Betty Boothroyd: First female Commons speaker who enhanced the parliament over which she presided

Daughter of Dewsbury textile workers became a megastar over her five decades in parliament – despite multiple failed attempts to win a seat

Betty Boothroyd has died aged 93 (PA)

Betty Boothroyd was one of the great proceduralist speakers of the House of Commons. She was a genuinely decent, gutsy Yorkshire lass of superb bearing and presence, whose public persona was rightly hugely popular in Britain and abroad, and therefore enhanced the ever more miserable and ineffective parliament over which she presided.

She had an attractive, self-deprecating sense of humour, as emerged on her election as speaker on 27 April 1992: “I well remember a former member of this house recalling at a previous election of this kind the qualities which another speaker had outlined 400 years earlier. Speaker Yelverton thought that the office of speaker demanded ‘a voice great, a carriage majestical, a nature haughty and a purse plentiful’. How do I measure up to that? Not very well, I fear. I certainly do not possess a purse plentiful. I do not believe that I have been endowed with a haughty nature. It is true that in the past I may have been granted some physical agility; but my carriage is not all that majestical now.

“So what is left? Perhaps only what Speaker Yelverton described as a ‘voice great’. Honourable and right honourable members, with experience here I know that I can use that voice strongly in fairness and justice when the occasion demands.”