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To the women and girls who helped build me but never got to see the finished result

Mom, Baby Iris and Jo Cox

Everyman (noun): an ordinary or typical human being
‘Despite his superstar status, in his movies the actor is able to play the role of an everyman quite convincingly.’

Everywoman (noun): an ordinary or typical woman
‘Despite her role as a working mother of two, in her job she is able to play the role of everywoman quite convincingly.’

‘You will never be popular.’ Not necessarily what you want to hear when you’ve just started a new job. I’d been in Parliament for just four months when the Rt Hon. Harriet Harman placed her hand on my shoulder and spoke these fateful words to me. I’m not a spiritual person – I don’t have faith; I’m your classic smug cynic – but I kid you not, at that moment I felt some sort of baton passing. I’m not messing – I feel a proper div saying this – but I felt something in my heart. I’d stopped smoking around the same time, so perhaps it was coincidentally the moment that my heart started to function properly after twenty-two years of abuse.

Being told that you’ll never be popular might seem harsh. Especially when it was said to me by the woman who, aside from my mother, had probably had the greatest effect on my life. This is a woman who fought for women like me to get where I am. She was elected around the same time I was born. Every moment she has spent in our democratic palace has been to make sure that girls like me from outside the Establishment can have a couple of kids, make some monumental mistakes and still stumble upon success and, in my case, one of the most powerful jobs in the land. Don’t get me wrong, I deserve a massive wedge of the credit for my own success, but the ladder I climbed wasn’t just thrown down to me by Harriet and other women in Parliament; it was whittled by them until their hands bled. Telling me I’d never be popular was her way of saying that it was now my job to build the ladders; that my hands were going to be full of splinters but it would be worth it.

So there I was in the mother of all Parliaments, with the mother of Parliament inspiring me with her knock-’em-dead feminism. She was right, of course. In my sixteen weeks in Westminster I had become, in some quarters, fairly unpopular both in and out of the parliamentary bubble. Quite an achievement when Parliament was shut for recess for nine of those sixteen weeks. In that short time, I’d marked myself out as an angry feminist. A big pink target was scrawled on my back and – whaddya know! – the delegitimisation of my voice had begun. I don’t mean to brag, but I count myself in the cool crowd. I was your classic popular kid at school. This new unpopularity was going to be hard to handle.

I might as well get the negatives out of the way now, so we can get back on track. I am writing this as a call to arms to activism after all. They do say forewarned is forearmed, so even though I am tired of saying what I’m about to say, any woman who dares to speak out has to prepare herself for the slow and subtle push for her voice to conform to the norm. These are the top five things people do to infantilise strong (usually female) voices.

Shushing

I accept that this might be going on in the real world – in offices up and down the UK, people might actually be shushing their colleagues – but I can’t say it happened where I worked at Women’s Aid, so I’m a bit new to it. In Parliament there is a fair amount of shouting, ribbing and sledging. It is often presented as being a very male behaviour, but many of the women on the green benches do it too. Nicky Morgan is a proper mutterer. Anna Soubry jolly well lets you know what she jolly well thinks. I myself am perhaps one of the loudest, but my voice is rarely alone. If I am getting aggravated or am heckling in a debate, I have noticed men from the opposition benches, men who shout and holler all they like, shushing me like I was a five-year-old on a car journey and they were about to miss some vital bit of storyline on The Archers. I am not a child; do not shush me.

These men have cottoned on to the fact that saying ‘calm down, dear’ won’t play well. So instead they have replaced it with the weaponry of a primary school teacher. On one sublime occasion, a minister on the front bench – a privileged bloke who has never lived on the benefit we were debating – wanted silence for his oh-so-uninformed view on what gets mothers back to work. He looked at me like I was a pramface commoner, fag in hand, screaming kids round my ankles, and shushed me. ‘You’re not my dad,’ I responded. ‘Don’t you dare shush me while the men shouting around me get no such treatment!’ There it is: paternalistic shushing, as if the women in the Commons are nothing more than infant children, there to present an acceptable image. I say to you, good sir, you can take your shushing shushes and stick them up your shushing arse!

