MOVE OVER MRS T!
A riotous encounter with the original trailblazer for women in politics (she’s 91)
For 91-year-old Barbara Hosking, CBE, it is all rather bemusing. Not only is her memoir a surprise publishing hit, but she’s also being celebrated as an icon of early feminism just as all things feminist become hot-button issues.
Yet it’s true — in the days when glass ceilings really were ten feet thick, she smashed through them. over a 60-year career in politics and TV, Barbara claimed her place alongside some of the most powerful men of the 20th century and quietly witnessed, at times from a ringside seat in Downing Street, some of its most exciting events.
She is quite literally the trailblazer you’ve (probably) never heard of.
We meet at her cosy Westminster flat, full of books and paintings of Cornish seascapes, a reminder of her modest childhood as the daughter of a farmer growing up in Penzance.
Indeed, her background makes her achievements all the more inspiring.
In those days, underprivileged girls from the West Country simply did not make it to the heart of political power — yet, in the Sixties and Seventies, as a high-ranking civil servant who had risen from the typing pool, Barbara could be found working in the press office for Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson, then writing speeches for Conservative PM Ted Heath.
She never let sexism overwhelm her, though there was plenty of it. ‘I kept bobbing up again like a cork to have another go. It was bloody-mindedness in a way, I was not going to be kept down. And I think that probably helped me working in the civil service with ministers.
‘While I respected them and their achievements, I wasn’t in awe of them. I could tackle Ted Heath about his ghastly cardigan and suggest he bought a lovely tailored one with shoulder pads instead, which he did. A lot of people would have felt they couldn’t do that, but I owed a debt of loyalty. He was our prime minister and he had to look his best. I wasn’t frightened of him, as others were.’
There’s a great moment in the book, titled Exceeding My Brief: Memoirs of A Disobedient Civil Servant, where she demands a second glass of sherry, before telling Heath what’s wrong with a speech he’s just written. ‘The chaps were all like this . . .’ she mimes them gasping. ‘Men with men, there’s a real pecking order. I think they do it much more than women.’
Naturally bright, she combined a sharp mind with common sense and absolute discretion, qualities that made her a huge asset. Yet she loved to defy convention, too.
Promoted to the role of private secretary at the Cabinet office in 1973, Barbara accompanied the new minister for government communications, Geoffrey JohnsonSmith, to a meeting in Brussels, but found herself shuffled out of the room post-dinner along with all the politicians’ wives.
Barbara refused to be excluded from the circles of power and literally fought her way back in — much to Sir Geoffrey’s relief, since she was the one who’d mastered the briefing notes. It caused a mini scandal among the European politicos.
‘I always enjoyed the feeling of being something of a trailblazer,’ she says, remembering being one of the first women to join the formerly all-male reform Club. ‘Sometimes, our great
208 Record number of women MPs elected at the 2017 General Election
institutions were — and sometimes still are — very slow to learn the day of the woman was, and is, coming.’
That brain is still razor-sharp, and neither does she look her age. With youthful skin, upright posture and a wardrobe of Jaeger tailored separates, she appears at least a decade younger.
‘I know I don’t look 91,’ she smiles. ‘I don’t act it or talk like it because I have a young voice and lots of energy.
‘I think I have a lucky gene. My background is Cornish peasants and they had tough lives. But I also eat a Mediterranean diet: fish, olive oil, yoghurt and fresh vegetables. I sleep eight hours a night, though I did smoke until I was 50 and I still drink.’ recently, her health worker rang and said: ‘Barbara, we must have something wrong in your notes. It says you have at least two glasses of wine a day. You don’t do you?’
She grins. ‘I said: “I do.” And I don’t think it’s excessive.’
Sadly, her older sister and younger brother have died, while her younger sister has dementia. ‘You look in the diary and their names aren’t there,’ she says.
But her mantra has always been to keep calm and carry on and she is essentially happy.
The best anti-ageing elixir of all is an adventurous spirit: ‘I always hated being bored.’ That restlessness led her, at the age of 50, from Westminster to a top job in television as Director of Information at the Independent Broadcasting Authority, where, astonishingly — even for the mid-Seventies — she discovered she was being paid less than her male deputy.
