Jo Swinson: ‘We can stop Brexit. That is totally possible. It’s not guaranteed but it is possible. It is about political will’

When Jo Swinson was a little girl, she always wanted to be an author. By the time she was a teenager, she was determined to go into business. At 17, she joined the Liberal Democrats. But ever since school, when she considered how her career might pan out, she wondered how she would juggle things if she wanted to have children. She realised it wasn’t something men tended to think about – and decided that needed to change.

Years later, as a business minister in the coalition Government, she introduced a law allowing parents to share time off following the birth or adoption of their child: Shared Parental Leave became her work baby. ‘We’re never going to get equality in the workplace until we have a much more equal spread of how domestic responsibilities are taken on,’ she says, reflecting on the landmark legislation. Now, the 39-year-old MP for East Dunbartonshire has made history again by becoming the first female leader of the Lib Dems. And as a no-deal Brexit becomes a very real possibility, she’s positioned herself as the face of Remain.

The day we meet, she’s trending on Twitter, was up early to be grilled on Radio 4’s Today programme and has made headlines after saying she’d back Labour MP Harriet Harman or Conservative MP Ken Clarke over Jeremy Corbyn to lead an emergency government in the hope of stopping a no-deal Brexit.

She’s surprisingly relaxed, considering her head of office is fielding a volley of online criticism as we speak. ‘I’m getting a lot of attacks and I think Sara’s looking at my Twitter mentions today so I don’t have to. Which is quite a nice thing for me not to have to; not a nice thing for Sara to be seeing that,’ she laughs.

She’s frustrated, though, that women in the public eye are still treated differently. When she was pregnant with her first son, Andrew, now five, she was constantly asked how she was going to make it work– a question she says her husband, former Lib Dem MP Duncan Hames, never faced. Then, during the recent leadership campaign, she was asked in a newspaper interview if she was planning to have any more children. The timing meant it was ‘basically a job interview when you’re running for leader and I’m absolutely certain that these questions do not get asked of men’, she remembers.

Charles Kennedy and Nick Clegg were a similar age to her when they became Lib Dem leader, she points out, yet there’s still an assumption younger women aren’t up to the big jobs. ‘Charles and I were both 39 when we became leader [but I get], “Oh, is she experienced enough?”,’ she says, before adding, ‘When Nick Clegg became leader he hadn’t been a minister for three years. I have.’

Recently, she tells me, she was in a meeting in which another attendee kept addressing a male researcher instead of her – despite her being deputy leader at the time. ‘The male researcher felt quite uncomfortable about it,’ she says, explaining she’s decided to take the approach of ‘gently’ challenging this behaviour from now on. But first she has a bigger priority. Since becoming leader of her party last month, she has focused on recruiting and getting plans in place ‘so we can actually avert from this awful path, which I think is going to be a disaster for our country’, she says of her anti no-deal stance.

Her refusal to back Corbyn as an alternative leader – in spite of saying she’d do ‘whatever it takes to stop Brexit’ – lies behind much of the criticism she is facing when we meet. But she remains forthright: she doesn’t believe Corbyn would get the support needed in Parliament. ‘I’ve said I want to meet with Jeremy Corbyn and I’m keen to speak to him very soon and we need to find a plan that works,’ she says. ‘I just don’t really want to spend time talking about plans that won’t work.’

Whether she thinks he’ll be able to command a majority or not, she’ll have to deal with him sooner or later, though, just as she will Prime Minister Boris Johnson. How does she find them on a personal level? ‘I don’t think Boris Johnson is likeable,’ she says. ‘Mostly in politics, when you’re in a different party from someone, you can nonetheless feel they’re genuine and that they care,’ she explains. ‘I don’t feel that with Boris.’ (That said, she feels Carrie Symonds has been the victim of overt sexism. ‘She’s a communications professional, she’s had her own career with significant successes. But her role is seen as “girlfriend,”’ she says.)

Swinson used to find Corbyn ‘very easy to get on with’, but feels he’s let people down over Brexit and his handling of anti-Semitism within his party. But she’s friendly with some opposition MPs: occasionally, she trains in the parliamentary gym alongside staunch Tory Brexiteer Peter Bone and they’ve found themselves heading along the corridors of Westminster together, ‘both in our gym kits, going to an unexpected vote’.

This is not a politician who refuses to discuss the personal. Last year, Swinson shared a startlingly honest account of the home birth of her youngest son, Gabriel, now 14 months, on Instagram. She described being ‘on all fours, roaring’ on her dining room floor. Now, she says, she spoke frankly in the belief it can be helpful to hear about other women’s experiences.

Since it’s the school holidays, Swinson has brought her five-year-old son, Andrew, along to our photo shoot and interview: he jumps up and attempts to join in as she poses for the camera, until he’s gently persuaded to watch his mum from a stool out of shot. Later, while he’s happily occupied with a colouring book, Swinson explains that she got pregnant with him when she was 32, having just had a big promotion to the coalition Cabinet.

‘We’d got married the year before and so were at that stage that we were just thinking about having a family,’ she says. ‘Then suddenly I became a Government minister and it was like, should we delay this? We literally had that conversation because of having a very high-profile and intensive job.’ Today, they’re clearly glad they didn’t put it off. ‘As an MP, one of the first things that you do genuinely think about is, “If I want to have a baby, how do I try to time this around elections?”’ she adds.

While she doesn’t believe it’s only women who should have to think about (or be asked about) balancing a career and family life, she’s candid about the fact that being a party leader with two young children is going to be difficult. ‘Do I have all the answers of exactly how it’s done? I mean, I clearly have to do it slightly differently to how some of the previous leaders who had grown-up kids would have done it,’ she says. ‘But we need to be able to have a politics, a public life, that has a good variety of people in it; men and women at different life stages, ages, and that includes parents with young children.

‘We can’t just say that, for the period when people have young kids, they need to be written out of our public life. Not least because the voices of these people having these experiences need to be heard when we are discussing legislation about childcare and about education and about how people pay the bills.’ Sometimes, she says, it’s about standing firm and reiterating: ‘No, this just cannot work... I’m going to my son’s parents’ night,’ she adds – the exception being when she has to drop everything for an important Brexit vote. And there are sure to be more of those, as the countdown to 31 October reshapes the political landscape. Earlier this month, independent MP Dr Sarah Wollastonannounced she was joining the Lib Dems.

Is anyone else about to defect? ‘I’m speaking to various MPs who are really unhappy in their parties at the moment and who agree with us on stopping Brexit,’ she says. While she won’t name names, the Liberal Democrats are clearly enjoying a resurgence: they finished in a strong second place in the European Parliamentary elections and have seen more than 30,000 members sign up since May. Chuka Umunna (formerly Labour, then Change) defected to the party in June; then they won the Brecon and Radnorshire by-election, followed by Wollaston joining. Swinson is hopeful the momentum can give them a chance of achieving their goal. ‘We can stop Brexit. That is totally possible. It’s not guaranteed but it is possible. It is about political will,’ she says.

Whether you’re inspired by or despise what she’s doing, she’s sure to continue to make headlines. Could we even be heading for a repeat of 2010’s ‘Cleggmania?’ ‘I don’t think this is about personality,’ she says. ‘It’s about what we stand for.'