Jill Knight, the long-serving Conservative backbench MP for the south Birmingham constituency of Edgbaston, who has died aged 98, was not as benign or inoffensive as she sometimes appeared.
Known for her colourful floral dress sense – once memorably described by the former Times parliamentary sketch writer Craig Brown as making her look like a fist fight in a hydrangea bush – Knight devoted much of her career to campaigning against immigration and easier divorce, was in favour of the return of the death penalty and, most notably, clause 28 banning the alleged promotion of homosexuality by local authorities in their schools.
The clause arose out of a spurious moral panic that was stirred up on the Tory backbenches in the mid-1980s and assiduously promoted by some tabloids that teaching unions and some Labour local authorities were somehow encouraging children to become gay. There was virtually no evidence for this apart from some nebulous and notably prim sex education books seeking to reduce anti-gay prejudice.
As the Daily Mail’s education correspondent at the time I was charged with finding such subversive literature in schools, but never did. The only copy of the most notorious booklet – Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin – that I ever saw was the one in the bottom drawer of my desk at work. Nevertheless it was an early culture wars issue and the fear among some Tories such as Knight that children could be “made gay” was exploited by rightwing and some evangelical pressure groups.
The clause took two years to reach the statute book, interrupted by the 1987 general election, a process whose unintended consequence was to unite most of the gay population and many others in outright and reasoned opposition, including stunts such as lesbian activists abseiling into the Commons chamber and others invading the BBC’s Six O’Clock News studio during a broadcast.
Knight – in 1985 she became Dame Jill Knight – introduced the original clause in the Commons which eventually became part of the Local Government Act of 1988, claiming to have been besieged by concerned parents and complaining of having been hectored by the Gay Liberation Front. When she voted against equal rights to marriage in 2013, she insisted unconvincingly that she was not homophobic as some gay people were “very good at antiques” – antique hunting was one of her own recreations.
The clause was eventually repealed in 2003, without a single prosecution, leading eventually to an apology from David Cameron in 2009 and, in an interview nine years later, Knight’s regret that she was “sorry if the law hurt anyone”. Private member’s measures that she got passed concerned childproof packaging, genetic engineering, design copyright and nationality rights for children born abroad with British mothers.
Born in Bristol, she was the daughter of an accountant, Arthur Meek, and his, wife Alma, a teacher. Though given the name Joan, as a twin to her brother Jack she was always known as Jill. Following her parents’ acrimonious divorce – a life-changing experience affecting her future views on stable family life, as she never saw her father again – the family moved to Birmingham, where she attended King Edward VI grammar school in Handsworth.
Knight claimed that it was a socialist teacher who turned her into a young Conservative after she was marked down for an essay on William Morris’s News from Nowhere. During the second world war she served with the Women’s Royal Air Force (Wraf), where she met and in 1947 married Monty Knight, an optician, who shared her robust rightwing views.
In 1956 Knight became a Tory councillor in Northampton, where the family lived, and fought the fox-hunting Old Etonian Labour MP Reginald Paget (later Lord Paget of Northampton) unsuccessfully at the general elections of 1959 and 1964. She encountered distinct misogyny from local associations when applying for selection as a candidate in winnable seats, but was eventually chosen – from more than 200 male candidates – following the sudden death of Dame Edith Pitt, the MP for Edgbaston, the leafy Birmingham suburban constituency, shortly before the 1966 general election.
She held the seat until retirement in 1997, when the constituents chose another woman, this time Labour’s Gisela Stuart, to succeed her. The seat, once Neville Chamberlain’s, is the only one in the country to have chosen four successive female MPs, the current incumbent being Labour’s Preet Gill.
In parliament – initially one of only 26 women MPs, seven of them Conservative – Knight was reliably reactionary on social issues. She consistently opposed the legalisation of abortion – “Babies are not like bad teeth to be jerked out,” she said during the passage of David Steel’s abortion bill in 1967 – and also the provision of the contraceptive pill to teenagers.
She opposed sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa and was a member of the rightwing Monday Club during its 70s heyday. It was in a speech at her constituency association’s dinner in 1974 that Sir Keith Joseph effectively scuppered his chances of ever leading the party by arguing that the balance of Britain’s “human stock” was threatened because poorer people had too many children.
She became a firm supporter of Margaret Thatcher, claiming to detect communists in senior positions in the Labour party: “If Nazi Germany had had as many supporters at Westminster at the time of Munich as communism has today, we would have lost the war.”
Never likely to become a minister, she was a member of the executive of the backbench Tory 1922 committee, including terms as secretary and vice-chair, for 18 years, and served on the home affairs, race relations and immigration select committees and on the all-party child and family protection group.
Her only rebellion came when the Thatcher government imposed charges for eye-tests and dental appointments, bearing in mind her husband’s profession. Following her retirement from the Commons in 1997, she was given a life peerage, becoming the first woman to serve in parliament continuously for more than 50 years, standing down finally only in 2016.
Monty died in 1986. The couple had two sons, of whom one survives her.
• Joan Christabel Jill Knight, Lady Knight of Collingtree, politician, born 9 July 1923; died 6 April 2022
