High priestess of Tory sleaze

‘She can’t stand that woman,’ an aide of Mrs Thatcher once said of Dame Shirley Porter, the notorious, scandal-prone leader of Westminster City Council during the 1980s. Such contempt was perhaps surprising, for Lady Porter was seen by many as the mirror image of Mrs Thatcher both in her outspoken character and in the aggressive way she ran her municipal fiefdom. Domineering, energetic and impatient, she liked to pose as the champion of business and the ratepayer against sclerotic civic bureaucracy. Like Mrs Thatcher, she was ferociously partisan, relishing battles with her opponents, while she could also be brutally intimidating to her own senior officials.

Yet, as the BBC journalist Andrew Hosken shows in this superb biography, Lady Porter had nothing like Mrs Thatcher’s political talent or genuine gifts of leadership. A noisy self-publicist, she allowed toughness to descend into bullying, radicalism into overt corruption. Lacking any real political principle, she became obsessed with clinging onto office at any price, eventually presiding over probably the most fraudulent local authority regime in British history, even outdoing the Labour empire of T. Dan Smith in Newcastle in the 1970s. Lady Porter was the high priestess of Tory sleaze, her actions helping to undermine the reputation of the Conservative party in the 1990s and pave the way for the arrival of Tony Blair.

For all its perceived mundanity, local government has often been the subject of fierce controversy, reflected in the current rows over council tax levels or in the bitter disputes about the role of local education authorities at the beginning of the last century. But no era has seen more explosive municipal politics than the 1980s. In London, Ken Livingstone turned the GLC into a cesspit of puerile extremism, trumpeting his support for violent Irish republicanism or doling out grants to a bewildering array of fringe groups.