Margaret Beckett

"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."

"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."

"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"

"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"

"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."

"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."

"Just because you get married doesn’t mean you don’t need to work."

"Every winter that I remember in my childhood, he was gravely ill and seemed to be nearly dying."

"I was positive that the Labour party had much too much sense to elect him"

"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."

"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"

"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"

"must be my greatest achievement, because so many people who had nothing to do with it tell me it was their greatest achievement"

"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"

"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"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"But I’m under no illusions whatsoever that there will be a big screaming queue outside Keir’s door if we win."