Background
Born in Canberra, Australia, she is the daughter of Sir Lenox Hewitt (b. 1917), a leading civil servant (Secretary of the Australian Prime Minister's Department, and later chairman of Qantas), and Lady (Hope) Hewitt (1915–2011). She was educated at Canberra Girls' Grammar School (formerly Canberra Church of England Girls' Grammar School), and the Australian National University. She went on to study at both Newnham College, Cambridge and Nuffield College, Oxford where she was awarded two master's degrees. She speaks French and is a keen gardener.
Initially a Conservative, she married David Julian Gibson-Watt, second son of David Gibson Watt, Conservative MP for Hereford, and Diana Hambro, in 1970. They were divorced in 1978. By this time she had moved to the left, becoming a committed feminist. MI5 classified her a "Communist sympathiser" in the 1970s because of her relationship with William (Bill) Jack Birtles, a lawyer. In 1981, she married Birtles in Camden; they have a daughter (born September 1986) and a son (born February 1988). In 1971, she became Age Concern's Press and Public Relations Officer, before joining the UK's National Council for Civil Liberties (now Liberty) initially as a women's rights officer in 1973, and for nine years from 1974 as the General Secretary.
In 1990 the Council of Europe ruled MI5 surveillance had breached the European Convention of Human Rights. She was a member of the advisory panel of the New Statesman magazine for ten years from 1980, and is a former school governor at the Kentish Town Primary School.
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