Categorising Betty Boothroyd as a “rightwing party loyalist” may give a misleading impression of her political outlook, particularly towards some of the “reforms” of the New Labour era. Although she was scrupulous in her objectivity as speaker of the Commons, the fact that she never abandoned some deeply held socialist beliefs was brought home to me during the first term of the Blair government in the late 1990s.
At home one weekend, I received a phone call from Betty saying how much she shared the concerns of some Labour MPs – I was the member for Wakefield – about increasing marketisation of the NHS at the time. She obviously could not go public, but my experience with Betty on this and other issues was that her approach to politics was a complex one.
