In many ways Janet Anderson, the former Labour minister, who has died aged 73, was ahead of her time in seeking to use her position in parliament to secure a raft of life-saving social changes in the law that would prove in time to be both popular and widely welcome. She was the first MP to propose legislation to prohibit “sex pest” stalking, to ban drivers from talking on mobile telephones and to establish a national register of paedophiles, and, while she was unsuccessful from the backbenches of the House of Commons, it was her campaign skills that forced eventual government action on all of these issues.
Before she was elected as an MP in 1992, she also played a forceful role in the campaign to reform shop opening hours and, as the junior minister with responsibility for broadcasting at the then Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), she oversaw the introduction in 2000 of free TV licences for those aged over 75 and discounted charges for people who are visually impaired.
She believed that politics was about everyday life and that politicians – “we’re just like other people really” – were elected to try to improve people’s lives. To that end she set about her career in politics with vigour and determination, but tempered by an innate sense of good humour, an understanding of how best to get results, and by making everything fun.
It was her bad luck that this lightheartedness led to her being caught out, when she was shadow minister for women in 1996, by the journalist Petronella Wyatt in the Daily Telegraph. In the course of a 90-minute interview, Anderson had promised that under the next Labour government, then already on the horizon, all women would have more freedom to choose their style of life: to work, to stay at home – even, she had joked, to be promiscuous. It was this last undertaking that was singled out as a “Labour promise”, much to the irritation of Tony Blair and to Anderson’s remorse.
The same irrepressible humour went down rather better, however, at Buckingham Palace the following year, when Labour had won the general election and Anderson was made vice chamberlain of the household, a whips’ office appointment requiring the incumbent to write a daily report on parliamentary proceedings for the monarch. As subsequently transpired, when Anderson later published a version of her notes, under the title Dear Queen, in 2016, her hilarious reportage was forthright, opinionated, acerbic and immensely appreciated. Her Majesty had already told the prime minister how much she enjoyed the reports and when Anderson revealed that her formal wand of office was primarily used to change the TV controls in the whips’ office, the Queen reportedly burst out laughing.
Anderson was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, into a political household in which the twin influences of socialism and Methodism were prevalent. Both her grandfathers were miners and her father, Tom Anderson, was employed by the Labour party as a full-time organiser, acting as agent for Hugh Dalton, a leading member of the Attlee government at the time of her birth in 1949. Her mother, Ethel (nee Pearson), was a shopkeeper who played the organ at the Methodist chapel. The family moved south because of work and Janet was educated at Trowbridge girls’ high school (now John of Gaunt school) and Kingsfield comprehensive and Kingswood grammar school (now amalgamated as King’s Oak academy, Bristol). She studied business and languages at the Regent Street Polytechnic (now the University of Westminster) in London, and at Nantes University in France.
She worked as a secretary for the Scotsman newspaper and subsequently the Sunday Times from 1971 until 1974 and then, having joined the Labour party aged 17, answered a small ad in the New Statesman for a post working for Barbara Castle, MP for Blackburn and health secretary in Harold Wilson’s second term of government. She continued working for Castle when the latter joined the European parliament in 1979 and in 1981 joined Jack Straw who had succeeded as Blackburn’s Labour MP.
She moved from London to the constituency, learning the lie of the land in Lancashire, and subsequently stood unsuccessfully for the neighbouring seat of Rossendale and Darwen in the 1987 general election. She nursed the seat, however, while working as a campaigns organiser for the parliamentary Labour party and running a public relations business, and in 1992 defeated the sitting Conservative to win with a slim majority of 120, the smallest in that year’s election.
By this time she was a practised political operator. She was trenchant in argument, according to Straw. “She was a bit like Barbara Castle in that respect,” he said. “She didn’t take any prisoners. She was a lot of fun to be with.”
When she arrived at Westminster as an MP, she was promoted almost immediately, as a parliamentary private secretary to the deputy Labour leader, Margaret Beckett. She resigned in disagreement with Beckett over the move to one member, onevote and, having supported Blair in the leadership election of 1994, was then an opposition whip until offered the women’s portfolio in 1996.
After her year as a government whip until 1998, she was appointed to the DCMS and there took a lively interest in her responsibilities, notably for tourism and the arts. She persuaded the Foreign Office to allow filming of the 1999 Bond movie The World Is Not Enough outside MI6 headquarters, against the wishes of the intelligence agency, and manoeuvred the Ministry of Defence into providing troops for a Steven Spielberg film. Anderson was an enthusiastic supporter of the arts and busily set about a personal campaign to try to make up the £100m a week lost to British tourism by the 2001 outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease.
Blair retired her to the backbenches after the election of that year and she thereafter served on the DCMS select committee (2002-10), the home affairs select committee (2003–05) and a number of other parliamentary administrative committees.
When the parliamentary expenses scandal was exposed, Anderson was revealed to have misused the system by claiming car mileage between London and her constituency of 60,118 miles (£16,612), equivalent to five round trips a week during parliamentary sittings. During this time she was living in London and claiming expenses of £23,039 for her second home allowance, although living with her partner, Jim Dowd, the Labour MP for Lewisham West, who was already claiming London weighting for the shared premises. From 2001 until 2008 she was among the highest claimants for the parliamentary additional costs allowance. She repaid £5,750 for money overclaimed for petty cash, but the publicity over her claims was widely believed to have contributed to her loss of her seat in the 2010 election.
In 1972 Anderson married Vincent Humphreys, with whom she had three children, James, David and Kate. The couple separated in 1998 when Anderson formed a relationship with Dowd. She is survived by Dowd, whom she married in 2016, and her children.
• Janet Anderson, politician, born 6 December 1949; died 6 February 2023
