A woman on the verge of equality…
Is Sophie Walker, the new leader of the Women’s Equality Party, this generation’s Emmeline Pankhurst, asks Claire Cohen
‘Irealised the other day,” Sophie Walker tells me, “that I’ve taken on a job which involves going on stage after Sandi Toksvig for the rest of my life.” She throws her head back and laughs. “How did I not think that one through?”
Today Walker, 44, is publicly unveiled as the new leader of the Women’s Equality Party (WEP). It’s just four months since the other founding members, broadcaster Sandi Toksvig and journalist Catherine Mayer, first threw around the idea for the WEP. As another general election approached – with the only obvious concession to women being Labour’s pink bus – the pair realised they were fed up of having their concerns relegated to the back pages of political manifestos. Especially at a time when women make up 51 per cent of our population but only 30 per cent of MPs, 25 per cent of judges and 25 per cent of FTSE 100 board directors.
“I have made jokes over and over again about politics,” Toksvig said at the time. “This election, I’ve had enough.” She and many other women, it seems. Since the time she first came up with the idea, 58 branches have sprung up around Britain, from Cardiff to Croydon; Lewisham to Leeds. It’s already been claimed that the WEP is the fastestgrowing political party in the UK. When it opened for monthly membership a few weeks ago, 1,300 people joined on the first day – paying £4 each.
And that’s before mentioning the tens of thousands of emails from enthusiastic volunteers wanting to work for the party, which will officially launch in September, with the aim of fielding political candidates in 2020.
Walker, a Reuters journalist with 20 years’ experience, will now be at the forefront as the party’s leader. “A lifetime of experiences made me want to do this,” she says. “I realised the other day that I’m having exactly the same conversations with my friends that my mother was having with her friends in the Seventies. I look at my daughters (age 13 and six) and think I really don’t want them to be the third generation having those conversations.
“But it’s already happening. My youngest girl loves science and superheroes, but is constantly made to feel they’re not appropriate for her gender. My eldest daughter has to navigate a sexualised environment, because lad culture is rife in schools and girls are under pressure to look and behave a certain way.”
As soon as she heard about the WEP, Walker got on the phone. “I felt excited by politics for the first time in a long time. I wanted to be part of it.” This, she says, is despite having no previous political experience. “I didn’t study politics at university. I didn’t do an internship with a politician. I haven’t written policy papers. I didn’t go to Oxbridge. I am completely new to this,” she admits. But what she does have experience in is campaigning.
Her eldest daughter, Grace (she also has two stepsons with her civil servant husband), is autistic. Walker, who lives in north London, has spent the past few years actively trying to increase support for autistic children and their families. She’s an ambassador for the National Autistic Society and has written a book,
Grace Under Pressure, about the experience of raising an autistic child and the mental anguish it put her through as a mother – including a spell on anti-depressants. Does such openness not make her vulnerable in the public eye? “I’m pretty much out there,” Walker agrees. “I talk frankly about my life and I think I’ll be taking the same approach going forward. It’s daunting to put your head above the parapet, but I think it’s important.”
To date, the WEP has offered its members nothing more tangible than a list of six “goals”. These are: equal representation in politics and business, equal representation in education, equal pay, equal treatment of women in the media, equal parenting rights, and an end to violence against women. So now she has been announced as the party leader, surely there are firm policies on the table? “We’re asking the people to write our policies,” she replies.
What, like a party by committee? “It’s about opening up the political game to real people. Some people won’t get involved until we come out with a big, shiny booklet full of policies, and we get that. But there are lots excited by the idea of being able to write it.”
While the response to the party has been impressive, the eye-watering expense of founding a political party is also huge, which is why Toksvig, although not the leader, is still the public face of the party and she is a big draw at fundraisers. Toksvig – who recently left her Radio 4 show,
The News Quiz, to pursue her career in politics – has so far been the focus for much of the social media trolling. Now much of that will surely come Walker’s way. Sticking your head above the parapet, as she’s now done, seems to attract the most vindictive trolls. When MP Stella Creasy and Caroline Criado-Perez campaigned to put Jane Austen on the £10 note in 2013, both were subjected to vile abuse, including rape and murder threats. So, how does she expect to handle it?
“I’ve been on Twitter for a long time and I’ve seen it all,” she says. “I’m sick of seeing women reduced to two-dimensional characters who are there to be judged. I’m just me – a writer, a mother, a runner. I will fall flat on my face at some point. And that’s OK. I’ll just get up and keep going.”
But for how long? Will the WEP be around as a real political force in a decade? Or are they there to simply act as a pressure group to push equality into the mainstream political agenda? It’s a strategy that appears to be working in other countries. Sweden’s Feminist Initiative party saw its first MEP elected last year. The party also launched in Norway this April. “Of course I’d love to wrap this up in five years time,” says Walker. “Ideally, I’d like it all to be sorted out by tomorrow, thanks very much.
“It’s not going to happen overnight, but in five years I think we will have won seats in elections. Looking at the tidal wave of support, I’d be very surprised if we hadn’t managed to take this mainstream.”
For someone who says she’s not playing the political game, Sophie Walker is pretty good at it. And I, for one, am ready to believe her.
‘It’s about opening up the political game to real people’