Standing Down (17 page)
Authors: Rosa Prince
Sir Richard will miss the ‘buzz’ of the Commons, but not the drudgery that he says accompanies the life of an MP these days:
When I first came here we had no internet, no phone, and a dozen letters a week. Now you’re wrestling with a thousand emails a week, endless demands and pressures on your time. And there’s much lobbying of MPs going on now.
You have to keep pushing it back all the time. I’ve happily coped with it since 1983 but I won’t miss it.
I’m one of those Tories who doesn’t think politics is the most important thing in life. I’ve always had an outside interest, a consultancy of some sort. And I’ve always sneaked away on Sundays to go and sail a boat.
***
CV
Born in Berkshire; raised in Somerset; became lieutenant in the Royal Navy; went into the law, specialising in commercial and maritime sectors.
1983: Elected MP for Nottingham North
1987: Loses Nottingham North
1992: Elected MP for Croydon South; become PPS to Michael Heseltine at Department for Trade and Industry to the office of the Deputy Prime Minister
1995: Becomes a member of the Whips’ Office
1997: Becomes shadow Minister for London and Local Government
1999: Becomes shadow Defence Minister
2000: Becomes shadow Paymaster General
2001: Returns to the back benches
2004: Becomes shadow Environment Secretary
2005: Returns to the back benches
2010: Becomes chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee
2012: Announces he will stand down at 2015 election
Sir Richard Ottaway is married to wife Nicky.
Dame Anne McGuire,
sixty-five, was Labour MP for Stirling (1997–2015).
‘I never rebelled – never felt the urge to. I’m here on a party menu, not as Anne McGuire.’
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Sometimes there’s almost an expectation that you’ll go for a parliamentary seat. I was going through the party structure and I was kind of promoted into a couple of selection conferences, which I have to say were pretty bruising.
It wasn’t just about the gender issue. It was a difficult time in Scottish politics with the poll tax, and Militant Tendency, so you tended to get put into a box.
I had been so active in Scottish Labour politics, it wasn’t as though I felt I was a stranger. You just get on with it.
It wasn’t just the [civil partnerships] legislation, what I found most uplifting about it was the journey that some of the MPs were willing to describe, the journey they had been on [serving as Disabilities Minister, introducing civil partnerships to Scotland and being made a Dame].
Adjusting to life on the back benches was hard. You have got two options: you either go and sulk and become bitter or say as one door closes another one opens. There was some lobbying to stop me being reshuffled out. Every minister feels they had done a good job. I was disappointed. There is no doubt that I was disappointed.
It is not an age thing. I have two grandchildren who I don’t see enough.
It’s like leaving any workplace. I don’t know what I will do next, I genuinely don’t know. People keep saying, ‘You must have something planned,’ but actually I don’t.
Try to be yourself. Try to remember that you do a special job but it doesn’t make you special. If you lose contact with the people around you then you definitely can be seduced by the bubble.
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the full story
Born Anne Long, one of four sisters raised on a housing scheme in Easterhouse, Glasgow, politics was ‘in the air’ from a young age.
Her father was a railway signalman who became involved with trade union and local council politics while her mother worked part time in the shoe section of a department store and was active in community and church women’s groups.
It felt natural to join the Labour club at university, where she met her husband Len, and graduate to the constituency party when she set up home.
Within a few years she was rising up the ranks of the Scottish Labour Party, and was being urged to put her name forward for selection for a seat at Westminster.
The experience was not a happy one, as members of the far-left Militant Tendency blocked her appointment. ‘I was on the mainstream of the Labour Party, which saw Militant for what they were,’ she says. ‘Those were pretty bruising experiences, so I thought, “Well, I’m not going to go through all that.”’
She bowed out, instead continuing her rise through the party and trade union ranks, and serving as chairman of the Scottish Labour Party at the 1992 election. It wasn’t until 1995 that she was selected to fight the seat of Stirling under the new all-women shortlist:
It wasn’t my overwhelming desire that my life’s ambition had to be [to become] an MP. I had tried for it, it didn’t work out, I thought well, there’s other things I can do with my life.
