Camberwell and Peckham MP Harriet Harman to stand down at next General Election

Camberwell and Peckham MP Harriet Harman, the longest-serving female MP in the Commons, has announced that she will not be standing for the party at the next election.

Ms Harman, who has represented Labour since 1982, revealed the news on Twitter.

She wrote: “After nearly 40 years in Parliament I won’t be standing again at the next election.

“It’s been a great honour to be an MP and to represent Camberwell and Peckham since 1982.

“I will do that with complete commitment and enthusiasm up until the last day!”

Ms Harman’s tweet was accompanied with an image of her letter to Labour members in her constituency.

In it, she said: “I feel I can leave the House of Commons now confident that Labour is gaining strength under the leadership of Keir Starmer and the new team he has appointed.

“It has been an overwhelming honour to be Member of Parliament representing and working for the people of Camberwell and Peckham for nearly 40 years.”

She entered the Commons as one of only 11 Labour women MPs in a parliament that was 97 per cent men.

She added: “Now there are 104 Labour women and across all parties women MPs are a ‘critical mass’.

“There remains much more to be done till women genuinely share political power with men on equal terms and until women in this country are equal.

“I will leave the House of Commons with my feminism, my belief in Labour and my enthusiasm for politics undimmed.”

Ms Harman was Labour’s deputy leader from 2007-15 and a minister under Labour prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

She also stepped in as acting leader when Ed Miliband resigned as party leader in the wake of Labour’s defeat in the 2015 general election.

Harman is a great-great niece of the Liberal statesman Joseph Chamberlain and is a cousin once removed of former Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.

Harman gained a 2:1 BA in Politics from the University of York.

She made her name as legal officer for the National Council for Civil Liberties. In this capacity, she represented a prisoner who was kept in solitary confinement – and was found in contempt of court for sharing documents she had read aloud in the courtroom with a journalist. The contempt of court action was pursued by then-Conservative Attorney General Michael Havers. Harman subsequently took the case to the European Court of Human Rights, successfully arguing Havers had breached her right to freedom of expression.

Harman was later involved in a European Court of Human Rights case against MI5 after it emerged the internal spy organisation held a file on her. She and General Secretary of the NCCL, Patricia Hewitt successfully argued this infringed their rights because MI5 was not a legally constituted and democratically accountable organisation. The success of the case led to enactment of the Security Service Act 1989.

She was elected for the constituency after the death of Harry Lamborn in 1982 – one of the candidates was Tory John Redwood, who was later a candidate for the Conservative leadership as MP for Dover.

After Tony Blair became prime minister in 1997 she became Secretary of State for Social Security and the first ever Minister for Women.

She was sacked from the position in 1998 following a series of public rows with junior minister Frank Field, though others also cited her decision to cut benefits to lone parents as a factor.

She returned to the front bench in 2001 as Solicitor General. She was later Minister of State in the Department for Constitutional Affairs with responsibilities including constitutional reform.

In 2007 she was elected Labour deputy leader with a majority of less than one per cent over Alan Johnson.

She joined Brown’s Cabinet as Leader of the House of Commons, Lord Privy Seal and Minister for Women and Equality, and was also chairman of the Labour Party.

When Harman, as Leader of the House of Commons, stood in for Gordon Brown during Prime minister’s questions on Wednesday 2 April 2008, she became the first female Labour Minister to take Prime Minister’s Questions.

On 1 April 2008 the Daily Mail reported that Harman had decided to wear a kevlar-reinforced stab vest while touring her Peckham constituency under police guard.

Harman married Jack Dromey in 1982 in Brent, after meeting him on the picket line of the Grunwick dispute in 1977; she was legal advisor to the Grunwick Strike Committee. They have two sons, Harry (born February 1983) and Joseph, a former Lewisham Labour councillor (born November 1984), and a daughter, Amy (born January 1987).

In 2012, Harman was awarded the Freedom of the Borough of Southwark.