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Margaret Ann Jay, Baroness Jay of Paddington, PC (born November 18, 1939) is a British politician for the Labour Party.

Her father was former Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan,^[1] and she was educated at Blackheath High School and Somerville College, Oxford.

Between 1965 and 1977 she held production posts within the BBC, working on current affairs and further education television programmes.^[1] She then became a journalist on the BBC's prestigious Panorama programme, and Thames Television's This Week. She went on to present the BBC 2 series Social History of Medicine, as well as being a contributor to Newsnight, Any Questions, Question Time and other current affairs programmes.^[1]

She has a strong interest in health issues, notably as a campaigner on HIV and AIDS. She was a founder director of the National Aids Trust in 1987. She is also a patron of Help the Aged.^[1]

She was appointed a life peer in 1992 with the title of Baroness Jay of Paddington, of Paddington in the City of Westminster, and acted as an opposition Whip in the House of Lords.^[1] In association with the shop workers' union, she led opposition to the liberalisation of Sunday trading hours.

After her party's election victory in 1997, she became Health Spokesman and Minister for Women in the House of Lords. From 1998 she was Leader of the House of Lords, playing a pivotal role in the major reform that led to the removal of most of its hereditary members. She retired from active politics in 2001. Among numerous non-executive roles that she has taken on since retiring from politics, she is a non-executive director of BT Group.^[2] She is currently co-chair of the cross-party Iraq Commission (along with Tom King and Paddy Ashdown) which was established by the Foreign Policy Centre think-tank and Channel 4.

Before her resignation, Jay spent £100,000 in taxpayer funds to give a speech telling women how to find job placement^{[citation needed]}. She gave an interview in which she said she did not believe in private education; it was afterwards revealed that her three children had all attended private schools. On her own part, she said she attended "pretty standard grammar school," which was actually Blackheath High School, a top fee-paying independent school. She drew ridicule when she said she could understand the needs of rural voters because she had a "little cottage" in the country; this turned out to be a £500,000 house in Ireland, and she also had a large £300,000 house in the Chilterns though this had long belonged to her husband's family.^[3][4] She was called a "crony" of Tony Blair and was not well-liked by fellow Lords, Labour or Tory alike.^[3] Some resented the fact that she held such a high position, but was never elected to any post, and she fought to expel hereditary peers, arguably like herself, from the Lords (although, as an appointed life peer, she wasn't included in the expulsion).^[3] For this, the Daily Mail wrote that Jay "has been accused of hypocrisy more often than any other member of the Government."^[4]

In 1961, she married fellow journalist, Peter Jay, who is also a child of political parents, Douglas Jay, Labour MP and president of the Board of Trade, and Margaret (Peggy) Jay, member of the Greater London Council. Peter Jay was appointed ambassador to the United States of America by Dr. David Owen, Foreign Secretary in her father's government. While in the USA, she met journalist Carl Bernstein, made famous by Watergate, with whom she had a much-publicised extramarital relationship in 1979.^[1] Bernstein and his screenwriter wife Nora Ephron (who was also friends with Jay^[5]) had an infant son, Jacob, and Ephron was pregnant with her second son, Max, in 1980 when she found out the news of Bernstein's affair with Jay. Ephron delivered Max prematurely as a result.^[6] Writer Ephron was inspired by the events to write the 1983 novel Heartburn,^[1] which was made into a 1986 film starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep. In the thinly fictionalized book, Ephron gave unflattering depictions of both Jay and Bernstein, writing of a husband who was “capable of having sex with a venetian blind"^[6] and saying that Jay looked like a giraffe with "big feet."^[6]

Peter Jay then had an affair with their nanny, fathering a child in the process.^[7] The Jays were divorced in 1986 after 25 years of marriage, and she lived for a while with Professor Robert Neild, the Cambridge economist, who was also married for 25 years at the time.^[3] In 1994, she married AIDS specialist Professor Michael Adler, who had been chair of the National AIDS Trust when she was its director and they met, during which period he was married to Karen Dunnell with two young daughters. They married two weeks after his divorce.^[3]

In 1998, The Independent noted that Baroness Jay, then recently appointed "Minister of Women," has "reason to know a good deal about the issues that affect the British female in the 90s. She has, after all, personally been involved in the break-up of four marriages which has brought heartache and disruption to the lives of no less than 11 children... So the woman who has so enthusiastically earned her expertise in adultery, disloyalty, divorce and family break-up now stands - all 5ft 11ins of her - as the shining proof that women really can have it all."^[7] Commenting on this personal background, the Birmingham Post noted: "This is, of course, the behaviour of the born aristo (at least it was in the 18th century), which makes Baroness Jay a peerless peeress."^[7] Jay's attempts to block any attempts to encourage "traditional marriage" in the Lords sparked some to comment on her own personal life. Jay said, "The concept of a wholly exclusive relationship between two people on which modern marriage [is founded] ... has in a sense had its day."^[4]

She has three children: Tamsin, Alice and Patrick.

• biographical article, NZ Herald 2005
• BBC profile 2001