The Convention was led by Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the former French President. Stuart relates that she came to have "great sympathy" with her laptop spellcheck, which "whenever I typed in the word Giscard, replaced it with ‘discard'." Giscard and his collaborators dismissed the objections of Stuart and a few others, including the Tory David Heathcoat-Amory, who spoke up for what ordinary people actually wanted. As Stuart said in a Fabian pamphlet, The Making of Europe's Constitution, "For the voter the crucial question is ‘Can I get rid of them if I don't like what they are doing?' This has always been a problem with the European institutions and the Constitution does not resolve it."
In her own political life, Stuart has practised what she preached so unavailingly to Giscard. The voters of Edgbaston could easily get rid of her if they wished. When she took the seat in the Labour landslide of 1997 it had been Tory for over 70 years. One of her predecessors was Neville Chamberlain: the man of Munich has been replaced by a woman from near Munich. Stuart has survived in this natural Tory territory in part by demonstrating her independence from the Labour party leadership. In the 2010 general election she ran a local campaign which sprang from a series of "manifesto meetings" at which voters expressed their concerns on such subjects as immigration and the need for lower taxes on the low-paid, on which the national leadership had little to say. When the Guardian went to interview her during the campaign, it found a photograph on the wall of her constituency office of Gordon Brown on which were drawn a pair of devil's horns and a moustache. Stuart said the party had made a "big mistake" by not having a leadership election in 2007, when Brown took over from Blair.
At Westminster, Stuart has tried to instil some realism into the government's position on Europe, as when she asked David Cameron last January: "Will the Prime Minister tell us how on earth he thinks that a country such as Greece will regain competitiveness if it cannot devalue, which it cannot do within the euro?"
