A Woman’s Work
Harriet Harman

Theresa May: The Enigmatic Prime Minister
Rosa Prince

Here is a tale of two sisters, of a kind. One, the nearly woman, could have been Labour’s first female prime ­minister, and the other, a vicar’s daughter, has been dogged by success right to the door of Number Ten. Harriet Harman was acting and deputy leader of her party, hugely influential but always the bridesmaid, never the bride. Theresa May was the Tory maiden who caught the flowers thrown by David Cameron.

That’s enough gender imagery. I can feel the froideur. But the female dimension is absolutely critical to both their stories and, what’s more, makes these two accounts far more readable than, say, the autobiography of David Blunkett or the hagiographies of Tony Blair.

A Woman’s Work is the memoir that Harman, third of four daughters to a doctor and a solicitor in St John’s Wood, north London, vowed she would never write. She mocked such works as “male vanity projects”, and never kept a diary of her 35 years as an MP, minister, feminist and reformer. While male Cabinet colleagues scribbled for posterity, she was always doing, not recording, and there is a very great deal of doing in this book.

Brought up in a 1950s household of competitive siblings, trained to stand on her own two feet and not depend on any man, Harman was “suffocated” at St Paul’s Girls’ School and “trod water” at York University. She only found herself after qualifying as a solicitor, and then working at a London law centre fighting the political and legal establishment on behalf of women strikers.