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The former Liberal Democrat equalities minister tells Hadley Stewart about how she became the originator behind one of the biggest landmark moments in LGBTQ+ history.
As Baroness Lynne Featherstone walked from the Institute of Government to the Home Office a thought popped into her head that would ultimately change the course of LGBTQ+ history. It was 2010 and Featherstone had just been listening to Michael Hestletine and Andrew Adonis speaking to her and other newly-appointed ministers about how to navigate their new roles. The Lib Dem minister, who had both an equalities and Home Office portfolio, was advised to focus “ruthlessly” on one or two things that she wanted to achieve during her time in office. Equal marriage came to mind. “Then the battles began,” she says. “And what battles they were.”
Featherstone came to politics as a second career. She grew up in Highgate, north London, in a household that seldom talked about politics. As I sit down opposite her in her study, the embers from the fireplace crackling in the background, she tells me that beyond the price of beer and cigarettes, her family didn’t really think about politics. “There wasn’t time for politics, because they were a very poor immigrant family,” says Featherstone, whose grandparents emigrated to England from the former Soviet Union. “They had to work really hard, so politics sort of passed them by.”
Equally, Featherstone wasn’t harbouring aspirations of getting involved in politics either. She was far too focused on becoming an actor. When I bring this up, she seems surprised. “Wow! You’ve done your homework,” she replies, wide-eyed. But her dreams were somewhat squashed, after eighteen-year-old Featherstone auditioned for drama school and was told that she was too young. It was a moment that made her reflect on the life she was trying to pursue. “Do I want a life begging to be accepted? You know, it’s such a hard life,” she says of acting.
Then, one day shortly afterwards, her mother told her that if there was one thing worse than drama school, it was art school. And with a friend at Oxford Polytechnic (now Oxford Brookes University) who by all accounts was having a wonderful time, Featherstone applied to study on the college’s communications and design course. She was there for three years and said she “absolutely loved” studying at a polytechnic. “I thought there’s this great cosmos of builders and caterers and architects,” recalls Featherstone. “It was like all human life was there, all rubbing along together.”
It was at Oxford Polytechnic that she got her first taste of politics. Her course was at risk of being closed down, as the college board announced they were scrapping art courses. Featherstone was outraged and started a campaign called ‘Save Art’. “Being on a design course, we could make posters and banners. We weren’t hamstrung in terms of how to do this stuff,” she laughs. Her tutors gladly gave her a six week sabbatical for her to go campaigning, because their jobs were at risk. “It was this that gave me my first taste of campaigning, media and holding debates,” she says. “I had no idea it was political until all the student unions across the country offered to come and help me.” Featherstone’s efforts paid off and plans to scrap her course were halted.
(Isaac Qureshi/Vada Magazine)Despite being a passionate campaigner during her student years, she graduated during “a nightmare” time for politics. “So I walked away from politics for about twenty years and followed my design career,” she explains. In the years that followed, Featherstone went on to start her own design business, get married to an architect and have two children. The beautiful house we are seated in for our interview today, with its open-plan layout and floor-to-ceiling windows, was designed by her now ex-husband.
It was listening to Margaret Thatcher when Featherstone’s children were young, which made her political passions come to the surface again. “She was saying there’s no such thing as society or community. I just got so angry,” recalls Featherstone. “I guess I’d always liked the idea of politics, but I didn’t think someone like me could be a politician.” So she went out and read each party’s literature. It was the Lib Dem’s preamble to their constitution that caught Featherstone’s eye: “It said that no one shall be enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity. And I just love that. It’s kind of my credo, really.” It’s a moment that she tells me makes her feel lucky, because she chose the right party for her; and a decision that would ultimately be the foundation for her political career and would see her create change in society.
Featherstone was one of three women elected to Haringey council in 1998, forming the first Lib Dem group on the council, with Featherstone holding the position of leader of the opposition until 2002. As she begins to tell me that she didn’t really know what the council did until she was elected to one, she says: “It sounds ridiculous, but apart from your bins, if you’re not linked to them through social services or any need… By then, we’d gone from immigrant to working class to middle class. So I didn’t really have any knowledge of what a council was.”
