then again four years later, you have a lot to thank this formidable woman for because she was Blair’s right hand; a truly remarkable political organiser who applied ferocious discipline to the Labour Party, adding her political acumen to Blair’s, turning Labour into the election-winning force it became.
Blair remained a close friend to Margaret, visiting her in hospital and when she returned home to Colliers Wood for the final days to be with her beloved older sister Siobhan, also a Labour MP. Margaret was the youngest and first female general secretary of the Labour Party and supported Labour to the end.
I was a young rookie journalist at the Guardian when Labour won that landslide, so I cannot speak first hand of her Westminster years. But it’s well known that she organised the campaign behind abolishing Clause 4; it was her idea to introduce Labour’s pledge card and she terrified the hell out of many less formidable than she was. I was only fortunate to know Margaret last summer. The cancer had already taken hold. She didn’t know whether she had weeks, days or months left. At our first lunch that last April, she shrugged, with a grim, determined smile, “Well, you’ve got to just get on with it, don’t you?”
She lived a full year. Sheer bloody-mindedness, I suspect. And as was typical of Margaret, when she found out the drug trials for Glioblastoma weren’t available in this country, she raised vast sums to ensure University College London Hospital got the first tranche of funds it needed, even as this cancer took its devasting toll on her.
A mutual friend had introduced us, and I began consulting for the firm she co-founded, The Pipeline, which helps women in senior leadership find their true potential and reach board and CEO level. It was a brilliant organisation and is still going strong. She had left politics in 2001 and had seen how smart, capable women were still being held back. And she spent the last 10 years of her life pushing them forward. Her motivation was doing what was right. That’s why her politics was so important to her. She understood that society — and business — would benefit hugely from better gender diversity at the top.
As part of my work, I frequently spoke to women who had gone through Pipeline’s highly successful leadership programme. And I wonder if Margaret knew the effect she had had on them; the awe, love, and respect they held her in. As a consultancy, The Pipeline was frequently hired by the Civil Service, to sustain senior women in the Cabinet Office, the MoD, and the Justice Department, to name a few. The BBC, and nearly every corporation in this country you can think of, did so too. Her approach was muscular, strategic, data-driven and thorough. We discussed together how much we wanted to begin work with the Metropolitan Police.
Margaret launched The Pipeline with her co-founder Lorna Fitzsimons at around the same time that London’s former mayoral hopeful Daniel Korski was allegedly grabbing Daisy Goodwin’s bosom in Number 10 (he denies these allegations). It is the details of the meeting that stick with me. He barely listened to her pitch, and began by putting his feet up on her chair.
Why? Power and influence puffing up otherwise fragile egos? Who knows. But a male club locking many women out for decades was a harder ceiling to crack. Margaret wanted to do her bit fixing that.
As a friend of hers said, “There are doers and there are talkers. Margaret was a doer. And she hated injustice.” She understood women needed support networks and confidence. Many women have risen in the civil service and politics due to her efforts. That was not just because she broke barriers in Labour, but because she dedicated her life to pulling women up behind her.
Despite her cancer, she noticed that summer I was battle-bruised. She quietly lent in. My last sight of her was looking like a rock chick in double denim.
They say behind every great man, there’s a great woman. I prefer behind every great woman, there are even more great women. Margaret McDonagh was one of them.
Emily Sheffield is a former editor of the Evening Standard
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