Baroness Jeger

Lena May Chivers, politician and journalist: born Yorkley, Gloucestershire 19 November 1915; Member, St Pancras Borough Council 1945-59; staff, Manchester Guardian (later The Guardian) 1951-54, 1961-79; Member for Holborn and St Pancras South, London County Council 1952-55; MP (Labour) for Holborn and St Pancras South 1953-59, 1964-74, for Camden, Holborn and St Pancras South 1974-79; Vice-Chairman, Labour Party 1978-79, Chairman 1980; created 1979 Baroness Jeger; married 1948 Dr Santo Jeger (died 1953); died 26 February 2007.

In 1953 Lena Jeger was one of a number of formidable ladies serving on the London County Council when, out of the blue, her husband, Dr Santo Jeger, MP for Holborn and St Pancras, died in his early fifties. Lena Jeger was catapulted into candidacy for this numerically small inner-city constituency and on her birthday, 19 November, scraped home as the new MP. She held the seat two years later, in the 1955 general election, serving until 1959, and again from 1964 until 1979, when she was made a life peer.

She was born Lena Chivers in 1915, the daughter of a postman, and spent her early years in Gloucestershire before moving to London, which was to be the centre of her adult life. In 1936, after leaving Birkbeck College, she got a job first of all with Customs and Excise and then moved to the Ministry of Information and the Foreign Office.

At the height of the Cold War she was an assistant editor in Moscow of British Ally, a newspaper published by the British government for issue in the Soviet Union. She managed to combine life in Moscow with membership of the Holborn and St Pancras Borough Council, later representing the area from 1951 to 1954 on Sir Ike Hayward's London County Council.

She had married Santo Jeger in 1948. A GP by profession, he had won the seat of St Pancras South-East in the 1945 general election. From 1950, he represented the new seat of Holborn and St Pancras South. After his death in September 1953 she stood in the resulting by-election in November. "Somehow I had to live between the funeral and polling day," she recalled.

Later, she would regale us with colourful stories of the campaign. Canvassing as she did from the top of flats, downwards, she met a woman in the lift. Jeger addressed her on the issue of the day - German rearmament - which evoked the reply, "People have been pissing in this lift. What are you going to do about it?"

Jeger said that, if elected, she could not promise, as an MP, to stop this. She harped back to the German threat. "Well," said the woman. "If you can't stop people pissing in lifts, how are you going to stop Germans rearming?"

Lena Jeger drew the conclusion that MPs, however immersed in foreign policy and the great issues of the hour, ought to remember that politics is local. She was an earthy politican, and the better for it.

Her maiden speech, on 25 February 1954, was far from the anodyne pleasantries which are de rigueur for maiden speeches today. She made a serious and thoughtful contribution to the foreign affairs debate. Jeger spoke, too, from personal experience:

Hating totalitarianism and Communism as I do, all the more for having been very close to it, I yet found it impossible - when I was working and travelling in Russia on behalf of the British Foreign Office soon after the war - to go through the burnt and ravaged villages of the Ukraine without a tremendous feeling of compassion. Not, let it be said of despair, because the courage of the people as they tried to rebuild their homes was obvious.

As Jeger looked back on the time that she had spent in America, Russia, Europe and Africa, there was borne in upon her the deep conviction that the things humanity has in common are far more numerous and important than those which divide it. She was an issue politician both in the House of Commons and on the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party (1960-61 and 1968-80).

Defeated in the 1959 general election by the well-known BBC Tonight programme anchorman Geoffrey Johnson Smith by 656 votes, she turned the tables in 1964 by 2,756 votes, holding her seat by slim majorities until she passed the baton to Frank Dobson in 1979. Dobson says:

She pursued causes which may have become fashionable now, but were highly controversial when she espoused them. For example, she sponsored David Steel's Abortion Law Reform Act, 1967, though her constituency had one of the highest Roman Catholic votes in London.

She campaigned ferociously against smoking in public, and wrote an anti-smoking polemic for Penguin (Common Sense about Smoking, 1962: she was a compelling writer, and for a long time on the payroll of The Guardian). She campaigned for independence for Cyprus, when the British government were fighting Eoka and Colonel Grivas and packing off Archbishop Makarios to the Seychelles.

It was a pity that Harold Wilson did not include her in his government, but perhaps he thought her too reckless for the Foreign Office, where, in the opinion of many of her colleagues, she was highly qualified to be an asset. She accepted with wry good-humour the appointment of Chairman of the Government's Working Party on Sewage Disposal in 1969-70. Actually, in spite of ribaldry, she made a massive contribution to a very real problem.

Jeger argued for a more positive policy for freshwater quality to be integrated with the forward planning for water quantity, both nationally and locally. Public investment in sewerage and sewage treatment was increased substantially. She fought successfully for a policy to improve rural sanitation with priority for the replacement of earth and pail closets and the elimination of sewer ditches.

The Jeger committee was, I think, the first to argue that the British government should be active in the formulation of international agreements to control sea pollution. She was determined that the authorities responsible for water resources should consult the Sea Fisheries Committees and the Ministry of Agriculture on estuarine and coastal discharges. She would warn her colleagues in the Commons smoking room (one of her haunts) that, in the expansion of existing industries or the siting of new industrial premises for the manufacture of chemicals, there should be careful controls on the discharge of effluent directly or indirectly into rivers used as sources of public water supply.

Jeger also gained great credit among her colleagues for the work that she put into the British Nationality Bill of 1981, which provided for the acquisition of the status of British subjects by alien women who had been married to British subjects without citizenship under Section 13 or 16 of the British Nationality Act of 1948. She was a champion of the proper treatment of women by society.

For me the apex of Lena Jeger's achievement came when she chaired the annual conference of the Labour Party in September 1980 at Blackpool. In the most difficult situations, her chairmanship was quite superb, never matched by any male Member of Parliament. Jeger by sheer charm got over potential explosions.

"It is no good people saying that they want a hundred flowers of argument to blossom if they knock the heads off the blossoms in the garden next door," she said in her chairman's address:

Dissent is of the essence of democracy. We honour dissenters in undemocratic regimes abroad;

at home, Labour has never been a monolithic party with a stringent list of policies to which every single individual has to agree to the last dot and comma. We leave that to totalitarian parties.

I must confess I have spent much of my political life fighting conference decisions, and it is part of the vitality and originality of our movement that this must be so because we are a growing organism and by the laws of nature we should change over the years as new challenges arise and new ideas develop in this changing world.

The erstwhile Bevanite of the 1950s ended to resounding applause in the Winter Gardens:

We have to take the poetry of our ideals and translate it into the pros and policies of everyday life. We have to combine our personal attitudes with a collective effort towards the achievement of freedom and a world peace. Do not let us forget that this is the context of our work this week, and now - let the work begin!

On 20 February that year, she had made her maiden speech to the House of Lords. No one who knew her would be surprised to learn that the entire 11 minutes was devoted to the problems of Cyprus. She was loved by the Cypriot community, mirabile dictu both Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot, for the painstaking concern that she had always shown this sizeable community in the constituency where she was deemed to be a superb inner-city member.

In my last conversation with Jeger, as she was helped into a House of Lords lift in March 2005, she told me that she was "disgusted" at the way in which Blair - no "Tony" in her vocabulary - had dismantled the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party and transformed decision-making, if turbulent, party conferences into political rallies.

Subsequently, a mutual friend told me of Jeger's nonagenarian rage when Walter Wolfgang was ejected from the Labour Party Conference in September 2005 for (rightly) shouting that the Foreign Secretary was talking rubbish on Iraq.

Tam Dalyell