Harriet Harman: how I protected my baby from Margaret Thatcher, ‘the witch’

According to some of the more far-left members of the Labour Party, Harriet Harman is a Tory. The somewhat surprising claim came after she told her party to abstain on the Tories’ Welfare Bill, leading 48 MPs to break whip and vote against it.

However, seemingly keen to silence the naysayers — in an interview with the Guardian — Harman, who has three children with Jack Dromey, has given an account of the lengths she has gone to to avoid socialising with Tories. The acting Leader of the Labour Party says that she once hid in a side corridor to prevent Margaret Thatcher — who she likens to a witch — from meeting her baby son:

‘Very early on, I brought in one of the babies to the Commons and I saw her at the other end of the corridor. She was bearing down on me with two adoring parliamentary private secretaries trotting at her side, and she looked as if she was going to come and admire the baby.