Read an Excerpt
Chapter One: 11 September 2021: Emma Looking back, it was the interview in the Guardian Weekend that started everything. Or rather, the fact I was on the cover. Exquisitely photographed, I looked more like an Oscar-nominated actress than a Labour politician.
It was hard not to be seduced by it all. The designer trouser suit elongated my legs, as did the suede heels: something I resisted at first because I always wore flats. But heels connoted power, according to the stylist, and it was a trope I chose to accept in that one reckless moment (the first of several reckless moments). In any case, I hoped the heels were balanced out by the message on my crisp white T-shirt: Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History. It was something I vehemently believed. Only, when I saw myself on the front cover—with that defiant slash of red lipstick, my armor against a hostile world, and my thick bob blow-dried into a dark halo—I hardly recognized myself. I’d morphed into someone else entirely. Sex and power were the not-so-subtle subtexts of that photo.
Sex, power, and unequivocal ambition.
Even before the publication, I’d felt uneasy.
“Crikey!” I said when Dan, the photographer, showed me a couple of images through the preview screen on the back of his camera. They were tiny—three inches by two—and yet they were arresting. The back of my neck prickled. “I look pretty formidable.”
“You look strong,” Esther Enfield, the paper’s newly appointed political editor, reassured me. “Strong and determined. It fits the interview. Illustrates what you were saying perfectly. You didn’t pussyfoot around with your message, and neither does this.”
“I don’t know. Can I see it again?” I leaned toward Dan, suddenly conscious of his physicality. He towered over me, long-limbed and energetic, like a teenager oozing testosterone, though he must have been in his early thirties. His breath smelled of artisan coffee.
“You look great.” He was brisk, and I sensed his eagerness to get on with it.
“I just look a bit... hard?” I lingered on a shot of me in a butter-soft black leather jacket, the collar framing my unsmiling face. He’d captured a side to me I didn’t like to acknowledge. Was I really as ruthless as he’d made me appear?
Esther shrugged, which made me feel foolish. In her mid-forties, like me, she knew what she was talking about and had sound instincts. Besides, this was the left-leaning Guardian, a paper more in tune with my politics, not the more right-wing Daily Mail.
“This will be good for your career, I promise.” She seemed to read my mind, and then she gave me a proper, warm smile. And so, because this was my first national newspaper feature, because I didn’t want to look weak, because I was flattered, I suppose, that the Guardian thought me sufficiently interesting to put me on their magazine’s front cover, I let myself be swayed by her arguments. I let myself believe what I wanted to believe.
Besides, as Esther said, the photo would be balanced by what was inside: a sharp attack on the government’s austerity measures, apparent in my Portsmouth South constituency, where the need for food banks had proliferated in the last couple of years; a critique of my party leader, Harry Godwin, as “ineffective and prone to self-indulgence”; and details of my private member’s bill calling for anonymity for victims of revenge porn—the reason I’d agreed to this piece. It was a serious interview, worth doing, despite knowing it would irritate more established colleagues, and the photos would be seen through this lens.
“It’s a fantastic shot,” Dan, stubbled and artfully disheveled, said. Later I wondered if this was the reason I caved in so easily: this simple flattery from a younger man who had coaxed me into being photographed like this. “Just a couple more. Head up, that’s it. That’s perfect. Sweet.” Was I subliminally so desperate for male admiration? At forty-four, so conscious of becoming sexually invisible that, despite everything I stood for, I let myself be flattered by and play up to his uncompromisingly male gaze?
“Okay. Let’s go for it,” I told Esther. “As you say: no point pussyfooting around.”
“Absolutely. Honestly, the pics are arresting, and it’s precisely because of this that readers will spend time over this interview, and your colleagues will have to listen to what you say.”
And so I quashed my critical inner voice: the one that used the waspish tones of my late grandmother, with a smattering of my ex-husband David’s caution, and that always gathered in volume until I felt like shaking my head to be rid of it.
Pride goeth before a fall.
Of course, later I would regret this, bitterly, deeply, because that cover shot would be used repeatedly: the stock image that would accompany every Emma Webster story from that moment on. It would be the picture used when I was arrested, when I was charged, when the trial began. And this would rankle because, far from capturing the true me, it was a brittle, knowing version: red lips slightly parted in a way that couldn’t fail to seem distinctly sexual; gaze defiant; a clear, almost brazen challenge in what the article would describe as my “limpid, dark eyes.” A far cry from how I thought of myself, or who I’d ever been: a history teacher at the local high school; Flora’s mum; or a junior politician who tried so very hard to serve her constituents while campaigning on feminist issues more generally.
A picture paints a thousand words. And yet this one reduced me to nothing more than a glamorous mug shot: my challenge to the camera not so different from the insolent expression captured in every custody photo snapped by the police.
Nolite te Bastardes Carborundorum. Don’t let the bastards get you down. I had an old T-shirt with that message. Perhaps I should have suggested to the stylist that I wear it?
It would have been incendiary, of course. A clear middle finger to the trolls, the media, the critics in my own party—let alone my political opponents—who were poised, even then, to see me stumble.
Had I known what would happen, I might have put it straight on.
Show More
