Prissy and patronising. But I confess I’ve grown a sneaking admiration for Harriet Harman

HARRIET HARMAN is by common consent one of the more irritating leading politicians of recent times. Even some on the Labour side have found that they can have too much of her.

Her critics allege that this sometimes strident feminist and embodiment of all that is politically correct is not the sharpest knife in the drawer. They also say that only her incredible powers of endurance have kept her slithering about near the top of the greasy pole.

Well, I am certainly not going to pretend I’ve been her greatest fan over the years. But I am going to write something I never thought I’d say. Harriet Harman, who is acting leader of the Labour Party, has shown herself over the past few days to be brave, sensible and level-headed.

For weeks she has been performing well at Prime Minister’s Questions, asking pertinent and intelligent questions which demand straight answers of David Cameron. Gone for the moment is the yah-boo rumpus that characterised the PM’s exchanges with Ed Miliband. Then on Sunday Miss Harman astonished many of her colleagues, and wrong-footed her opponents, by telling the BBC that her party wouldn’t oppose Tory moves to limit child tax credits to the first two children of a family from 2017, as announced by George Osborne in last week’s Budget.

She disclosed that during the election campaign she had spoken to many mothers who resented the fact that poorer families could have the cost of an extra child cushioned by the State. ‘They’re working hard and they feel that it’s unfair on other people that they can have the bigger families they would love to have if they were in a position to do that.’

Horror of horrors! A senior Labour politician who actually listened to people’s concerns! This intervention came days after Miss Harman and Chris Leslie, the Shadow Chancellor, had signalled that Labour would not oppose other aspects of the Budget, such as the reduced benefit cap of £20,000 (£23,000 in London) and an annual one per cent limit on publicsector pay rises for four years.

Needless to say, her response has not gone down well with the comrades. At a stormy meeting of Labour MPs on Monday evening, only five out of 25 members who spoke supported the acting leader’s stance. According to today’s New Statesman magazine, one rebel, Andy McDonald, warned that she was tolerating the policies of ‘Mao Tse-tung and King Herod’ by refusing to oppose the two-child tax credit cap.

THREE of the four candidates for the leadership of the Labour Party — Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and the hard-Left Jeremy Corbyn — have publicly dismissed her remarks. Mr Corbyn was, unsurprisingly, the most disdainful.

What motivated Harriet Harman to aggravate so many in her party? She has watched while it opposed every Coalition welfare reform in the last Parliament, allowing the Tories to depict Labour plausibly as the party of welfare. Yet by the time of the election, Labour had accepted nearly all the changes, with the exception of the socalled Bedroom Tax.

She evidently wonders where the advantage lies in opposing every new reform, only to go along with them in the end, while her party merely succeeds in deepening its reputation for being indiscriminately in favour of welfare and opposed to the interests of working people.

In other words, she understands that welfare reform is both popular and necessary. Indeed, as Secretary of State for Social Security in Tony Blair’s first administration in 1997, she proposed cutting welfare for single parents. Harman lasted only 15 months in her Cabinet post before being banished for a time to the backbenches.

Moreover, as acting leader she has seen polling evidence which confirms that Labour’s appalling performance in May’s election is attributable to a widespread perception that the party was too anti- business and pro-welfare — in short, too Left-wing.

No doubt, as acting leader only for a matter of months, and no longer beholden to Left-wing union barons or worried about her political future, she also feels she can afford to be candid, and tell it as it is.

But will Labour listen? It seems increasingly unlikely that Ms Harman will be able to hold the line next week, and prevent her colleagues from voting en masse against the Government’s two-child cap on tax credit. She herself has said that she will listen to criticisms, which may suggest that she is beginning to buckle under pressure.

I hope not. Improbable as this may seem, hers is the voice of moderation and common sense. Surely the lesson Labour must draw from its election victories in 1997, 2001 and 2005 is that it does best when it fights on the centre ground, and does not alienate ordinary working people.

Of course part of me — but only a small part — hopes for a Jeremy Corbyn victory. He would make Michael Foot’s Labour Party — which went to the country in 1983 with a manifesto that has been described as the ‘longest suicide note in history’ — look like a branch of the Boy Scouts.

BUT those of us on the centre-Right should resist the temptation of wanting Labour to lunge further to the Left so that it renders itself unelectable in 2020, and for many years beyond.

This country needs a strong and vibrant Opposition. The lack of one in the heyday of New Labour, when the Tories were weak and divided, contributed to Tony Blair’s hubris.

The pity is that Corbyn’s strong showing is having the effect of tugging Yvette Cooper and Andy Burnham further and further to the Left. Only the Blairite Liz Kendall among the leadership candidates has supported Miss Harman’s line on welfare. Admirable woman though she may be, I fear she looks and sounds as though she is about 19.

Some pundits are predicting the irreversible decline of the Labour Party, just as it was widely said in 1997 and in the following years that the Tories would never achieve power again. The truth is there is no inevitability about it. There is a choice.

As Tristram Hunt — another Labour politician for whom I don’t normally have a great deal of time — correctly put it on Tuesday, his party has ‘no Godgiven right to exist’. Once-great national institutions like Woolworths have vanished because they failed to adapt. Labour could equally consign itself to history.

Please don’t think I am becoming sentimental about Harriet Harman. I haven’t forgotten her patronising and prissy manner. Nor her pig-headedness. Last year she refused to take any responsibility for the support which the National Council for Civil Liberties gave to the gruesome Paedophile Information Exchange in the late Seventies and early Eighties when she was, for four years, the organisation’s legal officer.

In her day, she was a paid-up member of the Radical Left, and has chopped and changed her position within the Labour Party, which helps to explain why she is such a great survivor — the only member of the 1997 Cabinet still in front-line politics.

But in her swansong, when she no longer has anything to lose, Harriet Harman is telling the truth — which is that a Labour Party which ignores the views and interests of ordinary working people, and blindly opposes all welfare reform, is unlikely ever to enjoy power again.