When Gillian Keegan was elected to be Chichester’s first female MP, the last thing she imagined she would be doing is feeding a pint of beer to a horse.
“You feed it straight from the pint”, she explains, “I was actually really good at it, I didn’t spill a drop.”
While at pains to point out that it is traditional to feed Dray horses alcohol as a reward for towing children and beer kegs around, Ms Keegan admits she is disappointed that she will not be able to put her “bonkers” new skill to good use.
“There’s only about four working Dray horses in the in the country so I can’t take it up as a career,” she says. But Ms Keegan, 49, is still reeling from the career change that flipped her life “180 degrees” in June’s general election.
She won the seat of Chichester in West Sussex for the Conservatives with a 22,600-vote majority and left behind a 27-year career as a globetrotting executive in the manufacturing, technology and banking industries, with stints in Japan and Spain. She regularly clocked up more than 200 flights a year.
“I loved it. My Sundays used to be catching a flight to somewhere, whizzing around the world doing deals. I did 27 years of it, but another 27 years may have been less exciting.”
An international business career and a future as a Conservative MP was not the life Ms Keegan had dreamt of growing up in Knowsley, Merseyside, surrounded by the “chaos” of the miners’ strikes, militant Labour-run councils and a family of staunch, working class socialists. “Everybody around me was Labour,” she recalls.
It was only after she left her failing comprehensive school at 16 with ten O-levels — a “miracle” — and secured an apprenticeship at a local car factory that she began to rail against “petty” industrial disputes and her political convictions began to take shape.
“I was 19 the first time I got to vote. Margaret Thatcher was in power at that time.” But despite a belief that socialism’s economic model is “doomed to failure” in an era of globalisation and competitiveness, Ms Keegan was more convinced by the Iron Lady’s ideas than by her personality.
“I mean she sounded weird. So if you’re a young girl sat in Liverpool and there’s this woman with a handbag, I wouldn’t say I was inspired but I was interested in what she had to say and I resonated with it.”
She is adamant that party-based tribalism hides a preference for Conservative policies, and compares it to blind taste testing on fizzy drinks.
“Everyone thought they liked Coke and everyone chose Pepsi — if you did a blind taste challenge on the political parties everyone would choose Conservative.”
Spurred by a disillusionment with New Labour to join the Tories in 1998, it wasn’t until a chance meeting at the theatre with Baroness Anne Jenkin, who co-founded the Conservative Women2Win organisation with Theresa May, that Ms Keegan began to seriously consider a career in Westminster.
She served as a councillor in Chichester for three years and took over as director of Women2Win after undertaking her own “mini-apprenticeship” to prepare herself for life as an MP, which she has since discovered is “like drinking water from a fire hydrant — it’s kind of all rushing at you at once.”
Ms Keegan has spent the summer recess sifting through an “overwhelming” backlog of casework, visiting schools and handing out flip-flops to relieve late night revellers of their high heels as part of a City Angels patrol.
She has also heard concerns voiced by farmers in Chichester, which voted 51-49 to leave in the EU referendum, over the impact of Brexit on the seasonal workers who arrive every year to pick peppers, herbs and salad leaves from the area’s glass house farms.
“This year they’re finding they’ve got lower numbers applying to come to the UK, that’s largely because of the because the pound is not worth as much as it was.”
Since her return to Westminster last week, Ms Keegan has begun preparations for her role as a newly-elected member of the powerful public accounts select committee.
“I think I’ll get myself feeling comfortable enough to contribute a lot more.” She has already formed alliances with colleagues of the 2017 and 2015 intake keen to put their mark on the party before the 2022 election and says that work is under way to feed their concerns into the chancellor ahead of this year’s budget.
“There’s a number of us that are working to put together a submission for the Treasury to consider in the Autumn statement.”
Among Ms Keegan’s priorities will be a push for more of the higher level apprenticeships that taught her “the art of the possible”, coupled with better careers advice, which is “rubbish in most schools”.
Ms Keegan’s maiden speech to parliament outlined her commitment to improving social mobility, but it also revealed a surprising fact about her personal life.
John Bercow, the speaker of the house, revealed that she was godmother to two of his children as a result of his friendship with her husband Michael, a technology executive and former Conservative councillor.
“They met when they both worked on Lambeth council 32 years ago,” she says. “They chose to live in Lambeth because they wanted to go on the most militant tendency council in London which was Red Ted Knight’s. It was their goal to rid the world of socialism.”
The families regularly enjoy games of “crazy croquet’ at Ms Keegan’s home in Petworth and have shared skiing holidays together. On one memorable occasion, she recalls having to help the speaker overcome a phobia of chairlifts.
“We were on the plane going out skiing and he said ‘the only thing I can’t bear is chairlifts’. I said ‘how do you think we’re going to get up the mountain? You’re going to have to get in a chair’. He was terrified of heights on the chairlift, so I had to coach him, but he overcame his fear and he did ski.”
But is the speaker of the House of Commons any good on the slopes? “I wouldn’t go that far. He and my husband were equally matched, so they skied together.”
Times article click the link below:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/gillian-keegan-from-working-class-me…