was simple – to the point of naivety. I asked myself ‘would I vote for her?’ and the answer was a resounding yes. Would she appeal to voters of all genders, classes and ethnicities? I thought so. Eritrean-born, adopted by a white family in Manchester, she was in a position to speak to the universalities of female experience and to the specifics of intersectionality – the ways in which that experience is changed or impacted by other factors.
Hannah thanked me, and said she’d ponder. A few days later she declined, with expressions of regret. She had too much going on, too many commitments. Straining to hear her as I stood in a noisy airport, phone clasped to ear, I tuned out the background hum of things unsaid. It was only recently that I summoned up the courage to ask her if she had spared me a more brutal response. She explained that the reasons she gave were genuine but that the deciding factor had been risk – and the risks would always be greater for black women. The animus she’d attract from trolls and anti-feminists would comingle with racism, while some strands of black activism would inevitably label her a sell-out.
WE represented a leap in the dark and, while she trusted Sandi and me, she couldn’t be sure how the party would evolve around us. After working at the Guardian, she knew that organisations sometimes mistake good intentions for good practice. I also hadn’t factored in the economic hit she’d take in spending time party-building. If we asked her now, she might be more inclined to say yes, she added kindly.
There were other barriers to overcome. Some people who came on board kept their support quiet because they were members of parties less enlightened about collaborative politics. Even so, every day brought a fresh crop of outrageous talents to my kitchen table. This, we realised, is what politics might be if it weren’t such a narrow club. All the candidates WE has fielded so far are new to politics, extraordinarily gifted and extraordinarily different to each other. The steering committee crackled with ideas and energy.
Even in this crowd, Sophie Walker was an obvious standout. I had invited her to speak on equal parenting at our first ever public meeting. She held the attention of the room in a way that only natural communicators can do. In April 2015 the steering committee elected Sophie leader. The vote was unanimous and unanimously enthusiastic. In August, on the day she came to work at the party full time, leaving a job at Reuters to do so, she and Sandi and I lined up for a joint portrait in the King’s Cross offices of the Guardian.
We might have been re-enacting the ‘Class Sketch’. First performed in 1966 on David Frost’s satirical TV show, The Frost Report, the skit featured tall, gaunt John Cleese peering down his nose at the shorter, stockier comedian Ronnie Barker. ‘I look down on him, because I am upper class,’ Cleese says. Barker returns his gaze: ‘I look up to him, because he is upper class. But …’ He swivels to stare at five-foot-nothing Ronnie Corbett. ‘I look down on him because he is lower class. I am middle class.’ ‘I know my place,’ deadpans Corbett.
Sophie, at well over six foot and skinny, is Cleese to my Barker and Sandi’s Corbett. Stand us next to each other, and the effect is pretty funny. Some of our critics laughed at us, rather than with us. They depicted the Women’s Equality Party as a joke and the joke was that we were all middle class. ‘Sandi Toksvig’s Women’s Equality Party is a middle-class ladies’ campaign group doomed to fail,’ read one headline.
That neatly summarised the message of the Guardian feature that accompanied the photos, written by a journalist called Paula Cocozza.
We arrived for the interview and photo shoot after a full morning of meetings in my kitchen. We’d strategised our approach to a fundraiser that evening and discussed Stella Duffy’s proposals for extending our reach beyond our initial catchment. The first person to sign up to the party on Facebook, and an original member of the steering committee, Stella was our branch-builder and queen of email-answering, directing the enthusiasms of would-be supporters into practical steps, and often pulling all-nighters as she attempted to combine her commitment to WE with her work as an author and the founder of the community arts and science project, Fun Palaces.
A chunk of the morning before the Guardian interview had also been devoted to making progress on policy, a consultative process harnessing the input of our rapidly expanding branches, grassroots organisations, campaigners and experts. We ran through a to-do list that included pinning down the date and detail of our autumn policy launch, and figuring out the logistics for a series of membership and fundraising drives, including a potential partnership with the producers and distributor of the movie Suffragette. We discussed merchandising possibilities too. We needed money, we needed staff and we needed offices.
The flow of emails, far from slowing, had multiplied and diversified. In addition to offers of help and declarations of enthusiasm, we now received endless press bids, queries from organisations working in overlapping fields, and approaches from politicians from other parties wanting to scope us out. Many of these communications betrayed false assumptions about the size and resourcing of WE. Correspondents complained if they didn’t get a response within 24 hours. One group asked us for a donation.
We were certainly more organised than we had been. Our subcommittees still relied heavily on volunteers, but this situation was clearly unsustainable – for the party and the exhausted volunteers. In addition to Sian, we now had a fierce and forensic Treasurer, Samantha da Soller, and a secret weapon, Polly Mackenzie, a Liberal Democrat who had until the recent elections served as Deputy Director of Policy at 10 Downing Street for the coalition government and had come to us as a consultant. Marketing and public relations support came from Andrea Hartley and her company Skating Panda. She had apologised to me after the March public meeting: she loved the idea of the party but didn’t have time to help. A few days later she emailed to say she didn’t have time to help but would do so anyway.
In Sophie we had that most precious of assets – a leader, a natural and inspirational leader. When she spoke, people listened and wanted to listen. She could run meetings, an underrated skill essential to an evolving organisation. She had already cut her campaign teeth pushing for better treatment for her daughter Grace, whose Asperger’s Syndrome went undiagnosed for years, in part because the condition is assumed not to affect girls. Sophie had become a potent advocate and activist, and ran marathons to raise money for autism charities. In her blog, Grace Under Pressure, later published as a book, she documented struggles with public services and schools, and her daughter and herself. Running had also helped to rescue her from depression. Divorced from Grace’s father, and for a considerable time a working single mother, she remarried, acquiring two stepsons and a second daughter. She spoke at the first WE meeting about her experiences of juggling work and family in a system and society that sees childcare as a matter for mothers alone.
Her parents attended university, the first members of working-class families to do so. After state school in Glasgow, Sophie also went to university, Reading. She found a way into Reuters via a short-term contract and remembers her conversation with her future boss when the company decided to move her onto permanent staff. ‘I’m always interested in people who get in by the back door,’ he told her.
Cocozza didn’t see in Sophie a woman who got in by the back door. If the author’s impressions aligned with her expectations, we carried some of the blame – literally. Three ‘white, middle-aged, middle-class’ women, we arrived with bags of white, middle-aged, middle-class food.
Sandi, handing out Pret A Manger sandwiches, appeared to Cocozza’s eyes ‘mum’, whereas I defined myself as ‘the most obvious politician of the three’. This is not a compliment, nor is it ever the business of the Guardian to dole out compliments.
That didn’t stop us from wincing as we read the piece because it reinforced precisely the narrative we’d been hoping to change. ‘Listening to Toksvig, Mayer and Walker, clues arise that suggest they may not be able to hear how their assumptions can shade into complacency,’ Cocozza had written. ‘Their
