Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1992,

and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a labor MP. She started her professional life as a civil servant but found the strain of remaining

neutral to testing.

She now proudly represents the Birmingham constituency where she was born, and boldly campaigns in support of many issues, not all of them popular.

She's resigned from the Labour Front Bench twice, but her most famous cause has been the attempt

to have Page 3 girls banned from the tabloid press. In this attempt she

so far failed but has suffered vilification at the hands of the newspapers as a

result. She is Claire Short. Patently Claire you're a woman of very strong views who doesn't mind having a go as it were

Do you ever wish you weren't that sort of person?

I think very occasionally but I just am I mean so if I wasn't that kind of person I wouldn't exist

then I've always been like it since I was a little girl I mean sometimes I am one of these people that will sort of argue with people you know if

something that I feel passionate about comes up on a social occasion and sometimes I think

oh shut up Claire leave it I can't help it. I do, I mean it all.

But does it mean that people perhaps have a wrong impression of you?

When people meet you, do they say, gosh, I didn't know you were going to be like this which is that you seem to have a sense of humor and you smile and you seem warm?

That's how used to happen especially when the sun and all that were really having a girl and trying to create this image of me

this Harriedon vials or joyless woman and then I turn up and everyone kept saying

but you're lovely it was only because they believed the other story.

It's a rather sexist thing though, isn't it, that people say that about it, that they believe you're some kind of campaigning

Harrodin, because they don't say that of men who campaign hard and who are quite fierce and have strong

...