Margaret Beckett Quotes

British politician (born 1943)

Margaret Mary Beckett, Baroness Beckett, GBE, PC (née Jackson; born 15 January 1943), is a British politician. She was a Member of Parliament for more than 45 years, from 1974 to 1979 and 1983 to 2024. A member of the Labour Party, she was the United Kingdom's first female Foreign Secretary, and served as a minister under Prime Ministers Harold Wilson, James Callaghan, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Beckett was Deputy Leader of the Opposition and Deputy Leader of the Labour Party from 1992 to 1994, and briefly Leader of the Opposition and acting Leader of the Labour Party following John Smith's death in 1994. A member of the Labour Party, she served as Member of Parliament for Lincoln from 1974 to 1979, and for Derby South from 1983 to 2024. Her 45 years in the House of Commons makes her the female MP in the Commons with the longest service overall (Harriet Harman has longer continuous service) and she was the last sitting MP who served in the Labour governments of the 1970s. Beckett alongside former Labour Party colleague Baroness Harman became members of the House of Lords in 2024.

From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Alternative Names: Dame Margaret Mary Beckett • Baroness Beckett

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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.

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 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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Margaret Beckett Quotes

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