McDonald unsuccessfully contested the seat of South Gloucestershire as the Labour Party candidate at both the February 1974 and October 1974 general elections.
[2] However the same report noted that there was "relief" that Labour had held the seat and that for Prime Minister James Callaghan the most important thing was that McDonald's victory would "swell the Government's effective majority to three.
McDonald is currently a director of the British Portfolio Trust, Complaints Commissioner for the London Metal Exchange, ICE Futures and Virt-x and a member of International Monetary Fund's Expert Roster.
She was Gwilym Gibbon Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford and wrote The Future of Whitehall, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1992[3] and is also the author of Parliament at Work, Methuen, 1989 and The Future of Retail Banking in Europe: A View from the Top, with Professor Kevin Keasey, John Wiley & Sons, 2002, and numerous research papers for a variety of clients including Deloitte's and PricewaterhouseCoopers.
In 2013, Bloomsbury Academic Press published her book Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: Turning the American Dream into a Nightmare.