COMMENT Journalist Elsbeth Ganguin was nothing if not outspoken. Forty years ago, during the long battle between the trade unions and the Labour government, she so exasperated Harold Wilson, the prime minister, that at one Number 10 briefing he offered her a cigar “to keep her quiet”.
At the time it was still rare to find a woman covering the strife-torn world of industry – let alone one who enjoyed smoking cigars, as Wilson knew she did when he sent a flunkey to fetch one for her. Yet Ganguin, who has died at the age of 86, had trodden a remarkable road before becoming one of Wilson’s inquisitors. She had gone from aristocratic luxury in 1930s Germany, through war years that ended with her fleeing from the Russians with her baby, to the confines of a cramped semi in Manchester.
