My fight for the right to wear the trousers
From school uniform crusader to leader of the Lib Dems, Jo Swinson has never taken no for an answer... and now she’s ready to take the battle to Boris over Brexit
BACK in 2006, when the expenses scandal was at its floating duckhouse peak, Jo Swinson, then a relatively new, wet-behind-the-ears MP for East Dunbartonshire, was asked why her travelling costs between Scotland and London had spiralled so much in the past year.
‘Well,’ she responded, ‘I stopped being eligible for my Young Persons Railcard.’
Such is the blunt, no-nonsense approach of the young Scotswoman who took the reins of the Liberal Democrats in the other political leadership election this week.
At the age of 39 Swinson, with her earnest, head-girl manner, is not only the first woman to run the Lib Dems, but the first female Scot ever to run a national political party, a distinction that will surely see her cement her place in the history books.
Since her re-election in 2017 (she lost her seat to the SNP in 2015 only to win it back two years later), Swinson has become one of the party’s most visible figures, the natural heir – so some say – to Vince Cable. With her youthful demeanour, focus on parental rights and forthright manner, she is being hailed as a breath of fresh, albeit Liberal, air.
She is also, for now it seems, determined to carry on the Liberals’ recent and rather tasteless pledge: ‘Bo **** ks to Brexit’.
‘I will do whatever it takes to stop Brexit,’ she declared to jubilant cheers as she took to the stage on Monday in a sleek red dress.
It’s an ambitious pledge, given that in the intervening days she has found herself up against Boris Johnson’s bruiser of a Brexiteer Cabinet, determined to exit the European Union by October 31.
On Thursday she showed she meant business by tabling an early day motion for a vote of no confidence in Johnson and imploring Jeremy Corbyn to back her. Labour rejected the motion and accused her of childish and irresponsible game-playing.
Perhaps. But less than a week into the job, it is an insight into the steely mind of a woman who will stop at nothing to get what she – and her party – wants. This is, after all, a political leader with only 12 MPs who during her leadership acceptance speech declared: ‘I stand before you not just as the leader of the Lib Dems but as a candidate for prime minister.’
SWINSON has always been something of a crusader, albeit for lost causes. As a teenager at Douglas Academy in Milngavie, Dunbartonshire, she launched a campaign for the school uniform to be changed so that girls could wear trousers if they wanted to. ‘I didn’t particularly want to wear trousers but I thought it a matter of principle,’ she says.
‘I made my case about how it would be warmer if they could wear them in the winter. And I remember the assistant head saying to me quite pointedly, “Well, it might be warmer than a very short skirt”.’
Swinson didn’t win, but the experience bolstered her ambition.
‘I was always trying to do my little bit to change the world,’ she says.
Exceptionally bright (she was the school debating champion), she went on to the London School of Economics, where she worked part-time in Marks & Spencer’s lingerie department to make ends meet, helping befuddled husbands buy gifts for their wives come Valentine’s Day.
‘I would help them out, though,
saying things like, “Do you know her size?” Some were well organised and had quickly checked in their underwear drawer.
‘But sometimes you’d ask and they would say, “Kinda average”. I would say, “It doesn’t really work like that”.’
She joined the Lib Dems at 17 after her interest in politics was piqued by the 1997 General Election and stood for her first seat four years later, against John Prescott. Unsurprisingly she did not win, but she did gain a 6 per cent swing, and in 2005 defeated Labour’s John Lyons in East Dunbartonshire to become the first MP born in the 1980s and the ‘baby of the House’.
At only 25, her first weeks as an MP were a baptism of fire. ‘There were some daunting moments and I remember at my first Prime Minister’s Questions I was terrified,’ she said once.
‘Tony Blair could demolish people at the dispatch box. But my question went fine as I asked him if we should get rid of the Punch and Judy style of Prime Minister’s Questions.
‘He was stumped and didn’t really have an answer for a few seconds, which was good. But I still remember my heart beating really fast, though.’
In her early years she championed equality and women’s rights and founded the Campaign for Body Confidence, now the body image charity Be Real.
‘There is nothing wrong with a company using a 19-year-old, slim young woman with long, blonde hair to advertise a product,’ she said once.
‘The difficulty is if all the products are promoted using the exact same kind of model. That can be quite damaging in the pressure it puts on women and girls, and increasingly men and boys, to conform to an ideal.’
Under the coalition government, she had a number of roles, including business minister, but it was in the field of equality that she made her most indelible mark, not least when it was highlighted that she had been forced to stand for 20 minutes in the
House of Commons while pregnant before she was offered a seat.