If anyone ever shushes you, my advice is to call it out. Ask the man in question, ‘Did you just shush me like a child?’ They will then be forced to verbalise their dislike of your opposition to their views and will fall apart almost instantly.

‘You would say that’

This is an absolute killer. If you care about something or have been identified as a person with a certain position (i.e. feminism), immediately your insights are no longer legitimate. No one says to their GP, ‘You say I’ve got tennis elbow, do you? Well, you would bloody say that.’ My advice is to simply reply, ‘Yes, I would say that because I am both learned and experienced in this field, so what I say is based on evidence. What about you?’

The fear of a pigeonhole

If only I had a pound for every time someone had said to me, ‘Be careful you don’t get pigeonholed with the whole feminism thing.’ As if the fact that I fight for women not to be murdered and raped means that I don’t also have opinions on road safety, the economy and foreign policy. My pretty little head can only deal with one thing at a time, you see. No one ever said to Andy Burnham, ‘Watch out, dude, your ten-year campaign for Hillsborough victims means everyone is going to think you only care about football crowds.’ No, in that time he managed to be a treasury minister and Secretary of State for Health, and also hold a variety of shadow ninja positions. No one ever said to George Osborne, ‘Mate, always chatting about the economy will make people feel like you are a one-trick pony.’

Women with a cause suffer from these accusations simply because they are women. If their cause is women too, they must be reminded of how narrow this is all the time, for fear that something might actually change. I say ignore these comments and care about what you care about. Faking it, like so many things in life, is a pointless exercise that will ultimately leave you dissatisfied.

‘You are an attention-seeker always chasing publicity’

Oh what a classic way to shut me up! To make me feel guilty for getting publicity for the things I care about. When I stood up in the Commons on International Women’s Day and read out the names of 120 women murdered by men in a single year, every newspaper wrote about it. I made it into the New York Times. For a moment I imagined Carrie Bradshaw and her friends discussing it in their fancy clothes in some trendy Greenwich Village brunch hangout. Should I be feeling guilty that people were talking about something that needs talking about? Jeremy Corbyn is in the papers every day, but I doubt he gets called a publicity-seeker. When he was a backbencher, as I am, and was famously marched off by the police in front of the hacks’ cameras at an anti-apartheid rally, I doubt anyone said, ‘God, he likes himself, he’s only doing it to get a spot on Russia Today.’ On the contrary, he is a man of principle, whereas I – a woman – am considered to be like someone on The Only Way Is Essex.

The whole point of being a campaigner is to get publicity to change things. It’s the sodding job. I have long campaigned for sustainable funding for refuges in the UK because they are forced to survive year to year on uncertain budgets. It took a campaign by the Sun in partnership with Women’s Aid to make the government pay attention. Publicity matters. When people call me an attention-seeker, they do it to silence me, and I’m ashamed to say it works. I will withdraw from interviews and avoid noteworthy campaigns for a few months after I’ve been splashed across the public consciousness. I’ll bet you anything you like no man with a cause ever did the same.

But I say to you now: don’t do it. Don’t listen. Line up every possible platform you have: TV, newspaper, magazine, podcast, radio. Tell the world what you care about, because it makes them care too, and we need people like you to speak up.

They threaten you

The previous four things are often subconscious acts carried out as a result of our continued existence within a patriarchal society. They are not exclusively done by men. We are all guilty of unconscious bias and its associated behaviour. But this final act is committed by true baddies. If they cannot silence you by undermining you, if they fail to make you feel so anxious about your actions that you can’t sleep, then the threats roll in. Every day I receive threats. They range from death and rape to warnings of unemployment. Plots to deselect me and others like me from our seats in the House of Commons are the most common.

