Left’s Queen of Sanctimony
She destroys the good names of men she says sexually harassed her. But what’s most telling about Harriet Harman’s new book is what she DOESN’T say. About defending paedophiles, for instance. Or how her moral superiority was central to Labour’s collapse
NIGHT-TIME in the House of Commons. Harriet Harman MP is carrying her newborn son along a corridor when she sees Mrs Thatcher heading towards her. At o nce H arman b ecomes a nxious, a s i f a m ere look from the then prime minister has some kind of malignant supernatural power — like that o f t he G orgon M edusa i n G reek m ythology, whose stare turned the living to stone.
‘I w as g ripped b y t he s ense t hat I c ouldn’t b ear her eyes to fall on my perfect baby,’ she recalls of that moment, months after she had been elected as MP for Peckham in 1982. ‘I pulled the blanket over his face to shield him from her gaze.’
This hysterical, frankly puerile, reaction to an encounter with arguably the greatest prime m inister o f o ur a ge i s r ecalled b y H arman i n h er autobiography, A Woman’s Work, which is p ublished this week. It is hardly fitting for a supposedly serious political figure who satonthe front bench for almost three decades and temporarily led the Labour party twice.
Her conduct could not be described as sisterly or even rational. She writes of her visceral loathing for Margaret Thatcher, even though the prime minister’s example did more for female emancipation than all of Ms Harman’s equality edicts about w omen’s advancement in public life.
The b ook h as a lready s toked controversy-for the historical legations of-serious sexual harassment she makes in it against a number of men.
In one case, she claimed that when she was a politics student at York University, her tutor Professor T. V . Sathyamurthy promised to bump up her degree from a 2:2 grade to a 2:1 if she agreed to have sex with him. She was outraged and refused, she writes. Harman still received a 2:1.
The former wife of the professor retorted that the accusation was not only f anciful, b ut a lso u nfair, s ince S athyamurthy, who died in 1998, could not respond. There was further anger over another of Harm an’ s claims, involving a lawyer at a firm where she worked as an articled clerk in the Seven ties.
According to her book, this man ‘crept up behind’ her and groped her while she was on the phone to a client, causing her to ‘scream’. In her narrative, instead of feeling any shame, the assailant criticised her for shrieking when she was dealing with a client.
Again, friends of the retired lawyer — named in her book and now 87 — are appalled and said that, given the integrity of his personality , the incident ‘ could not’ be possible.
Even when she reached the front rank of politics, Ms Harman was not free from predatory attention, she claims. She records that in 1991, at a function in the Welsh constituency of her Labour colleague Peter Hain, she was ‘groped horribly’ on the dance floor by a senior member of the local Labour party.
What is striking about the three incidents is that Harman took no action at the time. She didn’ t make an official complaint or go to the police.
She may, of course, have had her r easons for doing nothing. In the first two cases, she claims to have felt too young and feared that complaining ‘ might make things worse for me ’.
In the case of the Welsh incident, she says she did want to embarrass her h osts. B ut i naction h ardly s quares with her self-appointed position as a champion of women’s rights and scourge of the male patriarchy.
The publication of her autobiography coincides with Labour’s descent into a pparently t erminal c haos, w ith a fifth of Labour MPs defying Jeremy Corbyn’s three-line whip and instead voting against legislation to trigger leaving the EU.
Harman professes despair at Labour’ s predicament, but there is no doubt she has played her part in it.
As the high priestess of the m etropolitan e lite, h er o bsession w ith reversediscrimination and identity-politics has alienated Labour’s t raditional working-class supporters.
The further she rose in Labour’s ranks, the steeper became the party’s decline.
Her notorious Labour women’s pink bus, w hich t ravelled r ound t he c ountry at the last General Election, often driving away the female voters it was meant to woo, was a telling symbol of her patronising outlook.
I saw Harriet Harm an’ s character first hand when I spent three years working as her aide from 1989 to 1992. Before I took the job, I had been warned that she could be a difficult boss, though I found h er d ecent a nd g enerous.
But she was a strange mix of vaulting ambition and chronic insecurity, of resilience and vulnerability.
Harm an was self- assured in front of a camera or a microphone, yet her ignorance of current affairs meant she required ferocious and often nerveracking briefings.
