A chunk of the morning before the Guardian interview had also been devoted to making progress on policy, a consultative process harnessing the input of our rapidly expanding branches, grassroots organisations, campaigners and experts. We ran through a to-do list that included pinning down the date and detail of our autumn policy launch, and figuring out the logistics for a series of membership and fundraising drives, including a potential partnership with the producers and distributor of the movie Suffragette. We discussed merchandising possibilities too. We needed money, we needed staff and we needed offices.
The flow of emails, far from slowing, had multiplied and diversified. In addition to offers of help and declarations of enthusiasm, we now received endless press bids, queries from organisations working in overlapping fields, and approaches from politicians from other parties wanting to scope us out. Many of these communications betrayed false assumptions about the size and resourcing of WE. Correspondents complained if they didn’t get a response within 24 hours. One group asked us for a donation.
We were certainly more organised than we had been. Our subcommittees still relied heavily on volunteers, but this situation was clearly unsustainable – for the party and the exhausted volunteers. In addition to Sian, we now had a fierce and forensic Treasurer, Samantha da Soller, and a secret weapon, Polly Mackenzie, a Liberal Democrat who had until the recent elections served as Deputy Director of Policy at 10 Downing Street for the coalition government and had come to us as a consultant. Marketing and public relations support came from Andrea Hartley and her company Skating Panda. She had apologised to me after the March public meeting: she loved the idea of the party but didn’t have time to help. A few days later she emailed to say she didn’t have time to help but would do so anyway.
In Sophie we had that most precious of assets – a leader, a natural and inspirational leader. When she spoke, people listened and wanted to listen. She could run meetings, an underrated skill essential to an evolving organisation. She had already cut her campaign teeth pushing for better treatment for her daughter Grace, whose Asperger’s Syndrome went undiagnosed for years, in part because the condition is assumed not to affect girls. Sophie had become a potent advocate and activist, and ran marathons to raise money for autism charities. In her blog, Grace Under Pressure, later published as a book, she documented struggles with public services and schools, and her daughter and herself. Running had also helped to rescue her from depression. Divorced from Grace’s father, and for a considerable time a working single mother, she remarried, acquiring two stepsons and a second daughter. She spoke at the first WE meeting about her experiences of juggling work and family in a system and society that sees childcare as a matter for mothers alone.
Her parents attended university, the first members of working-class families to do so. After state school in Glasgow, Sophie also went to university, Reading. She found a way into Reuters via a short-term contract and remembers her conversation with her future boss when the company decided to move her onto permanent staff. ‘I’m always interested in people who get in by the back door,’ he told her.
Cocozza didn’t see in Sophie a woman who got in by the back door. If the author’s impressions aligned with her expectations, we carried some of the blame – literally. Three ‘white, middle-aged, middle-class’ women, we arrived with bags of white, middle-aged, middle-class food.
Sandi, handing out Pret A Manger sandwiches, appeared to Cocozza’s eyes ‘mum’, whereas I defined myself as ‘the most obvious politician of the three’. This is not a compliment, nor is it ever the business of the Guardian to dole out compliments.
That didn’t stop us from wincing as we read the piece because it reinforced precisely the narrative we’d been hoping to change. ‘Listening to Toksvig, Mayer and Walker, clues arise that suggest they may not be able to hear how their assumptions can shade into complacency,’ Cocozza had written. ‘Their language is encoded with a privilege they appear not to notice … It all suggests difference of the wrong kind: that the life experiences of Mayer, Toksvig and Walker may be alienatingly divergent from the people they want to reach.’5
On the day of publication, membership applications skyrocketed. The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.
While Cocozza and others, ourselves included, worried whether we were too privileged to pursue politics effectively, another school of thought predicted the Women’s Equality Party would dissolve into a puddle of sugar. An article in Spiked greeted our founding with a call for an end to feminism under the headline ‘The Women’s Equality Party: for ladies too nice for politics’. ‘Women’s Equality Party needs a strong dose of Nigel Farage’, advised the Telegraph. ‘The Women’s Equality party has a problem – no one hates it’, a second Guardian piece declared.
If any of us resented these accusations – how dare they call us nice! – we bit back the responses that might have punctured our ladylike image. Several of us had tweeted our criticisms of Cocozza’s piece and then regretted doing so. For one thing, we were determined to treat journalists with courtesy, and not only because some of us were journalists. We were setting out to do politics differently and to develop a style and sensibility distinct from the male-dominated old guard. That difference showed itself in small touches. Sandi accepted the title of ‘MC’, a role hitherto absent from party politics. Would she be master or mistress of ceremonies, I asked her? ‘It depends on the day,’ she replied.
More ambitious was our desire to resist the combative culture that simultaneously unites and divides Westminster hacks and media managers. Like most members of the parliamentary lobby, I’d learned to expect abusive calls and texts from special advisers as part of my job. Parties often employ human attack dogs who attempt to secure the coverage they want by shouting or threatening to remove access. After reading Cocozza’s piece, I couldn’t help laughing at a memory that bubbled to the surface. In 2008, I’d gone to the pub after putting to bed my first long TIME cover story on David Cameron. The feature explained that the Conservative leader looked set to become Prime Minister, but his rise in the polls and a recent by-election win by a posh Tory candidate did not mean that his gilded past had lost the power to haunt him. I’d tracked down a contemporary of Cameron’s in Oxford University’s Bullingdon Club who described a night on the tiles with the wealthy student and his similarly privileged fellow members as ‘Brideshead Regurgitated’. ‘Champagne memories and social deprivation could make for an uneasy juxtaposition, especially in such tough times. Can someone marinated in plenty viscerally understand what it feels like to be poor or excluded?’ I wrote. ‘[Cameron] brushes the question aside with visible irritation. “I don’t have this deterministic view of life that you can only care about something if you directly experience it,” he says. “You can’t walk a mile in everybody’s shoes.”’6
Before leaving my office, I’d emailed a copy of the cover image, but not the text, to Cameron’s then director of communications, former News of the World editor, Andy Coulson. In UK editions, the cover would run with the gnomic headline ‘Behind the Smile’. Outside Britain we’d chosen a more direct line, assuming people might not recognise our cover star: ‘David Cameron: A Class Act’. Coulson didn’t like the pun at all. He called me to deliver a long ticking off. I recall standing outside the Fox and Anchor as his voice issued tinnily from my mobile phone: ‘Class no longer matters to voters!’
At the Women’s Equality Party, we resolved to handle media politely but also firmly. One of our core objectives is equal treatment by and in the media, a huge and urgent issue for women and for democracy that I’ll explore in depth later in this book.
A small but significant part