It is Harriet Harman’s 65th birthday. She has been out celebrating with her sisters, she is about to go on holiday for a couple of weeks and, in a month, she will be retiring to the backbenches after 30 years in frontline politics. You could excuse the caretaker leader of the Labour party for being demob happy. In fact, she is anything but. Harman has probably never been more anguished.

We meet at Labour party HQ, where chaos reigns. When I ring the bell there is no one to let me in. The building is about to be knocked down and the party does not know where it is next heading. It seems horribly symbolic.

It has been little more than a week since MPs voted on the Conservatives’ welfare bill, on which Harman advised Labour colleagues to abstain. If she wanted to go out with a controversial bang, there was no better way to do it. After all, this bill undoes so much of the work to which she has dedicated her parliamentary career. It reduces the benefit cap from £26,000 to £23,000 in London and £20,000 elsewhere, scraps housing benefit for jobless 18- to 21-year-olds, limits child tax credits to two children, and abolishes child-poverty targets. In the end, 48 out of 232 Labour MPs voted against the bill, causing an existential crisis in the party. John Prescott summed up the feelings of many when he said Harman was “wrong, wrong, wrong” not to oppose the welfare bill, allowing “the SNP, Greens and even the Lib Dems” to “claim they’re the real parties of opposition”.

Harman has been in charge of Labour since Ed Miliband’s resignation following the party’s crushing general election defeat in May. Surely she must be disappointed to be presiding over such a mess? “I’m very disappointed. People are feeling angry because we failed to win. It was bound to be an unstable period, and people feel very unsettled by it.”

Harman in 2014 as deputy leader of the Labour party while the then party leader Ed Miliband speaks in the House of Commons. Photograph: PA

Hasn’t she added to that instability by abstaining in the welfare bill vote? While Labour supporters had been wondering how the party would move forward, now they have begun asking what Labour is actually for. “I regret the fact that it was very turbulent,” she says slowly and carefully. “George Osborne put that bill forward with the sole purpose of trying to cause splits within the Labour party.” It’s no coincidence, she says, that, in the same bill in which he introduced cuts to “the benefits of people who can’t work because they’ve got cancer or Parkinson’s”, he also introduced 3m apprenticeships, and, at the same time as abolishing the child poverty targets, cut council rent by 1%. “Basically, he put in one bill things he knew we didn’t want to vote against and things he knew we were against, just to give us a problem.”

Can she really blame the Tories’ dastardliness for her own failure to oppose the bill? That has always been the protocol, she says – if you agree with some things but disagree with others, you abstain.

Harman always tends towards the earnest, but never more so than now. She prickles with angst as she talks me through the process. “What I did was listen very carefully to the shadow cabinet about what we should do about it.” There was a show of hands. “Eight people wanted to just abstain, 11 wanted to have a reasoned amendment and abstain, and four wanted to vote against.” She decided to abstain with the amendment, but says she could not have won anyway. “There was never going to be a right answer, because the only right answer was not to have the Tories in government and not have the flipping bill in the House of Commons.”

There is something rather sad about all this because Harman has been one of the most constant and principled politicians of her generation. No modern British MP has done more for women’s rights, or suffered such derision for her staunch feminism and perceived political correctness; Harman was mocked as “Harperson”, and dismissed by many old-school Labourite parliamentarians as posh, po-faced and priggish.

Harman campaigning in the 1982 Peckham byelection, which she won, becoming an MP for the first time. Photograph: PA Archive/Press Association Ima

When she was elected MP for Peckham (now Camberwell and Peckham) in a 1982 byelection, she became one of only 10 female Labour MPs in parliament. Her first question was about childcare, and she continued in that vein. “There was jeering from the Tories. Ridiculing me. ‘This is supposed to be about politics, why are you asking that?’”

The truth is that she didn’t get much more support from many in her own party. While the then leader Neil Kinnock encouraged her initiatives, much of 80s Labour was prehistoric when it came to sexual equality.

Many Labour MPs did not consider Harman to be one of them. She came from a well-to-do background, her father was a Harley Street physician and her mother one of only three women at the time to study law at Oxford (the female presence caused such a commotion that the criminal law lecturer refused to teach them). Harman was educated at the private St Paul’s girls’ school, did a degree in politics at the University of York and worked as a lawyer in the 70s, fighting a number of well-known trade union disputes, including Grunwick. Her profile was boosted as legal officer at the National Council for Civil Liberties from 1978-82, and she frequently appeared on BBC’s Question Time.

