Judith Hart: Minister Who Speaks Her Mind

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31275, 23 January 1967, Page 2

Judith Hart: Minister Who Speaks Her Mind

(By

TUI THOMAS)

“Who is she, that pretty woman in blue?” The question was whispered more than once at the annual meeting of the Victoria League for Commonwealth Friendship at Mansion House, London, last July. Everyone in the large audience seemed to know everyone in the official party, except the woman in blue. She was a puzzler.

The stranger who excited so much curiosity was Mrs Judith Hart, the newly-appointed Minister of State for Commonwealth Affairs. She was deputising as guest speaker for Mr Arthur Bottomley, then Commonwealth secretary'.

Mrs Hart looked attractive, she read her speech on the Commonwealth in a wellmodulated voice and she had pleasing comments to make. She was a success.

Anyone hoping to hear profound new statements on the Commonwealth, then going through one of its crises, might have been disappointed. Nothing she said would have rallied waverers to the flag. But Judith Hart knew she was “preaching to the converted.” Her points of view were put forward with sincerity and the easy confidence of a skilful politician assuring a rally of friends. “What a gentle little person to be tacking a man’s job,” someone remarked after the meeting. No-one should underestimate the grit and tenacity of Judith Hart, however. She knows how to speak her mind. A modem, more feminine but nonetheless assertive Mrs Pankhurst, colleagues call her. Her voice is constantly heard in the House of Commons battling for equal rights and opportunity. She is a living proof of what women can do if they have the mind and the will Outspoken Mrs Hart has a reputation for standing up to the Prime Minister (Mr Wilson) if she disagrees with him. She recently gave Mr Duncan Sandys the sharp edge of her tongue after he had led a noisy rally in Trafalgar square calling on the Government to reopen negotiations with Mr lan Smith’s rebel Government in Rhodesia. Mr Sandys complained that her attack on him amounted “virtually to a charge of treason.”

Commonwealth commentators wondered if Mrs Hart knew enough, at that stage, about Zambian - Rhodesian affairs when Mr Wilson first sent her to Zambia to try to sort out a trade tangle last June.

It was unwise, they said, to send a woman on such a delicate mission to a country where women were kept in the background; to talk aid and economics to President Kaunda who was openly hostile to Mr Wilson. Hie mis-

sion called for a “toughliner,” they said. But the feminine touch of Judith Hart succeeded. When she returned to London, most of her critics conceded that she had done “a pretty good job.” Mr Wilson has sent her back to Zambia several times since.

No one person can be given the entire credit for persuading President Kaunda to stay in the Commonwealth during those critical months, but there is no doubt that Mrs Hart made her own forceful contribution to his decision. And she probably soothed his troubled brow. Attractive The woman who now seems to have cut Mr Sandys to the quick is one of the best-look-ing women in the House of Commons. Well-groomed from her brown hair to her pinklacquered finger-nails, she

wears clothes that are quietly well-tailored yet somehow catch the eye. Other M.Ps. stop, look and listen when she rises to speak. The day I interviewed Mrs Hart in her office in Downing street was toward the end of a particularly gruelling Parliamentary session. The House had been sitting until the small hours every day for nearly two weeks. But there was Judith Hart immaculate in pink linen, crisp and as alert as one Who had enjoyed all the rest she needed—and at her desk before 10 a.m.

“The Commonwealth will go one; it must go on,” she snapped, not unkindly. But she sounded as if she dared anyone to think otherwise. She blinked once as she went on talking, and it was then I noticed her direct blue eyes were red-rimmed through lack of sleep. But when she rose from her desk she walked across the big room as briskly as an athlete. The resilient feminist, Judith Hart, became Minister of

State for Commonwealth Relations in April. In Mr Wilson’s Government she had already been a Joint Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Scottish Office for two years. Building Interest For some years the Labour member of Parliament for the Lanark Division of Lanarkshire, Scotland, had been building up an interest In the Commonwealth. Mrs Hart had been a vice-chairman of the Movement for Colonial Freedom and she had been particularly concerned with the problems of Commonwealth immigrants to Britain. Born Judith Ridehalgh in. Lancashire in 1924, Mrs Hart took a first-class honours degree in sociology at the London School of Economics, University of London. As a sociologist she concentrated mainly on research and completed a valuable survey on provisions in Scotland for mentally handicapped children. Science Too Science is also one of her absorbing interests. She is a former branch secretary of the Association of Scientific Workers and was a vicechairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party’s science group. She married a scientist, Dr. A. B. Hart, in 1946 and they have two sons. Mrs Hart contested two Parliamentary seats before she was elected by her present constituency in 1959. One feels she is the kind of woman who would have.kept on and on until she found a seat on the Labour benches at Westminster. She is a fighter who knows how to put herself across.