When I ask Angela Eagle why she would be a good deputy leader for the Labour party, she gives a rather unexpected answer. As well as the three points in her surprisingly-succinct “elevator pitch” – champion members, campaign for equality, fight Tories – she adds another: “I can chair meetings.”
To illustrate quite how good she is at this, she describes what happened at an EU summit in 1998 when she ended up chairing the environment council of ministers. “I got us to agreement on seven directives and finished by 5.30 in the afternoon,” she says, smiling. “Nobody had ever heard of that happening. I actually performed a kind of auction of car emissions to get a deal on what they ought to be… The Germans wanted it to be as big as possible and the Danes wanted it to be zero.” And the German representative who Eagle brought into line so promptly at that meeting? Angela Merkel.
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