Standing Down Read Online Free

Labour parties around the country began inviting her to become their candidate – offers she felt unable to accept.
    Two years later though, while working at her day job in the Citizens Advice Bureau, she had another epiphany: ‘I thought to myself: “We’re dealing with the same problems year in, year out. Wouldn’t it be better to get somewhere where you can try to change things, so that people were not faced with these problems?”’
    One of the constituencies that had approached her over the years was Lewisham Deptford, but, hoping to be selected for her hometown of Torfaen, Dame Joan turned it down. She came second in Torfaen, and considered giving up:
    I had to think: ‘Do I really want to do this? I’m not so sure.’ The idea of going back to Wales, representing my home town, that was incredibly powerful.
    Then I got a note from Harriet Harman [Labour’s deputy leader], who I didn’t know except by reputation. And Harriet said, ‘Joan, Lewisham Deptford is wide open, go for it’ – which is utterly typical of Harriet. She’s always looking out for other women. Answer: yes.
    It took eight months, it was a very difficult contest, but I got it; and I’ve been here for nearly twenty-eight years.
    Although Lewisham Deptford was a Labour seat, Dame Joan was nervous about her prospects and conscious that the two neighbouring constituencies were Conservative:
    Election night was very bittersweet. We were all counting in the same place. Lewisham East [and] Lewisham West were lost and then we came to Lewisham Deptford.
    By then I was really nervous … you are looking at every single bundle of pink papers going into baskets.
    By the time she was declared the new MP for Lewisham Deptford, it was clear Labour had lost the election nationally. ‘That was devastating,’ Dame Joan says. ‘Of course I was very, very disappointed about my colleagues, but at the same time I couldn’t help but be euphoric myself.’
    Dame Joan arrived at the House of Commons as one of just forty-one women MPs. It was a place she knew reasonably well from her days campaigning with CND, but she was ‘shocked’ by the working conditions nonetheless:
    It was absolutely the worst place I’d ever worked, and I’d worked in the voluntary sector. The facilities were the worst I had ever experienced.
    I remember naively asking for a map, because I have no sense of direction. I went to the library and they said, ‘Madam, security! There’s no map available of the House of Commons’ – which is a lie, of course. You couldn’t get anything. You were treated like a new kid at school.
    I had never been the subject of sexist behaviour at work. In my last few jobs I’d been the director, I had been used to giving orders rather than taking them.
    Always having my strings pulled, that’s how it feels, that you’re in the clutches of the whips from the minute you arrive.
    I was naive enough to stand up at a meeting where they were discussing the allocation of offices and say: ‘What are the arrangements for making an application to have a non-smoking office?’ They said: ‘You’ll be lucky if you get an office at all.’ You were expected to sit in a room with a man smoking a cigar or a pipe. It was a sense of: ‘Oh, God, another silly woman.’
    There were constant put-downs to the women. You had to really be very, very strong all the time, be very determined.
    An awful lot of women from that time were essentially honorary men, for that reason. It was easy to be an honorary man like Mrs Thatcher or one of the boys like the Labour women.
    I was absolutely determined that I am a feminist and I will be a Labour MP and I will always be a woman MP. I’m not going to pretend.
    As a ‘national figure’ from her CND days, Dame Joan was aware that her high profile had the potential to put some of her new colleagues’ noses out of joint:
    I perceived that this was not welcome, that people thought that I would consider myself more important,