THE term “political wife” was once a sneer. Pauline Ashley was the woman who made it a phrase of honour and achievement. Without her, Jack Ashley, the fast-rising Labour MP who was struck deaf on the verge of ministerial office, could not have survived in politics to change the lives of countless others through a range of campaigns on issues from thalidomide to army bullying. In confrontation after confrontation, she was at his side, helping him to steer through the problems of deafness and advising on lines of attack. She developed into a thoroughly formidable and skilled political tactician herself, working with Jack through four decades on every cause he took up.
Yet in person, “formidable” was the last word anyone would use of Pauline Ashley. Strikingly beautiful throughout her life, she arrived everywhere with a broad grin and an inexhaustible store of pomposity-pricking common sense. The daughter of an insurance broker and a Liverpool beauty, she won a mathematics scholarship to Girton College, Cambridge. Her degree in maths and economics there was not the only thing she won: by 19 she was married to Jack, then a young trade union leader who had become a mature student.
As a debating star for the Cambridge Union, Jack Ashley had been touring the United States. On his return Pauline, a cub reporter for the university newspaper Varsity, was sent to interview him. He responded by asking her for a date. The year was 1952 and from then on they were never apart.
Pauline Ashley’s early married years were dominated by bringing up three daughters, though she also became a maths teacher at Sutton High School while her husband was making a name in television. When he was elected as a Labour MP in 1966, she became his researcher and adviser on social policy, throwing herself into political campaigning and helping him to tend his constituency, Stoke on Trent South.
Jack’s sudden deafness, though, caused a crisis in the family. Pauline, like many others, urged him not to quit the Commons but to stay and try to fight the affliction. His success, mastering lip-reading and remaining to become the leading backbench campaigner of his day, was her triumph too. On every issue he fought, she immersed herself in briefings and discussed their daily tactics.
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Her own work grew steadily too: she took a masters degree in social administration at the London School of Economics in 1977, and was involved in a York University and Department of Health and Social Security study into the income and spending of families with handicapped children. She later published The Money Problems of Poor People.
From the 1980s onwards, she also achieved much and inspired others to do more in her work in a wide range of public posts. She made a difference as a governor of London’s Royal National Throat, Nose and Ear Hospital, then as chairman of London University’s Institute of Laryngology and Otology and, more recently, as a dynamic chairman of the Electricity Consumers’ Committee for the South East. Jack’s deafness provoked a more personal search for understanding about the causes and remedies of hearing problems: in 1985 she founded the Hearing Research Trust, which she chaired for ten years.
A familiar figure at Westminster, with her carefully-filed papers and newspaper cuttings, and her pointed arguments, she was well known to most of the powerful Labour figures and many of the Tory ministers of her time. She was also a hugely engaged mother and grandmother. Her daughters, Jacqueline, Jane and Caroline, all achieved successful careers — in journalism, politics and international development — partly thanks to the vigour, encouragement and determination of their mother. Her extended family enjoyed her frequent whirlwind arrivals at one of the Ashley homes. Gardens would be dug and tidied; lights and doors mended; children scooped up; wise advice dispensed; letters rebuking companies or officials dashed off; her husband’s jokes laughed at . . . and off she would go again, thinking only of the next person to help. Good Samaritans are to be found often: Practical Samaritans are rarer.
Pauline Ashley was a woman with an inexhaustible supply of optimism and a delight in life. At her 70th birthday party last year, a huge range of friends assembled to cheer her continued progress. She had managed to avoid old age almost entirely; her appearance seemed unchanged through decades and her energy left relatives and colleagues in their thirties and forties floundering helplessly behind.
In the story of the Labour Party in Parliament, Pauline Ashley’s unique contribution, with Jack’s, will not be forgotten. Millions of people across Britain who never knew her name owe her a great debt. In her unorthodox way, she was a powerful politician too.
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She is survived by her husband, made a life peer as Lord Ashley of Stoke in 1992, and by their three daughters.
Lady Ashley of Stoke, political campaigner, was born on August 2, 1932. She died from a heart attack on July 28, 2003, aged 70.