TIME’S UP!

Betty Boothroyd, Baroness Boothroyd OM PC was born just Betty Boothroyd on October 8th 1929 in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire. Her parents were both textile workers, and she was educated locally at state schools, where she failed the 11-plus and, after before studying at Dewsbury College of Commerce and Art, became a shop assistant and a shorthand-typist..

Boothroyd was a political activist from an early age. Her parents, Archibald and Mary, were members of the Labour party and the Textile Workers’ Union. They relied on the union for the protection of their jobs in the heavy woollen industry. They did not always have work, although Mary, a weaver, was more often employed than her husband –because her wages, as a woman, were lower.

Her young life was hard, though Boothroyd never romanticised her past, even if it appears to read straight from an Alan Sillitoe play; taking it in turns with her mother to scrub the front steps, the zinc bath on Fridays in front of the fi re, sitting talking in the evening by fi relight in order to save on the electricity. It was, to all intents and purposes, a happy childhood, but Betty hated the narrow streets and Yorkshire’s dark satanic mills.

At the age of 17, Betty, nimble-footed in many ways, broke her parents’ heart by announcing she wanted to turn professional at dancing. Her parents had always harboured ambitions for their daughter to take up politics.

She had been a singer and dancer with a teenage jazz band, the Swing Stars, when she successfully auditioned for the Tiller Girls in London. She spent the freezing winter of 1946, cold and unhappy in her lodgings in Greek Street. In the end, she returned home with a foot infection and a bruised ego. “I wasn’t much good at it actually”, she wistfully remembered many years later.

Her father, whom many said she was closer to, underhandedly taught her how to roll cigarettes and, when drinking, never to mix. But it was her mother who fostered what would become her political career. Mary took Betty to political meetings in Leeds or Huddersfield on a Saturday afternoon to listen to Clement Attlee or Nye Bevan. Betty joined the Labour League of Youth at 16 and was a member of its national consultative committee at the time the Attlee government fell in 1951.

In 1952, Denis Healey made his way into Parliament, having fought and won a byelection in Leeds South East, and he recorded he took the afternoon off to judge a speaking contest for young socialists, “and chose as winner a bonny lass from Dewsbury who danced as a Tiller girl in the chorus of the local pantomimes.” That same year, Boothroyd also stood, unsuccessfully, for Dewsbury council.

On her return to London in 1952, she worked at the Labour party’s headquarters as a secretary. She then worked as a secretary in the Commons for Barbara Castle and Geoff rey de Freitas, then as secretary to a US Congressman in Washington DC from 1960-62 and for one of the fi rst Labour life peers, Lord (Harry) Walston.

In 1973, at her fi fth attempt, she entered parliament as member for West Bromwich. Parliamentary tradition dictates that an MP’s maiden speech in the Commons is largely free of controversy. Ignoring all protocol, Boothroyd instead made a feisty maiden speech. She claimed to be able to speak for “ordinary working people” and attacked the then Heath-led Conservative government for its failure to alleviate the injustice of the two-tier society that existed in the UK.

She became the fi rst woman to be made a Labour government whip when appointed assistant whip after the October 1974 General Election. The then Labour chief whip, Bob Mellish, reportedly told her: “Keep your trap shut, girl, and you will get on.” Th is, of course, is in fl at contradiction to the role of a Government whip, but also in fl at contradiction to common decency, irrespective of how much Parliament is and was a nest of misogyny. She promptly resigned her post to serve as an appointed member of the European Assembly. Th is was in the era before direct European elections took place.

Boothroyd, a pro-European Labour MP whose politics sat on the right of the party served on many committeesboth in opposition and in government, and occupied many minor Government roles. She never made it as far as the Cabinet or shadow Cabinet.

She was serving as Th ird Deputy Speaker when the Speaker of the House, Bernard Weatherill, announced his intention to stand down at the 1992 General Election. Following John Major’s surprise victory at the polls, Betty Boothroyd came from being a back-marker to win the MPs’ nomination to take the role. She was the fi rst woman Speaker of the House of Commons in the 700-year history of Parliament.

Parliamentary protocol dictates that the seat of the Speaker of the House shall not be contested by other parties at the General Election. The main parties adhere to this, but in the 1997 General Election, an Independent Labour candidate stood, alongside a far-right National Democrats candidate. Boothroyd doubled her majority that night. All told, she won on eight Parliamentary election occasions.

Boothroyd’s style as Speaker was fairly conservative. She won many fans on both sides of the floor as, nominally, the role is supposed to be one of neutrality. It’s an overlooked consideration to many MPs and observers who forget that the Speaker no longer speaks for their ‘side’ in Parliament; they have to retain an air of neutrality. In that regard, she acquired many plaudits.

To Parliamentary observers, her style was that of a strict, but kindly and fair headmistress, with a fair amount of humour thrown in. Indeed, she broke with hundreds of years of tradition, by refusing to wear the wig while in the Speaker’s chair.

She believed that it was up to MPs to make changes in the way business was done, rather than the occupant of the chair. However, she wanted the strict protocol of Government within Parliament to be maintained, and would freely admonish, in public, any MP who fell foul of this edict. Her particular beef was with the growing practice of ministers choosing to bypass the House of Commons to make important political pronouncements to television or radio instead. Th is became a particular issue after the election of Tony Blair in 1997.

However, she ruled the Commons with good humour and considerable charm. When members spoke for too long she had a habit of clumsily stifl ing a yawn as a signal of her displeasure and at the end of prime minister’s questions she inadvertently introduced what would become her catchphrase by declaring after one of her fi rst sessions in the chair: “Time’s up!”