My constituency party volunteered to have an all-women shortlist. I suppose initially I was a bit ambivalent about them.
I came from a late ’60s generation where it was about merit, but I realised this was not just about me, this was all over the UK [that] women were finding it difficult.
I thought it was a valuable short-term piece of positive action. Otherwise women were never going to punch through.
Stirling was a challenge, a Conservative-held seat with a high-profile MP, Michael Forsyth, the then Scotland Secretary. But Dame Anne was confident, and set about campaigning with gusto:
I thought I was in with a good chance. The thing about Michael Forsyth was in three previous elections Labour candidates thought they were going to beat him and he always pulled the rabbit out of the hat.
Even at that stage I had been too long in politics to take anything for granted.
At the same time my mother was ill, she was dying of breast cancer, she died in 1996. She came out and did a wee bit of telephone canvassing but after that she was too ill.
So there was a whole range of mixed emotions. My father had died too, so they never saw me become an MP – but if you believe in the afterlife I suppose they did.
Election night was fun except [for] the phone call from my campaign organiser to the house [saying] I needed to prepare two speeches because it was really quite close.
I can still remember looking at the television [and thinking] ‘everybody’s winning except me’. I was such a pessimist.
It was so exciting that when the announcement came I kissed my election agent and shook hands with my husband instead of the other way round.
On her first day in Parliament, Dame Anne found herself among friends, both among the tight circle of Scottish MPs and women parliamentarians she had met at Labour conferences:
We came down in a taxi very near the beginning and the taxi driver was chatting away, as you do, and we said we were going to the House of Commons, and he said, ‘Are you the wives of the new MPs?’
We said, ‘No, we
are
the new MPs.’
Before the end of the year Dame Anne was faced with what would turn out to be the toughest test of her conscience, when the new government cut benefits to lone parents.
She considered rebelling but didn’t, ultimately deciding to trust that Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, would not be acting unless he had plans to help the needy in other ways.
In fact, Dame Anne would prove the ultimate loyalist, never rebelling once during her eighteen years in Parliament:
Never. I have never felt compelled to. I do think I am here on a party menu. I am not here as Anne McGuire.
Maybe we shouldn’t have that unconditional trust [but the] people of Stirling, they elected me in the context of a Labour manifesto.
There have been occasions where I have found it really difficult. Sometimes the easy route is to rebel.
Within a year of being elected, Dame Anne had been appointed to the Labour Whips’ Office, where she remained for another four and a half years, rising to Lord Commissioner to the Treasury, a role that, to her astonishment, required her to physically sign cheques on behalf of the government:
Everybody who ever aspires to be a minister should spend time in the Whips’ Office. It gives a sense of camaraderie. It also is a very quick and steep learning curve about how this place works.
The only thing about being a government whip is you don’t participate in debates. And as someone who built up a reputation that could talk for Scotland, could talk for Britain, that was a bit frustrating at times if I’m truly honest.
I remember the first time I had to sign a bill for £23 billion or something like that. This was astonishing to me, that little Anne McGuire who had grown up in Easterhouse was signing these government cheques.
Dame Anne was moved to the Scotland Office in the reshuffle of 2002:
It was straight out of
Yes Minister
sometimes. The first day in Dover House [home to the Scotland Office] – it’s a fantastic building, Lady Caroline Lamb had her affairs there – and I still remember sitting in my chair and trying to figure out the levers.
I pushed the lever and I went right back. One of the private office came running in and said ‘Yes, Minister, what’s wrong?’ And I thought, ‘This is it, this is life imitating art.’
But you should never become enamoured with it. Being an MP is a privilege, being a minister is an extension of that privilege. But you should never take it for granted because you know you’ll not be there forever.
And it’s about what you can do while you’re there that’s important.
While at the Scotland Office, Dame Anne was responsible for steering the legislation on civil partnerships for homosexual couples through Parliament, one of her proudest achievements.
