Natalie Fleet is nervous about this interview. Her assistant has warned me and Fleet tells me several times, before and during. “I just feel sick,” she says. “I don’t know if it’s because it’s about me or because of the subject. It just doesn’t seem to get any easier.”
The subject is rape – specifically Fleet’s experience of being groomed by an older man when she was 15, becoming pregnant and having the baby. That daughter, “the love of her life”, is now 24. Since entering parliament last summer as the Labour MP for Bolsover, Fleet has spoken a good deal about rape, her life story and the lack of support for mothers whose children were conceived this way – and each time it upsets her. “My husband said: ‘I don’t want you to be the “rapey MP”,’ and I don’t want that either,” says Fleet. “But it’s such a massive void in our national conversation. If nobody’s talking about it, then people won’t report it or understand it, perpetrators won’t be prosecuted or convicted. And shame really does need to switch sides. That can only happen if we start telling each other that it’s not our fault.”
