The Preferred Term

In 1997, who succeeded Greville Janner as the MP for Leicester West? Why, none other than Patricia Hewitt.

In its opposition to what became the Protection of Children Act 1978, the National Council for Civil Liberties, under Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt, was opposing the Labour Government of the day.

It had been taken up and given Government time, but it had begun as a Private Member's Bill, introduced by a Conservative MP who was to go on to become one of the Thatcher Government's most dedicated critics.

There was really no dividing line whatever between the strongly anti-worker, or at any rate anti-working-class, New Left and the "libertarian" New Right, so that the New Left's eventual capture of the Labour Party after the death of John Smith wholly predictably entailed a full capitulation to the Thatcherism that the New Right had defined, although the New Left had named it.

Patricia Hewitt is a key figure in that whole story. She it was who told speakers at Labour Conferences, "Do not use the word "equality"; the preferred term is "fairness"."

She it was, a mere Press Officer, who, in a sign of things to come, was not told where to get off for having presumed so to instruct her betters.

She went on to help found the Institute for Public Policy Research, and then, soon after Tony Blair became Leader, to become Head of Research at Andersen Consulting, a position for which she had no apparent qualification beyond her closeness to the Prime Minister in Waiting.

In 1997, she entered Parliament, he entered Downing Street, the Labour commitment to regulate such companies was dropped, and so was the previous Conservative Government's absolute ban on all work for Andersen in view of its role in the DeLorean fraud.

Andersen paid just over £21 million of the £200 million that Thatcher and Major had demanded, barely covering the Government's legal costs.

It went on to write, among other things, a report claiming that the Private Finance Initiative was good value for money, the only report on the subject that the Blair Government ever cited, since the only one to say that ridiculous thing.

As Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, Hewitt tried to give auditors limited liability. It took the Conservative Opposition and the Bush Administration to see her off.