‘I wanted my mum to spot me on the green benches’
Dressing in bright pink isn’t the only way that new MP Dehenna Davison stands out. Cara McGoogan meets a rising Tory star
When Boris Johnson’s “baby” MPs gathered for a photo on their first day in Westminster last week, Dehenna Davison was visibly beaming. But it wasn’t the 26-yearold’s smile that caught attention – it was her green velvet suit.
“It’s so comfy, it feels like PJs,” says Davison, who gladly admits it cost £68 from Dorothy Perkins. “I bought it for the count.”
She is wearing a hot pink suit – also high street, from River Island – when we meet at the entrance to Parliament on Friday morning, a look she partly attributes to trailblazing US politician Alexandria OcasioCortez. Buying a new wardrobe was one of the things she quickly did after becoming the first Conservative MP to represent Bishop Auckland, a market town in County Durham, since its creation in 1885.
“I didn’t have any clothes that would make me feel the way I wanted to when stepping in here for the first time – confident and ready to be the best me,” she explains. “I also wanted my mum to be able to spot me on the green benches.”
Davison – whose first name rhymes with Vienna – is still feeling her way around Parliament and, after a security guard scolds her, says, “It’s like the first day at school. I keep getting in trouble for going through the wrong doors.”
We had hoped to sit down in her new office, but she is yet to be allocated one (she hopes to share with Miriam Cates, the 37-year-old new MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge). In the meantime, Tom Tugendhat MP has lent her his, but her chief of staff has the key and is running late after a night “on the lash”, so we settle on a cold bench in St Stephen’s Hall instead.
Davison hasn’t slept for more than a few hours, but is bright-eyed and quick-talking as she tells me about her first week in Westminster. Her favourite moment so far? Spotting Baroness Karren Brady during the Queen’s Speech.
“I don’t get too star-struck,” she says. “But I glanced over and thought, ‘My goodness’. Sitting on those benches for the first time, and seeing the Queen, was such an honour.”
Westminster is a world away from Davison’s roots in Sheffield – where her mum, Nicola, 45, was a nursery nurse, and dad, Dominic, a stonemason. Davison may be just 26, but she has more life experience than many – she worked at Pizza Hut from 16, married a man 35 years her senior at 24, appeared on reality TV, and has already run for Parliament three times.
But it was aged 13 when her life changed forever, after Dominic was killed in an unprovoked attack in a pub. A single punch ruptured a blood vessel in his neck and flooded his brain. “It hit me in the gut,” recalls Davison. “If someone is unwell you can prepare a bit, but when it happens that suddenly, the shock takes a very long time to get over.”
Her eyes flicker as she recalls the hospital waiting room where she sat for 45 minutes as staff attempted to resuscitate her father, as well as the hours spent in court when his alleged killer was acquitted. But her memory fails when it comes to their final moments together. “It kills me,” she says. “A few days after it happened I tried to remember and I couldn’t. Why would I? It was just a normal week, a normal day. It’s awful not knowing.”
Grief and a burning sense of injustice drove Davison. At 16, she represented her family at a criminal injuries compensation tribunal, and developed a keen interest in politics. From a family of non-voters, she none the less attributes her Conservatism to her upbringing.
“The aspiration, wanting to work hard to get on and to leave something better behind for your children, was everything I’d been brought up to believe in,” she says, citing her entrepreneurial father and “grafting, ferocious” grandmother as inspiration. David Cameron, too – “I genuinely admired his positivity and vision.”
At the University of Hull, where she studied politics, Davison met her first serious boyfriend, the Tory councillor John Fareham. The two became engaged in 2015 and married last year at a ceremony in Hull’s Guildhall, when he was 59 and she was 24. Their wedding was filmed as part of Channel 4 documentary Bride and Prejudice.
“I was concerned it would be a Jeremy Kyle-esque ‘look at these people, they’re so different’. But it was incredibly heartwarming,” she says, calling the programme “an eye-opener about relationships, love, and how there’s not one size fits all”.
The couple have since separated and Davison now lives alone with her rescue puppy, Carter, near Bishop Auckland.
“When you pass major milestones you really miss having your dad there,” she says. “Graduating from university, getting married, and being here. It’s made me more resilient and determined.”
The only time she nearly lost her nerve was in the hours before the election results were announced. Her puppy ran away and she had to chase him for two miles down the road; then she was gripped with panic.
“My friend gave me a pep talk and we listened to Taylor Swift,” she says. “There’s a video of me nibbling the ends of my nails; then three, two, one, [the exit poll was released] and I’m up with my arms in the air.”
She needn’t have worried: she won a 7,962 majority over Labour’s Helen Goodman, who had held the seat since 2005.
After picking up her parliamentary pass and MP’s rucksack, containing an iPad and laptop, Davison tweeted that she felt “like Paddington”.
“The gothic architecture is just like Hogwarts,” she tells me. “Yesterday, I gave myself 30 seconds in the Central Lobby to soak it in. There’s a sense of awe that I’m here, and the responsibility to not let
‘I’m a millennial and apparently a snowflake as well, which is hilarious’
people down.”
Her priorities, she says, are “to get our A&E back and sort out our high street”, working alongside the “tight knit” community of MPs that form the new Tory “blue wall” in the North. “We’ll be banging on the door of Government,” she says.
Yet, despite being named as one of “Boris’s babies” – part of the cohort of new, “woke” MPs – Davison is something of an old soul, who interned with Jacob Rees-Mogg and counts long-standing MPs Simon Clarke and Rishi Sunak among her friends. fri
“I’m a millennial and apparently a snowflake as well,” she says, “which is hilarious. I’m about as far away from a snowflake as they get.”
When she heard that Nadia Whittome, Wh the 23-year-old Labour MP, MP was donating more than half of her £79,000 salary to charity, she gave gav a wry smile. “I thought, ‘Blimey, if £35,000 £ is a workers’ wage, I need to work w where she’s living’,” says Davison, Dav whose most recent job at County Cou Durham start-up, Lumo, paid £27,000. £27 “I wasn’t entirely convinced – it was more of a virtue signal.”
As A we talk, the clock ticks closer to 9.30am, 9.3 when Davison needs to be in the h Commons to vote on the EU Withdrawal Bill.
“It’s my first vote in Parliament and probably the biggest piece of legislation for the entire year,” chirps Davison. “Whether I was elected or not, I would be excited. I’m not nervous, but I am conscious of going to the right lobby – I haven’t quite learnt my way around yet.”