In the garden of a cafe in the middle of her Brighton Pavilion constituency, Caroline Lucas is eight hours into her bombshell day: the country’s only Green MP has just announced that she won’t stand again for election. She went from a squeaky, 1,200, didn’t-see-that-coming majority in 2010 to a don’t-bother-counting-them almost 20,000 majority in 2019, and has ascended to that very rare status with many of her constituents: it doesn’t matter whether or not you agree with her, you vote for her anyway. It would be rude not to: she works so hard and makes so much sense.
She has the very short hair of a person who doesn’t have time for hair, estimates that she works “75 or 80 hours a week” and looks harried but undefeated. I already knew she wasn’t going to stand again, obviously – that’s why I’m here. But I still can’t quite believe it, and keep opening my mouth to start a question that turns out to be nothing but “but”: “But you’re an institution … But your constituents love you … But you actually make things happen; who else is going to do that? … But there’s so much still to do.”
She made this decision about a year ago. “I’ve become more and more aware of the difficulty of being able to devote as much time as I would like to the nature and climate crises, which are the things that really drive me,” she says. “As those global environmental crises get even more serious, I want the freedom to be able to focus.”
OK, fine. Reasonable, even. In New York the sky is red and stinks of the Canadian wildfires. In Brighton, it’s the most beautiful day, which I studiously don’t mention in case I sound like Richard Tice, moaning that the BBC should be celebrating the “lovely hot days” of summer rather than reporting an official heat-health alert. “In my lifetime alone, we’ve destroyed half our biodiversity. That’s just in my lifetime. It’s so devastating.” She tells me about the swift: how imperilled it is, how incredibly industrious. “They fly a million miles in a lifetime; how extraordinary is that? Populations of the swift are down hugely. Those are things I really want to spend my time working on.”
But what would focusing properly entail? She knew I would ask that, she says, but she just doesn’t know yet. “I haven’t had the time to step back and breathe and think about it.” She is inspired by the knowledge and the activism of younger people, and thinks about ways to amplify their voices. “But I just don’t know yet, because at the end of this meeting I’ll be going back to my inbox and working out what to do about dental services in Brighton.” And the rest: terrible injustices in the benefits system, awful underprovision for mental illness, the long fallout of Covid, especially for small business and the self-employed. She keeps it as courteous as she can (the rudest word she’ll use about the Conservatives is probably “cloth-eared”) but that combination, of sitting opposite ministers who want to give the green light to the biggest undeveloped oilfield in the North Sea one minute, and seeing the human cost of callous policy play out among constituents in real time – well, I’m sure it’s fine if you don’t care. But it must be hell if you do.
“It’s not that I don’t have hope,” she says. “It’s just that I don’t have patience.” I try one more time: what does impatience look like? Is she leaving Westminster so she can glue herself to things? “To be honest, being an MP wouldn’t stop me gluing myself to things. You can see that in Balcombe, where I was arrested and had a court case, even while I was an MP.” She was protesting at the energy company Cuadrilla’s exploratory oil drilling site in West Sussex, and was acquitted in 2014 – she still cites fracking as one of the issues on which she’s done most to change the weather. “It’s always difficult to say exactly that cause and effect, but I think we changed the conversation.” Don’t let anyone tell you glue doesn’t work, kids, though I should say for accuracy that in Balcombe no glue was involved.
That’s what I was expecting when I asked what she was proudest of in her 13 years in parliament: the greatest hits of conversations that simply wouldn’t have happened without her, questions that wouldn’t have been asked, assumptions that would never have become common. She’ll go there if pushed: “I remember saying that coal power shouldn’t be going ahead, back in 2013, and everybody laughing, thinking I was ridiculous. Now, coal power is off the agenda.” But the achievement she holds up first is getting natural history added as a GCSE, so kids at school, increasingly disconnected from the natural world, can get some dirt under their fingernails. She quotes from Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder: “We won’t protect what we don’t love. And we won’t love what we don’t know and see and hear and touch and feel.”
I think about all those years in necropolitics, with boorish idiots laughing at her for wanting the planet not to die. It must have been pretty lonely. “It’s lonely within parliament, yes, definitely. At the time when you’re standing up, all eyes are upon you, the cameras are on you, you’re about to say something that you know at least half the people in the room are going to think is ludicrous, yes.” Her skin never got any thicker. “It always felt a little bit like a nightmare.” She swerves deftly back to the positives: the inspiration she took from grassroots activism, the support she got on social media, her lovely staff.
Now 62, Lucas grew up in Worcestershire with two siblings and rightwing parents. Not hard-right, she says, “just reflexively, Daily Mail-reading rightwing”. Her father ran a small business and was an early adopter of solar panels. “I hated them when I was about 13 or 14; they had such loud motors in those days. Five o’clock in the morning, this bloody motor on the outside of the house would start whirring. I mean, they don’t do that now. I have solar panels now and they’re very lovely,” she says, enunciating carefully into the microphone. So she didn’t get her originally peacenik, countercultural politics from her parents – those were from her schoolfriend Rachel’s bluestocking mum – but it’s where she picked up her respectful, conciliatory tone. “I think it taught me respect for people, knowing that you can violently disagree, but you can’t necessarily assume that they are bad people.”
