Perils of politics parsed in cautionary thriller

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This article was published 27/08/2022 (1499 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

What can it be like going to work every day, knowing someone may be waiting there to assault you? Checking to see if there’s a bottle of water on your desk, in case someone who’s threatened to throw acid in your face is in the line to see you? Rearranging the chairs in your office so that they slow an attacker, enabling you to exit by a special safety door?

Maybe it’s not a work day and you can relax — at least until curiosity gets the better of you, and you check the newspapers and social media for some passing mention of a goal you have achieved. Instead you find your face and your efforts taken apart, autopsy style, and so you escape your stress by hopping on your bicycle… but down the road, there’s an oddly aggressive cyclist who appears to be stalking you, and…

That is the life of Emma Webster, former high school teacher, now a divorcée, mother of a fragile teenage girl and Labour MP for Portsmouth South, London. Properly staged and photographed, she is a graceful package of stylish power, intense in her commitment to serve her constituents, especially poor and vulnerable women. This is not a popular priority.

Among the relationships to balance are those with her insecure daughter, her resentful ex-husband, his judgmental new partner and of course Britain’s tabloid press, allegedly the world’s most dangerous, members of which smile and smile and play the villain.

British novelist Sarah Vaughan did not so much invent Emma Webster as assemble her. Vaughan, an Oxford English graduate, didn’t need IKEA-like instructions; she spent 11 years reporting on the antics of British politics for the Guardian before leaving to write political fiction in 2008.

“I’m attuned to doublespeak, the slipperiness and moral ambiguity,” she commented in a recent interview. Vaughan is also a superb storyteller and a natural master of suspense.

She was inspired to write Reputation by the actual experiences of female MPs, one of whom confided that she had nine locks on the door of her home.

Sadly and dramatically, Vaughan makes it clear that misogyny lives in the halls of electoral politics, and shows no sign of moving out soon. Misogyny’s target may be female politicians, but its true victim is democracy itself, which is disempowered and diminished by the absence of female candidates who have been chased away from politics.

The trouble with hatred of any variety is that it tends to corrupt everyone in the room and can even lead (accidentally?) to mayhem and murder. MP Baxter is charged with the latter when a tabloid writer is found dead in her apartment. Baxter is an especially unpopular suspect, campaigning as she does against sexual bullying, revenge porn and the online abuse of women and girls.

Sarah Vaughan has woven an acidic cautionary tale for any woman considering entering politics — and, indeed, for any person who takes the right to vote seriously. Her first thriller, Anatomy of a Scandal, has just been filmed as a six-episode series for Netflix. Reputation, Vaughan’s gripping fifth novel, has already been optioned for the small screen.

Lesley Hughes is the author of The Dead Candidate’s Report: a Political Memoir.