Feminism is at the heart of her politics. She tends to see herself as part of the movement first and an individual second. “The idea was that we would start challenging all these men-only places, so women who were teachers would try to be headteachers, women who were lawyers would try to be judges, and women who were engaged in politics would try to be MPs.”

She was raised by a father who told her that she could never be dependent on a man for money, and a progressive mother (who unsuccessfully stood for the Liberal party under Jo Grimond). Even then, though, Harman recalls seeing her mother cooking her father’s breakfast and supper with her law books propped behind the cooker. “I thought that’s quite a hard way to do it; that’s not for me.”

Harman in 1988, when she was shadow spokesperson for health, with striking nurses. Photograph: Daily Mail/Rex Shutterstock

When she was young, it was still legal to advertise for “the right man for the job”. One of her three sisters applied for a job in a law firm, only to be told they already had a woman and that if there were two of them they would fight. She recounts the stories in a proper, restrained and very Harmanesque manner, but the quiet outrage is still fresh in her voice. There is something quintessentially English about Harman – from her “blinking” and “blooming” expletives, to the immaculately bobbed hair, the no-nonsense decency and the way she pronounces class as if it has a handful of Rs in the middle. Despite her very different politics, you could imagine her in an Enid Blyton story.

When she became an MP, she expected to be joined by many of her female friends in the Labour party a year later. But the 1983 election was disastrous for Labour, and she was left isolated. The few women who were in the party were incredibly tough – they had to be – and much older than Harman, who was then in her early 30s and had just had the first of her three children with her husband, the trade unionist Jack Dromey.

The parliamentary Labour party (PLP) was not used to young mothers demanding to be taken seriously as politicians, and Harman found the environment alien. “I do sometimes go to the Strangers’ Bar [in the Commons] now, and feel comfortable doing so, but I didn’t go in those days because I didn’t have anyone to go with.”

Couldn’t the then prime minister Margaret Thatcher have taken her? Harman recoils. She wouldn’t have dreamed of socialising with her, she says. “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. I had this terrible feeling of thinking, ‘I don’t want her to look at the baby’, almost like one of those cartoons where the witch looks at the baby and the baby shrivels. I didn’t want my perfect baby to have Thatcher’s eyes upon him.” Did she hide her baby from Thatcher? “No, I just shot off down a side corridor. It was very visceral, very heartfelt.”

Harman believes that, in one way or another, she has been unpopular most of her time in parliament. It is certainly true that the press has given her a hard time over the years. She says there were always people nudging her, offering gentle words of advice that perhaps she should stop harping on about wimmin; that she should put a sock in it. Did she listen to them? She shakes her head. “I was the parliamentary wing of the women’s movement. It was my duty to be inside and raising all these issues and getting sneered at and jeered at.”

Harriet Harman: ‘It’s easy to go from hero to zero in politics.’ Photograph: David Levene/Guardian

Despite the taunts, her political history elides neatly with that of the Labour party over the past three decades, and she can claim some credit for many of its greatest achievements. What is she most proud of? “Being part of the team that got us through a period where people said we were going to fall behind the Lib Dems and we were finished as a party. Being part of that party that said we refuse to be finished and, actually, we’re going to get in to government. And to get in to government and to be able to do a national childcare strategy, a national minimum wage, equality act, acts on domestic violence, to treble the investment in the health service, to end up with 100 women MPs.” She pauses, and says there’s still so much to do.

When Harman suggested in the 80s that at least three places in the shadow cabinet should be reserved for women, she made enemies galore. “All the men who didn’t get on the shadow cabinet thought they would have been there but for those three places,” she says. “They were furious, and I didn’t get elected to the shadow cabinet, not least because I was having this massive backlash.”

So isn’t it embarrassing that there has still not been a female Labour leader 40 years after Thatcher first led the Tories? Yes, she says, but she regards Thatcher as an aberration. “There was a woman leader who was not supportive of other women, and, when she went, it was basically a men-only cabinet. She was beating the men at their own game. In Labour, we’ve got 50-50 in the shadow cabinet, and nearly 50% in the PLP.”

If it was so important for her generation of feminists to prove their mettle in the top job, why has she never stood for the leadership? “I’ve done a lot of the struggle and a lot of the battles, and carried a lot on my shoulders. I think I’ve done my bit.” Isn’t that the problem, though? She has done all the heavy lifting and crisis manage when times were tough, and then stood aside? “It might be,” she says. So why didn’t she go for the top job? “You know, it’s quite thrilling to be asked that because, for ages, it might have been regarded as a ludicrous prospect. I did think it was incredible to get to be deputy leader of the party.”

