Last week Newsnight ran an item on the new Tory priority list, which is apparently crammed full of “glamorous” candidates. Even though I’m only a novelist (perhaps the Newsnight bar for “glamour” is set pretty low) I was listed as one of them, although I did appreciate their using a photo of me taken when I was 19 years old, and not a mum of two in her mid-thirties! Ten years ago, if you told me I’d be a Conservative parliamentary candidate, I would probably have laughed. I’d just joined the Labour party.
Though my family was active in our local association, and my mother later went on to be a county councillor in East Sussex — I remember idolising Margaret Thatcher throughout my childhood — I don’t have the sort of background from which Tory candidates are usually made.
Student politics put me off: I loved the debating at Oxford, but found the electioneering unpleasantly vicious. Anyway, a Conservative MP, I believed, needed to lead an uncontroversial life, be a lawyer or a banker. Instead my heroes were record business entrepreneurs such as Sharon Osbourne and David Geffen.
She was the legendary rock manager who ensured Ozzy’s career didn’t die with Black Sabbath, he was a maverick from New York who had founded two record companies and discovered the likes of Guns N’ Roses. My heroes wore black leather jackets and tattoos, not pinstripe suits. I gave up the idea of politics, and applied for an internship at MTV.
When I finally broke into the record business, after a couple of miserable stints in PR and classical music, I loved it. I was working for Sony Europe as a junior in marketing, with a job that involved going on the road with rock bands. My past academic life — I had read Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse as part of my degree in early English — and student politics seemed remote. I was wearing sunglasses, going to gigs, flying round Europe and getting paid for it. But even if I had landed a dream job, I discovered it wasn’t quite enough. I wanted to do something creative myself.
As a teenager, I was an inveterate bookworm. I wrote my first story at five and won the Cadbury’s Young Poet of the Year competition at 18. Although I loved literature, I always had a soft spot for pop fiction. Novels such as Lace and Kane and Abel were my dose of escapism at Oxford, in between decoding medieval English texts. I had always wanted to write a fun, glitzy, retro-Eighties blockbuster. In the end, it seemed stupid not to at least have a go.
I sent my sample chapter to 13 agents, signed with the best one, and on my 22nd birthday I got a book deal with Orion. There was no way you could write novels and take two flights a day, so I quit Sony. For a 22-year-old girl, sharing a dingy flat in Swiss Cottage with holes in the plaster, my new contract seemed like a hell of a lot of money. My first book, Career Girls, was a bestseller, as were the following seven, including the latest, Sparkles. I have now sold more than 2m books. All of them feature strong women.
I remained conservative, but I wasn’t happy with the Tory party. Lady Thatcher, my heroine, had been kicked out, and the Tory government that replaced her was dissolving in infighting. The parallel with the Blair government of today is striking.
Furthermore, the “back to basics” campaign had been launched, and it made me uneasy. In my early twenties, I was going through a phase of rejecting the Catholic faith of my youth. I had no problem writing the standard bedroom scenes usually found in airport books. And if I wasn’t going to take moral advice from a priest, why would I take it from a politician? The back to basics line of thinking seemed profoundly unconservative — big government poking into people’s private lives and morals. Then there was Tony Blair. As David Cameron has pointed out, Blair’s great gift was to accept that the reforms of Thatcherism were not going to be reversed — because the British people didn’t want them to be.
The Tories had comprehensively won the battle of ideas. On trade union reform, nationalisation, unilateral disarmament, punitive taxation, right to buy, and so on, Blair admitted that there was no going back. He spoke of keeping spending to Tory levels, ditching the commitment to high taxes. It was even reported that he had paid his respects to Thatcher. I joined new Labour.
Yet every morning when I went to my computer to write, I saw the postcard of Thatcher that I had pinned up to the side of the monitor with Blu-Tac. I never stopped being a conservative; but I thought Blair was one too. Blair did do one wholly good thing — he gave independence to the Bank of England. But on almost every other issue, I saw I’d been taken in by the packaging. Blair was a Eurofanatic. He soon exhibited the anti-civil liberties streak that is now out of control. He let Gordon Brown raid the country’s pensions so that now we’ll all have to work longer; he instituted chaos instead of a fair immigration system.
I rejoined the Tories and became active, leafleting for my mother in the local elections, donating money, joining bodies and associations. During 2001, when I was living in New York with my American husband Anthony, I actually flew back to England just so I could canvass and work in the general election. I had a friend who was fighting a Shropshire marginal; I had to do something.
Meanwhile, I was going through a personal revolution. I slowly started to rediscover my Catholic faith, which meant changing my own behaviour. In my late twenties, I came to accept Catholic teaching, including on sexuality and marriage — it was a slow, gradual realisation, more than any overnight switch. Eventually, I realised that my personal moral code meant that I could not write any more passionate scenes. But conventional wisdom says they sell novels. I didn’t know how my publishers would take it; I remember having a stiff drink and then ringing them up. But they were very supportive, and my sales actually jumped. Anthony and I had two babies very close together, and I concentrated on them; we were moving home to England, but there was no chance, with a toddler and a newborn, of doing that in time for the last election.
But when I was invited to Oxford to a debate about Conservatisim in March 2004 I jumped at the chance. The guest of honour was Oliver Letwin, then shadow chancellor. And Theresa May, the former chairman of the party, was fighting to get more women to apply to the candidates’ list. I started to think about it. Maybe I could be more than an activist, eventually. Then Cameron was elected. In his very first speech as leader, he promised to end the scandal of the Tories’ lack of women MPs. I felt encouraged to apply, at least. True, I’d never been a candidate — but I had been a supporter and an activist all through the wilderness years. I wasn’t a lawyer or a banker — but I was made to feel that experience as a young mother, and as a popular novelist who appeals to and sells to women, was also valuable.
As a mother of two small children, one of each, I’m in a fortunate position; my husband runs his own business and I’m a writer so we are able to share the childcare, which has meant being able to raise them by ourselves, without nannies. Few women are as lucky as I am. As a politician, I would be keen on expanding the choices mothers have. There’s far too much lecturing and judging of women, of mums who choose to stay home and of mums who choose to work.
I am also concerned about plunging standards in our schools and — particularly — with bullying. As a bookish girl with thick, ugly glasses I was bullied myself. I believe there is an epidemic of playground bullying going on. I’d like to tackle that. Some people have expressed dismay that priority candidates are going to be “parachuted in” to constituencies. I can only speak for myself, but if I were to be so fortunate as to be selected for a constituency, I would move there immediately. It would become my home, the place where we would raise our children. Writing gives you lots of free time; I would expect to be out canvassing, leafleting, speaking, and knocking on doors six days a week. Tory candidates need to show total commitment.
Every candidate on the list has been shown a great degree of trust. I am determined to earn it.
