Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Politician who became the first woman elected Speaker of the House of Commons, and the first from the opposition benches since 1835.
On the island
Eight records
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:33Is there a lot of your mother in you, do you think? I mean, do you handle difficult MPs like she might have scolded you, you know, told you off for being stubborn or bloody minded?
Not my mother. I think my father was more the disciplinarian. I was brought up in a very disciplined household, and I think perhaps I follow my father in terms of being disciplined about timing, duty, and that sort of thing.
Presenter asks
14:21When did politics enter your life then, Betty?
I think from the moment I was born, I think I came out of the womb into the Labour movement. Uh my parents were involved very much at a local level. Our front room was always given over to uh Labour Party meetings as well as to wakes and weddings and things like that. And it was the committee room on Polling Day. So I was brought up in the Labour movement and I was in the League of Youth as soon as I was fifteen, sixteen.
Presenter asks
15:31At what point did you decide then that you could do better than the MPs themselves and be one yourself?
I felt this in nineteen fifty five, fifty six. And I was on a the Labour Party list as a candidate, but I had not been selected. And I went to see the General Secretary of the Labour Party to say, look, why don't you put me on List A, which was the most prominent list? And he said … I was selected for the by-election in South East Leicester in 1957. A 20,000 Tory majority, and I was the only person who believed I could win it. It was great fun.
The keepsakes
The book
Vikram Seth
I'm going to take a gamble. I haven't read it. It's a it's a book called A Suitable Boy. And the writer is a man called Vikram Seth. It's had good reviews and it's a love story set in post independent India. But the essential element, I think, for A Castaway is that it's got thirteen hundred pages, which is rather more than War and Peace.
The luxury
Not recorded.
Presenter asks
18:47What is it that you find so all absorbing about [the House of Commons]? Can you sum it up?
I like parliamentary procedures. I like the democracy of this country, the way it works. It's not perfect by any means, but it has stood us in good stead for a very long time. I'm very proud of it, and I seek to protect it.
Presenter asks
21:52Did you have that kind of terrible angst over the decision over the Maastricht vote?
Yes, I did have it at that time. I was questioning myself the whole time. … I felt lonely. Right up to the last minute, and I told no one, other than the clerk of the house, what I intended to do, right until the last moment.
Presenter asks
28:23Do you feel that you've substituted the one for the other in a way that the commons, if you like, is your family?
Yes, I do. I w it I think it must be wonderful to have a family and a home, uh that sort of structure. Uh but I think I've sacrificed it in order to devote my entire life to the commons. So I have sacrificed a family, but at the same time it makes up for it in the most enjoyable job and a very privileged job that I'm able to do.
“I think I came out of the womb into the Labour movement.”
“I think I ought to be in the Guinness Book of Records for the girl most unlikely to succeed.”
“Elect me for what I am and what you know of me in that respect, not for what I was born, a woman.”
“I just want to be known as a jolly good speaker, and a nice girl, and somebody who has been very fair and just all round.”
“I think that if I had the mace with me, then the sergeant at arms would send out the navy and the air force to find the mace and I will be rescued.”