The Right Honourable The Baroness Jay of Paddington PC
Chairman of the House of Lords Constitution Committee
Incumbent
Assumed office 2010
Preceded by	The Lord Goodlad
Leader of the House of Lords Lord Privy Seal
In office 27 July 1998 – 8 June 2001
Prime Minister	Tony Blair
Preceded by	The Lord Richard
Succeeded by	The Lord Williams of Mostyn
Minister for Women
In office 27 July 1998 – 8 June 2001
Prime Minister	Tony Blair
Preceded by	Harriet Harman
Succeeded by	Patricia Hewitt
Personal details
Born	Margaret Ann Callaghan (1939-11-18) 18 November 1939 (age 73)
Political party	Labour
Spouse(s)	Peter Jay (1961–1986) Prof. Michael Adler
Relations	James Callaghan (father), Audrey Callaghan (mother)
Children	Tamsin Alice Patrick
Residence	Paddington, The Chilterns and Ireland
Alma mater	Somerville College, Oxford
Occupation	television producer/presenter

Margaret Ann Jay, Baroness Jay of Paddington, PC (born 18 November 1939) is a British politician for the Labour Party and former BBC television producer and presenter.

Background [edit]

Her father was former Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan,^[1] and she was educated at Blackheath High School, Blackheath and Somerville College, Oxford.

Between 1965 and 1977 she held production posts within the BBC, working on current affairs and further education television programmes.^[1] She then became a journalist on the BBC's prestigious Panorama programme, and Thames Television's This Week and presented the BBC 2 series Social History of Medicine.^[1] 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 and is also a patron of Help the Aged.^[1]

Political career [edit]

She was appointed a life peer in 1992 with the title of Baroness Jay of Paddington, of Paddington in the City of Westminster, and acted as an opposition Whip in the House of Lords.^[1] 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. On November 11 1999 the government's reform bill was given Royal Assent and more than 660 hereditary peers lost their right to sit and vote in the Lords. At the close of the debate Baroness Jay's remark "The time has come to wish you well and say 'Thank you and goodbye'" was criticised by some for not reflecting the significance of hereditary peers' contribution. (English Earldoms were an Anglo-Saxon institution, dating from around 1014 AD and so almost a thousand years of history was coming to and end). She retired from active politics in 2001.

A significant feature of her political career is that every office she held was an appointment; she was never elected to any public office.

Among numerous non-executive roles that she has taken on since retiring from politics, she was a non-executive director of BT Group.^[2] She is currently co-chair of the cross-party Iraq Commission (along with Tom King and Paddy Ashdown) which was established by the Foreign Policy Centre think-tank and Channel 4.

Before her resignation, Jay gave an interview in which she said she did not believe in private education; it was afterwards revealed that her three children had all attended private schools. On her own part, she said she attended a "pretty standard grammar school", which was actually Blackheath High School, an independent school. She drew ridicule when she said she could understand the needs of rural voters because she had a "little cottage" in the country; this turned out to be a £500,000 house in Ireland, and she also had a large £300,000 house in the Chilterns though this had long belonged to her husband's family.^[3][4] She fought to end the voting rights of hereditary peers in the House of Lords.

Personal life [edit]

In 1961, she married fellow journalist Peter Jay, himself a child of political parents: Douglas Jay, Labour MP and president of the Board of Trade, and Margaret (Peggy) Jay, member of the Greater London Council. Peter Jay was appointed ambassador to the United States of America by Dr. David Owen, Foreign Secretary in her father's government.

While in the USA, she met journalist Carl Bernstein, who had helped expose Watergate, with whom she had a much-publicised extramarital relationship in 1979. Bernstein's then-wife, Nora Ephron, fictionalised the story in her novel, Heartburn, in which the character of "Thelma" is a thinly disguised representation of Jay (the novel was subsequently made into a film with Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson).^[5]

Peter Jay then had an affair with their nanny, fathering a child in the process.^[6] The Jays divorced in 1986 after 25 years of marriage, and she lived for a while with Professor Robert Neild, the Cambridge economist.^[3] In 1994, she married AIDS specialist Professor Michael Adler, who had been chair of the National AIDS Trust when she was its director.

Baroness Jay has three children: Tamsin, Alice and Patrick.

References [edit]

External links [edit]

• biographical article, NZ Herald 2005
• BBC profile 2001

v t e Ministers for Women and Equality Minister for Women 1997–2007 Harriet Harman Baroness Jay Patricia Hewitt Tessa Jowell Ruth Kelly Minister for Women and Equality 2007–2010 Harriet Harman Minister for Women and Equalities 2010–present Theresa May Maria Miller

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