‘Pick your battles,” Sophie Morgan says, dressed all in black, looking incongruously gorgeous, like she belongs in a sonnet or a music video, not in the Guardian offices (no offence, colleagues). “Pick any battle.”
The latest battle she has picked is with airlines, who treat disabled passengers shockingly badly. Wheelchairs get lost and broken, people get left on planes for hours waiting for help to disembark, basic human dignities are disregarded. “What’s happening here is not a bunch of disgruntled holidaymakers whose luggage is lost,” she says. “It feels like an assault.” It doesn’t mean she didn’t wrestle with it as an issue: “Part of me thought, really, why are we campaigning for flights, when flying’s so bad anyway, in a climate crisis? When we’re in a cost of living crisis where disabled people are struggling to access anything, let alone holidays? But it does feel, when you’re us, like no one’s listening.” I get a flash of Morgan’s Loose Women persona – funny, knowing, redoubtable.
