As part of LGBTQ History Month, we recognise people that made a change and today it's with sad also to announce the passing of Maureen Colquhoun the UK's first openly lesbian MP, aged 92 died yesterday, 02/02/2021
Colquhoun was elected as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Northampton North at the February 1974 general election. A married mother of two teenage children, left her husband, Sunday Times journalist Keith Colquhoun, for the publisher of Sappho magazine Babs (Barbara) Todd, in 1975.
Colquhoun was deselected due to her sexuality and her feminist views;[19] in late September 1977, members of her constituency party's General Management Committee voted by 23 votes to 18, with one abstention, to deselect her,[20][21] citing her "obsession with trivialities such as women's rights".[22] The local party chairman Norman Ashby said at the time that "She was elected as a working wife and mother ... this business has blackened her image irredeemably".[22] "My sexuality has nothing whatever to do with my ability to my job as an MP", Colquhoun insisted in an article for Gay News in October 1977.
The vote by her constituency party was overruled in January 1978, as supporters of Colquhoun appealed to the National Executive Committee, who agreed that Colquhoun had been unfairly dismissed owing to her sexual orientation. Colquhoun wanted to put the past behind her and work with her local party, but the Vice-Chair of the General Management Committee said he thought that was impossible as many members were unwilling to work for Colquhorn's re-election, the prospects for which he thought were not promising. At the 1979 general election, she lost her seat to the Conservative Antony Marlow on an 8% swing.
Following Colquhoun's defeat as an MP, she worked as an assistant to other Labour MPs in the House of Commons, and was elected to Hackney London Borough Council, serving as a member of the council from 1982 to 1990. She divorced her husband in 1980. Babs Todd was still her partner at Todd's death on 13 February 2020.