The incident led to a highly charged debate over whether or not it was sexist to offer a pregnant woman a seat. Swinson, rather politely, declared it ‘part of life’s little courtesies’.
She has two children, Andrew and Gabriel, with husband Duncan Hames, another former Lib Dem MP who lost his Chippenham seat in 2015 and now works for a think tank. It is Swinson’s drumbanging for parental rights – including legislation on shared parental leave – that has arguably made her best known outside the Westminster bubble.
Her challenge now, however, will be to persuade Lib Dem voters on both sides of the Border who are disillusioned with Labour and turned off by Johnson’s gung-ho approach that there are a few more strings to her bow.
Despite taking her seat at only 25 years old, Swinson has always been quick to quash suggestions she is a career politician, pointing to stints in retail and as a PR manager at a radio station in Hull in her early 20s as evidence that she has a hinterland outside the political sphere.
WHEN she lost her seat to former BBC journalist John Nicolson during the great SNP surge of 2015, she took on a number of roles in areas that interested her – becoming chairman of charity Maternity Action and non-executive director of Glasgow tech company Clear Returns – and wrote a book, Equal Power:
Gender Equality and How to Achieve It. Just weeks after losing her seat, she also had an unfortunate encounter with her successor.
‘I was on a flight from London with my son and he was sitting on my knee – and who ends up in the seat right next to us? John Nicolson. ‘I said to him, “Don’t worry – he’s not usually sick on people”.’
When she won back her seat in 2017, it was with a renewed sense of vigour, achievement and, one suspects, maturity. She took on the role of deputy leader of the party, as well as spokesman for foreign and Commonwealth affairs.
But it was for a proxy voting issue that Swinson made most headlines, when she was ‘paired’ with then Tory chairman Brandon Lewis on a key Brexit vote so she could be at home with her baby son, meaning neither MP would vote so their absences cancel each other out. Lewis, however, did vote. Swinson was apoplectic, describing the move as a ‘calculated, deliberate breaking of trust’ by Tory whips. Lewis apologised, describing it as an ‘honest mistake’. Shortly afterwards she became the first politician to take a baby, her son Gabriel, into a Commons debate. That the debate was about proxy voting was not, one suspects, a happy coincidence, although she declared she was making a greater point. ‘I think it’s a step forward for modernising Parliament and for sending a message that it really needs to be possible for parents to be able to combine their responsibilities for their children with their working lives,’ she said. ‘All too often that is made too difficult.’ It should be noted that in contrast to the recent Tory party leadership contest, the Lib Dem process was rather more, well, civilised. The parliamentary party agreed both she and Ed Davey would be nominated by two MPs to create the contest, then the MPs would remain neutral. It is clear the Lib Dems wish to brand themselves as the ‘kind party’, rather than the slightly fuddy-duddy, sit-on-the-fence party of old. But will Swinson’s blunt approach fit that vision? A humanist who doesn’t believe in God, a woman who openly says Donald Trump is a racist and Johnson isn’t fit for government, she certainly does not mince her words.
CRITICS point to her voting record, which includes cutting welfare payments including those for people with illness or disability, voting against increased income tax over £150,000 and against a tax on banker’s bonuses as evidence that she has more in common with some Tory views than she likes to admit.
Others have branded her arrogant for fronting a party that promotes democracy while declaring that her priority will be to reverse Brexit.
‘I’m not going to change my view on what I think is right for our country,’ she said this week.
One Tory backbencher sneered at her views. ‘The Lib Dems used to pride themselves on being the anti-establishment party of pavement politics,’ he said. ‘They now don’t even hide their contempt for voters and democracy. It isn’t a new leader they need, it is clearly a new party name.’
She faces other battles, too. In the event of a General Election, Swinson will have to contend with an SNP which will view her as its number one target. That’s if she chooses to defend her constituency. As a Scottish MP, she is the only party leader who cannot vote on English matters, a niggle that might persuade her to up sticks for a cosy English seat instead.
While there will certainly be some adjustments to Swinson’s life as leader (as well, one imagines, as an increase in the number of times she has to explain how to pronounce ‘Milngavie’), there is also, arguably, no better time to be the leader of a party that has received a welcome and unexpected boost in the polls thanks to the chaos of the past three years. The Lib Dems are undoubtedly having a moment. Whether that moment will turn out to be Swinson’s, or yet another crusading lost cause, is up to her.