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Margaret Beckett
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Margaret Mary Beckett (née Jackson; born 15 January 1943) is a British politician for the Labour Party. She is the Member of Parliament for Derby South and the current Minister of State for Housing and Planning.
Beckett was first elected to Parliament in 1974 and held junior positions in the governments of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan. She lost her seat in 1979 but returned to the House of Commons in 1983 and became a senior member of the Labour Party.
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Margaret Mary Beckett (née Jackson; born 15 January 1943) is a British politician for the Labour Party. She is the Member of Parliament for Derby South and the current Minister of State for Housing and Planning.
Beckett was first elected to Parliament in 1974 and held junior positions in the governments of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan. She lost her seat in 1979 but returned to the House of Commons in 1983 and became a senior member of the Labour Party. She was elected Deputy Leader of the Labour Party in 1992 and was briefly its leader in 1994 following the premature death of John Smith, the first woman to occupy either role.
After Labour's victory in the 1997 general election, Beckett became a member of Tony Blair's Cabinet. Initially the President of the Board of Trade, she was later the Leader of the House of Commons and Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. In 2006, Blair appointed her Foreign Secretary, making her the first female to hold the position and—after Margaret Thatcher—the second woman to hold one the Great Offices of State.
After Blair resigned as Prime Minister in 2007, Beckett initially stood down from the Cabinet. After some time, Blair's successor Gordon Brown made her Minister of State for Housing and Planning in 2008. She is one of the longest serving ministers in government and one few remaining MPs who served in the Labour governments of the 1970s.
Early life
Margaret Jackson was born in 1943, in Ashton-under-Lyne, into a working-class family. Her father was an English carpenter and her mother an Irish Roman Catholic. Her sister is a Catholic nun. She was educated at the Notre Dame High School for Girls (a state school in Norwich), then at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, where she qualified as a metallurgist.
In 1961, Jackson joined Associated Electrical Industries as a student apprentice in metallurgy. She joined the Transport and General Workers Union in 1964 and remains a member to this day. She joined the University of Manchester in 1966 as an experiment officer in its metallurgy department. In 1970 Jackson went to work for the Labour Party as a researcher in industrial policy.
She married party official Lionel "Leo" Beckett in Lincoln in 1979. Leo works as Beckett's agent and aide, travelling with her and working in her private office. The couple are a close political and professional team. They have no children.
Beckett and her husband enjoy caravan holidays and have continued to do so throughout her political career. She was asked to give up holidays in her caravan in 2006 in light of security concerns.
Member of Parliament
In 1973, she was selected as Labour candidate for Lincoln, which the party wanted to win back from dissident ex-Labour MP Dick Taverne. Jackson lost to Taverne at the February 1974 General Election by 1,297 votes. After the election she went to work as a researcher for Judith Hart, the Minister for Overseas Development at the Foreign Office. Harold Wilson called another general election in October 1974, and Jackson again went to fight Taverne at Lincoln in the October 1974 General Election. This time Jackson was elected, by just 984 votes.
Almost immediately after her election she was appointed as Judith Hart's Parliamentary Private Secretary. Harold Wilson made her a Whip in 1975, and she was promoted in 1976 by James Callaghan to Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department of Education and Science, replacing Joan Lestor, who had resigned in protest over spending cuts. She remained in that position until she lost her seat at the 1979 General Election. The Conservative candidate Kenneth Carlisle narrowly won the seat with a 602 vote majority, the first time the Conservatives had won at Lincoln since 1935.
She joined Granada Television in 1979 as a researcher. Out of Parliament, and now Margaret Beckett, she won election to Labour's National Executive Committee in 1980, and supported left-winger Tony Benn for the Labour deputy leadership in 1981 against Denis Healey. She was the subject of a vociferous attack from Joan Lestor at the conference.
Beckett was chosen to fight the parliamentary seat of Derby South after the retirement of the sitting MP, Walter Johnson. At the 1983 General Election she won the seat only very narrowly, with the Labour majority down to 421. During her time in Parliament, she has continued to live in the constituency, in one of the poorer areas of Derby, next door to a public house and in an area dominated by council housing. She continues to support local co-operatives.
Shadow Cabinet and Deputy Leader, 1984-94
Returning to the House of Commons, Margaret Beckett gradually moved away from the hard left, supporting incumbent leader Neil Kinnock against Benn in 1988. By this time she was a front bencher, as a spokeswoman on Social Security since 1984, becoming a member of the Shadow Cabinet in 1989 as Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury. After the 1992 General Election she was elected Deputy Leader of the Labour Party and served under John Smith as Shadow Leader of the House of Commons. She became a Member of the Privy Council in 1993. She was the first woman to serve as deputy leader of the Labour Party.
Following the sudden death of John Smith from a heart attack on 12 May 1994, Margaret Beckett became Labour leader, the Party's constitution providing for the automatic succession of the deputy leader for the remainder of the leadership term, upon the death or resignation of an incumbent leader in opposition. Labour leaders are subject to annual re-election at the time of the annual party conference while the party is in opposition. Accordingly, Beckett was constitutionally entitled to remain in office as leader until the 1994 Conference, but the party's National Executive Committee (NEC) decided to bring forward the election for Leader and Deputy Leader to July 1994.
She came third in the subsequent leadership election, behind Tony Blair and John Prescott. The Deputy Leadership was contested at the same time; Beckett, standing in this election as well, was defeated, coming second behind Prescott. She did however enjoy being kept in the shadow cabinet by Tony Blair as Shadow Health Secretary and was a senior Labour Politician.
