ORDER AND OUT
How ballsy Betty Boothroyd once snubbed Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams and left MPs in stitches with joke about Sun’s page 3
BETTY BOOTHROYD, Britain’s first female Speaker of the House of Commons, once said: “Politicians, like Tiller Girls, are public performers – they forget it at their peril.”
In her incredible life, Baroness Boothroyd, who died on Sunday aged 93, had been both a Tiller Girl who danced at the London Palladium and a politician admired on the world stage.
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Once, while shopping in a supermarket on holiday in Florida, Betty was stopped by a group of Americans who told her: “You’re the English woman who refuses to wear the wig.”
For centuries, Speakers in the Commons had worn a wig of office.
But in April 1992 when Betty, MP for West Bromwich West, was voted in as Madam Speaker, she ditched the wig and had her robes made by the Queen’s dressmaker, Hardy Amies.
For eight years the millworkers’ daughter from Dewsbury, West Yorks, brought a dash of showbiz to Parliament, especially with her searing put-downs.
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Tory Iain Duncan Smith, who once tried to intervene while Betty was speaking, was told: “Order. I’ve not finished.”
She banned Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams from using Commons facilities unless he took the Parliamentary Oath.
When he asked what he should tell journalists, she said: “You tell them exactly what I have told you.
“The fat old girl in there is immovable.”
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After suspending another Northern Ireland MP, Ian Paisley, for un-parliamentary language, he boasted: “I got the front page of the Belfast Telegraph and you got page three.”
Unfazed, Betty replied: “I’ve never been a Page Three girl before.”
When PM Tony Blair replaced twice-weekly Prime Minister’s Questions from 1997 with just one session on Wednesdays, she got her own back by doubling the time slot.
Betty was born on October 8, 1929, the only child of Ben Archibald and Mary, who were active in the local Labour Party.
Having left home aged 17 to join the John Tiller dance school in London, she performed at the Palladium until a toe injury cut short her career.
After a series of secretarial jobs, she unsuccessfully stood five times for Labour before winning a 1973 by-election in West Bromwich.
Betty had several marriage proposals but said “politics always got in the way”.
Aged 70, she stood down as Speaker, ending her last PMQs as she always did, shouting “Right, time’s up”.
Then as Baroness Boothroyd of Sandwell, she spent 20 years in the House of Lords.
When she arrived, there was no desk for her.
To solve this, she told the clerk she would call a press conference to tell the world how badly she was being treated.
Following her death at Addenbrooke’s hospital in Cambridge, flags flew at half-mast over Westminster yesterday as MPs held a minute’s silence.
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Current Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle said: “Betty was one of a kind.
“A sharp, witty and formidable woman and I will miss her.”
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