Photographer: Ed Miles.
When Gina Miller was a little girl, growing up in Guyana, she used to sneak out of bed at night to eavesdrop on her father and his friends downstairs. They were meeting secretly to plot their opposition to the country’s ruling dictatorship and, although she didn’t understand every word, she was fascinated. ‘They’d talk about people and poverty and rights and I’d pick up on not just the passion but their principles – the fact that they wanted to change the world.’ She knew what he was doing was risky, but grew up wanting to be just like him.
Fast-forward to January this year, when Miller launched True & Fair, a new political party whose mission to clean up politics looks suddenly timely following allegations of lockdown-busting parties in Downing Street. ‘We still have a political system based on “my word is my bond”, and that gentlemen will behave properly. It’s so naive and outdated,’ she sighs, when we meet at the glossy west London offices of the investment company she now runs with her third husband. ‘The system is broken and my bottom line is it’s time to rebuild.’ And rebuilding, it turns out, is something she knows a little about.
At 56, Miller, a successful businesswoman, is best known for taking Theresa May’s Government to court over its handling of Brexit. But she’s also a former single parent to a daughter with special needs, once so poor that ‘I’d go through my coat and the bottom of every sofa to see if I had a few more pennies to buy food’. She is, she says, also a survivor of sexual and domestic violence.
‘At my lowest point I wanted to take my own life; it felt like that was the only way. I was drowning and I didn’t know who I was any more,’ she reveals. ‘It was my daughter who saved me because I kept thinking, “Well, who’s going to look after her?” But you never fully recover. It’s like a beautiful vase – if it’s smashed on the floor you can piece it back together, but the cracks are still there. I’m still cracked. But what keeps me going is thinking I won’t let anybody else tell me who I can be or control me, so it’s given me a different sense of strength. When people abuse me, I just smile and think, “You have no idea who I am.”’
Miller was walking to campus during her final year at university in London, having been sent overseas aged 11 to escape political unrest at home, when her life changed. ‘I was set upon by a group of men who brutally abused me. I was raped,’ she says, matter-of-factly. ‘They were fellow students who thought I was “too Western” and they were teaching me a lesson.’ Traumatised, she dropped out – little knowing that, decades later, following the Brexit court cases, her university would offer her an honorary degree.
Her parents urged her to return to Guyana but, by now, Britain was her home. ‘I’ve never run away from anything and I just said no.’ Instead, she married at 21 and had her daughter, who suffered serious brain damage at birth. After that marriage ended, she retrained in marketing, and eventually remarried. But she claims this relationship turned abusive (something her second husband has strongly denied, claiming she had a ‘drink problem’, which she has in turn denied) and that she fled in the middle of the night with nothing, living in her car for three weeks with her daughter at one point.
The police weren’t, she says, sympathetic. ‘It was so much easier for partners then to say, “She’s drunk, she’s neurotic, she’s going mad,” and for the police to go, “Oh, of course.” Things have moved on but not enough. When I see figures like a 1.3% rape conviction rate – we’re going backwards, it’s so shameful. Another reason for stepping up is that I think we have to address the access to justice women are being denied.’
Now happily remarried to City millionaire Alan Miller, with whom she has two children aged 15 and 16, she thought long and hard about re-entering public life given the outpouring of death threats she faced during the Brexit court cases. One man was jailed for offering £5,000 on Facebook to anyone willing to run her over, and she stopped going out with her children in case they witnessed something traumatic. ‘People were saying things like, as a woman of colour I should go “back home”, or I can’t be bright enough to bring this case,’ she says. ‘That shocked me. I’ve never thought [those attitudes] had gone away completely but they have always been on the fringes of society. Now they were mainstream.’
She found facing crowds outside court particularly tough. ‘Walking out and seeing a gallows and people shouting, “She should be hung,” and the police just standing there and doing nothing – that actually was terrifying,’ she says quietly.
But still, she remains determined to fight back. ‘I have to do it for my children and for future generations, because I don’t want them to have to live in a country where you have to worry about your gender, your race. This whole debate that women should and must do this or behave in a certain way to look after themselves is completely wrong. It’s about how we behave as a society, not about you having to put this on yourself.’ She works on policy ideas after the children are in bed until 2am, and unwinds by dancing to Iggy Pop: ‘I’m a crazy dancer, I’ll dance all over the entire house, on the sofas.’
Miller started pondering a new political party in lockdown, worried that temporary restrictions on our freedoms during Covid could set a precedent for more permanent clampdowns on the right to protest (under the Government’s proposed police bill) or foreign-born Britons’ rights to citizenship. Although she’s an ex-Labour supporter, her party isn’t, she insists, left- or right-wing; she just wants politicians held accountable for mistakes, misdemeanours and misspent public money. Despite the near impossibility of new parties winning seats under Britain’s electoral system, she plans to stand candidates at the next election. Is she eyeing Boris Johnson’s seat? ‘It’s very vulnerable, as is [Justice Secretary Dominic] Raab’s.’
Miller was shocked when Johnson repeated an untrue smear in Parliament recently about Labour leader Keir Starmer failing to prosecute the paedophile Jimmy Savile, but argues voters are more alert now to such tactics. ‘More of the general public are saying, “This isn’t acceptable, this is not us, these are not our values.”’ She also backs tougher regulation of social media to curb conspiracy theories and hate speech online.
Since launching True & Fair, she’s been approached by consultants offering her politician-style makeovers, but while she has her own golden rules – ‘I never wear a new thing when I’m speaking!’ – she’s wary of becoming too focus-grouped. ‘You do get a huge amount of personal attacks on what you’re wearing, what you look like, how you sound. But I’d encourage women not to be dissuaded by those who would seek to shut us down.’ With Gina Miller, there’s little danger of that.
Hair and make-up: Min Sandhu at Carol Hayes Management using Lancôme Official Colour Wow.