Former Labour MP Glenda Jackson died, aged 87, on 15 June. This interview was first published in the New Statesman on 14 August 2014.
It’s hard to imagine Glenda Jackson being scared of anything. A firecracker in the Commons, she has reduced Iain Duncan Smith to slumping in his seat like a guilty schoolboy and she stunned the House with her blistering “tribute” following Margaret Thatcher’s death last year. She wasn’t always so comfortable in the chamber. Of her maiden speech in 1992, she tell me: “It was the most frightening experience of my life. [I was] absolutely petrified . . . It suddenly struck me that here I was, representing a constituency synonymous with some of the world’s greatest exponents of the English language. I mean, the name Keats suddenly came steaming into my head. God! It was very frightening.”
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