Interview: Lynda Waltho
Members of parliament come in all shapes and sizes. Some are businessmen, coldly calculating which of their statements can reap the most profit. Others are lawyers, calmly dissecting legislation to get their point across; or publicity-seekers, generating attention wherever they can. Lynda Waltho is none of these things. Lynda Waltho is a mum.
The Stourbridge MP’s maternal instincts are entirely in tune with her political outlook, so much so they almost prevented her from making the leap to national politics at all.
Ms Waltho spent much of the 90s steadily climbing the ranks of her local party as a working mum and had never considered running for parliament, despite constant suggestions from those around her.
“I was the sort of mum I wanted to be. When you have young children, being an MP can be a tremendous pressure. I didn’t want to miss too much,” she says.
It was the unexpected decision of Debra Shipley to stand down from illness at the 2005 election which eventually cracked her resistance. Here was the opportunity to represent the place where she lived and worked. “It’s got to be you”, she was told.
With her husband and children happy, she “out-organised” the Tories and, in a three-week campaign, won a slim majority of 407. “It was a shock,” she admits. “When I went to Keele University I felt not that I shouldn’t be there, but that it wasn’t the place for me. Well, I remember sitting on those benches and thinking – I’ve really done it this time.”
Ms Waltho has, in the intervening three years, settled into life in Westminster. It was difficult initially – returning to her childhood bedroom in London for the first two months made her wonder whether the last 30 years had been a dream – but sharing with two other MPs helped and she is now, quite clearly, thoroughly at home.
Yet as we chat in Portcullis House the conversation keeps turning to her roots in politics: where she came from, why she is here.
“My political activity wasn’t as formal as some others. I did things like campaign for a playground; and I was one of a group of mums who got a lottery grant for an after-school club.
“I like to think of it as my policy – we were there before it was sexy,” she jokes. “But that was the point: we were concerned about our families. We were professional women and we wanted to go back to our jobs.”
Practical involvement, rather than engaging in the more formalised aspects of local party politics, always attracted Ms Waltho more. But she found herself climbing the ranks nonetheless.
Here, too, she found herself seeing opportunities to make a difference on her issues. As chairperson of her local party she was able to make local selection decisions for councils in West Midlands. “I was able to affect the type of people we had as councillors and therefore improve the quality of the decisionmaking,” she explains. “I’m a bit of a control freak – but I enjoyed being chair because I felt I could make the system work better.”
The instinct to improve things is fundamental to most people’s political makeup. Many of Ms Waltho’s priorities – those of working families, women’s issues, deprived areas – make her especially well-suited to the Labour cause.
“It’s politics with a small ‘p’, isn’t it?” she continues, explaining that while she came from a Labour background she naturally gravitated to the party while still a teenager.
“I think when people join the Labour party we should make them watch The Full Monty, Brassed Off and Billy Elliott. Although I lived through it all, I’d forgotten just how bad it was and how Thatcher turned brother against brother, practically.
“I just remember the despair and their whole lives breaking up. It was absolutely awful.”
Her deep-seated opposition to Thatcherite policies makes her a natural Labour supporter. And Ms Waltho maintains that level of natural, instinctive activism which comes from many years in the party. She can’t help but mention she recently managed to get a young couple to sign up. “In this day and age that’s a bit of an achievement – a feather in my cap,” she laughs. She’s actually got a point.
The state of the economy, if current polls are to be believed, could see many of those like Ms Waltho with their seats under threat at the next election. But she remains upbeat.
“It’s been like this since I started – campaigning from day one. You can’t take it for granted – you never can.”
“To represent the place where you live and work – I can’t think of a bigger word than privilege. It’s just the most fantastic feeling that you can affect change where you live.”
And, just as she was able to do while still living at the house with her husband, Ms Waltho maintains her links with home. She remembers getting a phone call as she entered a key ministerial meeting seeking to extract several million pounds from the government.
“Just as we were going in my phone rang. ‘Mum, where’s my PE kit?’ You go from one extreme to the other.”
She adds, with more than a hint of pride: “I was able to say it’s in the airing cupboard on the second shelf down. There’s nothing like teenagers to make you remember what’s real.”
Lynda Waltho was talking to Alex Stevenson
