The 1987 general election brought a breakthrough for women in parliament in more ways than one. Margaret Beckett, having first been elected as an MP in 1974, had become used to the idiosyncratic arrangements in the members’ cloakroom, where “everybody has a peg, and a red ribbon to hang their sword”. Male MPs would first be given their spots, with female members squeezed together into what she calls “a little section at the end of the cloakroom”.
After the 1987 election, however, “when we came back, you couldn’t find your peg. And the attendants said: ‘Oh no, madam. There are so many of you ladies now that we can’t put you all in one group – we’ve had to do it alphabetically.’”