Naturally, she wasn’t having that, and spoke out. The finance director who adjusted her salary deemed her a ‘suffragette’.
But she made her point and got equal pay — which is why recent revelations of inequality between the pay packets of senior men and women at the BBC shocked her so much. It is a battle, she sighs, that’s been going on within broadcasting for decades.
She had assumed it was getting better, when it clearly is not. ‘My definition of feminism is equal pay and equal chances,’ she says firmly.
THErE was nothing about Barbara’s childhood to suggest that she would rise so high. The family farm had no electricity and her unfaithful, disciplinarian father was a tyrant.
He went bankrupt in the Thirties and, a decade later, joined the army and went off to war, effectively liberating her mother, who was appointed billeting officer for evacuees.
‘It was the first time she had paid employment and real decision-making responsibility,’
says Barbara, approvingly. Despite unruly behaviour at the private Methodist school for which she won a scholarship, Barbara shone academically and there was talk of Oxford — but she had to leave at 16 to support the family and became a typist, filing stories to the local paper.
She was 21 when she arrived in London. It was 1946, and she worked for Odeon cinema’s magazine, before going to adult education college and ending up at Labour Party HQ. But then — remarkably — she took a job with a Cornish friend, working at a copper mine in Tanzania.
Three years in remote Africa were the making of her, she says, from dealing with earthquakes to finding a spitting cobra under her bed. ‘I was a woman in a totally male environment. But I made friends with the toughest of them without compromising my own beliefs.’
Meanwhile, she was coming to terms with her sexuality. Though she briefly thought of marrying a handsome miner in Tanzania, she always knew she was a lesbian after falling in love with a schoolfriend aged six.
Barbara is a private person, but knew she had to be honest about her love life in the book. And now, ‘I’m becoming a gay icon’, she hoots. Gay rights campaigning group Stonewall has even asked her to give a talk to 800 people.
Her close friends knew she was gay, of course, but it’s created a stir among her wider circle. ‘My joke is: I’ve come out at the age of 91 and if I don’t like it, I’m going back in again.’
The memoir is dedicated to Barbara’s civil partner Margaret, 71, whom she met 20 years ago when both were members of the 300 Group, the all-Party Westminster campaign to encourage more women into politics.
‘We became friends, but the possibility of a closer relationship had never occurred to me. Not only had she been married, but she was 20 years younger than me. Happily, I was wrong.’ After Africa, Barbara came back to London and worked for the Labour Party, becoming a press officer to Harold Wilson.
She considered standing as a Labour MP, but realised she was actually a Cornish Liberal at heart. So she decided to apply her talents to the civil service, effectively beginning all over again at the very bottom.
USeD to dealing with men, as determined to succeed as them and more than ready to roll up her sleeves, she was always bound to be a success.
But she so nearly didn’t write her bestselling memoir detailing how. Ten years ago, after two of her closest friends died, she threw out all of her diaries.
Fortunately, she had kept a record of the food and drink she served to guests — going back to 1965 — so was able to trace her career trajectory in terms of improving menus. And now, she has a hit on her hands.
We talk female role models. She mentions Margaret Thatcher. ‘I think some of her policies were quite wrong, but some things had to be done and she did them. For instance, [tackling] the power of the unions.
‘I mean, when the dead can’t be buried and you walk through Leicester Square with towering rubbish over your head . . . She had total bravery and willpower. You can imagine what she was like as a backbench MP being patronised, a grocer’s daughter, by all of these etonians.’
In contrast, she says, Theresa May lacks a killer instinct. ‘She holds back when she should strike. It’s her nature. I feel huge sympathy with her. Nobody else is going to have this job at the moment — they don’t want it.’
She thinks it’s sad both major political parties are in such disarray and that she probably won’t see Brexit resolved in her lifetime, ‘which is a pity, because I want to know what happens’.
Is she really as disobedient as the title of the book suggests? ‘A civil servant once said to me: “When will you learn that rules are to be obeyed?”
‘I looked at her in amazement and I said: “I was brought up to understand that rules are to be interpreted.” And I think it’s true for any sophisticated person. Jobsworths are really very boring people,’ she beams.
ExcEEding My Brief, by Barbara Hosking, is published by Biteback at £25.