But this isn’t specific to me, or to other MPs. This happens across the land. In every town someone is being called in to their boss’s office and being threatened; more subtly than Internet bullying, but threatened all the same. We all have to rub along together, so we should bend and mould to our environment. I get that. Threats are different; threats come about because of a perceived imbalance in the established power structure. They are designed to squash. My best advice is to call it out if you can. I can’t imagine anyone in Westminster would threaten me, because I would sing like a bird and everyone would want to listen (one of the reasons why they don’t want you to have publicity).

If any one of these five devices is ever used to shut you up, you are winning. It turns out that not being popular actually means not being popular with the kind of people you wouldn’t want to go on a date with or find yourself in the caravan next door to on holiday. Next time someone says, ‘I know this really matters to you, I’m just worried it might mean people don’t take you seriously,’ what you should hear is ‘Goddammit, people are taking you seriously!’ Never in any rom-com or coming-of-age-drama did the popular kid emerge smelling of roses. Nobody cheers when the person who always does well does a bit better. If people come after you for being a success then shout it out, shame them to their faces and amongst their peers; it’s what they’re trying to do to you. Let’s all relish our unpopularity. Let’s take back the tag and wear it as a shield. Let’s say sod the idea of toeing the line. Let’s be unpopular together, because I sure as hell don’t want to be unpopular on my own! That would be no fun at all.

On an otherwise unremarkable day in 2013, Twitter exploded with the hashtag #tweetyour16yearoldself. The normally acidic social platform turned instead to the kind of inspirational quotes people normally reserve for crap memes written in Comic Sans atop stock images of footprints on the beach: ‘It gets better, you can do it’, ‘You can do anything, be anyone’, ‘Listen to your parents; turns out they were right’, ‘You know how everyone thought you’d amount to nothing? Keep going, they were wrong.’ It was one long lament about how crappy it is to be a teenager and how being an adult is way better. This is not my experience, so I wrote, ‘You are nowhere near as good as you think you are. Take yourself down a peg or two.’

More recently, in 2016, Sajid Javid, the then George Osborne apparatchik Tory Business Secretary, wrote a public note to his sixteen-year-old self: ‘Work hard, never stop learning and stay true to yourself and your family.’ I imagine this is exactly what his sixteen-year-old self actually did and he was rather too unimaginative – or too chicken – to tell himself anything different. Personally I would tell Sajid’s sixteen-year-old self, ‘Loosen up, dude. When you are older, your every waking minute will be watched by journalists, so do all the wild things you want to do now while no one is watching. PS In 2016, when you go on a junket to Australia while the British steel industry crumbles, you will look a douche. Perhaps rethink that one.’ But hey, his version made for a good bit of Conservative ideological pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps soundbitery and, let’s face it, was probably written by a 22-year-old political advisor named Ben from Tunbridge Wells.

When I was sixteen, I needed to be taken down a peg or twenty. I was not a quiet young woman; I was in-your-face and bold as brass. I was a teenager in the era of girl power, Brit Pop girl bands and grunge. I remember deciding that Courtney Love would play me in a film of my life, which might give you an idea of my place on the shrinking-violet chart. No one could tell me what was what because I knew better. The reality is of course that, like most teenagers, there were endless times when I didn’t tell the truth or speak up when bad things happened. Being a teenage girl is to live your life in a decade of contradictions, utterly vulnerable but completely averse to the idea of being vulnerable.

Before I worked with abused young people and before I had my own children, I thought my teenage years were pretty happy. In my school canteen they used to sell those long ice lollies that we call tip tops in Birmingham (I believe others call them ice pops). In the summer all the girls would buy a couple and go and laze around on the grass outside, whiling away our lunch hour tattooing the names of the boys we fancied into our legs with a compass. Oh, the glory days of being fourteen. One day I went to buy my quota of cola and blue raspberry tip tops only to be told that they had been banned in school because they were unladylike. What kind of ridiculous fool looks at a bunch of kids eating frozen E-numbers and thinks, ‘By golly, those girls look like they are performing fellatio on those long bright blue shards of ice. This must be stopped immediately’?

