Angela Eagle interview

This article is from the October issue of Total Politics

The lesser-spotted Angela Eagle has never really craved the limelight. Google her, and you’ll find reference to the fact she is a twin, a lesbian and the woman who turned Michael Winner’s catchphrase into a retort David Cameron would rather forget.

You can find a fair few YouTube clips of her taking on the government, George Osborne or Danny Alexander. But by the time you get to page four of the search engine, the only additional information you unearth is an online petition to remove Eagle as the MP for Wallasey – signed by three people.

Labour’s shadow chief secretary to the Treasury has not been known to “do the publicity thing”, as one colleague puts it.

“I don’t gossip,” Eagle admits.

However, she appears to be warming up to ‘the publicity thing’. After nearly 20 years in Parliament, she’s had a very public makeover. And she’s keen to talk about it.

“It’s better to be looked over than overlooked,” she says, quoting Mae West. “And if you are looked over it’s better to be well dressed… That little bit at the end is my creation.”

This includes a fresh wardrobe – “as you can see with my brand new suit today”. She gestures to her outfit. “What can I say? I enjoy wearing my new clothes. It’s nice to look nice.”

Does the new look come with a new attitude? Eagle replies: “Maybe being a bit more comfortable in your own skin, having time to develop that once you’re not in the grind of government.”

Eagle isn’t afraid of the limelight; she just doesn’t court it. She came out in an Observer article in 1997, and experienced an overwhelming number of bids to talk about her sexuality. She was, after all, Parliament’s first openly-lesbian MP (Maureen Colquhoun did not open up about her sexuality until she left politics). “After I came out, it was like a trap door opened up,” Eagle explains. “Nobody wanted to talk to me unless it was about that. I stopped doing [interviews] because I was getting a bit fed up.” She laughs. “The consequence was that I disappeared completely!”

The youngest person to enter Parliament from her 1992 intake, she is refreshingly honest about her aspiration. “I’ve always been ambitious. I’ve always said I’ll serve the party at whatever level… I wanted to do a good job for my constituents, a good job for the party, and get as far as I could in terms of being promoted.

“When I first came in, [Labour leader] John Smith wanted people to learn the craft of being here. I did a really quite full ‘apprenticeship’, if you could put it that way. I certainly got around.”

‘Getting around’ meant spending time on the employment select committee, the public accounts committee and a stint as an opposition whip. Eagle also worked at the Department for the Environment, Transport and the Regions in 1997, before embarking on “really tough work” around employment at the Department of Social Security. Then, in 2001, she became a junior minister in the Home Office. “Again, never going to make you popular,” she adds.

Her words ring true. In 2002, Tony Blair dismissed Eagle from government. “Sacked!” she exclaims. “I was sacked by mobile phone just as I was about to speak to a meeting of a hundred people. Not the most fantastic day of my life. It was totally unexpected.”

She thinks Blair showed her the door partly because she had been “shifted around, doing very difficult jobs in the engine room. Maybe I didn’t have the contacts and the networking skills, I don’t know. Sometimes you think if you do a good job, it would get noticed. My experience is that’s actually not the case. You’ve got to do PR. I learned the hard way that it’s about being in somebody’s gang.”

She complains that this is a “very male” way of doing politics. “Women come in and think, ‘If I could just do a good job then maybe that’ll be fine’. It doesn’t work like that.”

Angela and her twin, Maria, were born in Bridlington, East Riding of Yorkshire, to a trade unionist father and a dressmaker mother. “They both came from working-class families in Sheffield,” explains Eagle, “but they didn’t join the party until Maria and I did.” The Eagle sisters became Labour members at 17. Angela went on to study Philosophy, Politics and Economics at St John’s College, Oxford, in 1983, while Maria popped down the road to Pembroke College to study the same subject.

Despite being born minutes apart, they are not scrutinised in the same way as Yvette Cooper and Ed Balls, or David and Ed Miliband. “To be fair, we haven’t both contested the Labour Party leadership. I don’t know what would have happened if we had, but we spent years playing chess against each other.”

