Hanging near Margaret Beckett’s desk in parliament is a cartoon, drawn by her cousin, of things she has loved. It depicts her and her late husband, Leo, surrounded by the trappings of ministerial office, alongside their trusty caravan. Even as foreign secretary, she refused to give up holidaying in it, battling to establish secure phone lines on campsites and trundling through France with her close protection officers following in a camper van. If some found it incongruous, she didn’t care.
“I remember when I was at college, at some do or another, people were passing round the bottle and I was – like everyone else – swigging out of it. And somebody was saying: ‘Oh no no no, you’re not somebody who should ever be seen swigging out of a bottle.’ It was the same sort of reaction,” she says, with a hint of satisfaction. There is a stubborn streak in Beckett, a dogged refusal to be pigeonholed or cowed, that has underpinned an extraordinary half-century in politics.
We meet on what neither of us knows will be the eve of the announcement of a snap general election. She decided, years ago, that she would retire at the next election, not because she was slowing down (at 81, she is as sharp as ever), but because Leo was. They always came as a package – he shelved his political ambitions to support hers, even attending her Whitehall meetings as an adviser – and she planned to spend her retirement looking after him, but he died in December 2021. Carrying on alone hasn’t always been easy.
“There’s nobody there when you go home, which is the experience of everybody who is widowed,” she says. “It’s there not being anyone to do the zip up or catch that awkward necklace – and I’m starting to get a bit of rheumatism in my hands.”
A granddaughter has assumed necklace-fastening duties (while she and Leo didn’t have children together, he had two from his first marriage), but she has lost the person she could tell “all these unacceptable things” at the end of a frustrating day. When a Labour colleague recently asked her advice on coping with the stresses of government, Beckett’s answer was “marry the right person”. But there is so much more to her career than that.
Elected in 1974 as one of only 27 female MPs, Beckett combines an almost unrivalled depth of institutional Labour knowledge with a particular kind of authority. (A cabinet colleague once told me that his entire body relaxed when he heard her on the radio, knowing that however bad the crisis, she would be on top of it.) But that trust was won the hard way.
Although she is celebrated as Labour’s first female leader, stepping in after John Smith died suddenly in 1994 was “my worst time in politics”, she says. Her voice catches as she describes how the party’s then general secretary, Larry Whitty, broke the news of Smith’s heart attack over the phone. “My immediate response was that we must make sure that there’s no pressure on him to go – we must protect him, shield him, make sure he’s got through it, because I was confident that he could be got through it and carry on,” she says. But Leo, beside her, had heard something in Whitty’s voice. “He said: ‘Margaret, I think he’s already dead.’ And he was.”
As Smith’s deputy, her job was to hold the reins until a new leader was elected, but it proved a lonely task. “I knew that most of my shadow cabinet colleagues didn’t support me at all, and probably most of the PLP [parliamentary Labour party].” Why not? “I think some of them probably thought I shouldn’t have been deputy anyway, a mere woman,” she says, noting that earlier attempts to get more women into the shadow cabinet succeeded only when the team was expanded so that no man lost his place to a woman.
“I remember one of my north‑east colleagues saying firmly in the tearoom one afternoon that there wasn’t a woman in the parliamentary party who was fit to be in the shadow cabinet,” she says. Since Beckett was sitting right there, a male colleague politely suggested: “With the exception of present company?” “No,” retorted the MP.
She is laughing as she tells this story, but didn’t she mind? “I don’t remember minding. I remember thinking it was all a bit sad that those were his views. I probably thought it was a bit unfair – but, you know, life is unfair.”
She recalls talking recently to the historian and crossbench peer Peter Hennessy. “He said to me: ‘You don’t do intimidation, do you, Margaret?’ And I hadn’t thought about it – haven’t thought about it since, really – but I sort of knew what he meant. I was an engineering apprentice when there were 20 of us [women] out of 2,000 – and I was the only woman on my course for a part of it. You would just get used to how bitchy men are.”
Born in Ashton-under-Lyne in what is now Greater Manchester in 1943, Margaret Jackson was one of three girls who grew up to become a nun, a psychiatrist and a politician respectively. They were raised to understand that “just because you get married doesn’t mean you don’t need to work”, she explains. Their mother, a teacher, was the breadwinner after their father, a carpenter, came home from the war too sick to work. His heart was already so damaged by childhood illness that he wasn’t called up to fight, but rather to repair bomb damage around the country. He died when Beckett was 12.
“Every winter that I remember in my childhood, he was gravely ill and seemed to be nearly dying,” she remembers. “So we were dependent on her salary and conscious always of the fact – although she didn’t get equal pay, of course – that we were blessed compared with other people, because she earned just enough to keep our heads above water.” After a degree in metallurgy and an industrial apprenticeship, Beckett eventually landed a job researching industrial policy for the Labour party. She met enough MPs to realise that she could do what they did.
The parallels between 1974 and now are striking: a backdrop of galloping inflation, an unpopular Tory government bequeathing economic woes to a Labour one. Is it a better prism through which to view this election than sunny, upbeat 1997? “Oh, definitely. Of course, what is different is that I think the Tory government then were not actively seeking to create trouble for an incoming government – they just were floundering. This lot seem to me to be doing everything they can to create as much trouble for their successors as they can, irrespective of the national interest.”
