Britain’s first openly gay female MP
Maureen Colquhoun, who has died aged 92, was elected to Parliament in 1974, at a time when there were fewer than 30 women in the House of Commons. As Labour member for Northampton North, she fought for reforms on a range of issues – including equal rights for women and the decriminalisation of some drugs – that “gained growing support in subsequent years”, said The Times. As a result, she came to be seen by her party as a courageous pioneer; but at the time, she was sometimes dismissed as “difficult”, and when she came out as a lesbian in 1976 – the first MP to do so – she was reviled in the press, and her party voted to deselect her. “Another eight years would pass before a future Labour minister was able to introduce himself at a rally with, ‘I’m Chris Smith...and I’m gay’ and be met with a five-minute ovation”; and “it was not until 1997” that another female MP came out – Angela Eagle.
Maureen Morfydd Smith was born in 1928 in East Sussex, and brought up by her single mother, Elizabeth. Educated at a convent in Eastbourne, she later studied economics at LSE. Aged 20, she married Keith Colquhoun, with whom she had three children. Having always been interested in politics (she had joined the Labour Party aged 17), she stood as a local councillor in Shoreham in 1964. She made waves even then – and was barred from all its committees by her “overwhelmingly male and Tory” colleagues, said The Daily Telegraph; they dubbed her “Mrs Chatterbox”. Nevertheless, she persevered in politics, and in the snap election of February 1974, she was elected to Parliament. Although some years earlier, she’d had a secret affair with a woman, she considered herself happily married to Keith. “I may be liberated, but I still want to get home to cook his dinner,” she said, when calling for better working hours for MPs. But while working on the Balance of the Sexes bill, she fell in love with Barbara “Babs” Todd, publisher of Sappho magazine; soon after, she ended her marriage (amicably, she said) and moved in with Todd and her children; her own were by then grown up.
The party tried to keep her affair quiet, but news leaked. The media attention was brutal; she took the Daily Mail to the Press Council for harassing her family, and for the tone of its coverage. But the decision to deselect her may not have been entirely down to her sexuality: she had upset many in the party by seeming to defend Enoch Powell’s views on racial strife. In any case, she successfully appealed her deselection – but lost her seat in the Tory landslide of 1979. Later, she spent eight years sitting on Hackney Council; and after she and Todd moved to the Lake District, she was an active member of the National Park Authority. They were married in 2015; Todd died last year.