Labour veteran Dame Margaret Hodge elevated to House of Lords

Last month, 79-year-old Hodge, who served as the MP for Barking since 1994, spoke to the JC about her life in politics. Her over 50 years in public office included a stint as leader of Islington Council, taking on corporations and how they pay tax as chair of Parliament’s public accounts committee, and fighting both the BNP and Jeremy Corbyn.

Born Margaret Oppenheimer in Egypt in 1944 to German parents who left Europe before the Holocaust, Dame Margaret lived her early life in the shadow of the Shoah. Most of her extended family were slaughtered by the Nazis, and her parents feared surging Jew-hate in the Middle East. When a stone was thrown through her father’s office window in Alexandria, the family fled Egypt. They arrived as refugees in the UK, the only English-speaking country that would accept them, in 1948.

Dame Margaret joined the Labour Party aged 17, “because it was an international party and it fought racism.” Her father, a Tory-voting steelworker, nearly kicked his socialist daughter out of the family home when Harold Wilson was elected in 1964.