There were some wild times, though – too wild for a kid of fourteen. I look back in horror at some of the stuff I thought was normal and acceptable. I can see now the many times I should have spoken up, been the bold, brave girl I thought I was. The things I bragged about while smoking fags around the back of the gym should have been shared with the police instead.

We had endless lessons at school about not bowing to peer pressure. It was presented to us like some faceless demon, an actual thing that could hurt us, and something that we should avoid. It was always suggested that bad people caused peer pressure and weak people succumbed to it. The reality of the slow drip-drip-drip of wanting not to stand out that comes with being an adolescent, and how that grooms young people to take risks, was never put across well. Not only did I bow to peer pressure, I almost certainly generated it. We all did. Despite how oh-so-original we all thought we were, the reality was about constant subtle assimilation to be like everyone else. Looking back, the absolute coolest kids, the ones everyone actually liked, were the ones who didn’t just join in with the crowd. My mate Hannah, who was a super brain, who never smoked or drank, who went to youth theatre, got good grades and was kind to people, ended up being the most popular girl in school. She was so comfortable in her own skin, so funny, authentic and sweet, that everyone in every clique liked her. She became head girl when the students were balloted because she was admired by all. I think if there was a league table of who has been a bridesmaid the most times for fellow pupils, Hannah still easily tops it.

Many years on from my school days, I find myself standing in front of a classroom full of thirteen-year-olds, about to dig deep and talk to them about sex. Not the comfy kind of respectful sex you have when you are in your thirties and have been married for ten years. To be honest, I think I would find this more cringeworthy: nobody, but nobody, wants to hear about momfn1 and dad sex. No, I am there to talk to these young people about rape and sexual exploitation. I’m here to lecture them, but with fun, run-around-the-classroom training riffs.

When I was thirteen, I would have looked at the rather dumpy woman at the front of my classroom and thought, ‘Whatever, love’ – or whatever it was we said in the early nineties. I’d have probably sucked my teeth as if I were some sort of rude girl, not the girl from a nice-ish bit of Birmingham I actually was. I thought I was all that and then some. I thought I could handle myself, that I was untouchable. When I was thirteen, I thought I was the feminist I am today. I wasn’t.

Like many girls, I professed feminism while pretty much capitulating to everything that since then I have trained girls not to do. My gang of mates thrived on being the coolest. Being the coolest meant having boyfriends way older than us. Oh, how very sophisticated we thought we were when our male friends would pick us up from school in their cars. Nothing says cool like a bunch of girls in uniform driving past their bookish peers in a parade of Vauxhall Astras or Novas. We thought we were having fun, and most of the time we were, but bad things used to happen too. I remember one of my mates having to kick her way out of the back of a clapped-out van some bloke had taken her into so he could have his way with her. Attempted rape, you say; a macabre anecdote to be feasted on for weeks was what we saw. We didn’t tell our parents and we certainly didn’t tell the police. Instead we mulled over every detail, sucking it dry of every last drop of drama we could get. I remember being in the local pub when I was about seventeen and my mate’s boyfriend – who was ten years her senior – appeared to have sold her to another man in return for a bag of weed. We joked and laughed about how we would have a whip-round to buy her back. Today I call this sexual exploitation; back then I swooned over the idea that these edgy men found us so desirable.

They weren’t edgy; they were criminals. If memory serves me right, I heard years later that one of them was in prison serving quite a hefty sentence for a violent rape. It hurts me deeply to say this, but I’m sure if we had known this at the time, we wouldn’t have thought it anything but glamorous.

The feminist I am today wants to scream at young women not to fall for it. The feminist I am today wants to yell from the rooftops at all the men who thought having a teenage girl as an accessory was acceptable. I want to go into every classroom in the country and say to all the young people obsessing over who has lost their virginity or not that in no way does having sex with a random person at a party or in the back of a car make you cool; it makes you pretty much the same as every other kid I knew when I was growing up. If anything, it is dull. What makes you cool is being yourself; being fearlessly who I am is the beginning, middle and end of why I have been a success in almost all areas of my life. Have sex when you want to, not because Becky came back from Marbella and said she had had sex with a lad from Newport, because at the end of the day, Becky is probably lying.

