The woman famously told to “Calm down dear” by David Cameron, in one of many House of Commons exchanges when she visibly got under the prime minister’s skin, will do nothing of the kind.
After a week of hesitation, Angela Eagle has announced her bid for her party’s leadership in a series of Sunday morning television interviews, and on Monday will formally launch her campaign.
“Politics is poisonous for women right now,” Olivia Bailey, chair of the Labour Women’s Network, and a former aide to Eagle, tweeted on Friday. The power struggle in the Tory party brutally bears out her observation, and the Labour leadership campaign is unlikely to prove any gentler.
However, many believe the former shadow business secretary and chess champion is up to the challenge. “She’s tough – in the best possible sense of the word,” a former colleague, who rates her chances highly, observed.
Angela and Maria Eagle, twins separated by 15 minutes, were born in Bridlington in east Yorkshire, to solidly working-class parents, and both attribute the self-assurance that carried them through school, Oxford University and professional careers before full-time politics to the determination of their parents.
Their mother, Maria recently revealed in an interview, passed her 11-plus but then dropped out of school because her parents could not afford the uniform. Their father made it to art school, but had to leave to earn a living as a printer. He taught the twins to play chess at the age of eight, which proved a useful skill for both. Angela, the stronger player, beat a boy to win the Formby under-11 title. “When the prize was a Biggles book, I realised that chess was only for little boys, and that I would have to carry on, and so I did,” she recalled. She continued to play in tournaments into her 20s. Although work dominates her life, she also has eclectic interests in music, and was praised by Chrissie Hynde for her comprehensive knowledge of the Pretenders back catalogue.
Both twins claim to have been interested in politics as toddlers, were teenage members of the Labour party, and both stood in the 1992 general election. Angela became the generally well liked and hardworking MP for Wallasey, though in the bitter and widening split between the parliamentary Labour party and the grassroots members, there have been mutters that she could face deselection. It took five years for her sister to join her, as MP for Liverpool Garston (now Garston and Halewood), making them the first twins, and soon government members, in parliament. Both served in the governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and the shadow cabinet of Ed Miliband.
Eagle, who has been in a civil partnership with Maria Exall since 2008, became the first female Labour MP to come out as gay in 1997. When she told John Prescott, then Labour’s deputy prime minister, he responded: “Tell me something I don’t know.”
The leadership contest really began for her on 27 June, when she became the 15th member of Jeremy Corbyn’s frontbench to leave, tweeting that she had done it “with deep regret, and after nine months of trying to make it work”.
Those who are loyal to her are fiercely so. Bailey, who is now research director at the Fabian Society, responded to her resignation on Twitter: “Proud of my old boss, who will not have taken this decision lightly. A loyal servant of the Labour party.”
Eagle also pledged that she wanted to help “heal” the Labour party, a challenge that could be greater than winning the leadership contest. Within minutes of the LabourList site reporting that her hat was finally in the ring, one of many bitter commenters posted: “This is not about ‘healing the party’. It’s a deliberate act of sabotage.”
Asked in an interview in February about the future for Labour, with the faultlines already visible in the party when the EU referendum was still only a dot on the horizon, she said firmly: “The impossible can happen.”
