Labour’s lady in waiting

Harriet Harman’s office reflects her status as the grande dame of British politics. Ensconced in a corner of Portcullis House, she enjoys two of the finest views in London, over both the Palace of Westminster itself and Parliament Square. As she ushers me in, the imposing effect is only spoiled by the fact that the windows are in dire need of cleaning.

As deputy leader, Harman is, officially, the second most important person in the Labour party after Ed Miliband. She has been an MP for 30 years and is married to a unionist-turned-parliamentarian, Jack Dromey. She knows the party like few others on the Labour front bench. Several of her colleagues, including Miliband, have worked as her advisers. Harman, though, is quick to stress that she doesn’t still think of herself as the boss’s boss. ‘I see Ed Miliband as leader of the party, I see Liz Kendall [another one of her former advisers] as doing social care.’ With deliberate understatement, she remarks that ‘it is very different being leader of the Labour party to being my special adviser’.

When I ask Harman if she saw Miliband as a future leader when he was her underling, she pauses before deciding against a direct answer. He was, she says, ‘exceptionally thoughtful, bright and committed: never one of those people to do back-door short cuts. He was always very straightforward. He had good politics.’ But it was all a very long time ago, she says. I can’t discern whether her hesitation is a product of not wanting to say that she marked Miliband out for the purple at first sight or whether he didn’t strike her as a future prime minister at the time.

It would be wrong, though, to imagine that this 62-year-old is preparing to pass the torch to the next generation. Sacked in Tony Blair’s first reshuffle, she only spent four of Labour’s 13 years in office at the Cabinet table. Having climbed her way back up the greasy pole, she clearly wants to claim her prize.

It still rankles with her that Gordon Brown did not make her deputy prime minister after she beat five opponents to the deputy leadership in 2007. When I ask her if she would have been offered that role if she was a man, she pointedly replies: ‘I think you’ll have to ask Gordon Brown that question.’

What Harman doesn’t want inside the next government are any Liberal Democrats. She is dismissive of the idea — one both Ed Miliband and Ed Balls have flirted with — that Vince Cable is a more sympathetic figure than Nick Clegg. ‘It is not what they say, it is what they actually do,’ she says, citing the Lib Dems’ voting record. She warns that it ‘doesn’t matter if they sound different, they’re all equally complicit’.

Interestingly, she also has firm ideas on what the party’s economic policy should be: Labour, she says, should not promise to match Tory spending plans at the next election. ‘Our argument against the Tories is that the scale and pace of their deficit reduction is self-defeating and hurting the economy and therefore making less money available. So we have got a fundamental economic critique — we would not be signing up to doing the very thing we think is hurting the economy.’

This declaration is a shot across the bows of Ed Balls. Those close to the shadow chancellor have been briefing that he is considering matching George Osborne’s spending plans at the next election, as Labour did before the 1997 election. Such a promise may pain Labour, but would (the argument runs) serve a powerful tactical purpose: neutralising the Tory claim that Labour can’t be trusted with the nation’s finances. But to Harman’s mind, the economic and political costs would be too much to bear.

In her opinion, the key to winning a Labour majority at the next election is in making progress in the south. She calculates that the party needs to go from having 10 MPs in the south-east, south-west and the eastern region to 36 MPs — a steep climb. In contrast, its task in the north-west and the West Midlands is far easier. There, it only needs to increase its number of MPs from 68 to 94.

On top of her role as deputy leader, Harman is also the shadow secretary of state for culture, media and sport. This means that she’ll craft Labour’s response to the Leveson inquiry’s recommendations on press regulation. Her belief is that any new system will need a ‘statutory underpinning’ so that parliament will, controversially, have to pass a law regulating the press. Harman can’t see any alternative. She believes that, despite what Lord Hunt, the new chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, hopes, not all newspapers will voluntarily agree to submit themselves to a new regulator.

Harman has no truck with the idea that women are, as a recent Spectator cover story had it, now ‘the richer sex’. She declares, with much passion, that ‘there’s still an unequal division of labour in the home’. Her goal is ‘the universal provision of child care’, which she thinks would both help children get the right start in life and help women’s rights. David Cameron is considering deregulating child care in the hope of encouraging a greater supply of nannies at affordable rates. Harman is dead against this idea.

‘That’s not going to make child care cheaper, that’s not going to increase the supply of child care,’ she says. She does not explain why allowing child minders to look after more kids would fail to increase the supply of child care. Her answer: the country ‘just needs more investment’ in child care. This spending-heavy answer is a reminder that Harman is not a ‘what matters is what works’ Blairite, but an old school left-winger.

Few politicians have taken more flak in their careers than Harman. Her feminism has won her as many enemies as friends. But when I ask what misperception about her most annoys her, she replies, with a certain pain in her voice: ‘They used to say I was thick… they don’t say it so much any more.’ She says with frustration: ‘I used to feel that was just unjustified.’

It is easy to mock Harman as Harriet Harperson, the embodiment of gender studies political correctness. But it’s hard to describe her as a fake. To spend any amount of time with her is to realise that, for good or ill, she firmly believes in what she is saying. She is a politician motivated by principles, not polling data. She believes in things, campaigns for them relentlessly and — as the Equalities Act shows — gets things done.