THE WESTMINSTER WHISTLEBLOWER
Behind the closed doors of Westminster lies a toxic culture of power play and sexual misconduct. One woman reveals the sordid truth
Inside the corridors of British government lies power, influence and... a culture of SEXUAL MISCONDUCT. It’s been left to a 25-year-old woman, Tara O’Reilly, to try to disrupt the system FROM WITHIN. Here, she reports from the front lines of a toxic political scene
The Lords Bar in Westminster is unlike many bars you will find across the United Kingdom. For years, it has been where the great and the good of British politics have come to down tools and unwind after a hard day at the office. And even today, as Big Ben strikes 6pm, you’re likely to see some of the country’s most prominent politicians drinking away another difficult week. The truth is, most weeks are punishing in Westminster. If you’re an MP, you’re likely to have spent most of that time baiting in Parliament, holding difficult, often combative press conferences or working around the clock to deliver bills and proposals. That means the Lords Bar has a slightly more feverish atmosphere than most bars you’re likely to ever find yourself in. People are ‘tactile’ and as boisterous with their language as they are with their manners. And, if you’re a young woman like me, you feel that fever more than most. This summer, the ‘fever’ was particularly high. It was one of the last days of Parliament before the summer recess, and like most parliamentary assistants, I wanted to celebrate the upcoming break from Brexit. Over the previous six months, we’d lost a prime minister, gained another, had countless and inconclusive arguments over the Irish border, extended the Brexit deadline and barely come up for air. That evening I found myself in the Lords Bar with a female colleague. Women are often outnumbered in Westminster’s bars, with most of us being assistants or ministerial advisors to the harried yet steely ambitious MPs. We are largely all young women, many of us with aspirations of our own to enter government at some point. I felt it as soon as I stood by the bar: a hand, the size of a dinner plate, grab my left buttock. It was quick, it was firm and, within seconds, it was gone. Had I imagined it? I asked myself. But I know what I felt. Like all of the women I was with that evening, I have experienced this sort of behaviour since the day I walked through Westminster’s doors. Over the past three years here, my sex life has regularly been the hot topic of conversation in otherwise-serious meetings. Senior male colleagues have thought nothing of sliding a cold hand up the back of my top when out at work drinks, while one political aide told me recently, without a hint of trepidation, that I was… ‘f*ckable’. That might sound shocking. But to the women of Westminster, this is what life is like. Of course, I always knew that a career in Westminster would not be easy. Its lifeblood is, after all, bluster, manipulation and unadulterated ambition. I also suspected it wouldn’t be the easiest working environment to step into as a 21-year-old parliamentary assistant who grew up on a council estate and dropped out of school at 16. But I believed, or hoped, that as the heart of British democracy it would be a place of solid moral standards. More than anything, I was excited to work in the Palace of Westminster. It is a magical place, its hallowed halls steeped in history and power. I had been a campaigner for more than three years, working for the Labour Party and for Sadiq Khan on his mayoral election, but I knew that if I wanted to effect real change, the best place for me to be would be Westminster. Within just a matter of weeks, however, I realised just how misguided I was. The first time I noticed something was amiss, I was walking through the corridors of the building where I worked and noticed men – multiple men – staring at my breasts. It was not a sideways glance, either. Not a Did I just imagine that? incident. It was blatant. And it started to happen all the time…
One of my first work drinks ended in a similar manner, as an older male colleague leaned over and whispered in my ear: ‘Most of the guys at this table want to f*ck you.’ Without any previous experience of Westminster, I very quickly felt like fresh meat thrown to the wolves. This, it turns out, was just a taste of what was to come – not only for me but for the majority of my female coworkers. Henna Shah has worked at Westminster for two years. She, like me, had an idealistic vision of what life would be like in the corridors of power. Until one evening at a Westminster work event. There, a male local council representative began running his leg up and down hers, just moments into their conversation and without a hint of provocation. She felt trapped, made her excuses and fled out into the evening. The interactions are not all physical. Language, as I have found out, can be just as intimidating. When Billie Heath (a former policy advisor to a senior MP) started working in Westminster in her early twenties, she did not expect her sex life to be part of the conversation. ‘My boss was really late for a meeting with a senior Irish politician, so I was left to entertain him and his team,’ she tells me. This is normal, by the way – schedules are hectic and timings are tight, so young women like Billie and myself often have to look after guests until our boss arrives. It’s part of the job. That is, until your sex life becomes part of the entertainment. ‘I’d been telling them a bit about myself, mentioning the fact that my boyfriend at the time was Irish,’ she explains. However, when her MP arrived and apologised for being late, the politician slapped him on the back and said, ‘Don’t worry, we like Billie, even though she’s not got any Irish in her, except when her boyfriend is putting it to her!’ whereupon the room roared. ‘I was 22 and just a couple of months into the job,’ she says sadly. However, as Sarah (whose name has been changed as she fears, like many I have spoken with, professional consequences if she talks about her experiences), a staff member who works directly for the House of Commons, tells me, harassment is not limited to just MPs.
