Heart of the Labour family

Labour's women have helped change Westminster

By Mark Davies BBC News Online political reporter

When Jean Corston was elected as chair of one of Labour's key bodies, she was widely dubbed as the Blairite candidate.

It was a description she says she later raised with the prime minister with "a wry smile".

Corston: Labour has always been part of her life

Not because the suggestion of loyalty to the leader offends her particularly - what amuses her is "this obsession with labelling people".

"First of all I am called a babe - well, you tell my eight year old grandson that I am a babe and he'd just fall about," she says.

Ms Corston, MP for Bristol East since 1992, was elected as chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party last summer.

And one label of which she is certainly proud is that of being the first woman to hold the position - "a huge honour", she says.

I said 'yes' to everything I was asked to do, and I just felt it was killing me really

Jean Corston

Ms Corston clearly relishes a role which puts her at the heart of Labour's Westminster operation.

The job is often described as that of shop steward for Labour's backbenchers, but Ms Corston thinks advocate is a more accurate description.

"The important thing is that backbenchers have an advocate that they can trust, that ministers know they can deal with someone who is very discreet.

Blair contact

"Politics at an internal party level only work when people feel they can say whatever they want to you safe in the knowledge that you are only going to divulge this to the people to whom it should be divulged."

Thatcher 'hindered' female politicians

She says the accusation that the Labour leadership isn't particularly interested in the views of its parliamentary party is just not true.

"I have been interested in looking back at the reports of the PLP (and) how often you can track an issue being raised and link it directly to ministerial action later," she says.

Moreover, she says the prime minister views the PLP as an important part of the Westminster machine and is in regular contact with her: "It is not just a sort of handing on news from on high, it is a genuine dialogue."

Ms Corston is warm and friendly, and speaks frankly about the challenges life has thrown at her, including the death of her mother aged just 38.

It has taught her, she says, to live life for the moment. She is determined, she says, never to become a "bitter and twisted" MP.

She came to politics early. She wrote an election address for her trade unionist father at the age of 13, but an experience when she was six provided an abiding memory of one of Labour's proudest achievements.

Memory

It was Christmas 1948 and after Ms Corston's sister had suffered a serious burn, her grandmother was astonished to be told that the treatment would come free on the new National Health Service.

That would be called spin now - it was called common sense then

Jean Corston

"Looking into her face, I suddenly knew that although I didn't know what this was about, I knew that this was something terribly important, and it sort of imprinted itself on my memory," she says.

In the 1950 general election, Ms Corston and her sister were called upon to help the local candidate.

"He was a single male candidate in 30s and that not going down very well with electors," she says.

"So we were told to put on our best smock dresses and told to hold his hands at all times, smile, but not say anything. That would be called spin now - it was called common sense then."

The Labour Party has almost always been in her life except for a period in her teens when she briefly lost interest in politics.

Labour family

She returned to the fold in her 20s, telling her father that she planned to get active in the party again.

The work of MPs needs to be given greater recognition, says Corston

He said: 'I always knew you would - the Labour Party has always been your family' - and it's true."

With many years working for the party and a law degree under her belt - she sat at Tony Blair's 's old desk while doing her pupilage - she arrived at Westminster.

She recalls bumping into Tessa Jowell, an old friend, on her first day in the Commons.

"Behind us were two of what can only be described as Tory knights of the shires - the kind of chaps who deplore suede shoes - and one of them nudged the other and said: 'Look at this, the place is filling up with women'.

"At that time, there were about 18 Tory women, there were probably three or four Liberal Democrat women and there were 39 Labour women.

'Queen Bee'

"If he thought that was evidence of the place filling up with women it did show to what degree the place was a male preserve."

We need to give MPs a clear message that being a minister isn't everything

Jean Corston

Ms Corston says Margaret Thatcher hindered the female cause at Westminster.

"There was this Queen Bee mentality which is that 'I am the exception to the rule...you can't possible be the same as me because there is only one Queen Bee'."

Things have improved since, she says, but there is still a pressing need to attract more people from a wider range of backgrounds.

She says one way of increasing the attractions of a career at Westminster is to give the role of the backbencher greater status, particularly through the select committee system.

"We need to give MPs a clear message that being a minister isn't everything."

'Profound shock'

There also needs to be greater recognition, she says, of the workload faced by MPs.

"I don't believe there is anybody who has done it and not found a sense of profound shock," she says. "If there is, then they are not doing it properly."

She says she took on too much when she was first elected. "After about 18 months, I really felt it was destroying my life. I just did nothing else, and I said 'yes' to everything I was asked to do, and I just felt it was killing me really.

"My staff and my family took me in hand and said I had to learn to say the word 'no'.

"I don't say no very often but I say it more than I used to."