Her lack of council knowledge didn’t hold her back, and Featherstone tells me she soon learnt what a council did and felt that she was able to make a real difference in her local community. Two years after being elected to the council, she was elected to the London Assembly, where she worked with Ken Livingston on congestion charging, before becoming Chair of Transport in London for five years and a member of the Metropolitan Police Authority. “Things just sort of snowballed,” she says of her political career. Five years later, Featherstone was elected to Parliament, and five years after that she was re-elected and became a minister in the coalition government, under David Cameron’s premiership.
(Isaac Qureshi/Vada Magazine)So out of all the issues that she could have concentrated her efforts as equalities minister, why did Featherstone choose equal marriage? “I’d always been an equal rights campaigner,” she replies. “To be honest, there were so many gay boys at Ox Poly. I had so many friends who were gay and grew up with a gay group as well. I think anything that would upset them, I would be angry about too. So when I look back, all of those things kind of coalesced when I found myself in that position.”
On the day Featherstone was walking back to the Home Office with the idea of same-sex marriage in her mind, she set the ball rolling by speaking with her team. She subsequently reached out to deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, who backed her, and home secretary Theresa May. May had “a pretty bad record” as Featherstone describes it, when it came to LGBTQ+ rights. May had voted against the repeal of Section 28 and same-sex adoption. Featherstone was dubious about how May might respond to her proposal.
Then came a moment of hope. Featherstone was watching May on ‘Question Time’ when she was asked about same-sex adoption. The then home secretary said she had changed her mind when it came to same-sex couples adopting children. “And she said this live on air!” says Featherstone. “I’m watching and thinking, maybe I’ve got a shot here.”
Three days after Featherstone wrote to May, she heard back that the home secretary would support her. May then wrote to the Cabinet, but the proposal was vetoed by Conservatives Philip Hammond and Ian Duncan Smith. “Cameron overruled them,” says Featherstone, which resulted in same-sex marriage being put on the table for consultation. “I mean fair play to Cameron, because he was very keen.” Meanwhile, Featherstone was busy reaching out to LGBTQ+ politicians and civil servants across government, to help her get equal marriage across the line.
At this point in our conversation Featherstone pauses. “I have to say, as I do on every occasion, the credit goes to the LGBT community, because they’re the ones who fought and died for it,” she says. “I’m just a liberal who thinks liberal things and found herself in government and wanted to do liberal things. Equal rights, it was a natural thing for me to do.”
A further stumbling block came from the then prime minister, David Cameron, who wanted Featherstone to drop civil partnerships for heterosexual couples from her proposal. “We rowed all day,” she recalls. “The spads [special advisors] were telephoning back and forth all day.” Later that evening, Featherstone agreed to drop the issue. “I decided that same-sex marriage was the big progressive leap forward, and straight civil partnerships would follow anyway.”
The following Sunday was the Liberal Democrats party conference and Featherstone was due to announce her plan that the government wanted to introduce same-sex marriage. Yet on the Friday before the conference, David Cameron announced it to the media instead. “He spiked all the publicity the Lib Dems would have got,” argues Featherstone. In the forward to her book Equal Ever After, published in 2016, she thanks him, acknowledging that she needed to have the prime minister on board. As for why she wrote the book? “I wrote the book, because I was pissed off!” she says of the lack of recognition she and the Lib Dems received from the former prime minister. “And to this day, he has never said a word to me about it, or thanked me for making him look half decent,” adds Featherstone. “He clings to it now like a life raft.”
(Isaac Qureshi/Vada Magazine)Speaking of her book, Featherstone fetches me a copy from another room, and slides it across the glass coffee table that stands between us. Subsequently, halfway through the interview, she momentarily asks for it back. She tells me she wants to ensure she’s not missing anything out. As she begins to thumb through the hardback, she realises she doesn’t have her glasses and does a lap of the open-plan space looking for them. It gives me a moment to admire the photos that are hanging on the wall behind me. Featherstone returns, saying her glasses are nowhere to be found. She then begins to laugh, as she realises her glasses have been sitting on the desk opposite us this whole time.
