Harriet Harman, the MP for Camberwell and Peckham, will step down at the general election.
The Labour MP has been a mainstay of the Labour Party for decades, holding cabinet roles, including deputy leader, in power and opposition.
Who is she, what has she achieved, and why is she resigning from frontline politics?
Who is Harriet Harman?
Harriet Harman was elected as MP for Camberwell and Peckham in 1982 and has held the safe Labour seat ever since.
Her 42 years of continuous service make her the longest-serving female MP, otherwise known as The Mother of the House.
Harman was born in 1950 to a Harley Street doctor father and a barrister mother.
She was educated at the private St Paul’s Girls School, Hammersmith. Harman went on to do a degree in Politics at the University of York where she became involved in student politics.
Harman is related to various British statesmen. She is the great-great-niece of the Liberal statesman Joseph Chamberlain, and the cousin once removed of former Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and Foreign Secretary Austen Chamberlain.
What did she do in politics?
She was first elected as MP – while pregnant – for Peckham in an October 1982 by-election caused by the death of predecessor Harry Lamborn.
She was returned with a 3,931 majority. The constituency became Camberwell and Peckham in 1997.
When Labour was elected to government that same year, Harman was made secretary of state for social security and the first-ever minister for women.
She was sacked in 1998, after publicly rowing with junior minister Frank Field. She didn’t return to the Labour frontbench until 2001, when she was appointed Solicitor General, a post she served until 2005.
Harman occupied several other senior positions under the Blair and Brown governments, including as leader of the House of Commons from 2007 to 2010. She was Labour’s deputy leader and chairwoman from 2007 to 2015.
As deputy leader, Harman was a prominent figure during Ed Miliband’s leadership, serving as shadow culture secretary, shadow international development secretary and shadow deputy prime minister.
Upon Miliband’s resignation in 2015, Harman took over as interim party leader pending a leadership election that summer. Jeremy Corbyn was the eventual winner.
Harman became ‘Mother of the House’ – the longest continuously-serving female MP in the Commons – in 2017, after 35 years.
In December 2021, she announced she would not stand in the next general election. Miatta Fahnbulleh was selected as her replacement in November 2022.
Why is she stepping down?
Asked why she was not staying in frontline politics to continue her work on women’s issues, Harman told the BBC the current and upcoming generation of women in politics was “every bit and more than capable of doing it themselves”.
Harman added that she would be “enthusiastically cheering them on”.
In her resignation letter, she noted that when she joined Labour had only 11 female MPs, a number that had risen to 104.
In June 2023, The Fawcett Society, a gender equality and women’s rights charity, announced that Harman had been appointed Chair.
What is her legacy?
The MP is known for championing feminist causes in Parliament, including a long-standing campaign against topless Page 3 girls – which eventually led to The Sun ditching semi-naked models in 2015.
Harman also brought forward the Equality Bill, now the Equality Act 2010, to ensure everyone has a fair chance in life.
The act promotes equality, fights discrimination in all its forms, including age discrimination, and introduced transparency in the workplace, seen as key to tackling the gender pay gap.
In her letter to the party where she stated her intention to stand down, which she shared on her Twitter, she said: “I entered the Commons as one of only 11 Labour women MPs in a parliament that was 97 per cent men. Now there are 104 Labour women and across all parties women MPs are a ‘critical mass’.
“But there remains much more to be done till women genuinely share political power with men on equal terms and until women in this country are equal.
“I will leave the House of Commons with my feminism, my belief in Labour and my enthusiasm for politics undimmed.”
What did she do before politics?
Before entering politics, Harriet Harman was a barrister and civil liberties campaigner. She was a legal officer for the National Campaign for Civil Liberties from 1978 to 1982.
It was revealed by a whistleblower in 1984 that MI5 held files on both Harman and Patricia Hewitt, then general secretary of the NCCL and subsequently herself a senior Labour MP.