Battleaxe: A Memoir

Born in Alexandria in 1944 to Jewish parents from Germany and Austria, Margaret arrived in England aged four – stateless, foreign, and an outsider. Those origins shaped everything. Her grandmother was murdered by the Nazis. Her grandfather was greeted as an enemy alien and then interned on British soil. Anti-racism was written into Hodge's DNA.

So was the instinct to battle back.

Over more than fifty years as an elected representative – councillor, council leader, MP and minister – she fought on every front. Against the old guard of the Labour right and the bullying hard left. Against Margaret Thatcher's assault on local government. Against the BNP, when Nick Griffin came to Barking to take her seat. Against Jeremy Corbyn and the antisemitism that infected her beloved party. And against the oligarchs, tax avoiders, money launderers and kleptocrats who have used Britain as their playground.

As chair of the Public Accounts Committee, she transformed a dry accounting exercise into one of the most feared scrutiny bodies in British public life. When a senior Google executive sat before her committee, she invoked the company's famous motto saying: 'You say you "do no evil" – but I think you do do evil, in that you use smoke and mirrors to avoid paying tax.' It was that kind of directness – applied equally to Amazon, Starbucks, Goldman Sachs and HSBC – that made tax avoidance a matter of public outrage rather than private cleverness. As Britain's first Children's Minister, she championed and expanded Sure Start, the network of children's centres that transformed the lives of hundreds of thousands of families – and whose destruction by subsequent governments remains one of her deepest regrets.

Battleaxe is her memoir of a life spent in the thick of it. It is candid about mistakes made and lessons learned. It is honest about the grief of losing her husband Henry, the love of her life, and about the loneliness and unexpected freedoms of life without him. It captures the joy of the battles won – crushing Nick Griffin in Barking, forcing transparency on tax havens, calling Corbyn an antisemitic racist to his face and refusing to apologise – and the frustration of watching hard-won gains undone by those who came after.

She has been called a champagne socialist, a national treasure, a loony leftie, a radical reformer, a traitor, and yes – a battleaxe. She has never much minded. What has always mattered is the fight itself, and the conviction that politics, done properly, can make the world a better place. Margaret Hodge, at eighty-one, is still fighting. In this forthright book, she does not spare herself. She reflects on lessons learned from things she got wrong. But above all, she writes with the passionate conviction of someone who has always believed that politics can make the world a better place – and who has spent a lifetime trying to prove it.