The Labour MP Dawn Butler remembers the first time she was called a liar. She was eight years old and had just returned from a family holiday to Jamaica. She was telling her class that she saw a cockroach that could fly when the teacher stopped her and said she was lying. Butler was told to leave the classroom. She ran out of the school and went straight home.
It wouldn’t be the last time. When, in 2019, she recalled a racist incident she had experienced in parliament – she said she had been confused for a cleaner because she was Black – the Liberal Democrat staffer Steve Wilson tweeted it was “just not true” and that she should stop “propagating” such stories. (Wilson later apologised.)
A year later she was accused of lying again, this time en masse on social media, when she shared a video of her and a friend being stopped by the police while driving to lunch. “It shows you again the lengths people go to not to believe that racism exists,” Butler says, from her parliamentary office in Portcullis House, London. “It’s all about their disbelief system, rather than confronting the truth.” It’s a grey, cloudy Tuesday afternoon. Butler, in her multicoloured jumper and trousers, stands out among the white shirts and grey skirts. She has bought cakes and hot drinks for me, her staffer and herself.
“There’s a certain group of white men who constantly try to put me in my place, who constantly try to push me back and say: ‘No, you’re not getting any further.’ They don’t want the system to change, because the system works for them the way it should.”
The word liar is therefore a loaded one for Butler. Yet she didn’t know how else to describe what she felt Boris Johnson was doing in parliament. “I had this internal battle that was raging for quite a while. I tried to use all of the parliamentary levers to hold the prime minister to account and nothing was working. In the end, I got so frustrated that I had to do something about it and so that’s why I called him a liar,” she says.
She did so on 22 July 2021. There was a handful of MPs present, wearing masks and social distancing. The deputy speaker asked her to withdraw her words, as under Commons rules it is forbidden for an MP to accuse another of lying. But Butler refused.
“I knew it was breaking parliamentary protocol, but this is a system that isn’t working. How can we allow someone to come to parliament and lie in parliament consistently and not call it out?”
She was duly ejected. While Keir Starmer said, three days later, that Butler was right, she says she faced criticism from other MPs – including from within her own party. One Labour colleague texted to ask if she had done it to embarrass the deputy speaker, while others quietly unfollowed her on social media.
“I knew I was doing this as a lone MP,” Butler says now. But “I wasn’t expecting quite the shame that other people felt. It was really obvious why I did it, because the prime minister kept lying. Had you not heard him?”
In the two years since, Johnson has been pushed out as prime minister by his own party and resigned as an MP over Partygate. In June 2023, the privileges committee concluded not only had he deliberately misled parliament, he was part of a campaign to abuse and intimidate MPs investigating him. In short, Butler was right – Johnson had lied.
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Butler grew up in Leytonstone, east London, in the early 1970s with her four brothers and sister. Her father ran a bakery, Butlers Bakery, but was a jack of all trades; he also cut hair and was the lead singer in a band called Balance Power. Her mother was an auxiliary nurse and the disciplinarian of the family. Butler would help out at the bakery, waking up at 3am to work with her father. Although she loved it, she never had any dreams of running her own: “I think I’ve done all of my early mornings.”
What job would she like to do if she wasn’t an MP? “I’ve done other jobs, whether it be computer programming or civil servant, but I think, ultimately, I’d like to be a television presenter, a bit like Oprah … You’re helping people, telling people’s stories, you’re helping make society a better place,” she says.
In her book, A Purposeful Life, released later this month, Butler describes her father’s bakery as a hive of activity in the local community. Customers included the athlete Dalton Grant, the singer-songwriter Ben Ofoedu, once of Phats & Small, and the actor and DJ Idris Elba. “Our customers didn’t come to Butlers Bakery just to be served. They lingered to have conversations, creating a real sense of community that I think is lacking today,” she writes. She watched children grow into adults, witnessing their journey “from buying a jam doughnut to West Indian hardo bread. The sign of a proper adult.”
She believes that version of London, which had a sense of togetherness, is long gone. “This idea which [Margaret] Thatcher had, that there’s no such thing as society, and having people just be really selfish about themselves, was a way to destroy something that was really great and powerful. I think we need to bring that back.”
Butler was confronted at a young age with the realities of institutional racism. When she was 13, her brothers talked to her about the police, telling her never to be alone with an officer and to contact them if something ever happened. At 18, shortly after getting a car, she drove to a nearby houseparty, but she didn’t have fun for long. A neighbour, angry at the noise, smashed her car windows. As she shouted at him, he went into his house and came out with a knife. He lunged at her brother. She called the police, but it was her brother who was arrested, not the white man with the knife.
