The last time Jacqui Smith had a dance lesson was when she was six or seven and her mother took her to a Scottish dancing group. She wore a kilt and took a few exams, but that was it. In the intervening 50 years, she says with a laugh, “my dancing has really been about family weddings – discos where you dance around your handbag – and prancing around the kitchen”. Smith – a former Labour MP, the first female home secretary, a scalp of the expenses scandal – is a contestant on this year’s Strictly Come Dancing. When we speak on the phone, it is after a long first day of training with her partner, Anton du Beke. “I think he was pleasantly surprised with my ability to pick things up,” she says. “I think we’re going to have slightly more in the dance than perhaps he feared.”
Du Beke, Strictly’s gentlemanly dancer, traditionally gets the show’s “comedy” celebrity (another political entrant, Ann Widdecombe, filled the role in 2010). Did it feel like an insult to be paired with him? The 57-year-old laughs. “Anton got to the final last year and he’s very clear about that and very ambitious for us, as am I.” He is also – how to put this kindly? – not hellbent on stealing his partners away from their husbands. Is she relieved at not having to face the “Strictly curse”, whereby the frisson between the dancers and their partners becomes too much to bear? Smith cackles, then adds: “I won’t have it said that Anton is not gorgeous. But he is happily married and I am in a newish, but lovely, relationship. Trust us, there will be no Strictly curse.”
It has been a strange and unsettling year for all of us – and more so for Smith than for some. In January, it emerged that her 33-year marriage had ended. Her role as chair of University Hospitals Birmingham NHS foundation trust (from which she has stepped down temporarily) has been particularly challenging, for obvious reasons. So this feels like a new phase in her life, she says. Strictly – fun, different, profile-building – came along at the right time. She has developed “a sense of perspective” and more confidence as she has got older. “I think, in some ways, I worry less and I have more joy now,” she says. “I’ve had a very lucky, fulfilled life, but I’m very happy and joyful about the opportunities at the moment and that I think are still to come.”
She says it is partly about sending the message, especially to women her age, that “there are many new ways, physically and emotionally, that you can reinvent yourself in your late 50s. I hope that’s what I’m going to prove. I’ve had some difficult times professionally, I’ve had difficult times personally over the last two or three years, and this is a chance to smile and live again.” Does she mean the end of her marriage? “Yes. I’ve been very sad about the end of my marriage, but in some ways it means you have to think about new starts.”
In truth, Smith has been in the process of reinventing herself for a few years. I interviewed her briefly when she was the home secretary and, goodness, she was boring. Even by politicians’ standards, she seemed stilted and humourless. This liberated Smith is very different. In the LBC podcast For the Many, which she hosts with the political pundit Iain Dale, and in her appearances on ITV’s Good Morning Britain, she has revealed herself to be outgoing and warm – with a filthy sense of humour. On the phone, she is funny and self-deprecating; although she still takes a politician’s approach to tackling questions, it feels as if she is at least trying to be open.
Has her personality changed, or was it the constraints of the job? “Home secretary is a serious role,” she says. “There is not a lot of time for laughing – and that’s right. And, of course, [being in] government means that you are quite often defending a government position. But if you ask people who were in cabinet with me, they will say that I was somebody who would have enjoyed a laugh and, I hope, was the same then as I am now. What I’m free to do now is to be that person.”
Smith was part of the wave of women who entered parliament with Labour’s victory in 1997. As a child, she wanted to be prime minister. “So, to that extent, I failed,” she says, a smile in her voice. She grew up in Malvern, Worcestershire, where her parents were Labour councillors. “There was lots of discussion and argument around the dinner table,” she says. “And there was a lot of involvement in politics day-to-day – I used to think that election day was one of the best days of the year, alongside Christmas Day.”
A clever child, she went from her state school to Oxford, where she read politics, philosophy and economics, before becoming an economics teacher. Once an MP, she quickly moved through the ranks, became a minister in 1999 and chief whip in 2006. When Gordon Brown became prime minister, he promoted her to home secretary – making her the first woman to hold the position. She dismisses the view that she was authoritarian (she pushed for ID cards and 42-day detention for terror suspects). “One person’s authoritarian home secretary is another person’s …” She trails off. “I said right at the very beginning that there’s no bigger honour than being responsible for the security and safety of the British people in a whole range of different ways. That was at the heart of the policies that I implemented – not authoritarianism.” She will not acknowledge a through-line from Labour’s immigration policies – under Smith, the numbers of immigration officers and detention centres rose markedly – to the Tories’ “hostile environment”.