The twins competed from the age of eight, taking their hobby to an international level. “We were constantly drawn against each other because people thought it was funny. We managed to avoid overt clashes – but if there was one job and we were both going for it, who knows what might happen?”

Eagle admits to never having been politically in tune with New Labour. “I come from a family that has a big trade union background. New Labour accommodated the Thatcher–Reagan consensus a bit too much. That consensus is crumbling now. But I never really fitted into the New Labour thing. I wasn’t a right-hand person of Tony Blair.”

Her political inspiration was Barbara Castle, former health and social services secretary. After Eagle’s first question session in the Commons, Castle sent her a handwritten note. “It said how wonderful I’d been, and how great it was that there were women, young MPs with fire in their belly, to carry on the fight. I cherish that little handwritten note.”

Eagle entered Parliament as one of 60 women MPs. “That wasn’t a proper recognition of the talent that was out there.” Five years later, she became one of ‘Blair’s babes’. It did not go down well. “I joined the party before Tony did and I’ve been in the party longer than he was, so I’ve never regarded myself as a ‘Blair babe’,” she says. “That was just a name that people pin on you so they can ridicule you.”

She recently struck out at another piece of name-calling against the sisterhood, when David Cameron told her to “Calm down, dear” during a heated PMQs session.

“It was illustrative of his general approach to women, which is quite dismissive,” she says. “He pretends he’s more modern than he is… but when he’s under pressure in the chamber, he reverts to type: very privileged public schoolboy who doesn’t particularly mix with women as colleagues.”
Eagle continues: “The Conservative Party has said publicly it’s now comfortable with issues of sexual orientation and gender, but when you push it, the old attitudes remain. I don’t think Cameron has done the heavy lifting in his own party to change its approach.”

The Labour MP entered into a civil partnership with her long-term partner, Maria Exall, in 2008. Where does she stand on same-sex marriage? “There’s no real technical difference, apart from the definition of legal confirmation, but if there are some reform churches or institutions that want to offer a marriage ceremony, that should be allowed. But you can’t force churches to do it.”

Eagle now works as financial secretary to the Treasury alongside Ed Balls, David Hanson, Chris Leslie and Kerry McCarthy. One fellow MP describes her as the “technical queen” of the group.

“I’ve got an eye for detail, and pretty good political antennae,” says Eagle. “Once I got back on the backbenches, I wanted to put my economics training to use. I thought, ‘Not enough women do economics, so go for it’.”

She joined the Treasury select committee in 2003, then, in 2007, made the move to the Treasury. “It’s like being at the hub instead of on the end of a spoke in a wheel. The civil servants there, even if they’re sometimes wrong, are more erudite, clever. It’s more of a power house.”

Former chancellor Alistair Darling published his memoirs recently in which he talks of a “fundamental disagreement” over economic policy between himself in No11 and Gordon Brown in No10. “I was there at the time and there were some tensions between No10 and No11,” admits Eagle. “But you expect that. Having battles and clashes is sometimes a thing you get with strong personalities talking about important things.”
She talks plainly about our current financial crisis. “We have to deal with the debt. There’s nothing progressive or left wing about having a huge debt that you can’t pay back. But we don’t want to bequeath to our children a smaller, nastier society in a smaller economy, where people don’t have the opportunity to reach their full potential or to do well in jobs they had before.”

She continues: “We need a new kind of economics that isn’t so obsessed with markets always being right and totally free because somehow the rational expectations thesis – which is a load of rubbish – will lead us to the right conclusion. We’ve just seen the biggest crash in modern history as a result of those market fundamentalist beliefs. We need to create a new political economy and that’s what the Labour Party should spend the next two years doing.”

Her political jousting partner, Danny Alexander, also leaves Eagle unimpressed. “They hardly ever let me at him. I don’t think he enjoys debating with me. So they keep him under wraps. I don’t think he expected to be chief secretary, let’s put it that way.”

She quotes Barbara Castle. “In politics, guts is all.”

She may not appear much in a Google search, but Angela Eagle is a long-game operator. In chess, patience is a virtue. Now she’s testing whether the same is true in politics.