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The Right Honourable Margaret Eve, Lady Hodge (born September 8, 1944) is a British politician, and Labour Party member of Parliament for Barking. She is also Minister for Children at the Department for Education and Skills.
She has been member for Barking since a by-election in 1994 caused by the death of Jo Richardson. She became a junior minister in 1998 and was made Minister for Universities in 2001, and remained there until 2003 when she was made Children Minister.
In 2003 she was involved in a controversial incident regarding the press coverage of the child abuse of a man who sought to make her ultimately responsible for what had happened to him, due to her having been leader of Islington Council when this had occured. Following a media campaign conducted by several national newspapers calling for her to resign, she was further drawn into the controversy by responding to the man in question by letter and referring to him in it as 'extremely disturbed'. Following this the man passed the letter to the press which planned to publish it, only to be judicially restrained from doing so at the instruction of Mrs Hodge. The letter was eventually published (mainly on the grounds that the reason for the blocking of the letter was seen as dispraportionate to the reaction from the press who typically strongly resist such forms of legal interference in their right to publish) and Mrs Hodge was forced to publicly apologise and offer to give a contribution to a charity of the man's choosing as recompense, effectively ending the situation in the eyes of the press.
Her time as Children's Minister (the first person to hold the position since it was created in 2003), however, has not been without further difficulties, and Mrs Hodge's resignation has been called for on several occasions by the press. Typically viewed as a strong political supporter of Tony Blair, she appears to retain high level support despite the actions of the press and the consequent problems that that has brought.
External links
- [1] (http://society.guardian.co.uk/children/story/0,1074,1087250,00.html) Guardian timeline of the Margaret Hodge row
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