As Britain’s second female Prime Minister, Theresa May is taking a close interest in plans to mark the 100th anniversary next year of women getting the vote for the first time.
I hear that Mrs May has thrown her weight behind a plan to honour the celebrated suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst.
Westminster Council will soon be considering a plan for a towering new bronze statue on Canning Green in full view of the Houses of Parliament.
Watson’s Wimbledon backspin
In the latest register of MPs’ interests, Labour’s Deputy Leader Tom Watson initially put down the value of two Wimbledon tickets and lunch at £302.
A few days later it was updated to a whacking £3,790. I know Watson is a heavyweight in more ways than one, but that must have been some lunch.
I know Watson is a heavyweight in more ways than one, but that must have been some lunch
There is already a statue of Pankhurst tucked away in Victoria Tower Gardens out of view of the Palace of Westminster.
The plan put forward by former Tory MP Sir Neil Thorne is to move the existing statue, which is much smaller, to Brompton Cemetery, West London, where Pankhurst is buried.
May has joined her predecessor, David Cameron, and Baroness Boothroyd, the first woman Speaker, in supporting a new and much larger 12ft statue of Mrs Pankhurst to be placed outside the Commons.
Women over 30 were given the vote in 1918, but it was not until 1928 that all women over the age of 21 were enfranchised on equal terms with men.
Pankhurst, a Tory, never saw this happen — she died just one month earlier.
‘Pankhurst is one of the great women of the 20th century,’ says Thorne, who is raising £150,000 for the new monument.
‘It’s only right her statue should look on to Parliament after she did so much to enable women to have the vote.’
Theresa May is set to honour celebrated suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, as Westminster Council will soon be considering a plan for a new bronze statue on Canning Green
- If Octogenerian peers are ejected next year under plans unveiled in the Mail to reform the House of Lords, few tears will be shed for Lord Heseltine, 84, the former Tory deputy PM. In the past 12 months, Hezza took part in only 3 per cent of the votes. No doubt when he did turn up it was to vote against the Tories.
- London’s Labour Mayor Sadiq Khan has not been granted a speaking role at next week’s Labour Party conference at Brighton. Comrade Corbyn’s team was clearly irritated when Khan — not the Labour leader — won GQ Politician of the Year.
- Tucked away in the Lib Dem conference agenda is the policy motion ‘Learning to communicate in English’. They’ve been talking Double Dutch for years.
- THE Labour MP for Ashton-under-Lyne, Angela Rayner, is hailed by many on the Left as a future leader of her party. But the shadow education secretary says that she has no wish to take over from Comrade Corbyn. ‘I couldn’t think of anything more frightening than standing up and having that pressure,’ she tells the monthly general interest magazine Prospect. ‘I was feral as a teenager,’ she adds. ‘I didn’t think I’d get selected as an MP, so the thought of being leader of the Labour Party and one day Prime Minister is the stuff that happens in books, to other people.’ That’s not unlike what Comrade Corbyn used to say — and now he thinks he’s PM-in-waiting.