She was a shrewd political operator, but was sometimes prone to grisly errors of judgment, as on the occasion when she decided — much to my m isgiving — to hire an agent to n egotiate fees for media appearances that other people thought were part of her routine duties. All too p redictably, she ended up embroiled in a Press row over accusations of h aving a mercenary attitude.
What is striking about the book is what H arman h as m issed o ut. T here i s no mention of her well-documented connection t o a n a ppalling a nd d eeply sinister organisation that defended child abusers.
Nor of the fact that, astonishingly, sheoncetriedtowaterdownchildpornography laws.
Before she became an MP, Harman worked a s t he h igh-profile l egal o fficer for the National Council for Civil L iberties (NCCL), a radical pressure group that later became known as Liberty.
Her husband Jack Dromey also served ontheNCCL’s executive foral most a decade.
So fixated was the NCCL with m inority rights and sexual liberation at this time that it happily accepted the affiliation of the infamous P aedophile Information Exchange (PIE), an appalling organisation that lobbied o n b ehalf o f c hild a busers a nd campaigned for the age of consent to be lowered to f our.
Such was the blind tyranny of the ‘liberal’ L eft t hat m any w ho s poke o ut against PIE feared being called a ‘homophobe’. A P IE ‘ information’ l eaflet at the time shows how the organisation u sed t his t o a lly i ts c ause t o t he gay rights movement.
‘Homosexuals are now widely regarded a s o rdinary, h ealthy p eople — a minority, but no more “ill” than the minority who are left-handed,’ it read. ‘There is no reason why paedophilia should n ot w in s imilar a cceptance.’
The NCCL appears to have bought this argument hook, line and sinker. None of this is recorded in Harman’s autobiography.
When the row over PIE’s link to the NCCL was exposed three years ago, thanks to an investigation by this newspaper, Harman was dismissive, arguing that affiliation was a minor administrative matter over which the NCCL had little control.
But the connections ran much deeper. The chairman of PIE sat on the N CCL’s g ay r ights s ub-committee, while it was the NCCL’s gay and lesbian officer, Nettie Pollard, who wrote to PIE in 1975 inviting them to affiliate, and even attended some of PIE’s meetings.
The NCCL publication, Guide To Your R ights, e ven f eatured a n a ddress for the Paedophile Information Exchange in West London. Harman said a t t he h eight o f t he f urore i n 2 014 that s he ‘ regretted’ t he i nvolvement o f PIE w ith t he N CCL ‘ before s he j oined’ as legal officer in 1978.
She has always opposed child
She’s a strange mix of ambition and insecurity ‘Apologise? I have nothing to apologise for’
‘I looked vacuous and evasive, even to my own eyes’
pornography and declared: ‘I’m not going to apologise because I’ve nothing to apologise for,’ arguing that the organisation was ‘immaterial’ to her work.
Yet, in 1978 in her capacity as the NCCL’s legal officer, Harman wrote a briefing paper trying to water down the Protection of Children Bill, which sought to ban child pornography. She argued that the bill would ‘increase censorship’, and that a pornographic picture of a naked child should not be considered indecent unless it could be proved the subject had suffered.
She said NCCL’s approach was to argue for clear definitions to make sure the law was precise, so it was about child protection, not censorship.
But then, where contentious subjects are concerned, it seems Harriet Harman is inclined to omit certain details — and nowhere more so than in this autobiography.
She downplays her privileged background, with a private education at St Paul’s Girls’ School in London, presenting herself as the product of an ordinary middle-class household — her father was a doctor and her mother a qualified lawyer.
What she neglects to say is that her father was a distinguished Harley Street physician and pillar of the medical establishment.
More egregiously, she makes no mention of the fact she is connected to the aristocracy: she is the niece of Elizabeth Longford, the distinguished historian and wife of Frank Pakenham, the 7th Earl of Longford. According to Tatler, the house journal of the upper classes, the Pakenhams were ‘pulsatingly patrician’.
As with so many socialists, hypocrisy has always been a central element of Harman’s career, typified by her decision — which she rather skates over in her book — to send her eldest child to a selective secondary school, even though Labour was ferociously opposed to selection.
Family considerations also clashed with her flagship feminist policy of all-women shortlists in Labour-held and marginal constituencies.
