Sir Mike Penning pays tribute to the late Baroness Betty Boothroyd, the first woman Speaker of the House of Commons.
Sir Mike Penning (Hemel Hempstead) (Con)
I wish to pay tribute to a wonderful human being and perhaps touch on some of the things that happened outside this Chamber, before I became a Member of Parliament, when I was sometimes sitting upstairs here. I vividly remember hearing her say, “Time’s up”—that is not a poke at you, Mr Speaker—and “Reading”. She hated people reading questions. Perhaps that is something that we should learn, as we would get through more questions. To be fair, she could understand people better when they spoke from the heart, rather than from something that was pre-written for them.
She was brilliant with the staff. We have heard so much, quite rightly, about what happened in this Chamber and in Parliament itself, but she was also enormously proud of the staff in this great House. She had time for everybody. I was working for Sir Teddy Taylor when I was on crutches, recovering from an injury. She had no idea who I was, but she stopped me and said, “What have you done, young man?” I was 40-odd at the time and was thrilled to be called a young man. I explained to her what had happened. She said, “You keep in touch with me as to what goes on.” When I was elected in 2005, she stopped me again, even though she was not in this House then, and said, “You’ve made it, young man, congratulations.”
Betty came regularly to the Tea Room and sat at her table. If anyone wanted to talk to her, that was fine, otherwise she would not interrupt at all. She was there to give advice. She liked the atmosphere—the ambience—of the place. The key for her was people—people from any background who had this opportunity in life, as she had, along with the likes of myself and many colleagues in the House today.
There was another part of Betty that has been touched on just fractionally today, which was Cyprus. Like my family, Betty loved Cyprus. She would go to Cyprus at any time that she could when it was warm—she did not like it in the winter. As my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) said earlier on, she also liked her ciggies, but if anyone mentioned that she was still smoking, she would say, “I have cut back. I am not smoking anywhere near as many as I used to.” That was rubbish. Sneakily, the ciggie was always there, even in her latter years, and even if she was down by the pool or on the beach—we have heard about the paragliding and things like that. Covid restricted her, and that really hurt her, because she could not get away to see her friends in her beloved Cyprus. Betty was immaculate. There was not, as we have heard, a bit of lippy out of place. To say that a lady of her years looked so immaculate by the side of the pool is not to belittle her or her age. She was just as proud as punch to be there in the sunshine with her friends.
From me, as probably the last speaker from the Conservative Benches, I say thank you to her for being a wonderful human being and for giving people the courage all those years ago to step forward. As the Mother of the House has said, it was so difficult for women then not just to fight a seat, but to get selected to fight a seat. For her to come through all that and to still have time for everybody else is something that her family and her loved ones should be very proud of, and we will miss her dearly.