UK street politics – a short history of awkward women

EVER SINCE three Suffragettes physically attacked the Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith on the Moray golf course at Lossiemouth almost exactly a century ago, British politicians have had cause to be wary of chance encounters with (very reasonably) angry women. As the Mole writes elsewhere today, the big question now is whether Health Secretary Andrew Lansley’s verbal punch-up with 75-year-old June Hautot will prove to be career-defining, as it was in at least one other case detailed here. (Incidentally, Asquith’s daughter Violet fended the Suffragettes off with a golf club until detectives came to the rescue, according to Colin Brown in his upcoming history of Britain, Real Britannia.)

JUNE HAUTOT, 2012
The woman who took on Andrew Lansley (above) outside Downing Street yesterday is the only ‘professional’ in this list – in that she belongs to the Keep Our NHS Public pressure group. Hautot, 75, simply refused to let Lansley past – jabbing her finger at him and saying: “I’m not getting out of the way... The waiting lists are going to go up, so you can wait.” Lansley countered: “I promise you... the NHS is not for sale, there will be no privatisation.” As usual, no one was listening to him. Hautot, who according to the Daily Mail claims to have shared a cell with Arthur Scargill’s wife during a long career in Left-wing campaigning, shouted: “Codswallop, you’ve been privatising since 1979. Don’t you dare lie to me.”

GILLIAN DUFFY, 2010
It wasn’t so much what 65-year-old Duffy said when she tackled Prime Minister Gordon Brown in Rochdale just days before the 2010 general election – it was the notorious “bigoted woman”  comment he made afterwards in relation to her remarks about immigration. While Duffy told reporters that Brown was a "very nice man" and that she had voted Labour all her life and intended to do so again, he got into his car unaware that he was still wearing a Sky News microphone. "That was a disaster,” he said, “they should never have put me with that woman. Whose idea was that? Ridiculous." Asked what she had said, he replied: "Everything, she was just a bigoted woman." It was the point of no return for Brown: a photo of him with his head in his hands after going on the Jeremy Vine show to apologise to Mrs Duffy became the image that defined Labour’s failure to retain power.

SHARRON STORER, 2001
Storer, 38, confronted Tony Blair as he visited the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham in May 2001, just days after launching Labour’s general election manifesto. She was furious because her brother had had to spend the night in casualty after no spare bed could be found in the bone marrow transplant unit. "He had a terrible evening,” she told the PM. “He had a very distressful 24 hours... Would you like to tell me how you are going to provide these people with better facilities?” Blair, who was unable to get a word in edgeways, had made the trip to Birmingham to counter accusations that he was not speaking enough to "ordinary voters", choosing instead to address handpicked audiences. It was a PR disaster. Storer’s most cutting line was: “All you do is walk around and make yourself known but you don't do anything to help anybody.”

WOMEN’S INSTITUTE, 2000
Full marks for sheer embarrassment. Tony Blair had just returned to Downing Street from taking paternity leave for the birth of his son Leo and was doubtless expecting a warm reception from the massed ranks of the WI when he rolled up to Wembley to address their annual conference. He talked of the renewed sense of purpose Leo’s birth had given him, and called for a revival of respect in British civic society. Respect, however, was the last thing on the ladies’ minds. His address was met by a slow hand-clap and heckling. According to the BBC, some women even walked out in protest, saying the speech was too long and too overtly political. Two years later, WI chairman Helen Carey turned down a request from Yvette Cooper, then a junior minister in the Lord Chancellor's Department, to speak. "We do not like to appear rude but we know what happened last time," she said.

DIANA GOULD, 1983
Mrs Gould was a Cirencester geography teacher who took on Margaret Thatcher over the controversial sinking of the Argentine warship the General Belgrano during the Falklands War the previous year. Gould, in the audience for a BBC Nationwide special, insisted that the Belgrano was sailing away from the Falklands when Thatcher gave the order to sink it, with the loss of 323 lives. Thatcher said she gave the order because the ship was within the Exclusion Zone and posed a danger to British lives, but refused to deal with Gould’s central point: “It was on a bearing of 280 and it was already west of the Falklands, so I'm sorry, but I cannot see how you can say it was not sailing away from the Falklands.” Mrs Thatcher’s husband Dennis is supposed to have said afterwards that it was proof that the BBC was in the hands of “a load of pinkos”. When Mrs Gould died at 85 last December, her husband Clifford told the BBC that she was particularly saddened by the sinking, and had "wanted to get it off her chest". ·