But that Labour government, battling fierce economic headwinds, crashed out after only one term (Beckett lost her Lincoln seat before bouncing back in 1983 in Derby South, which she held until the end of this parliament). Given the scorched earth Keir Starmer might inherit, is there a risk his could also be a one‑term government? “Oh yeah, there’s always a risk,” she says, before praising him for arguing upfront that Labour needs two parliaments to fix Britain. “Inevitably, if we do win, when we get towards the fifth year it’ll be: ‘You haven’t done XYZ,’ even though it was clear that that was meant to be a second-term project.” Starmer is, she says approvingly, perhaps “the most working-class leader we’ve ever had”, and a good trade unionist, one of her higher forms of praise.
Although Beckett is unswervingly loyal to leaders, she has a decided mind of her own. “People like to put you in a box and they decide what labels to apply to you and it doesn’t always work,” she says. Beckett transitioned from the Bennite left in the 80s to backing the moderate Neil Kinnock, before loyally supporting Tony Blair and then unexpectedly nominating Jeremy Corbyn for leader in 2015 to ensure anti-austerity views got an airing (while stressing she wouldn’t vote for him).
“I was positive that the Labour party had much too much sense to elect him,” she groans. Although she defended Corbyn publicly at first, privately she urged him to quit. “I thought that he ought to be able to see that he wasn’t suitable, he wasn’t up to the job. He wasn’t rude, but it had no effect.”
Her favourite leader, however, was Smith. Had he lived, she thinks he might have won more narrowly than Tony Blair in 1997, but governed differently. “If you had a discussion in shadow cabinet, John would always genuinely want to hear everybody’s point of view. Tony and Gordon not so much, especially if someone was long-winded and not pertinent.”
She ran against Blair after Smith’s death, but she never expected to win (the elected female leader Labour never had, she reckons, was Barbara Castle). She served in his cabinet as the business secretary, the leader of the house, the environment secretary and finally as the first female foreign secretary, before being dropped by Gordon Brown.
From the start, she was more passionate about trade and manufacturing than so-called “women’s issues”, arguing that feminism is about women pursuing whatever interests them. “I always resented the people who wrote in and said to new, young women MPs: ‘You ought to be campaigning on X or Y because that’s what a woman politician should do.’” Her proudest moment was helping negotiate the political settlement for a national minimum wage, which, she says drily, “must be my greatest achievement, because so many people who had nothing to do with it tell me it was their greatest achievement”.
Beckett never blew her own horn in office and banned her aides from briefing against colleagues, although that meant some briefed against her with relative impunity. When I ask about this, she describes a conversation with a former chief whip about a damaging untruth that refused to die. “He said: ‘There’s a simple rule of thumb: if you can’t stop the story, especially if it’s untrue, then the chances are that there’s somebody on your side briefing it.’ And I pretty soon discovered that there was – one of my most admired colleagues.” She won’t say who, except that he is dead now and “his reputation is all the more stellar thereby”. She can be superbly waspish.
But what of her mistakes? She can’t think of a decision she would now undo. She defends Blair’s decision to invade Iraq on the grounds that the evidence for what turned out to be nonexistent weapons of mass destruction seemed “clear and strong” to her at the time, if not to others. But I am curious about her time as foreign secretary, during which Bulgaria and Romania joined the EU and there was the beginning of a backlash against free movement of eastern European workers that the leave campaign would later exploit (including in Derby, which voted to leave). With hindsight, could Labour have done more to defuse those tensions?
“I think probably we could have done more to help people to understand what was happening, and why, and that that would have laid a bit of foundation. Whereas support for what was being done was being taken for granted,” she says. While she backed a second Brexit referendum in 2019, Beckett sees no easy way back into the EU now. “What people overlook is the impact – not in the sense of: ‘You’ve rejected what we said, how dare you?’ but having to join the euro, having to be in Schengen, not having all the concessions that we had won through successive governments.”
She avoids much of the abuse hurled at MPs in the post-Brexit years by not being on social media, but she worries about younger ones unable to escape what she sees as an “unhealthy contempt”, verging on hatred, for politicians. While she has never despaired of her party, at times she seemingly came close to despairing of her country. “I never expected that I would ever in my life think: ‘I wonder if there’s somewhere better to live.’ I have thought it once or twice in the last couple of years, which to me is extraordinary.”
Despite swiftly concluding that Britain has it better than most, she remains discomfited not just by the Boris Johnson era, but also by the way people responded to his brand of populism. “It’s this having your own facts. I’ve always believed in evidence-based policymaking, but if the evidence isn’t acceptable no matter how strong it is, that’s uncharted waters. Quite frightening waters.”
Perhaps she won’t miss this bad‑tempered parliament. Yet when asked about retirement plans, she sounds unusually vague. Indeed, she says she would accept a peerage: “But I’m under no illusions whatsoever that there will be a big screaming queue outside Keir’s door if we win.” It would be a brave leader who wouldn’t put Beckett near the front.
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