After dragging myself through my A levels, I went off up north to Leeds University, where I read economics, social policy and history. I had started out studying politics and history, but it might be a surprise to hear that I found politics a massive disappointment. I had thought the faculty would be full of radical socialists, fevered with activism. I had images of discussing feminist theory in incense-scented rooms with batik wall hangings. Instead I found loads of posh kids from the south – mainly Tories – discussing the philosophies of old white men. In my second year I changed to social policy and economics because it was about stuff that actually affects people now. I have never been one who wanted to theorise all day; I like action rather than words. I focused my studies on welfare benefits and the welfare state, and, in history, on women’s work.

I was not at all studious at university. I rarely attended lectures and went to the bare minimum of seminars. I got the reading lists in the first week and just did it by myself, with some help from my mom, who was a history scholar herself. More to the point, she was the woman paying the newly introduced fees, and she was determined to get her money’s worth. When you dedicate your life to bettering yourself through education as my mom had done, and then spend a good chunk of your life campaigning for education and opportunity for all, it is a slap in the face when you find yourself paying for an education for your lazy daughter who is determined to learn little more than how to be amazing at Countdown and the art of making roll-ups with one hand. My mother dragged me through my degree, demanding I send her every essay I was meant to be writing. To say that my efforts were a disappointment to her would be an understatement, although she rarely let on what a massive pain in the bum I was.

At university, I was not part of any societies; I did not join in with anything. Nowadays I spend my life with people who were deeply steeped in one political student movement or another. They seem to be part of a network I just don’t understand. To me, my NUS card was good only for getting 10 per cent off at Topshop. I went to university in 2000, when politics was on a sort of even keel. My main memories of university are of laughing with the houseful of girls I lived with, and watching endless box sets of Friends.

I managed to work my timetable so I was only on campus on Tuesdays and spent most of my time back home in Birmingham. The truth about this period of my life is that I had stopped speaking up for things. Blair was in power, the things that could only get better were getting better and the Labour Party activism I had been so steeped in through the eighties and nineties seemed not to reach me any more. I didn’t want to get involved with stuff or be brilliant. I just wanted to get through it.

I think perhaps I never really wanted to go to university, but it was expected of me at the time. I had always got good grades at school even if I had been a pain. Everyone was going; it was just what we did. I never felt that I needed liberating by leaving home; my life had always been pretty liberal. I didn’t know what I wanted to be and I still marvel at the idea that we expect seventeen-year-olds to make a decision that categorises them for the rest of their lives. I don’t regret it now I have the piece of paper, but I did not have a great thirst for learning that needed quenching, so going to university felt functional rather than desirable.

This was the time when I was supposed to be growing into an opinionated, learned adult deciding what my future was going to be. In fact, I was going backwards. Turns out life isn’t like magazine articles or rom coms. Mostly, I wanted to disappear, which I set about doing by starving myself for months on end. There was a six-week period when I ate nothing but popcorn, until I weighed a little under nine stone, which when you are five foot eight and have HH boobs means you look totally emaciated. Like so many girls, my weight was a way of keeping control of things – it was more about my head than my waist.

Between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one, it is safe to say that men controlled my outlook on life. While at university, I had the clichéd boyfriend-back-at-home whom I missed. I would have thrown it all away to stay with him. My mom had married my dad at eighteen and they were still madly in love forty years on, so I never bought the pervading argument at the time that settling down with your first proper boyfriend was probably not going to be the best option. He wasn’t even a very good boyfriend; he was a drunk who smoked too much weed, had little ambition and used to cheat on me all the time. I remember catching him snogging a girl in a photo on the website for Snobs nightclub in Birmingham.

