The next author in our exclusive podcast fiction series is former political speechwriter Tamsin Grey. She tells Katie Law how an online feminist movement inspired her genre-defining short story

ANEW genre of literature has been the talk of the London Book Fair this week . Fem in is t manuscripts based on the #MeToo Movement, along with nearfuture dystopias à la The Handmaid’s Tale, are being snapped up for the highest sums. This comes after writer Kristen Roupenian won a book deal rumoured to be over £748,000, when a short story she wrote for The New Yorker went viral in December.

Cat Person was a fictional account of an uncomfortable sexual encounter that struck a chord with millennial women across the world. Roupenian’s collection of short stories is due out early next year.

According to one commissioning editor, it’s “exhilarating” to see feminist fiction moving into the commercial sphere. Tapping directly into this trend is Tamsin Grey, with her short story My Beautiful Millennial, about a 21-year-old woman who travels the length of the Metropolitan line to break off her relationship with an older, predatory man.

“I was interested in the idea of a young person adrift in t h e wo rl d , b e i n g approached by a man who seems really interested in her and who she believes wants to help her, but she then realises is only after sex,” says London-born Grey, whose first novel is published next week, while she continues her day job as a civil servant at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. “The man is predatory but he’s sad and lonely too, so it’s also about feeling so sorry for someone that you feel pressured into having a relationship you wouldn’t actually choose.”

Like a growing number of women, Grey credits the movement with causing her to reevaluate past incidents in her life. In February Monica Lewinsky announced in a Vanity Fair essay that in the l i g h t o f # MeTo o , s h e n o w considers her affair with Bill Clinton in the mid-1990s as not just an abuse of power but possibly not even consensual.

“I think all the way through my teens and twenties there were these incidents, not necessarily full-blown relationships, when I’d go along with some kind of romantic connection that I wasn’t comfortable with,” says Grey.

She has worked in different government departments on and off since 2002, and recalls one job 10 years ago where her boss picked her out as his favourite, overtly promoting and praising her, which “went straight to my head”.

In the end, though, it did her no favours. Not only did she have to extricate herself but she also had to face the fact that her colleagues had come to despise her. Sexism is endemic in Westminster, she agrees, in as much as “it’s endemic everywhere” but says that “huge steps are being taken to ensure it gets stamped out from the government as a workplace”.

Initiatives include women’s networks and t h e B r i n g Yo u r s e l f t o Wo r k campaign, which publishes employees’ stories about their difficulties with their ethnicity or sexuality on the intranet, to encourage others.

“The more that can be done to raise awareness of situations where an employee is being psychologically manipulated — maybe not by someone being overtly cruel, it could be being flattered or sympathy being sought — the easier it becomes to have a canniness and take step back,” says Grey.

After graduating in English and French from Sussex University, Grey worked as a journalist before being employed by Defra as a freelance web writer. She loved being on the “inside of government” but after two years took a career break because of “caring responsibilities and my house falling down”. It was then that she had her first proper stab at a novel, having wanted to be a writer since she was seven.

Grey then went back to work as a speechwriter for ministers including Hilary Benn — “a very clever man” — and for Caroline Spelman, the then Environment Secretary in the Coalition government, just when Spelman had to do a U-turn on the proposal to sell off England’s publicly owned forests. It was “a very difficult time because all the s t a ke h o l d e r s turned against her Spelman and made it into a negative story which she hadn’t been expecting”, says Grey.

While the job of a speechwriter is both “hugely collaborative” and “deferential”, Grey was also constantly vetting what ministers could and couldn’t say. “One junior minister had a joke in his speech about areas of outstanding natural beauty and Kylie Minogue’s bottom. He might have thought it was funny but it wasn’t going to go down well with the audience or the media. You have to do a lot of research and work out which story is going to click with them. It can’t be just some policy or aspect of ideology. It has to be appropriate.”

What does and doesn’t count as appropriate these days is definitely “cranking up” as “people are getting more and more concerned about how s o me t h i n g w i l l l a n d ”, s a y s G r e y. Exacerbated by social media, “instead of having just a handful of journalists reporting your speech, you’ve got the whole world. Anyone can invent a particularly crucifying soundbite which will be followed by 100,000 people, and t h e n ex t t h i n g yo u k n ow i t ’s ‘the news’.”

The man is predatory but he is also lonely — it’s about feeling so sorry for someone that you start a relationship

BEING a good storyteller was obviously a great help to Grey back then, but these days she works in the policy unit on water quality, pollution, climate change and “all the other things that are destroying our e n v i r o n me n t ” . S h e d o e s n ’ t w o r k directly with Secretary of State Michael Gove, but he’s a regular in the canteen. “Unlike many other ministers he comes and gets himself a sandwich, sits down, reads the paper and eats his lunch in full view of all his civil servants, which I rather like.”

She thought about applying to be his speechwriter when the job came up, but “didn’t want to get quite back into the hurly burly of that world”, now that her writing career is looking so rosy.

Her debut novel, She’s Not There, acquired fo r a f ive -f i g u re s u m by HarperCollins in 2016, after several rejections and at least one re-write, tells the story of two young boys who wake up one day to find their mother has disappeared. With their father already in prison, they try to care for themselves, determined to remain independent,