“An older MALE COLLEAGUE WHISPERED : ‘Most of the guys WANT TO F*CK YOU’”
“In certain cases, THE ACCUSED were the very same people MAKING THE LAWS”
She was in her office one evening after drinks, when her manager, who was drunk, started to kiss her on her head. When Sarah made it clear she was uncomfortable, he jokingly did the same to a male colleague in the room. Sarah tells me that he has not been disciplined or investigated. She took sick leave shortly after the incident and has decided to work from home since February, saying it has ‘ruined’ the relationships she had with colleagues. As one colleague summed it up to me recently: ‘If they don’t want to sleep with you, they just ignore you.’
The powerful protect the powerful. And nowhere is this seen more keenly than in Westminster. Though it has tried to diversify its intake, Westminster is still home to the elite. (Over a third of politicians attended Oxbridge.) This means that, as well as it being filled with wealth and the sort of Teflon attitude to life that comes from privilege, it also inspires a group mentality, where tribal connections and loyalty are more important than the desire to behave well. In other words, it can often be hard for anything to ‘stick’ in Westminster. In recent years, this watertight culture, which has kept any transgressions hushed and its perpetrators protected, has been rattled. Just a month after the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke in October 2O17, as the #MeToo movement gathered momentum across the world, Westminster was facing its own reckoning. Women came forward and paved the way for many more to speak out, either privately or publicly, with their stories. This included Labour activist Ava Etemadzadeh, who accused MP Kelvin Hopkins of sending her inappropriate texts and being physically inappropriate while hugging her. Hopkins denies the allegations, and has since announced that he will not be standing in the forthcoming general election. There were government resignations. Damian Green, the First Secretary of State and Minister for the Cabinet Office, was forced to resign after being accused of sexual harassment by a Conservative activist. Michael Fallon, the Secretary of State for Defence, resigned after admitting his behaviour towards women in the past may have ‘fallen below’ standards. There has also been public shaming of MPs, including a dossier of alleged inappropriate behaviour that was shared, detailing complaints against 36 different MPs, ranging from being ‘handsy with women’ to ‘sexual relations with researchers’. I remember it as being a particularly unpleasant time to work in Parliament. The scandal, which became known as ‘Pestminster’, felt more nefarious than what was going on in Hollywood because, in certain cases, the accused were also the very same people who were making the country’s laws. It also didn’t go far enough. Laura Hughes, a journalist at the Financial Times who broke many of the ‘Pestminster’ stories, tells me she couldn’t write the most serious stories shared with her ‘because the victims were too scared for their experience to even be alluded to anonymously. Very few were willing to go on record and nearly everyone was distrustful of making a complaint to the party of their abuser’. Not many have faith in the complaints procedures offered by political parties and the Houses of Parliament, and most fear the repercussions on their careers and personal lives if they speak out. According to Isabel Hardman, journalist and author of Why We Get The Wrong Politicians, this is ‘because there has been no real complaints system. Perpetrators are effectively told that they can get away with it and victims worry that their complaints will get used politically’. (It’s often feared that political enemies will use complaints to embarrass or manipulate the accused, instead of it being investigated fairly.) In 2O19, Gemma White QC undertook an independent inquiry into bullying and harassment of MPs’ staff and found that it was ‘sufficiently widespread to require an urgent collective response’. Fewer than 4O MPs showed up to debate Gemma’s report, and not much has changed since. Many blame Brexit and the upcoming general election for this lack of engagement, but the more cynical of us would say that Westminster is so powerful, that those in it don’t feel it needs to change. As Jess Phillips MP told me: ‘The people who are affected by the changes are the ones in charge of changing it. It’s like MPs marking their own homework.’ And yet Westminster is responsible for setting the standard, both legally and culturally, as to how people are treated in workplaces
across the country. The issue is that it is also populated by interns and volunteers, many of whom fear professional repercussions for speaking out. What’s more, they’re not protected if they do. ‘The Equality Act is what protects people at work currently,’ says Deeba Syed, a sexual harassment lawyer at the charity Rights of Women. ‘However, it does not cover volunteers or interns.’ Raising a complaint with the employment tribunal is difficult, too, as you only have three months to file a complaint. Deeba, a political activist, adds, ‘This short time limit doesn’t encompass any of the emotional trauma that comes with sexual harassment.’ And because politics moves so fast, it’s often hard to find the time to process experiences of sexual harassment or assault, so many bottle it up until they’re ready to talk.