Butler recalled this when she heard about the racist murder of George Floyd. She called her brother to ask if he remembered what happened three decades earlier. “Do I remember, sis? I’ve still got the scars,” he said. The officers pinned him to the floor, with their knees on his neck and back. “I could have lost him, and it would have been my fault because I’d called the police,” she writes.
After finishing college, Butler worked as a computer programmer for a City firm, and as a civil servant, before working as a trade unionist, for the GMB and the Public and Commercial Services union. In 2003, she was asked to stand to become the Labour candidate for Hackney South and Shoreditch by a fellow trade unionist. Initially, she wanted to say no. “Why would I want to be a politician? Politicians, from what I could see, were either white or male: there were only two Black female MPs at that time – Diane Abbott and Oona King. That’s two out of about 650,” she writes. Also, she was a working-class woman who hadn’t gone to university. (She would later come to see this difference as a huge asset.)
But after consulting her family and friends, she was convinced to run. A group of volunteers joined her campaign, to her surprise, and went door-knocking to convince Labour party members to vote for her. “I enjoyed this part of the campaign because I liked talking to people, and could connect with them on different levels, through music, dance, politics and what-have-you,” she writes. She lost, however, to Meg Hillier, who still holds the seat. In February 2005, Butler stood to be selected as Labour’s candidate for West Ham. She was full of “drive and determination”, she notes in her book, and got the same team of volunteers to help her knock on doors and leaflet. She lost again, this time by just four votes, to Lyn Brown, who has held the seat since. Bruised, she wanted out of politics, but was drawn back just a few months later.
Butler had booked tickets to Jamaica when she found out Paul Boateng would be stepping down as MP for Brent South before the 2005 election. She was approached by several people to run again, but she just wanted to be left alone. It was the support of Paul Kenny, the former head of GMB, and his belief in her, that convinced her to try again. This time, she won selection – and the seat, beating, among others, the independent Shaun Wallace, now better known as one of the Chasers on the ITV quiz The Chase. Butler became Britain’s third ever Black female MP.
She knew many MPs in parliament were from a different world to hers, but she felt there was at least a common commitment to doing good for the country. “I had not envisaged complaining about an MP using the N-word, or MPs telling me I didn’t belong in parliament,” she says.
“The first time I ever experienced racism in parliament, I went home upset with myself, for letting my guard down and not even considering that I was gonna get racially abused. I was so caught up with: ‘Look what I’ve done, I’ve achieved it, I’ve become an MP, this is amazing.’ I was so caught up in the positivity of it all; I didn’t prepare myself.”
Butler recalls an incident that happened a year into her tenure. She had taken staff out for lunch on the terrace when another MP, the former Tory minister David Heathcote-Amory, challenged her right to be there, allegedly telling her that the place was for members. When she said she was a member, Heathcote-Amory allegedly said: “They’re letting anybody in nowadays.”
When the Guardian went to Heathcote-Amory for comment in 2008 about the incident, he denied his comments were racist. “What she is actually objecting to is that I didn’t recognise her as a new MP. I simply asked her what she was doing at that end of the terrace, and they are quite sensitive about this kind of thing, they think that any kind of reprimand from anyone is racially motivated,” Heathcote-Amory said at the time.
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Butler’s achievements early on were notable. In 2009, she became the first elected Black female government minister in the House of Commons (for young citizens and youth engagement), under Gordon Brown, having already served as the first Black female whip. At the end of 2009, Butler became the first Black woman to speak as a minister at the dispatch box. Just before she started, she got a text from Sadiq Khan, then a Labour MP, now the mayor of London, asking what time she was going into the chamber. He started running when she told him she was on her way, in order to be there to witness his friend make history. On that day, Butler writes in her book, Khan said to the speaker: “Dawn Butler is the first Black woman to talk at this dispatch box. Don’t forget to mention it.” There was applause from both sides of the house.
Butler tells me she is keen to follow in Khan’s footsteps and hopes to become the mayor of London one day. “Sadiq is obviously a good friend, so it’s whenever Sadiq stops and I will put myself forward. But saying something out loud, putting it into the ether and hoping it will manifest, is a lesson that I’ve learned in politics. When I stood for deputy [leader of the Labour party in 2020], it was very much a last-minute thing. Other people had been working on it for years. I came in very late in the game, and knowing it’s something that I would love to do and actually saying it: it feels good.”