As Featherstone sits back down opposite me and flicks through her book, she starts by telling me about the resistance she faced during the consultation period. “It was quite terrifying the things that were being said about me and about the gay community,” she says of that time. Not only did she face opposition from certain religious groups, she also faced threats of violence and death threats from members of the public. In the chapter of her book entitled ‘The devil lives in your anus’ (one example of what was said about her), she goes on to list the onslaught of insults that she and those around her endured. Parts of the media were fanning the flames of homophobia, with people arguing that the introduction of same-sex marriage would result in people marrying their brothers or table legs, she recalls. “It was just ridiculous and vicious and nasty,” says Featherstone. ”I had so many death threats and God knows what during the whole process.”
Featherstone also met with activists within the LGBTQ+ community, some of whom were dubious of her. Perhaps the biggest surprise for Featherstone came from Ben Summerskill, the former Chief Executive of Stonewall, who was against same-sex marriage. Did he give a reason, I ask. “He said gay people didn’t want marriage; marriage was for straights… I thought that was extraordinary and ridiculous.” It was only once Featherstone had sought the support of Stonewall co-founders Lord Michael Cashman and Sir Ian McKellen, she explains, did the charity eventually get behind her.
I turn around and point out a photo I’d spotted earlier of Featherstone and McKellen hanging on the wall. Featherstone giggles, “He’s delightful!” She speaks of fellow LGBTQ+ rights activist Peter Tatchell, another supporter, with fondness too: “An absolute hero in my view. I mean, I’ve never met a braver or more committed person anywhere about anything.”
Featherstone attended the Bar of the House of Lords to watch same-sex marriage complete its journey in July 2013; a landmark moment for LGBTQ+ rights in England and Wales. “It was like the sun had come out,” she recalls of that day, adding that the Gay Men’s Chorus was singing outside Parliament. “I went out and everyone’s smiling and happy, and it just felt completely joyous.” On a personal note, Featherstone tells me about her children’s pride. They previously, she mentions, were embarrassed about having a mother who was a politician; that changed when same-sex marriage was passed.
(Isaac Qureshi/Vada Magazine)Fast forward to today and Featherstone’s efforts for LGBTQ+ equality have been widely recognised. She was named ‘Politician of the Year’ by Stonewall in 2014, and last year received a lifetime achievement award from international LGBTQ+ rights charity, Kaleidoscope. Now a Member of the House of Lords, she remarks that the mood in politics has changed drastically. In fact, she admits that being a politician in today’s climate isn’t something that she would feel able to do. Featherstone tells me that she is concerned that we have lost the ability for reasonable discourse, pointing the finger at social media and certain parts of the national press.
Donald Trump, I say, ran his campaign on transphobia and was elected President of the United States. What does she make of this? “I think it’s a disgrace,” she says, somewhat deflated. “I think the lack of humanity and the weaponizing of trans people is disgusting and dehumanizing.” As for what she thinks of Trump himself, she argues that his behaviour towards minority groups gives “credence and power to the haters.” Featherstone, who also worked on LGBTQ+ rights abroad during her time at the Department of International Development, argues that Trump’s rhetoric and policies poses a real threat to LGBTQ+ rights on an international scale.
Despite the current political turmoil, when I ask Featherstone if she has any advice for someone wishing to go into politics now, she says they should pursue it. “There was nothing in my background or life that indicated particularly that this would happen, other than I’ve always just kind of been myself… Yeah, just be yourself.” It’s Featherstone’s candour and unfiltered comments, I venture, that have sometimes gotten her into some hot water. Does she have any regrets about being herself? “Absolutely no regrets whatsoever.”
Baroness Lynne Featherstone is featured on Vada’s latest digital cover, photographed in her home by Isaac Qureshi. Baroness Featherstone is a Member of the House of Lords and the former equalities minister who was the originator of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act, which introduced civil marriage for same-sex couples in England and Wales in 2013.
