Harriet Harman has revealed her financial adviser tried to talk her out of selling the family home after the death of her husband, because he thought she was “vulnerable”.
The Labour peer – one of the first women promoted to Tony Blair’s Cabinet in 1997 as social security minister – wanted to move just half a mile to a flat next door to her sister.
Her decision followed the death of husband and fellow Labour MP Jack Dromey after a heart attack in 2022, aged 73. Baroness Harman, 74, said: “He was like, ‘Ooh, you shouldn’t be making decisions. On my policy here it says you’re a vulnerable person because you are bereaved and therefore you shouldn’t be making these decisions’.
“Lots of people did say ‘Don’t make big decisions’, because, somehow, you’re not right in your head.
“Actually, this flat was going to be the only flat next to my sister, so I had to make that decision.
“So, he ticked the box, ‘I have given her advice that she is a vulnerable client’ and here I am next door to her and that is fantastic and this is my new life here in my two-bedroom flat, instead of being a remnant of my old life in a family house.”
The peer was married to Mr Dromney for almost 40 years and they shared a house in South London. She decided she could not face living there on her own.
Baroness Harman told Kaye Adams’s How To Be 60 podcast: “I felt I was in the wrong place in my old house. I just couldn’t be there, it felt too lonely and awful.
“I didn’t really stay there at all after Jack died. I just left straight away and then came to my flat, which has been fantastic.
“I would advise anybody to take the leap and to move and not to cling on to the old life which is gone. My life is not over, because I might have another 30 years.”
The couple had three children, and now Baroness Harman has seven grandchildren. She feels bad she doesn’t help more
with childcare.
“I’m feeling very guilty. I promised my kids, ‘Once I step down from the Commons, I will be like full-time childcare. You won’t have to worry about anything’.
“[But] I’ve not been living up to my promise, because I’ve been doing my podcast, I’m chairing the Fawcett Society – an organisation on women’s rights – and doing a Bar Council review about sexual harassment and bullying among barristers.”
The former MP left the Commons earlier this year after almost 40 years – the second longest-serving female MP in British history.
