Obituary: Dame Shirley Porter dies in Israel aged 95

Dame Shirley soon joined the ranks of that rare class of local politicians with a national profile. But that profile was later indelibly tarnished as she became the public face of the gerrymandering “homes for votes” scandal. Indeed, after her dramatic fall, she was described as “by a considerable margin, the most corrupt British public figure in living memory, with the possible exception of Robert Maxwell”.

The daughter of Sir Jack Cohen, the legendary street trader who built the Tesco supermarket chain, Dame Shirley grew up in Hackney, spent the war years at boarding school in Sussex, and then finishing school in Switzerland. She married Leslie Porter in 1949 and the couple had two children. Sir Leslie died in 2005 and their son, John, in 2021.

Dame Shirley’s early hopes for a seat in parliament were frustrated when, according to Andrew Hosken’s 2006 biography, the panel in charge of vetting potential female candidates for the 1959 general election decided that, in thenwords of one of its members, she was not “bright enough”. In anger, Dame Shirley joined the Liberal party in Finchley – ironically, at just the moment local Conservatives adopted the young Margaret Thatcher as its parliamentary candidate. Dame Shirley soon became involved with the campaign to expose a local scandal – the Finchley Golf Club’s longstanding policy of blackballing potential Jewish members – which antagonised the local community and briefly threatened the Conservatives’ hold on the “true blue” north London seat.

By 1974, however, Dame Shirley was back in the Tory fold and now a magistrate, was elected a Conservative councillor in Westminster. Five years later, when Thatcher moved into Downing Street, Dame Shirley took to referring to herself as the “other grocer’s daughter”, venerating her father in a manner similar to Mrs Thatcher, and developing an equal penchant for power dressing and showmanship. Her strident manner was similar to Mrs Thatcher’s, as was her desire to compare her leadership to that of a careful housewife minding the family budget. In reality, however, her wealth – the Tesco heiress was named by Vogue as the 20th richest woman in Europe – meant she had little in common with the Prime Minister’s rather more austere upbringing.

Unlike Mrs Thatcher, Dame Shirley claimed no ideological mission had brought her into politics, simply a hatred of litter. “Basically, I was just interested in cleaning things up,” she suggested in an interview in 1999. “I wasn’t a deep thinker.” From her perch on various committees, Dame Shirley directed not just a war on litter, but a wider clean-up of the borough: perhaps her most-lasting legacy on this front was the successful drive to shutter many of Soho’s sex shops.

Dame Shirley’s climb up City Hall’s greasy pole culminated in her leadership of the council in 1983. Her ‘War Against Reckless Spending’ campaign and agitation for the abolition of the alleged chief culprit of profligate expenditure, Ken Livingstone’s GLC, were not without impact. Her well-judged opposition to Livingstone was not simply a matter of economy. She correctly identified the GLC’s “thinly disguised attack on Jewish people and Israel”, while her vocal support for Soviet Jewry stood in stark contrast to the blind eye turned by the hard left.

Dame Shirley’s admiration for the Prime Minister appeared boundless: one local Tory councillor noticed the way the otherwise strong-willed Westminster leader became “like putty” in her presence. After Mrs Thatcher left office,

Dame Shirley was keen to play up the comparisons: “To put it bluntly”, she wrote, “she was an inspiration ... they called us bossy. Autocratic, difficult. They howled if we bypassed second-rate people or challenged old-fashioned methods.”

Her admiration was, however, unrequited. Mrs Thatcher, wrote Hosken, “appeared indifferent to Porter and gave the impression that she considered her something of a nuisance”. She was even reported to have described Dame Shirley as “really scary”. When, desperate to end Porter’s reign at City Hall, two senior Westminster Tories met with Mrs Thatcher’s parliamentary private secretary and sought to arrange the peerage Dame Shirley coveted, they received short-shrift. “She can’t stand the woman”, the Prime Minister’s parliamentary aide bluntly told them, according to Hosken.

Mrs Thatcher’s apparent dislike of Dame Shirley was not motivated by antisemitism; while famously having a high regard for Jews, she rarely enjoyed sharing the spotlight with fellow female politicians. But Dame Shirley undoubtedly faced more than a whiff of anti-Jewish racism. As John Ware, a producer for the BBC’s Panorama who investigated Dame Shirley’s record in Westminster, later suggested: “I think she experienced quite a lot of subliminal, posh anti-Semitism. When a Tory said ‘she’s ghastly’ you knew what they meant.” The novelist Jenny Diski, herself no fan of the former Westminster leader, also detected in some of the criticism directed at Dame Shirley a disdain for “a working-class Jewish upstart.”

Much of the later criticism of Dame Shirley was, however, utterly justified. In 1987, for instance, she pushed through the sale of three cemeteries for 15p to property speculators who made a mint before the council was ordered to buy them back five years later for £4.25m.

More infamy was to follow. Shocked by the Tories’ near-loss of the council in 1986, Dame Shirley embarked on a policy – officially known as ‘building stable communities’, later exposed as ‘homes for votes’ – designed to shore up the Conservatives’ position in key marginal wards. The policy involved selling-off council properties, shifting poorer – and likely Labour-voting residents – out of the borough, thereby replacing them with a more prosperous, Conservative-inclined electorate. Buoyed by an artificially low rate of poll tax, the Tories were triumphantly re-elected by a landslide in 1990. Dame Shirley stepped aside to take up the ceremonial post of Lord Mayor, and, a year later, the then Prime Minister John Major awarded her a Damehood.

But – even as she departed the UK to live in Israel – the legacy of ‘homes for votes’ was beginning to close in on Dame Shirley. In 1996, the District Auditor deemed the policy illegal, and levied a multi-million pound surcharge on Dame Shirley and a number of other councillors and officers. A series of see-saw legal battles was eventually decided by the House of Lords in 2001, with one of the judges, Lord Bingham, terming the policy “a deliberate, blatant and dishonest misuse of public power”. As a result, alongside her successor, Dame Shirley faced a £42m surcharge. After mysteriously claiming to have personal assets of only £300,000, she eventually reached a settlement with Westminster and paid £12.3m in 2004.

While her reputation in Britain never recovered, in Israel, where she took up residence in Herzilya, the Porter Foundation proved a generous benefactor to academic institutions and environmental projects – a cause she took up with characteristic gusto long before it was fashionable.

But Dame Shirley refused to apologise for her record back home and chose to present herself as a political exile. “I am being hounded for who I am, for my unrepentant Thatcherism, for the sins of the Eighties, real or imagined,” she unconvincingly proclaimed.