GINA MILLER
Gina Miller doesn’t consider herself award-worthy. ‘I’m not a hero,’ the 53-year-old insists. ‘I just do what I think is right.’ And yet Miller is the woman who single-handedly took the government to court in 2016 over its intention to trigger Article 50 and leave the European Union without parliamentary consent. The judges agreed with her. Later, so did the Supreme Court. Since then, she has become a prominent and vocal campaigner for democratic transparency, insisting that our politicians should be held accountable for their actions.
The issue at stake is not whether Brexit is right or wrong, she says: it runs far deeper than that. ‘My focus now is on what happens next, on how we heal this divided nation and how we try to safeguard the future for our children and the generation after that,’ she says. ‘How do we ensure we are going to live in a country that upholds the civil and moral values we hold so dear? I don’t trust the politicians to do this because I worry that the majority of them act in their own self-serving interests.’
Miller is a slight and elegant woman, with ramrod posture and a penchant for LK Bennett heels (she suffers from chronic back pain and insists they make it easier for her to walk). She is an unlikely attack dog, and yet has, in many ways, become the unofficial opposition, speaking out against everything from corruption in our financial services to domestic abuse, having survived a violent second marriage herself. Her outspokenness has come at great personal cost. She is the target of vitriolic racist and sexist abuse, to the extent that she now rarely leaves home without additional security for fear of acid attacks, and she regularly receives death threats.
‘The way I deal with it is to remind myself that the people abusing me are acting from a place of fear and ignorance,’ Miller says. ‘If I believe in what I’m doing, and the people I love believe in it, that’s what matters.’
This year marked the publication of her memoir, Rise, which tells of her own hard-won life experience, from raising a daughter with special needs in defiance of the medical establishment to setting up her own successful marketing business as a single mother. Her daughter, Lucy-Ann, is now 30 years old, and Miller is married to a fund manager, Alan, with whom she has two younger children. Together, they run an investment firm, SCM Direct. Her heroine is Maya Angelou (she took the title of her memoir from Angelou’s poem ‘Still I Rise’) and she gets daily inspiration from the suffragettes: ‘They were extraordinarily brave women. I don’t think we can even begin to imagine or to thank them for what they did.’
Her memoir was also intended to be a rallying cry to other women, ‘to speak up and stand tall for what they believe in’. In this, they could have no better role model than Gina Miller, Bazaar’s Campaigner of the Year.