The joys of being a ‘former’

 

To King’s College Hospital to meet some of the junior doctors. Every few seconds bleepers go off and the doctors dash out. How different from my usual meetings there with the management. The junior doctors are passionate about the National Health Service, and the care they give their patients. They are brainy professionals and we should all be falling down in gratitude to them. With Australia and pharmaceutical companies trying to lure them away, it’s mad to be cutting their pay. 

 

Mornings are transformed now that I am no longer acting leader. I lie in bed listening to Today — hoping Labour’s argument will triumph, but glad not to be the one to make it. Instead of sweating over preparation for PM’s Questions, I tweet pictures of my kittens. At the Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year Awards I find an unlikely kindred spirit. Having loathed the Tories in the Commons for decades, it’s startling to find how much I have in common with former chancellor Nigel Lawson. No, it’s not just that we both love Nigella nor, eerily, that both of us have the same hair colour we did in our forties. It is that I, too, am now a “former”. I used to pity the political “formers” hanging around the fringes of politics. But I love being one. Nigel Lawson, who was one of many formers and soon-to-be-formers at the lunch, pointed out to me that, with the recent sad demise of two political giants, Geoffrey Howe and Dennis Healey, he is now the most senior former! On to the second meeting of our new Joint Committee on Human Rights — half peers and half MPs. Despite never having been on a select committee before, I’m the chair. Our first inquiry is into the government’s drone strikes. What exactly is the policy? Is there a “kill list”? Who puts names on it? Are strikes fully legal and accountable? 

 

The Sunday newspapers are full of the Tory plans to water down the Human Rights Act. It’s not a good sign that they’re now calling it “Labour’s Human Rights Act”.  Off to the Southwark remembrance service in Borough High Street. Like most MPs I go to our local ceremony and value the moment of reflection. But one freezing November when we were standing there before the silence, with an icy wind whipping round, I moaned to Tessa Jowell, my fellow Southwark MP, that my feet and hands were numb. “But think,” she said, “how much colder it was for the soldiers.” She left the Commons in May and this Sunday was the first time in over 20 years that we didn’t stand next to each other during the silence. People still muddle us up, but I’m happy to have well-wishers congratulate me on bringing the Olympics to London. After the service, there is a meeting of Camberwell and Peckham Labour Party women. Nationally, there’s a clean sweep of men in the top positions now. Once again, time to step up our efforts to insist women get an equal say.

 

By arrangement with the Spectator