A prominent labour party lawmaker has accused one of her Indian-origin lecturers at York University in northeast England of sexual harassment decades ago in a new autobiography to be published on Thursday.
Harriet Harman, UK’s longest continuously serving woman MP, writes in ‘A Woman’s Work’ that professor TV Sathyamurthy, who taught politics at the varsity, had offered to give her a better grade if she agreed to have sex with him in the 1970s.
“Towards the end of my time at York, one of my tutors, TV Sathyamurthy, called me in to talk about my final degree. He told me that I was borderline between a 2:1 and a 2:2 but that if I had sex with him it would definitely be a 2:1,” she writes in her memoir, a preview copy of which was seen by PTI.
“I found him repulsive and had no doubt that, if that was what it took to get a 2:1, I’d settle for a 2:2. I had no commitment to the course and my family’s hopes were not pinned on my achieving any academic distinction, so I had no hesitation in repelling his advances,” notes the 66-year-old, who has been an MP from southeast london since 1982.
Despite rejecting the alleged advances, Harman writes, she went on to get a 2:1, equivalent to a first division, anyway.