There has been a well publicised exodus of senior female MPs, yet more women than ever are standing in this election. They explain why

Tucked away in the office of Labour candidate Natalie Fleet is a pop-up wendy house, meant to keep the children of campaign volunteers happy. But on the morning I visit, nobody can play there. In the middle of the night, someone smashed in the windows of her campaign headquarters in Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, showering everything in broken glass. Now the office is out of bounds for volunteers until it can be made safe.

“It’s deliberate, it’s targeted and it’s not very nice; and, unfortunately, in this climate it’s also predictable,” sighs Fleet, sipping a mug of tea amid the wreckage. Yet the prospective Labour MP for Ashfield is still out daily knocking on doors for Labour because for her, the prospect of her home town – which voted heavily for Brexit and where the anger at the failure to deliver it is palpable – turning Tory is both unimaginable and a real possibility.

“I grew up hearing the horror stories of the things the Tories had done to our town,” she says. “My mum worked in a factory that’s now been demolished. My male relatives worked down the pits that are now closed. The Tories did that, and our seat is at risk of being lost to them. We need to have the best possible chance of winning here.”

Who would want to be an MP in this climate? The answer, perhaps unexpectedly, is more women than ever. Despite a well-publicised exodus of senior female politicians quitting politics – from the Tories’ Amber Rudd and Justine Greening to Ashfield’s former Labour MP Gloria de Piero – the next parliament looks as if it could be slightly more diverse in terms of gender and race. More than half of Labour candidates are female, as are a third of Tories; an analysis by the thinktank British Future suggests, for the first time, more ethnic minority women than ethnic minority men could be elected.

However, Sam Smethers, the chief executive of the Fawcett Society, which campaigns for equal representation, warns against getting the bunting out. Two-thirds of the new parliament is still likely to be male. Unless the root causes of under-representation are tackled, Smethers says, the risk is: “We’re just going into a revolving door of more women coming in for a term and saying: ‘I can’t stand this any more, I’m going.’” Yet for all the understandable concern about women being driven out, there is an untold story about those quietly picking up the baton.

Fleet has not come up the easy way. After leaving school at 16 because she was pregnant, she got to university in her early 20s as a mother of two, only to drop out because she found it such a culture shock. “I’d never been anywhere so posh in my life, and I didn’t fit in,” she says.

Back home and looking for somewhere to belong, she joined the Labour party and was promptly taken under the wing of De Piero, who is sitting beside her. De Piero comes from a similarly working-class background and says she instantly saw something special about Fleet.

When De Piero stood down this autumn, Fleet thought hard before seeking the nomination; her husband and older son (she now has four children, aged 19, 16, 11 and six) were worried for her safety. But her driving force is feeling that a teenage mother in Ashfield today would have it even tougher than she did.

“When I was younger and vulnerable and I needed support, I had a government that gave me fantastic support. I had Sure Start nurseries, I had a Sure Start maternity grant, things now we’ve forgotten about (because) they were taken away such a long time ago,” she says, pointing out that she could also rely on a council house and tax credits covering much of her nursery fees. “Somebody in a similar situation now, they’d be queuing for a food bank.”

If the female class of 2019 have one thing in common, irrespective of party, it is a sense of urgency.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Carla Denyer, who is standing for the Green party in Bristol West. Photograph: Ben Birchall/PA

Carla Denyer used to be a wind farm engineer, but became frustrated with changing the world “one turbine at a time”. So, four years ago, she became a Green councillor in Bristol, successfully campaigning for it to become the first British city to declare a climate emergency and aim for net zero carbon emissions by 2030. This December, she is standing for parliament in Bristol West, arguably the Greens’ best chance of a breakthrough.

“Climate change has never been as high up the political agenda as it is now,” she says, sitting among a forest of Green placards in the former hairdresser’s that serves as her campaign headquarters. “That’s been down to a whole set of factors; alarmingly hot summers, we’ve had the Extinction Rebellion movement and the youth climate strike and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that came out a year ago telling us the horrendous impact of even a 1.5C rise.” And with 2030 potentially only two parliaments away, she points out, what incoming MPs do now is critical. “If not now, then when?” chips in the Green party’s Caroline Lucas. Lucas, who is standing for re-election in Brighton, is in town to support Denyer’s campaign.