However, help has come through solid whisper networks. There are dozens of WhatsApp groups across Westminster where women share their stories or offer advice about who to avoid. Marie Le Conte, journalist and author of Haven’t You Heard: Gossip, Power, And How Politics Really Works, tells me how they often protect young women. ‘Gossip is absolutely fundamental when it comes to keeping safe as a young woman in Westminster; there are so many unsafe men roaming around Parliament and we don’t always know who they are, so we rely on other people to tell us who to avoid one-on-one, who to avoid when they’re drunk, or who to avoid altogether.’ Hearsay isn’t always reliable, though. Marie agrees, ‘Informal networks aren’t foolproof, and I’m sure there must be stories circulating that aren’t true or only partly true, but we don’t have another way of functioning within the political sphere, so these stories will keep circulating.’ Instead, we have created our own form of self-defence – we pretend we have boyfriends, avoid alcohol, swerve the local bars late at night and delegate tasks to male colleagues so we don’t have to deal with rumoured sex pests. And we make sure everything is in writing. It is exhausting. The ‘low-level’ abuse is so commonplace now that I rarely even talk to my Westminster friends about it anymore. It is only when I notice my flatmate’s owl-like gaze when I tell her about my day that reminds me the culture in Westminster is not normal. Drinks with other female staffers often involve us all making plans to leave Westminster altogether, and it’s true that I’ve seriously considered giving it all up. But I don’t, because I don’t want to. So instead I’ve decided to speak out. I’m lucky that I have a boss, Clive Efford MP, who gives me the space to campaign. But calling out the culture has been tough. I have become something of a social pariah around certain contingents, and plenty of anonymous abuse (from those in Westminster? Who knows?) has appeared on my Twitter account. There are many meanwhile who have joked that they can’t speak freely in front of me anymore and sadly I do have to wonder what this will ultimately mean for my career here. Some progess has been made: the Independent Bullying and Harassment Reporting Helpline has been set up and MPs have agreed a new behaviour code in July 2O18 for those working there, which includes an emphasis on ‘respecting and valuing everyone’ and recognising ‘your power, influence or authority and not abusing them’. Holding politicians to account still remains difficult, though: MPs are regarded as ‘65O small businesses’, so operate independently of the House of Commons itself. Only in June 2O19 did MPs decide to allow the parliamentary complaints scheme to investigate historical allegations of bullying and harassment. The campaign group #LabourToo, set up in the wake of #MeToo by a group of women with experiences of sexual harassment and discrimination, is campaigning to change the way in which the Labour Party deals with complaints of sexual harassment, abuse and discrimination – and aiming for ‘a truly independent complaints process to support those affected by sexual harassment’. But it can feel as though political parties are working in silos and use accusations of sexual harassment to point score against one another. Many women in politics have taken it upon themselves to challenge Westminster to be better. In 2O19, a group of crossparty parliamentary assistants and I set up a group called Women in Westminster to offer support, career advice and connect women working in politics, irrespective of their political views. We may disagree politically, but our experiences as women have brought us together.
“Gossip is absolutely FUNDAMENTAL when it comes to staying safe IN WESTMINSTER” Making headlines (ABOVE) THE PESTMINSTER SCANDAL IN 2O17 EXPOSED SEVERAL ALLEGATIONS