Madam speaker. . - Reviews - book review

Contemporary Review, May, 2002 by John Knight

Betty Boothroyd: The Autobiography. Century. [pounds sterling]17.99. 338 pages. ISBN 0-7126-7948-0.

When, in 1987, Betty Boothroyd became one of his three deputies the Speaker of the House of Commons, Bernard Weatherill, presented the former Labour whip with a copy of a nineteenth century Punch cartoon which showed John Bull bearing a frilly-knickered woman upon his shoulders in the direction of the Speaker's chair. The woman, Lady Boothroyd explains, was labelled 'the Mother of Parliaments' and the joke to the political elite of the Victorian age lay in the ridiculous concept that anyone but a man would ever preside over that august assembly. Five years later, Betty Boothroyd's long political career reached its apogee when, with overwhelming support from all parties, she was elected the first woman Speaker in the long and colourful history of that place.

The former show-dancer turned political activist, who had first come to Westminster almost forty years earlier as a secretary to Barbara Castle and Geoffrey de Freitas, was a passionate believer in the sovereignty of Parliament. As a young and attractive political candidate, she had learned how to parry frivolous questions from the editors of women's magazines and, as Speaker, she was determined not to provoke the chauvinist titters which had been the objective of the Punch cartoonist.

Lady Boothroyd, the only daughter of a frequently unemployed weftsman and union activist, was born, over seventy years ago, in a 'back-to-back' in the 'undeniably grim' Yorkshire textile town of Dewsbury. It was her mother who, in her quiet way, encouraged Betty to think politically and 'to understand the importance of argument and debate and of communicating one's beliefs to other people'. For mother and daughter politics meant the Labour Party: it defined their 'inborn convictions and outward hopes' and in the League of Youth, Betty experienced front-line politics for the first time.

'If at first you don't succeed...'. Betty Boothroyd was determined to succeed, but her journey to the Speaker's chair was fraught with disappointment: she stood unsuccessfully for the Dewsbury town council and this was followed by four equally unsuccessful attempts to obtain a seat at Westminster. Her persistence was rewarded, however, in 1970 when she won a by-election in West Bromwich. Situated on the edge of the Black Country and only five miles from Birmingham, smoke still belched from its factory chimneys. But Betty Boothroyd liked its 'no-nonsense vitality and friendliness'; the feeling was obviously mutual and she represented the constituency for twenty-seven years.

Promoted to Labour's National Executive Council, Betty became a member of its committee of inquiry into Trotskyist control of Liverpool City Council, earning herself the epithet of 'Witchfinder General' and when she was tipped to become Bernard Weatherill's successor Private Eye opined that she had 'all the charm of carbon monoxide gas in an airtight room'. The British public, however, felt differently and when the girl from Dewsbury College of Commerce and Art was elected Speaker in preference to the Oxbridge-educated, former Conservative minister, Peter Brooke, she became a popular celebrity with a hybrid tea rose - 'Madame Speaker' - named after her.

Henceforth, she would reside in Speaker's House, which her predecessor had described as 'the best tied cottage in England'. But when John Biffen and Gwyneth Dunwoody - following an age-old custom - 'dragged' her to the Speaker's chair Betty Boothroyd was not merely being installed as presiding officer of the Commons, the constitutional link between the House, the monarch and the outside world, but its chief executive, in charge of a staff of two thousand and responsible for a considerable budget. A patron, president or trustee of seventy-four organisations, she was also an ex-officio Commissioner of the Church of England. The 155th Speaker became what she describes as 'the happy slave of a demanding schedule'.

Nine of Betty's predecessors had the misfortune to fall out with their sovereign and paid the price with their lives. Becoming Speaker of the House of Commons is happily no longer so precarious, but it certainly has its difficulties. Insisting upon parliamentary discipline, she was sometimes forced to remind Members that robust debate does not depend on personal insults, that 'good temper and moderation are the characteristics of parliamentary language'. When, on being elected to Parliament, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein refused both to take up their seats and to swear the oath of allegiance but nevertheless demanded full access to Commons facilities and the right to make the House their party's London base, it fell to Betty Boothroyd to uphold the Parliamentary Oaths Act of 1866 and refuse them that right. Her decision has now been reversed by the present government. She took issue with the Chairman and Director-General of the BBC over its plans to downgrade parliamentary broadcasting on ra dio and, by resolutely standing her ground, persuaded the Corporation to change its mind. When she felt that government ministers were sidelining the parliamentary process by briefing the press before making a ministerial statement in the Commons she did not hesitate to remind them formally that 'the House is rightly jealous of its role in holding ministers to account ... I deprecate most strongly action that tends to undermine this important principle'. In the words of one influential correspondent: 'If you don't, Parliament will soon count for nowt' and Madam Speaker 'could never countenance that'.