In government, 1997-2001
Under Tony Blair's leadership, Margaret Beckett was the Shadow Secretary of State for Health, and then from 1995 the shadow President of the Board of Trade. She was one of the leading critics of the government when the Scott Report published its findings into the Arms-to-Iraq scandal in 1996.
The Labour party won a landslide victory in the 1997 General Election and despite her connections to the old left of the party and the trade union movement, with which Tony Blair has an uneasy relationship, Margaret Beckett held a number of important positions in the Blair government. After the election she was appointed President of the Board of Trade (a position the title of which would later revert to Secretary of State for Trade and Industry); the first woman to have held the post. She was succeeded by Peter Mandelson in July 1998.
Beckett was then Leader of the House of Commons from 1998 until her replacement by Robin Cook in June 2001. Her tenure saw the introduction of Westminster Hall debates, which are debates held in a small chamber near Westminster Hall on topics of interest to individual MPs, committee reports, and other matters that would not ordinarily be debated in the Commons chamber. Debates that take place in Westminster Hall are often more consensual and informal, and can address the concerns of backbenchers. She received admiration for her work as Leader of the House, working on this and a number of other elements of the Labour government's modernisation agenda for Parliament.
Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, 2001-06
After the 2001 General Election, Beckett became Secretary of State at the new Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, created after the old Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food was abolished in the wake of perceived mismanagement of the foot and mouth disease epidemic in 2001. The new department also incorporated some of the functions of the former Department for Transport, Environment and the Regions (DETR), and was known by its initials, "DEFRA".
For legal reasons, she was also appointed formally as the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, which appointment she held until MAFF was finally dissolved on 27 March 2002 and the remaining functions of the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food were transferred to the Secretary of State at large.
She held the position of Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs until May 2006, when she was succeeded by David Miliband. Beckett would be on the front line of the government's efforts to tackle climate change, and attended international conferences on the matter. Towards the end of her time at DEFRA there was a crisis within the Rural Payments Agency, which failed to make statutory payments to farmers whose livestock had been affected by BSE and TB; the crisis generated some political pressure on Beckett and the then Farming minister Lord Bach.
During her tenure at DEFRA Beckett was re-elected to Parliament for Derby South at the 2005 general election, with a reduced majority.
In a report published on 29 March 2007 by a Parliamentary select committee, she was strongly criticised and called upon to resign as Foreign Secretary for her role, as the previous Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, in the 2006 mismanagement of EU farm subsidies (which cost the British Government up to £500 million in EU fines).
Foreign Secretary, 2006-07
Following the 2006 local elections, Tony Blair demoted Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, and appointed Margaret Beckett as his successor. She was the first woman to hold the post, and only the second woman to hold one of the great offices of state (after Margaret Thatcher). Beckett's appointment came as something of a surprise, for the media and for Beckett herself. She admitted reacting to the news with a four-letter word.
Some commentators claim that she was promoted to Foreign Secretary because she was considered to be a 'safe pair of hands' and a loyal member of the Cabinet. Her experience at Defra in dealing with international climate change issues has also been cited as a factor in the move.
Margaret Beckett had to adapt quickly to her diplomatic role and within a few hours of her appointment as Foreign Secretary she flew to the United Nations in New York for an urgent meeting of foreign ministers to discuss the Iran nuclear weapons crisis. About a month later, Beckett came under fire for not responding quickly enough to the 2006 Lebanon war, which saw Israel invade the country, although some reports suggested that the delay was caused by Cabinet division rather than Mrs Beckett's reluctance to make a public statement on the matter.
Beckett is understood to have delegated European issues to the Foreign Office minister responsible for Europe, Geoff Hoon who, following his demotion as Defence Secretary, continued to attend Cabinet meetings. Hoon and Beckett were said to have a difficult ministerial relationship.
As Foreign Secretary, Beckett came in for some trenchant criticism. According to the Times, she did not stand up well in comparison with the previous Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw. The Spectator described her as, "at heart, an old, isolationist, pacifist Leftist" and called on her to resign, and the New Statesman accused her of allowing the Foreign Office to become 'subservient' to 10 Downing Street after the tenures of Jack Straw and Robin Cook.
In August 2006, 37 Labour Party members in her Derby South constituency left the party and joined the Liberal Democrats, criticising her approach to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Two weeks earlier, Beckett's successor, David Miliband, openly criticised Blair and Beckett during a full cabinet meeting for failing to call for an immediate ceasefire. Jack Straw and Hilary Benn, then International Development Secretary, later came out against Blair and Beckett as well.
As of 2 October 2008, Beckett is the last remaining minister to have experience in the Labour governments of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan. She was also one of five remaining members of the original 1997 Labour cabinet, and one of the longest-serving Labour frontbenchers.
Post-Blair years
Upon taking office, Gordon Brown made it known that Margaret Beckett would not continue as Foreign Secretary. She returned to the Labour backbenches, after being sacked from her post. On 28 June 2007, Brown selected David Miliband as her replacement.
It was announced on 29 January 2008 that Beckett would become the new head of the Prime Minister's Intelligence and Security Committee, replacing Paul Murphy, who was promoted to Secretary of State for Wales.
Return to government
Having been tipped for a possible return to the front bench in July 2008, due to her reputation as a solid media performer, Beckett returned to government in the reshuffle on 3 October 2008 as the Minister of State for Housing in the Department for Communities and Local Government. She will attend Cabinet meetings, but is not a full member and will not be entitled to vote on collective decisions. She ultimately was allowed to come back due to her cabinet experience and her economic management in the past.
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