Others she had expected to be allies turned out not to be. Butler writes that when she confided in a senior white female MP about racism she experienced in parliament, she was told: “Well, at least they weren’t talking about your tits.” She notes it was only the first of such comments she got when trying to foster solidarity between women.
In 2016, at the height of the factional fight to remove Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour party, Butler, who was a close ally of Corbyn, received a request to produce a report collating everything she had done to date as chair of the Women’s Parliamentary Labour party. Butler does not know who was responsible for the request but, to her knowledge, it was the first time in the history of the Women’s PLP that a chair was asked to do so.
“And what was a report supposed to prove exactly? The played-out racial stereotype of laziness? As a Black woman, I am no stranger to hurdles appearing out of nowhere and having to go the extra mile to prove myself, but this assignment felt like a slap in the face,” Butler writes. Still, she asked a staff member to produce an 11-page, double-sided document.
Later, Butler writes, she found out that a coup to remove her as chair was being orchestrated by Harriet Harman and Jess Phillips, both of whom were critical of Corbyn’s leadership. According to Butler, the chair usually steps down after a conversation to agree a change and a “civil handover” after about two years. Butler had been doing the role for a year and believed she was doing the job well. She says that just before she went into a meeting, a whistleblower called and said they were coming for her. She writes that she found herself walking into an ambush.
“There were fake smiles and niceties at the meeting, although it felt more like an execution,” Butler writes. She noticed senior female figures from the House of Lords she hadn’t seen before. “I thought: ‘Wow, they really have gone through their address books to see who they could find to vote me out, when all they needed to do was ask. I would gladly have stepped down.” By the end of the meeting, Butler was out and Phillips had become the new chair.
How does Butler feel about that incident seven years later? “It was hurtful. Really, really hurtful. I really didn’t recognise the term white feminism until that time … But I understood and felt it then and it was painful because I thought we were in this struggle together, but obviously we’re not. I am very much alone in this struggle as a Black woman. It was definitely an attack,” Butler says.
Butler says she has since spoken to Harman, who has apologised for what happened at that meeting. As for Phillips? Butler goes back to how she feels Black and white female MPs are treated differently. She points to Phillips, newly elected, telling the press that she told Diane Abbott, the first Black woman to enter parliament, to “fuck off” in 2015, after Phillips clashed with Corbyn because he had given the top shadow-cabinet jobs to men. Abbott denies Phillips told her to fuck off, telling the Guardian in 2018: “What was extraordinary is that she made a big deal about telling people she had.”
Butler says: “That is such disrespect. There’s no way a new Black MP could come in and tell a senior white woman to fuck off and be seen as gutsy. All of the structures – the media, the print media, the TV media – all thought it was an amazing thing … It is shocking, it is shocking, the disrespect on Black women in this place.”
She adds that she couldn’t talk at the time about how she was removed as chair. “And I don’t think at that point I had the strength to take on the onslaught, or what would have been the establishment protecting white female MPs, whereas Black female MPs are very much underprotected,” she says. “But this is years later; I’ve gone through cancer and I’m going to tell my story.”
The Guardian contacted Harman and Phillips for comment.
Butler’s diagnosis with breast cancer was what prompted her to write her memoir. She announced it in 2021, after a routine mammogram. She took several months off from parliament to recover from her treatment. “You’re never the same person from pre-cancer diagnosis to post-cancer diagnosis,” Butler says, adding that it changed the way she did politics.
She began campaigning to increase awareness of breast cancer and improve care, noting that an estimated 1 million women in the UK missed appointments for mammogram screenings due to the pandemic; about 8,600 women could be living with undiagnosed breast cancer. She also discovered that “Black women get diagnosed later than white women and die at a higher rate”, so she partnered with the Metro newspaper on a campaign to encourage more Black women to come forward for mammograms. Butler has since had letters from Black women who have got breast cancer, telling her she has made a real difference to their lives.
When I ask which part of the book she most enjoyed writing, she refers to her last chapter, titled The Lime-Green Suit. “It signifies a sea change in my attitude to structures, from trying to fit in to understanding that you’re not going to fit in, because this establishment was not built with somebody like you in mind. But you’re here and you’ve earned your place here. You don’t need to justify yourself, so instead of fitting in, stand out,” she says.
The makeup artist, a young Black woman, arrives just as the interview ends. There is a warm back and forth on how much makeup Butler should wear (she would like to keep it to a minimum). Later, for the photos, she changes out of her multicoloured outfit into a lime-green crop top and skirt. Once again, she stands out against the grey clouds.
A Purposeful Life by Dawn Butler is published by Torva on 24 August. To order a copy, go to Guardian bookshop.