To be fair to my first love, he had not been dealt the best hand. He was a young carer for his mom, who had MS, and his male role models, namely his father, had not been good. I’m afraid I was the terrible cliché of a young woman who thought she could look after everyone. The trials of becoming a proper grown-up while still essentially being a child were tough on me. I seemed to cast myself in the role of woman-as-carer very early on and failed to see the toll it was taking. I thought he needed me to be around to keep him well and happy, and even though outwardly I still appeared self-assured, in my head I placed all my worth in the care of the men in my life. When it wasn’t my boyfriend, it was my brother.

As a child, I had been the bolshie (as in both Bolshevik and confident) girl, the tough cookie who could and would stand up to anything and anyone. My youngest brother Luke had quite a different role to play. The age difference between my siblings meant that we split neatly into two groups; my parents called us the ‘Bigs’ and the ‘Littles’. Sam and Joe – the Bigs – were both born in the early seventies, whereas Luke and I were born just twenty months apart in the early eighties. The two of us were close, very close. We spent our childhood together while our brothers were off being all teenage. Later, we hung out together, copping off with each other’s friends, partying together and coming down together. Even though he was older than me, I was in charge. It turns out that if your parents constantly drum into you that boys are no better than you, that you can do anything they can do, it sinks in. Maybe it sank in with Luke too, but with different consequences.

Luke had always been a troublesome teenager. He was soft and gentle; too soft and gentle. We always thought he was special because he was born on 29 February so only had a birthday every four years. We celebrated every year but he got special treatment on his real birthday. At sixteen, we would joke, he was only four. I’m sure the two things are unrelated, but we certainly infantilised him his whole life, and in many ways we still do. He had always had someone around to boss him about, so when he went off to secondary school without me or any of his comfortable bossy friends, he did not find it easy. He went to three different secondary schools, being either kicked out or absconding for so long they took him off the register. Luke was the person who bought me my first packet of fags when I was eleven, telling me that Lucky Strikes were made out of desiccated coconut and that menthol cigarettes cured colds and were good for your chest. Instead of shielding me from risk, like a big brother in our patriarchal society is meant to, he took me along for the ride so that he could convince himself it was not that bad. Like all people with bad habits, pulling others in with him was part of his strategy to convince himself that nothing was wrong.

In the time I was away at university, Luke’s problems became fairly dark and twisty. The year after I left home, although it was probably far sooner if he was honest, he became a heroin addict. For the first year or so, my parents didn’t know; all they knew was that he smoked weed and occasionally nicked their belongings. For a long while when I was at university, I was coming home to try to look after him. We only ever confided in Joe, our older brother, mainly when Luke had got into some sort of trouble I couldn’t get him out of. I tried to pay his debts, keep his secrets. I just tried to be with him as much as I could, as if somehow watching him all the time would magically make it better.

Anyone who has ever lived with a drug addict will know that they are impossible to look after. Fights are the most common outcome of any attempt to care. The addict will put you at risk without even a thought, lying to you constantly. I wonder if, when they tell you they need money for bus fare or new shoes for a job interview, they actually believe it is true themselves. Last time I got on a bus it didn’t cost a tenner, but a small bag of heroin costs exactly that.

I wanted so desperately to be the person who helped Luke. When you believe you can stand up to anything, that bravery and courage will solve all your problems, it is heart-crushing when no matter what you do, nothing gets better. There is no doubt that my experiences with my brother were my education: they gave me the best training and ultimately the drive to have a career working with vulnerable people. It is no surprise that every day of my working life since has been spent trying to improve the lot of people whom society fails to understand and protect. To so many people, junkies, rebellious teens, battered wives, refugees, or people with severe and enduring mental health problems and trauma are ‘other’. My experiences with Luke showed me that they were ‘us’. I spent my childhood and early adulthood speaking up for my brother, trying to be his voice; it made me realise that people who don’t have a bolshie sister or a close family might need a voice too. Every time I stand up in the House of Commons, I try to speak for people who are forgotten; I try to adjust attitudes and end prejudices. I think every family has a Luke, every family has something dark and sad; if more people spoke up about it, perhaps we could make all the families who are struggling feel like their efforts were less futile.