Greens kind of have to say that, since they wouldn’t get very far being tribal and pugilistic in a two-party system, but you can also see it in the things Lucas did that she didn’t have to do: her Dear Leavers project after Brexit, where she went to leave-voting areas such as the Isle of Wight and Dagenham, searching for what remainers and leavers could learn from one another. It annoyed me at the time – not Lucas, just the project, because that concentration on the feelings of the left-behind was letting the people who were manipulating that discontent completely off the hook. But then, the rest of us didn’t exactly bring them down, either.
Lucas studied English at Exeter University and could have seen herself an academic, immersed in books and worrying about the climate in her spare time, except “Greenham Common was happening, and I was getting more and more involved in the CND”. Her full political awakening was when she read Seeing Green, Jonathon Porritt’s guide to the politics of ecology. “It was just like a lightbulb moment – suddenly recognising that all the things that I cared about, whether that was nuclear disarmament, or the environmental movement or women’s movement, were actually connected in the political philosophy of that book.” She joined the Green party that day, marching up and down Clapham High Street in south London, “looking for a nice big building with a plaque on the wall saying ‘Green party’ and eventually finding a tiny broom cupboard”.
By 1987, she was the party’s press officer. “I’ll tell you when I was most hopeful,” she says, referring to a window in 1989 when everything seemed to be going the Greens’ way. “I’ve been hopeful since then, but there was that period – in 87, we got 1.3%, I think, in the general election. The European elections in 1989, we got 15%. It genuinely felt extraordinary.”
We’ve been trying out different eras of potential hope since. There was David Cameron’s short-lived husky fixation, then Ed Miliband in opposition, taking climate breakdown very seriously. We had Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader, seeming to have a real commitment to the Green New Deal, the complete reimagining of industry, energy and society of which Lucas was one of the architects. All were rejected – Cameron’s shtick only lasted a couple of months, and then he was all about cutting the green crap. Lucas says Miliband could “never go as far as he would have liked”, though she has a lot of respect for him, and Corbyn was “so tribal” by the end.
After her time as the Greens’ press officer, Lucas went to work at Oxfam, unable to remain on the party staff and join the executive committee, which is what she wanted, before winning as an MEP for the Greens in 1999.
It’s not what she dwells on, but if you were going to live any section of Lucas’s life, you’d choose the Brussels years. Her two sons – “lovely boys” – now 30 and 27, were small, and she and her husband, Richard Savage, a teacher, decided to move the family out there. The European parliament actually made things happen: “It was much more collegiate, collaborative, cooperative. The word ‘compromise’ wasn’t a dirty word. It didn’t mean you’d sold out; it meant that you’d tried to find common ground with a number of people to get something agreed. I was able to steer through legislation that would ban the sale of illegally logged timber. It was extraordinary.” About 90% of British environmental legislation – for brevity, call it everything useful we’ve ever done – came from the EU, and successive UK governments were driving that. “It’s so ironic that we’ve sabotaged the whole thing,” she says, given how much influence we had.
Ironic. There’s a polite word.
But whatever was happening in Brussels just wasn’t percolating into the British political conversation: “If we wanted to influence that, it felt so important to be at Westminster.” After 11 years as an MEP, she got her Brighton seat, and while she resists chalking up successes, it’s undeniable that some ideas would never have got into the bloodstream, from “climate emergency” to “universal basic income”, if she hadn’t been prepared to stand up and be bayed at. She’s very clear, by the way, that just because she’s leaving parliament doesn’t mean she thinks this is the end of the road for Greens in Westminster. She’s not doing a Tony Benn, who left parliament “to spend more time on politics”. Lucas, indeed, thinks there’s never been more call for a thorn in the establishment’s side, with a government this bad and a Labour leader who might make the right noises on halting oil and gas exploration but “will flip-flop on everything, from tuition fees to bringing water back into public hands, and tens of other things in between”. She rattles off four or five Green candidates who she hopes to see win at the next election. It’s just no longer for her.
I’d heard a rumour just before I met her, and was surprised to find it true, just not in the way I’d thought: she’s training to be a doula, a non-medical guide and companion through an extreme physical event, usually giving birth. But Lucas is not the birth kind – she wants to be an end-of-life doula. She’s already done quite a bit of training with an organisation called Living Well Dying Well, based nearby in Lewes. “It’s such a nourishing, transformative thing, such an enormous privilege, to be around people who are dying. Just the intimacy; what I love about it is that it cuts the crap, it goes straight to what matters when you’re talking to someone who’s dying. You’re not talking about things that don’t matter. You connect in a much deeper way.”
It’s the polar opposite of parliamentary politics, but it’s more than that. “It’s also about dealing with grief, and understanding different forms of grief. It’s made me think about what so many people are feeling now in terms of the planetary emergency: the preciousness, the fragility. It’s a wonderful way of putting things in perspective, remembering what matters.”