On paper, Denyer has a mountain to climb; Bristol West saw the largest swing to Labour in the country in 2017, increasing the sitting MP Thangam Debbonaire’s share of the vote by more than 30%. But Denyer argues Jeremy Corbyn’s equivocation on Brexit has tarnished him in this heavily pro-remain city, with Greens who once voted tactically for Labour reluctant to compromise again.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Daisy Cooper is the Lib Dem candidate for St Albans in Hertfordshire. Photograph: Aaron Chown/PA

Across the country, Brexit may be fuelling an angry backlash against MPs, but it has clearly galvanised many into fighting back. “We’ve raised more money, we’re attracting more volunteers than we ever have before,” says Daisy Cooper, the Liberal Democrat candidate for the Tory-held marginal of St Albans in Hertfordshire. “We’ve got people out still at 8pm in the freezing cold, in three coats and two hats, which they wouldn’t do if they didn’t feel there was so much at stake. The future of the country depends on seats like ours.” But at this election, no candidate has a monopoly on that sentiment, even if they all mean different things by it.

For years, Bell Ribeiro-Addy resisted the idea of standing for parliament, having seen first hand what could happen to black women who do. As an aide to the shadow home secretary, Diane Abbott – who endured more abuse than any other MP during the last election – Ribeiro-Addy would regularly open abusive letters in an attempt to shield her boss from the worst of it, or pick up the phone to anonymous callers screaming the N-word.

When Abbott first suggested she think about becoming an MP, she shied away. What changed her mind, she says, was seeing what Abbott achieved by rising above what has been, for her, life-long abuse.

“I’ve seen what it can be if you have a strong black woman who represents her constituents. For me, the opportunity to represent the place where I was born and raised in that exact same way – it’s a privilege,” says Ribeiro-Addy, who is standing for Labour in Streatham, south London.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bell Ribeiro-Addy, who is standing for Labour in Lambeth, south London. Photograph: David Mbiyu/Alamy Stock Photo

“Any MP has to have resilience, but particularly women and black women. Me being trained in that, it would be a waste not to use it.” Now she is excited by the chance to put the socialist policies she has worked on into practice – “We’re the sixth richest country in the world; people shouldn’t be suffering in the way they are” – and the hope that more black women in parliament could change it for the better. “I think it’s really going to change how people are represented and the way in which people treat us. It will make us more of a norm.”

In neighbouring Vauxhall, her Labour colleague Florence Eshalomi is similarly resolute, despite some concerns about how to protect her children, aged four and six, from any fallout.

“I’m not going to be bullied into silence,” says Eshalomi, who, like Ribeiro-Addy, grew up in the neighbourhood she seeks to represent. “We’ve got young boys and girls on the same estate that I grew up on dying, young women being exploited by gang members – I’m going to continue to speak up.”

In a Gloucestershire village pub, Siobhan Baillie emerges from inside voluminous layers of scarf, jumper and coat. The Tory candidate for highly marginal Stroud isn’t afraid of canvassing in this political climate: “I’m a divorce lawyer by trade, so I will still be more popular as a politician.”

Born in north Yorkshire, Baillie grew up on free school meals and left school at 18 to work as a legal secretary; she got her law degree via night school. “It took a long time, but I didn’t go to university, and when my friends were starting training courses – well, I’d had a caseload since I was 18,” she says, sipping lime and soda.

In Stroud, she has forged links with the local further education college. “They’re often kids who have dropped out of school or been excluded, and they’re doing amazing work but they feel like second-class citizens because they weren’t going to uni. If I become MP, I really want to major on that.”

In selecting Baillie, a remain voter who nonetheless now wants Brexit delivered so “we can move on”, her local Conservative association was thinking of the long-term future of its party in Stroud.

Despite fears that the exodus of mainly moderate Tory women would leave the party dominated by hardliners, Baillie cites candidates such as Joy Morrissey in Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire or Laura Farris in Newbury, Berkshire, as examples of women coming in to pick up where others have left off.

That is probably no accident. It is striking how many female candidates credit an existing female politician with mentoring, championing or outright nagging them to stand, suggesting this could be the outgoing generation’s efforts to pass on the torch. As Smethers puts it: “The power of being asked to stand clearly makes a difference. That really comes through in the research.”

Back in Ashfield, De Piero unexpectedly chokes up when asked what it means to be succeeded by Fleet. “I don’t want to swear here and I actually want to cry …” she pauses. “Some people might think: ‘Bloody hell, she’s a bit good, I need to watch her.’ But, actually, you hold your hand out when you meet a Natalie Fleet, and you encourage them because these women are the real deal.

“Neither of us has exactly done PPE at Balliol. We grew from poverty, both of us, and when people say: ‘Why does this Balliol thing keep perpetuating itself?’, it’s because you get a lot of Balliol people in politics and they go: ‘Who would be a good MP – ah, someone who looks like me.’”