Margaret Jay, Baroness Jay of Paddington
The Right Honourable Margaret Jay, Baroness Jay of Paddington,
PC (born
1940) is a
British politician for the
Labour Party.
Her father was former Labour
Prime Minister James Callaghan, and she was educated at
Blackheath High School and
Somerville College, Oxford.
Between 1965 and 1977 she held production posts within the
BBC, working on current affairs and further education television programmes. She then became a journalist on the
BBC's prestigious
Panorama programme, and Thames Television's
This Week. She went on to present the BBC 2 series,
Social History of Medicine, as well as being a contributor to
Newsnight,
Any Questions,
Question Time and other current affairs programmes.
She has a strong interest in health issues, notably as a campaigner on
HIV and
AIDS. She was a founder director of the National Aids Trust in
1987. She is also a patron of Help the Aged.
She was appointed a
life peer in
1992 with the title of Baroness Jay of Paddington, and acted as an opposition
Whip in the
House of Lords. In association with the shop workers' union, she led opposition to the liberalisation of Sunday trading hours.
After her party's election victory in
1997, she became Health Spokesman and Minister for Women in the House of Lords. From 1998 she was
Leader of the House of Lords, playing a pivotal role in the major reform that led to the removal of most of its hereditary members. She retired from active politics in
2001. Among numerous non-executive roles that she has taken on since retiring from politics, she is a non-executive director of
BT Group. [
1]
Her personal life is as remarkable as her professional life. In 1969 she married fellow-journalist,
Peter Jay, who was later appointed ambassador to the
United States of America by Dr.
David Owen,
Foreign Secretary in Callaghan's government. While in the USA, she met journalist
Carl Bernstein, with whom she had a much-publicised relationship in
1979 -- with the result that she was unflatteringly depicted in a novel by Bernstein's wife,
Nora Ephron, called
Heartburn, and subsequent
film of the same name. Her husband had an equally noted affair with their nanny. Peter and Margaret were divorced in
1986 after eighteen years of marriage and she lived for awhile with Professor
Robert Neild, the Cambridge economist. In
1994 she married AIDS specialist Professor Michael Adler who had been chair of the National Aids Trust when she was its director, during which period he was married to
Karen Dunnell.
She has three children: Tamsin, Alice and Patrick.
biographical article, NZ Herald 2005BBC profile 2001