The policy always had a ring of Orwellian doublethink about it, promoting institutionalised gender discrimination in the name of equality, but Harman vigorously clung to it as a means of boosting the number of female MPs.
So there was considerable surprise that she did not insist on an allwomen shortlist when the plum Labour seat of Erdington in Birmingham became vacant in 2010. Her husband Jack Dromey, a longserving trades union official, won selection as the Labour candidate.
As one of Harman’s Cabinet colleagues ruefully commented at the time: ‘Harriet is usually such an effective champion for all-women shortlists. It’s strange that she should have gone missing when the National Executive Committee decided to allow her husband a run at this seat.’
The same double standards can be seen in her support, as Blair’s Solicitor-General, for the invasion of Iraq, a policy of which any progressive politician should be ashamed, though Harman tries to minimise her role by saying she was not involved in any of the legal discussions.
Just as shameful was her failing, as Minister for Women, in the longrunning Rotherham abuse scandal, when around 1,400 vulnerable girls were ruthlessly exploited by predatory Pakistani gangs.
If ever there was a case for official intervention by a feminist crusader it was Rotherham, but politically correct Harman seems to have shown no obvious interest.
The scandal does not even merit a mention in her book.
What she does do throughout the book, however, is catalogue her grievances — though, in contrast to her self-proclaimed image as a strong feminist, she meekly fails to do anything about them.
She is particularly scathing about the regular slights inflicted on her by Gordon Brown, but, supposedly for the sake of party unity, she usually let him get away with them.
On one astonishing occasion in 1996, he actually re-wrote parts of her speech to Labour Conference without her knowledge as it was being fed into the Autocue.
She had wanted to argue that pension increases should be targeted at the poorest, but Brown disagreed and changed her words. She didn’t cause a scene.
Harman was angered that, after she was elected Labour’s deputy leader in 2007, Brown did not make her deputy prime minister in his new Cabinet. Again, she let it pass.
She was appalled when, by chance, she overheard Brown’s henchman, the notorious political fixer Damian McBride, on his mobile phone, spreading lies to the Press about her. But she did not insist on his immediate sacking.
Having been rejected for the deputy premiership, she was outraged when she learned in 2009 that Brown was planning to give the position to Peter Mandelson.
‘Over my dead body,’ she told Brown during a series of fraught confrontations. Yet the Labour prime minister went ahead and effectively made Mandelson his deputy by handing him the title of First Secretary of State.
As Harman notes bitterly, Brown then openly told the Press that Mandelson was ‘deputy prime minister in all but name’.
Yet again, she did not resign. There are, to be fair, touches of honesty about her own weaknesses in this book.
After a number of disastrous performances as Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury in the early Nineties, which expose her inadequate grasp of economic policy, she admits that she ‘looked vacuous and evasive, even to my own eyes’.
Similarly, her spell as Social Security Secretary in the first Blair government ended in calamity as she clashed badly with her cerebral deputy Frank Field — the pair were known to critical insiders as ‘handbag and brains’ — and failed to display any real authority.
‘I hadn’t a clue how to lead a department,’ she writes.
But what comes across above all is a rewriting of history that exposes Harman’s smugness and blithe disregard for reality.
She describes, for instance, how some of the housing estates in her Peckham constituency had become such places of fear in the Eighties that milkmen and postmen refused to make deliveries.
Predictably, she blames ‘Tory cuts’ under Mrs Thatcher, but fails to recognise the impact of welfare dependency, family breakdown and the loss of personal responsibility — social problems that she and her ilk created through their policies.
Nor does she touch on the devastating impact on our national identity of Labour’s policies of mass immigration and multiculturalism, of which she was a core supporter — a subject which is now at the forefront of our political debate.
Instead, all we have is the usual Left-wing determination to celebrate diversity, such as when she expresses her delight at the beat of African drums on the steps of Southwark Town Hall summoning her Nigerian constituents to a meeting.
The sanctimonious, morally superior values of so-called social justice warriors such as Harman have been central to Labour’s collapse. Her condescending, politically-correct triumphalism has helped to drag her party ever deeper into the mire of unpopularity.
Typically, she ends her book on a final resounding note of hypocrisy: ‘I’ve always denounced political memoirs as male vanity projects and vowed never to write one.’
Well, she has. And it is all the more revealing for what it omits, as well as for those men she’s accused — and whose reputations she’s destroyed.