Betty's high kicks and high office

Betty Boothroyd, the first woman Speaker of the House of Commons, is a no-nonsense Yorkshire lass from Dewsbury, born and bred into old Labour traditions. Barely a year has passed since she stepped down in her high heels from the Speaker's Chair, but this book has been rushed out because, she says, she believes Parliament is worth defending and that her conviction will help others to do so. She clearly believes that current political trends make her theme an urgent one.

For the young Betty, as the much-loved daughter of working-class Labour stalwarts, the party was the social and political centre of life: canvassing on the streets, gossiping over tea and biscuits at the weekly meetings of the Labour women's section. Hers was a Coronation Street world of back-to-back stone houses, poverty and domestic pride - scrubbing doorsteps, black-leading fireplaces, scattering wet tea leaves on the carpet to draw out the dust and Sunday treats of Yorkshire pudding with onion gravy. Both parents worked in the textile mills: Mum, a weaver, developed emphysema from years of dust and fibre particles; Dad, a weftman and outspoken trade unionist, was frequently unemployed. Young Betty got stars in her eyes at the local theatre, the Empire Palace, where she appeared as principal boy in the annual amateur pantomime and auditioned for the John Tiller School in London, where she went armed with two pairs of black satin shorts, a couple of blouses and a black bow. Despite a brief spell high-kicking at the Palladium, life behind the scenes was so horrible, particularly at the Theatre Girls' Club, a forerunner of Cell Block H, that she fled back to Dewsbury with a political career firmly in her sights.

She campaigned for Kennedy in 1960 and worked as PA to Harry Walston, millionaire Labour husband of Graham Greene's lover, Catherine, living the high life with them and making useful contacts in the process. After four election defeats and 20 years on the sidelines, she won West Bromwich in 1970, aged 43. As a member of the National Executive Committee, she fought shoulder to shoulder with Kinnock in the crucial battle against the Trotskyite " entryism" of Militant ("an obnoxious lot") and was dubbed by them "the Witchfinder General" for her part in the Liverpool inquiry into the activities of "Degsy" Hatton and his cohorts, so graphically depicted in Alan Bleasdale's brilliant television drama, GBH. As Speaker, from 1992, she fought as doughty a fight for the rights of Parliament against the executive.

"My strength lay in knowing the mood, the temper and the procedures of the House of Commons," she writes. "I knew how the place worked, by coming up through the ranks in a way no previous Speaker had ever done. I loved the House of Commons more than anything or anybody else in the world ..."

A stickler for tradition and principle, she ruled her unruly charges with the smack of firm government, facing down ruthless government whips and members of her own party alike. She took on the media in the form of scandal-mongering journalists who, in her opinion, debased the reputation of Parliament by increasing public cynicism about politicians, Birt and Bland at the BBC for their downgrading of parliamentary broadcasting and Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, of Sinn Fein, when they attempted to claim parliamentary facilities despite refusing to take the oath of allegiance. They took their case to the European Court, but Betty won through.

Tony Blair's "Napoleonic" plans for government, the disarray of the Tory Opposition and the general decline in quality of membership of the House presented her with far more serious challenges. She was infuriated by the way in which the Government leaked to the Press matters that should have first been raised in Parliament. "Time to get rough, Betty," her fellow Yorkshireman, Sir Bernard Ingham, wrote on one such occasion. "If you don't, Parliament will soon count for nowt." Boothroyd quotes Robin Oakley, then the BBC's political editor, as Blair's government reached the halfway mark: "Parliament has lost power and authority to the executive, to Europe, to the courts, to the media. The executive is almost totally dominant. It cares little for Parliament because it doesn't have to."

Betty Boothroyd is an admirable woman and her book is an important document for our times. It should be required reading for anyone interested in the survival of parliamentary democracy.

? Sarah Bradford's America's Queen: The Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis has just been published in paperback.