In the past, she has complained, justly, about her treatment by the media, elements of which often focused on what she was wearing or used gendered language to speak about her (“stroppy” was one word). When the MPs’ expenses scandal broke and it emerged that Smith had claimed for two pornographic films that her husband had watched, she became an early focus. “There were elements of it that were gendered, but, at the same time, a lot of my treatment came about because I was the home secretary and anybody who has that position will be in the public eye,” she says. “I made mistakes and mistakes were made around me. Because of my status, I probably took a bigger amount of flak than others who, in some cases, did worse than I did. But I have moved on from that and, actually, what I feel is that women in politics now have a tougher time than I had.”
Among her several jobs is chair of the Jo Cox Foundation, the organisation founded in the aftermath of the murder of the Labour MP in 2016 to create, among other things, a more civil public life. Smith is concerned about the abuse that MPs get, particularly on social media.
“That whole sphere of public life is much more toxic and potentially difficult now than it was in my day. I took a fair amount of abuse – some of it was deserved, and some wasn’t – but I think, almost across the board, MPs have a much tougher time now. What worries me is that it discourages people from wanting to be part of our democracy.” Particularly women? “It disproportionately affects women, and it disproportionately affects black women, as we’ve seen in terms of the abuse Diane Abbott faces, and Dawn Butler recently. It’s disproportionate for women, disproportionate for women of colour, and it’s worse now than it has been previously and I’m not willing to stand by and see that happen.”
She would like to see the end of anonymity online, at least behind the scenes, “so that, while [people] can remain unknown in public, if they perpetuate hate or threaten online, they can be identified by law enforcement if necessary”. She also supports the designation of misogyny as a hate crime.
Politics need not be “gentle”, she says. “But that doesn’t mean dehumanising people, being abusive, invading people’s personal space. It also means encouraging women to step into the public arena – and then protecting them when they’re there.” Would she go into politics now, were she starting again? “I think and hope I still would. But I might have thought more about it than I did at the time, because you are putting yourself out there. More importantly, I want other women to think politics is the place where they belong, where they can make a difference.”
There have not been enough women involved in decision-making during the Covid-19 crisis, she says. “I think it has been a problem for this government’s handling of it that there has been such a small, male group of ministers and advisers making decisions. I can’t believe that if there had been more women around the table, there wouldn’t have been somebody saying, for example: ‘If you’re going to tell people on a Sunday night to go to work on a Monday, it might be quite a good idea if you’d thought about whether or not they’ve got childcare or whether or not they’re caring for elderly relatives.’”
Likewise, she says it should have been a time to bring in people from all parties. “If you’ve got the biggest public health and political crisis probably in my lifetime, I think it’s a good idea if you bring all the talents in to help you to solve that. Boris Johnson has been too narrow in the people he’s had around him and he’s made less good decisions because of that.”
Smith resigned as home secretary in June 2009 and lost her seat the following year. She had been politically vulnerable for some time, but the expenses scandal finished her off. Claiming her sister’s London home as her main residence, which allowed her to claim expenses on the family home in her constituency – while not against MPs’ allowances rules – looked bad.
But it was the revelation that she had claimed for two adult films that became the source of prurient humiliation. Her husband, who was employed as her parliamentary assistant, had to make an excruciating public apology for embarrassing his wife. Even now, a look through the nastier replies to Smith’s tweets confirms people will always associate her with the films. How does she feel about the fact it is so enduring? “I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about what people associate me with; I spend a lot of time worrying about what I can do in terms of continuing public service and the joy that I can have in my life.”
The public storm, she says, “was absolutely horrible. There’s nothing nice about being on the front of the newspapers and, more importantly, there’s nothing nice about your family being on the front of newspapers, but we’ve all survived it.” She did not wallow for long, she says: “You spend a lot of time getting on with your life and doing the best that you can. Sometimes, you have to just keep going, and that’s what I did.”
Her political career did not survive, but her marriage did – at least, until recently. She says they “remain friends … we’re still in each other’s lives, but just in a different way”. Earlier this year, single for the first time in more than three decades, Smith tried online dating. What was that like? She laughs nervously. “I don’t think it’s that easy for anybody to meet a new partner after being, in my case, happily married for 30 years. I don’t like to be a dinosaur so, yes, I did do some online dating and met some very lovely people.” Did they know who she was? “I haven’t had that many dates, but they had all worked out who I was before I met them.”
She adds: “I’m a human being; I’m not just my public persona. Anybody who dates later on in life, you will bring with you a career, a lot of different experiences, but in the end you’re just a human being who’s looking for somebody else to share time and fun with. In that way, you’re not any different to anybody else.” She has a new partner who, she says, has “proved his absolute worth by buying me a vibrating foot spa” to restore her feet after a hard day’s hoofing.
What is she hoping to get from Strictly? “A glitterball, obviously,” says Smith of the winner’s trophy, then laughs. “However long it goes on, it has proved to me that it is possible to find new adventures and new fulfilling opportunities at this age – and long may it continue. There is a sort of feeling that you get to a certain age and you should, as a woman, fade into the background. Well, sorry, we’re not doing that any more.”