Luke is thirty-seven now. I am wary of saying too much, but at the time of me writing this, he is well. He is clean from the drugs and is being a good enough partner, a pretty good dad, an awesome uncle, an okay brother and an average son. I will reserve judgement about how far he has come. I have spent much of my life feeling hope, pride and disappointment like a revolving door. I’ve learnt to take each day at a time and just be glad when I don’t end up in A&E or searching my house to see what he has nicked when he pops over.

My childhood and coming of age was a rich tapestry full of brave characters not afraid to make their voices heard. There were times when I followed the crowd, allowed myself to become someone else’s idea of who I should be. People write to me and say they wish they could be more like me, that I am so brave, so willing to say ‘sod it’ to the world, but I wasn’t always like that. I’ve followed the crowd, I’ve let men tell me what to do and think. I’d like to do something sterner than tweet my sixteen-year-old self; she needs a proper talking-to. As they get older, women often cast themselves in roles they think are expected of them and push aside their own sense of self, put themselves last in the queue. When I was trying to look after Luke, I should also have tried to look after myself a bit better, seen myself as a patient instead of always the nurse. When my first boyfriend didn’t want to change anything about his life, I should have been less willing just to throw my lot in with his. If I hadn’t been worrying about him, spending all my time and money keeping our relationship together, I might have used my time at university to do something worthwhile, join in, discover stuff. Even the bravest, most self-assured little girls in society all too easily become stereotypical nursemaids. I’m not saying we shouldn’t take on caring roles in our families, I’m not saying we shouldn’t bend and be flexible. I am saying that we should never let young girls’ voices be stifled because the cool kids take the mick, and that women shouldn’t automatically be the ones who step up and do all the caring.

I have various tattoos that were once upon a time decorations to celebrate parts of my beautiful body. There’s a small Chinese symbol (I know, it was the mid-nineties) on my belly that I had done when I was fifteen. Then, it was about an inch from my belly button; today it’s drifted a long way left, about six inches from where it started its clichéd life. I also have what is affectionately called a ‘tramp stamp’ of lotus flowers at the very bottom of my back. I’ve no idea where that has ended up as I can’t see it, and for this I am grateful.

I once had a perfect midriff, and these markings were designed to draw the eye to my assets. Make no mistake, this is exactly what I thought my midriff was: an asset. I think people assume that a self-assured feminist like me has always been a bastion of high-kicking body confidence. In fact I was the same as every woman or girl, putting my worth into the way I looked. When my body was the conventional sort of perfect – big boobs, tiny waist, hourglass perfection – I was confident about it, but not for my own sake: I was entirely dedicated to the idea of male gaze. I even had a scratch-and-sniff belly top, with strawberries emblazoned across my bust. For me, the days of girl power were anything but. I knew as a teenager and a young woman that I had something to be envied by women and desired by men. Even better, I thought, when men much older than I was seemed to marvel at my physique. I never appreciated how healthy I was, how I could run a hundred metres in just under fourteen seconds or swim for miles and miles without stopping. These days I climb a flight of stairs in Westminster and need a sit-down. My health was never at the forefront of my mind.

Recently I was sitting on my usual Wednesday-night train from London back home to Birmingham. Seated opposite me were two women of African origin in Islamic dress. I assumed they were Somali, although I have no evidence for this other than the fact that, having lived all my life in one of the UK’s most diverse cities, I can recognise certain physical aspects as well as cultural trinkets that point to a person’s origin. They were quiet and snoozing. Sensible women.

Across the aisle from us sat about ten young people emblazoned with the livery of the phone shop EE. They were all in their late teens or early twenties, all from London, and were travelling, I think, to some EE training event in the Midlands. They were not quiet or snoozing. They initially caught my attention because, while they were loud, I struggled to decipher what they were saying, mainly because I could only understand one word in five. There was a lot of ‘fam’ and ‘bare’ being thrown around. In Parliament, in comparison, I am undoubtedly in the younger, more connected group of people. This is no benchmark; it’s not difficult to be relatively in tune with the zeitgeist when the average age of your colleagues is fifty.