Harriet Harman: The Last Bureaucrat Polishing Democracy While the World Burns
Harriet Harman and the Curious Persistence of British Politeness in a World on Fire
By Our Man in the Departures Lounge, watching the last flight to sanity taxi away without us.
LONDON—On the very day Elon Musk was busy turning Twitter into X, the oceans were rehearsing new temperature records, and a Russian missile politely interrupted a Ukrainian shopping list, Harriet Harman rose in the House of Commons to talk about parliamentary standards. It was, on the face of it, a bit like polishing the cutlery while the Titanic’s band played “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” Yet for connoisseurs of institutional black comedy, the scene was vintage Harman: neat grey bob, expression of mild maternal disappointment, voice steady enough to shame a confessor. If the globe is indeed sliding toward a geopolitical abattoir, at least someone remembered to bring the laminated rulebook.
Harman—MP for Camberwell & Peckham since Moses was in short trousers, Mother of the House since 2017—has spent four decades making the ungovernable slightly less so. Internationally, she’s the political equivalent of that one friend who still sends thank-you notes by post: quaint, faintly admirable, and faintly maddening. While strongmen elsewhere torch constitutions like cocktail napkins, Harman’s crusade is to keep the UK’s famously elastic constitution from snapping entirely. It’s the sort of mission that looks noble in daylight and slightly absurd by night-vision goggles.
Consider her latest encore: chairing the Commons Standards Committee as it tried to glue Boris Johnson’s exploded reputation back into some semblance of order. The assignment was roughly akin to re-inflating a whoopee cushion after the joke’s gone flat. When Johnson finally resigned his seat rather than face suspension, foreign observers—accustomed to leaders who simply promote themselves to Field Marshal for Life—rubbed their eyes. A prime minister, forced out by… rules? How terribly British. How almost endearing. How dangerously anachronistic in an era when “accountability” is usually a typo for “account ability,” something your offshore shell corporation definitely has.
Globally, Harman’s significance lies less in any headline policy than in her role as Keeper of the Shrinking Flame. While the United States debates whether its Supreme Court justices should be allowed to accept luxury RVs from billionaires, and while the European Union wonders if Hungary is technically still in the club or merely squatting, Harman keeps pushing the quaint notion that elected officials should declare gifts, pay taxes, and avoid lobbying for Caribbean citizenship between Zoom calls. Revolutionary stuff—if you squint.
Of course, the world notices Britain mainly these days for its creative approach to self-immolation—Brexit, Liz Truss’s 45-day micro-premiership, the pound’s periodic attempts to reach parity with the Mongolian tögrög. Harman’s insistence on process over pyrotechnics feels like bringing a level to a knife fight. Yet that stubborn proceduralism also exports a quiet form of soft power. Delegations from fragile democracies—the Malawian MP dodging WhatsApp death threats, the Colombian mayor navigating cartel WhatsApp—still turn up in Westminster to ask how you set up an expenses watchdog without ending up in a landfill. Harman, inevitably, is the one who remembers where the stapler is.
She is also, whisper it, a living reminder that the patriarchy occasionally misfiles its own obituary. First pregnant Labour MP, first woman to represent the Commons at PMQs, first to chair the National Women’s Commission while simultaneously running the Privy Council—she’s broken so many glass ceilings the Shard looks underdressed. In countries where women still need a male guardian to renew a passport, the image of Harman gently eviscerating a smug minister has TikTok resonance. Even if British politics is presently eating itself like a confused ouroboros, the clip carries a subtext: rules are not gendered.
Will any of it matter when Miami is reef and the Arctic a shipping lane? Possibly not. But as the planet’s temperature ticks up another ominous decimal, there’s a dark comfort in watching an elderly socialist barrister insist that the minutes of the last meeting must be approved before we adjourn to the apocalypse. It’s the sort of punctiliousness that keeps civilization tottering forward another day, like fastening your seatbelt on a crashing plane because, well, the sign is still lit.
In the end, Harriet Harman is the parliamentary equivalent of a “Mind the Gap” announcement: easy to ignore, oddly reassuring, and ultimately powerless if the train has already left the platform. But until the final departure board flickers out, someone has to warn us not to fall between carriage and abyss. Step carefully, ladies and gentlemen. The gap has never looked wider.