But again there was a problem – Gordon Brown never called her deputy prime minister. “No, he didn’t,” she says quietly, “and he should have done.” Did it upset her? “Well, I do think if I’d been man it would have been automatic. I should probably have kicked up a fuss about it. I think I’ve done a bit too much getting on with the job probably.” Did Brown ever apologise? “No,” she says, “but over the years we had a good relationship.” Harman can be frustratingly reserved. She will refer to all those who have dissed her over the years, but when you want her to name names, dish the dirt, get her own back, she calmly says that life is too short to hold grudges. Never kick up a fuss, always put the movement first.

With Gordon Brown at the 2007 Labour party conference. Brown never called Harman deputy prime minister. ‘He should have done,’ she says. Photograph: Stephen Hird/Reuters

Perhaps her decision to abstain on the welfare bill is another example of getting on with the job; taking one for the team. She says she was desperate to show that Labour had listened to voters who said the party was soft on benefits. “Between 2010 and 2015 we had 13 welfare bills and we opposed them all. We succeeded in getting our argument across on nothing because we just opposed everything blanketly. My argument was – and admittedly it’s not one that has persuaded the entire world – that we had to pick our territory.”



But this couldn’t have been more your territory, I say.

“No, but within that …”

“People don’t remember the good bits in between,” I find myself shouting.

“No, that’s true, that’s true. It’s true, if we had voted against it, the Tories would have said, ‘Look, Labour are so busy wanting to oppose every welfare change that they voted against three million apprentices, they voted against 1% rent cuts, and they even voted against a household benefit cap – which they had in their manifesto. Now, perhaps it would have been better to have had the jeering and the division between us and the public than actually having a situation where the party was very troubled, but there were a lot of people in the PLP who didn’t want us to vote against it because they were worried about what the public would feel about the fact that we hadn’t listened enough to some of the things they were saying.’

But isn’t the problem that she misread the public mood, that many voters want more fairness, not less? “This whole thing about the lesson you learn from the election is a very contentious thing. It’s obviously my decision, but I made it with the shadow cabinet.” She’s squirming, and I feel sorry for her. “There is a judgment that says, in the great scheme of things, it just looked as if you were being as mean as the Tories. And in the medium term, or even sooner, that might be everybody’s judgment.”

Would it bother her if failing to oppose the welfare bill turned out to be her legacy? She makes an anguished sound, then instantly regains control. On the positive side, she says, even if people hate her for it, it leaves the slate clean for the next Labour leader. “I think the new leader will take it forward and put their imprint on it, and everybody will say that’s great, that’s marvellous.”

What would she do if she had …

She interrupts my question. “Had my time over again?

I think you would oppose it, I say.

“Well, I probably would,” she says eventually, so quietly it’s almost a whisper. “I probably would. I did say to people in the PLP, there is no right answer. Opposing would certainly have been easier with some sections of the PLP and the party. I tried to do what I thought was the right thing for the party at this particular time ... although possibly not in the best interests of myself. It was one of the most difficult political decisions I’ve ever had to make. Would I rather have not had the responsibility to make the decision on that bill? Absolutely.”

Does she think the abstention might mean Jeremy Corbyn is voted in as the new leader? She says she won’t comment on individuals; she can’t, as the person responsible for ensuring a fair election. To ensure she remains scrupulously objective, she is not going to vote. Would she like to see a female leader? Can’t comment, she says – same reason. “But I have always said I thought there shouldn’t be an all-male leadership team. That is not a good thing.”

Having gone through the hell of the welfare bill, she seems more relaxed; relieved almost. When she started out in the caretaking role, she says, people had been strangely supportive, and she knew it couldn’t possibly last. “I have been involved in controversies in relation to the party all the way through. I had a brief period when people said nice things about me, but it was very short as it turned out. Very short.”

Did she enjoy those few weeks? “Yes! It’s very easy to go from hero to zero in politics … there are troubled and turbulent times and you make the best decision you can, but I know I’ve always made the decisions with honest, progressive motives.”

I ask if there has been a job she has loathed in government. She looks shocked at the suggestion, and says being an MP is such a privilege – how could she possibly loathe it? She is totting up all the posts she’s held. “No, there has been no job I’ve not liked.” She pauses. “Have I not liked a job?” Another pause. Then a smile. “Being interim leader, possibly.”