Jo Swinson is perhaps the least well known of the politicians on whom
the fate of Brexit and the future of the UK could rest. A Scot who went
to university in England (but not Oxbridge – she studied Management at
the LSE) she does not come across as a typical politician. For many,
she is a breath of fresh air, but that’s mainly because few voters had
ever heard of her before she became leader of the Liberal Democrats
on July 22nd 2019, two days before Boris Johnson became prime
minister. !
What does she stand for? It’s not only the general public who still
know relatively little about her. !
Her rise to national prominence was rapid but she is no political
newcomer. She first stood for parliament aged 21, fighting Deputy
Prime Minister John Prescott’s seat of Hull East for the Lib Dems.
When Swinson was elected as MP for her hometown seat of East
Dumbartonshire in 2005 she became the youngest member of the
House of Commons and the first to have been born in the 1980s. With
a brief interlude from 2015-17, when she lost the seat to the SNP, she
has been there ever since. !
She gained brief notoriety in 2009 during the expenses scandal, when
the Telegraph thought it had caught her out fiddling her travel costs.
Why had her travel expenses gone up so sharply in 2006, just a year
after she became an MP? ‘I stopped being eligible for a young person’s
railcard,’ was her answer. !
From 2012-15 she was a junior business minister in the Coalition
government, serving as Under-Secretary of State for Employment
Relations and Postal Affairs. This is enough for the Labour Party to try
to tar her as another closet Tory, deeply implicated in the Coalition’s
austerity program. !
As a government minister she voted for the full range of austerity
measures, including some of the most unpopular, such as the bedroom
!1 tax. She has since said she regrets this.
At the same time, she had little choice. All government ministers are
meant to vote for all government policies. The only alternative
is to resign. !
Swinson has been most explicit since then in disavowing Nick Clegg’s
broken promise on tuition fees, when he went back on a personal and
Lib Dem manifesto commitment not to raise them. Asked how she
would have handled the problem if she had been leader, Swinson now
says: ‘I wouldn’t break the promise in the first place … I remember
how I felt in the pit of my stomach when I heard what we planned to
do, and I’ve learned to trust my gut instinct, and never again fail to
challenge a decision that I believed to be wrong.’
! Traditionally, smaller parties have had a
fairly easy ride with extravagant manifesto commitments, because
it was unlikely they would ever be put to the test in government.
Coalition politics makes that much more dangerous. Swinson seems to
be saying she would be more careful about what she would promise.
Whether she can resist the temptation to entice disaffected voters
with juicy offerings remains to be seen.
! Labour have also tried to tie Swinson to the
group of Lib Dems who paved the way for a coalition with the Conservatives
by publishing the Orange Book in 2004, which promoted a free-market
version of liberalism, emphasising personal choice. Putting
Swinson in with this crowd is a bit of a stretch: in 2004 she was
not even an MP. !I
t is more plausible to see Swinson’s role from 2010-2015 as simply that
of a junior career politician trying to make her way. Like Ed Miliband
during the New Labour years, she was doing what she had to do to get
on. That means she is probably more vulnerable to another charge,
one which did Miliband far greater damage than accusations of being a
closet Blairite. As with Miliband when he became Labour leader in
2010, politics is the only significant job Swinson has ever had.
! Being married to a career politician, as Swinson
is, doesn’t help. Her husband Duncan Hames was a Lib Dem MP until
2015, and joined the Coalition government as Nick Clegg’s parliamentary
private secretary. !2
In an age of populism, having spent your professional life in and around
Westminster – as both Swinsons have – makes you an insider, when
being an outsider is a far better pitch. !
Swinson knows this. She has said that her earliest political hero was
not a politician at all but the businesswoman and campaigner Anita
Roddick, who founded the Body Shop in the 1980s. Swinson wants to
present herself less as a politician with a political philosophy than as a
campaigner with a social message: equality, environmentalism and
openness, including being open to a return to Europe. She has said she
will not enter government with populists or ideologues, among whom
she includes Nigel Farage, Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson.
! A more recent political hero is Jacinda Arden,
the New Zealand Prime Minister. Swinson said during her campaign
for the Lib Dem leadership: ‘The courage, humanity and compassion [Arden]
demonstrated after the terror attacks showed the kind of leader
she is. She is someone who understands the incredible power they
have as a figurehead to shape how people respond to those situations.’
! But it’s worth remembering that Arden only
got to be prime minister in New Zealand by entering government with Winston
Peters, her deputy and leader of the New Zealand First Party,
which is often described as populist and nationalist. When Arden took
six weeks maternity leave in 2018, it was Peters who stood in as PM.
Peters has advocated immigration curbs, voted against same sex
marriage and favours more direct democracy in the form of referendums.
If Swinson won’t work with populists and ideologues, she can’t
be Jacinda Arden. !
Swinson does also have one thing in common with Johnson, whether
she likes it or not. Both party leaders have small majorities in their
constituencies of East Dumbartonshire and Uxbridge respectively: just
over 5000 in each case. That means both are vulnerable at the next
election, where they will be targeted by opposition parties hoping for
a massive scalp. Party leaders can usually rely on big majorities at
home – John Major, when he was PM, had one of the safest seats in
England, as did Tony Blair. Not these two. !
!3 Swinson’s political persona – as a recognisable
human being, whose favourite show is Fleabag, who has two young
kids and a peanut allergy to boot – suits a time when party allegiances
are fraying and personal style and issue-based politics often matter
more for voters than traditional loyalties. But that means it’s
also a time when big name politicians are vulnerable to campaigns to
take them out in their own constituencies.
! The unpredictability of current politics has
given Swinson her big chance. It’s also what makes her vulnerable.