Bedfordshire has had its share of colourful parliamentary candidates, but none quite like the one who arrived in Luton in the spring of 2010 wearing an orange rosette for Luton Town and a purple one "for passion". Dame Esther Rantzen, who died today aged 86, spent the general election campaign of that year trying to become the independent MP for Luton South. She did not win. She never pretended it was anything other than the time of her life.
Why Luton
The trigger was the expenses scandal. Luton South's Labour MP, Margaret Moran, had claimed Β£22,500 for treating dry rot at a house in Southampton, a hundred miles from her constituency. Rantzen, who had spent 21 years on That's Life! chasing people who took money under false pretences (Hammersmith Magazine tells that story), said she would stand against her. Moran stood down; Rantzen stood anyway.
She ran the campaign from a unit in Luton's indoor market, between a party shop and a dry cleaner's. She was 69, a household name, and she dominated coverage of what was otherwise a routine three-way marginal. In January 2010, before the campaign proper, she attended a workshop in Birmingham run by the Independent Network alongside Martin Bell, the former independent MP for Tatton, and Dr Richard Taylor, the independent MP for Wyre Forest.
The result
On 6 May 2010 Luton South elected Labour's Gavin Shuker with 14,725 votes. The Conservative Nigel Huddleston took 12,396 and the Liberal Democrat Qurban Hussain 9,567. Rantzen finished fourth with 1,872 votes, 4.4 per cent, below the 5 per cent threshold needed to keep her Β£500 deposit. She had spent more than Β£10,000. She described the whole thing as "a lavish 70th birthday present" to herself.
It was a rare defeat in a life of victories. Childline, which she founded in 1986, took around 50,000 attempted calls on its first night. The Silver Line, which she founded two years after Luton, took 11,000 in its first fortnight. She was made a Dame in 2015 (Westminster Magazine covers the honours and her later lobbying of Parliament).
What Luton taught her
She said afterwards that the campaign had shown her how far ordinary voters felt from the people who represented them, and the lesson fed directly into The Silver Line: a service for people who had nobody to speak to, never mind speak for them. In her final years, with stage four lung cancer, she lobbied Parliament from the outside on assisted dying with more effect than most people manage from the inside.
She died today at her home in the New Forest. Her children said she would be remembered for "the humour, ingenuity and audacity she brought to her work". Anyone who watched her canvassing George Street in two rosettes in April 2010 saw all three.
Dame Esther Rantzen across our magazines
Each Firefly title is remembering a different chapter of her life. Read the others:
- Hemel Magazine: her Berkhamsted beginnings
- Harrow Magazine: the Edgware schoolgirl
- Oxford Magazine: Somerville and the Oxford stage
- Camden Magazine: Hampstead, home for half a century
- Hammersmith Magazine: That's Life! at Wood Lane
- Westminster Magazine: the Palace, the honours and Parliament
- Southampton Magazine: the New Forest cottage where she died
- Tower Hamlets Magazine: the Spitalfields cap-maker
- Warsaw Magazine: the family story that began in Warsaw
Sources: BBC News, ITV News, Hello!, Wikipedia, the family statement issued by Miriam, Rebecca and Joshua Wilcox, Somerville College, Hampshire Life, the Advertiser and Times, Jewish News, The Jewish Chronicle, Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine, UK Parliament election results. Images via Wikimedia Commons, credited individually.
