She was elected as a councillor on
Northampton Borough Council, serving from 1956 to 1966, and became a
whip. She unsuccessfully contested the parliamentary seat of
Northampton at the
1959 and
1964 general elections for the
Conservative Party. Knight was created a
Life peer as
Baroness Knight of Collingtree, of
Collingtree in the County of Northamptonshire in
1997 after standing down at that year's
general election, and retired from the House of Lords on 24 March 2016, the week of the 50th anniversary of her first election to Parliament. She was Vice-Chairman of the Association of Conservative Peers from 2002 to 2005. She was interviewed in 2012 as part of
The History of Parliament's oral history project.
Section 28 Knight, along with
David Wilshire, introduced the
Section 28 amendment to the
Local Government Act 1988, which barred local authorities, including schools, from 'promoting' homosexuality. While promoting the new clause, Knight claimed children under two had access to gay and lesbian books in
Lambeth, a claim which has never been substantiated. She linked discussion of homosexuality in schools to the spread of
AIDS, also describing homosexuality as "perverted" and "desperately dangerous". She was described as a key force behind the legislation and a "dedicated – not to say fanatical – anti-gay MP". In June 2013, Knight opposed
same-sex marriage legislation, arguing that Parliament cannot change the fact that "marriage is not about just love. It is about a man and a woman, themselves created to produce children, producing children. A man can no more bear a child, than a woman can produce sperm, and no law on earth can change that. This is not a homophobic view. It may be sad, it may be unequal, but it's true." In the same year, she claimed it was wrong for the Conservative Prime Minister
David Cameron to apologise for the legacy of Section 28, while appearing to defend herself from accusations of homophobia by claiming that gay people are "very good at antiques". In 2018, when she was interviewed by former
Attitude magazine editor
Matthew Todd, who confronted Knight about her role as an architect of and a main driving force behind Section 28, she said "I'm sorry if anything I did upset you. All I was trying to do was acting on what people wrote to me, said to me, what the papers said." Knight stated that her motivation had only been to maintain the welfare of children. ==Outside Parliament==