At one point, during a heated debate in the Commons chamber, Ann Widdecombe, the socially conservative former Home Affairs Minister, accused her of undermining the institution of marriage. She retorted that after more than three decades of marriage to husband Len she wouldn’t take lessons from the – unwed – Miss Widdecombe.
After the loan parents vote, Dame Anne found the issue of Iraq the most difficult of her time in Parliament:
Hindsight’s a great thing. I had discussions with various people who I knew and trusted who were members of the Cabinet, people whose judgment I value, who might have been privy to more information than I was, to make sure that we were doing the right thing.
And, well, time will tell. It’s probably the worst decision I had to make. You really do feel the weight on your shoulders when you have to make a decision to send people into war. All the controversy around made it really difficult.
When I was elected in 1997, when I was a young activist, I never thought that in 2002/3 I would have to make decisions about whether or not we would go to war. That’s not what politicians go into politics for. But you can’t run away from it.
After the 2005 election Dame Anne was moved to the Department for Work and Pensions to become Minister for Disabilities – a role she relished.
In 2007, she travelled to New York to sign into being the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Disabled People. ‘I thought: “This is it”,’ she says.
But after the high of the UN Convention she came crashing back down to earth with a bang a few months later when, as she puts it, she was ‘reshuffled out’ by Gordon Brown.
She denies she was a Blairite, saying, ‘I would like to think I am a mainstream Labour MP,’ but she clearly wasn’t Brownite enough to survive the change of leader, and despite her own protests – made in an angry exchange with Mr Brown – and those of the disabilities community, she found herself unhappily back on the back benches:
I would have preferred Tony to have stayed on. I think he had another election win in him. To a certain extent, every reshuffle you always expect to go. Gordon was obviously trying to put together his own team. We did have a conversation about it, put it like that.
Although it was sweetened with appointment to the Privy Council, the demotion meant she would never achieve her dream of serving in the Cabinet:
Cabinet? That would have been nice. It didn’t happen so there is no point going over it. It is a privilege to be here. There are lots of people here who have never had ministerial office. It took a bit of time to get back into the way of things. I just get on with it. Frankly I don’t go into corners and cry about things that might have been.
Like many MPs, Dame Anne found the 2009 expenses scandal the most ‘depressing’ time of her eighteen years in Parliament: ‘I think people found it personally devastating. There was a fear around here. But we deserved what we got. I don’t think anybody who wasn’t here at that time could appreciate what that did to morale.’
Dame Anne enjoyed what would become her last general election campaign in 2010 and, to her surprise and despite having supported his brother David for the leadership, was asked to serve as new leader Ed Miliband’s PPS.
Although they had a ‘good relationship’, she was again frustrated by the requirement as a creature of the leader to be somewhat circumspect in her public pronouncements, and soon asked to be moved to a role allowing her to speak out against the government’s welfare reforms.
By the time she decided to stand down from front-line politics, at the same time she announced her retirement from Parliament, she was once again the party’s disabilities spokesman:
I didn’t vote for [Mr Miliband], and I thought it was a measure of the man that he asked me to be one of his first PPSes.
I just thought it was important that the people who were on the front bench were the people who were hopefully going to go into the next parliament, hopefully in government.
I was under no pressure. With five-year parliaments, I would be seventy-one. Although I have another election campaign in me, it would be quite nice to do things that I want to do and not to be subject to the tyranny of the diary. It would be quite nice just to have a bit of me time. I hope that doesn’t sound selfish.
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CV
Born in Glasgow; attended Glasgow University; became a community worker; rose through trade union and Labour Party ranks to become Secretary of Scottish Labour Party.
1995: Selected to fight Stirling under all-women shortlist
1997: Elected MP for Stirling
1998: Appointed to Whips’ Office
2002: Becomes minister at Scotland Office
2005: Becomes Disabilities Minister
2008: Returns to back benches
2010: Becomes PPS to leader Ed Miliband
2011: Becomes shadow Disabilities Minister
2014: Announces she will be retiring at the 2015 election
2015: Appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire for political and parliamentary services
Dame Anne McGuire is married to Len and has two grown-up children, Paul and Sarah
.