Candy Atherton
Well-liked Labour MP and doughty campaigner who won Falmouth & Camborne from Seb Coe
CANDY ATHERTON, who has died suddenly aged 62, was a larger-than-life and highly popular Labour feminist activist who was mayor of Islington, MP for Falmouth & Camborne for eight years and up to her death an active Cornwall county councillor. Instantly recognisable, with her luxuriant straight blonde hair, large spectacles and enormous smile, she started on the Left of the party, but in the Commons strongly supported Tony Blair’s government.
Her choice, as another incomer, to oppose the Conservative MP and Olympic gold medallist Sebastian Coe was greeted by locals with suspicion, but Candy Atherton won them over. Even before her election in 1997, she persuaded the Home Office not to deport an illegal immigrant from Hong Kong who had been living respectably in Camborne for 17 years.
Candy Atherton persuaded Blair’s government to grant Cornwall Objective One development status, funnel in more than £2 billion for new roads, broadband, hospital facilities and airports, and upgrade Falmouth College of Arts to university status.
Falmouth University grew so fast that, as a county councillor, she opposed further enlargement because the town’s housing stock could not cope with the influx of students.
She also campaigned hard but unsuccessfully to save South Crofty, Europe’s last tin mine. When she told a meeting in Redruth that she would press Blair for the miners to be retrained, a voice at the back asked: “To do what? Sell ice creams to tourists?”
Candy Atherton was the driving force behind New Labour’s Sure Start programme for young children, and campaigned for the National Minimum Wage – a lifeline for many workers in Cornwall’s low-wage economy.
She persuaded the MOD in 2000 to re-examine the cases of 41 people who had died, and many more who had contracted illnesses after working at the former chemical weapons facility at Nancekuke.
Latterly she continued her campaigning despite being confined by illness to a wheelchair. At the 2016 Labour Party conference the chair got stuck as she tried to leave the podium after finishing her speech.
Jeremy Corbyn rushed to dislodge her as she dissolved into laughter, the chairman observing: “Now that’s what you call a hands-on leader.” This August, she appeared alongside Corbyn at a rally in support of the NHS.
Candy Atherton was in her time a glider pilot and a keen bird watcher. She lived for a while in north London on a canal boat – renamed “The Honourable Lady” after her election to Parliament.
Candice Kathleen Atherton was born at Sutton, Surrey, on September 21 1955, the daughter of Denis Atherton, a Daily Mirror journalist, and the former Pamela Osborne – who would be Mayor’s Consort in Falmouth the year her daughter became its MP.
From Midhurst Grammar School, she took a BA in Applied Social Studies at the Polytechnic of North London. She worked briefly for the Portsmouth News and in the probation service, and in 1977 founded the Women’s Aid Refuge.
Joining the Labour Party in 1979, she was a part-time researcher to the Left-wing MPS Judith Hart and Jo Richardson. She also became active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, leading its protest against the dispatch of the Falklands task force in 1982.
By then she was earning her living as a freelance journalist, and in 1984 she co-founded Everywoman magazine.
Candy Atherton was elected to Islington council in 1986, being mayor in 1989-90. The City of London made her a Freeman for her contribution to the reorganisation of local schools. In 1992 she fought her first parliamentary seat: Chesham & Amersham.
The next year, she helped Barbara Follett set up Emily’s List, a network aimed at getting more Labour women into Parliament. Soon after, Falmouth & Camborne became the first constituency to choose its candidate from an all-woman shortlist – two Labour councillors resigning from the party in protest – and in December 1994 she was selected.
The procedure followed was subsequently declared unlawful, but Candy Atherton’s candidacy was upheld.
At the 1997 election she defeated Coe by 2,688 votes, having blunted local Liberal Democrat campaigning and prevented the party making a clean sweep in Cornwall. She was the county’s first woman MP since the 1920s.
At Westminster she served on the Education and Employment Select Committee, and chaired the all-party parliamentary water group – mobilising opposition to Cornwall’s high water charges.
In 2001 she increased her majority to 4,527 over the Conservatives despite what she called “shameless tactics” from local Lib Dems. The next year she joined the Environment and Rural Affairs Select Committee, probing the activities of gangmasters in agriculture and suspicious deaths of dolphins.
The Lib Dems’ opposition to the Iraq War – which Candy Atherton supported – swung several seats to them from Labour at the 2005 election, and Falmouth & Camborne was one. Julia Goldsworthy defeated her by 1,886 votes.
Out of the Commons, she opened a political consultancy, also becoming a board member of the Housing Corporation and the Homes & Communities Agency and chairing the government’s rural housing panel.
However, Candy Atherton kept her roots in Cornwall. In 2009 she, her husband, mother and mother-in-law all stood for the county council. But she had to wait another four years to win a seat. From 2011 she also chaired Cornwall Labour Party.
Candy Atherton is survived by her husband Broderick Ross, whom she married in 2002.
Candy Atherton, born September 21 1955, died October 30 2017