Friday 27th January 2012 | 00:01

Jill Pay - Farewell to the Serjeant at Arms

On the eve of her retirement, Jill Pay, the first female Serjeant at Arms gives her first interview

Words: Sam Macrory

In a world where the men wear the breeches, a woman in tights was always going to stand out. With her distinctive red hair and diminutive stature, Jill Pay was an already an easily recognisable figure on the parliamentary estate by the time was she was appointed as the first female Serjeant at Arms in 2008. From that groundbreaking appointment onwards it has been an eventful four years.

In late 2008, after his parliamentary offices were searched by the police, a furious Damian Green cried constitutional outrage. Pay took the rap. After a few years of calm, last July’s select committee appearance of Rupert Murdoch ended with the BSkyB chairman assaulted by a pie-wielding protestor. In October Pay announced her retirement, and this week, after nearly two decades working in Parliament, she officially leaves the building for the final time.

“I am retiring because I can,” Pay insists. “I thought about it over a few months, and I know it’s the right decision. I want to move into the next chapter of my life while I have the energy and enthusiasm to take on new challenges. And quite a few are appearing on my radar already.”

We are talking – this is Pay’s first print interview – in a small meeting room in Portcullis House, the building whose construction she helped oversee. She seems content with the idea of her impending departure, even if she has no wish to talk about those twin events which stand out jarringly in a long and distinguished career. On the Green incident, she merely takes the opportunity to thank her husband for his support during what was clearly a personally testing time. “My husband was in newspapers for his whole career, so I knew how they worked,” Pay explains. “Through my husband, who is my rock, I could rise above it. If I had read it all then, I would have got in a bad way.”

As for last summer’s headline-making visit of Rupert Murdoch, Pay notes that she wasn’t present when the pie was thrown. “I was in a meeting and someone rushed in to tell me there had been an incident in the committee. I actually thought Rupert Murdoch had had a heart attack,” she reveals. “I came over straight away, and I saw what had happened.”

Following that incident, a new director-of-security role, one which removes powers from the Serjeant, was created. Pay pauses when asked about the new role. “In principle it’s a sound decision, but making it work will be quite challenging,” she suggests. “You can make mitigations against the threats, but you cannot predict. People who are planning to disrupt Parliament, whether it’s from a terrorist’s point of view or a demonstrator’s point of view, are usually going to be two steps ahead.” Then, echoing the IRA’s chilling warning in the aftermath of the 1984 Brighton bomb, she adds: “They have to be lucky once – we have to think about it all the time.”

Inevitably, the media give little space for the times when parliamentary security held firm, and Pay recalls 2010’s student riots, and the involvement of more “frightening” anarchists, as her biggest challenge. “They ripped up the barriers, and they weren’t far from the edge of the parliamentary estate,” she remembers. “If two or three had got in, then they would have run riot, and everyone’s safety would have been at risk.”

Headlines came late to Jill Pay’s life. She grew up in south London, where she attended Croydon High School for girls before moving on to study at a business college. Once qualified, she took a business manager role with Ogilvy and Mather, which she describes as “the equivalent of being executive officer to the creative director”. She gave up the job when the first of two daughters was born, spending the next six years out of work, “but keeping my hand in and doing the usual white middle-class things that mothers do, like work for the PTA”.

Pay returned to full-time employment in the private medical sector and estate management, before an Employment Department project in her native Croydon – Pay helped to enhance the career opportunities of young people through developing links across Europe – brought her into contact with politicians. She admits that politics has always been at “arm’s length” for her, but when the project ended, that distance changed.

“My husband brought the Daily Telegraph home one night, and there was an advert for a Head Office Keeper job here. I thought: ‘Oh no, I can’t do a political job’, and when I sat in Central Lobby for my final interview, I thought: “What am I doing here?” However, Pay reminded herself that “they think I can do it, so I should believe that I can”. She got the job, becoming the first woman, and the first person from ‘outside’ to be appointed. She describes her appointment as a “double whammy” for Parliament’s traditionalists. “There was a lot of tradition and things to challenge and turn around, but the people I was working with were really up for innovation and change”.

After five years, it became apparent that Portcullis House, the latest addition to the parliamentary estate, required a full-time member of staff to bridge the gap between architects and the estate occupants, and Pay was appointed to the ugly-sounding role of ‘accommodation rationalisation manager’. “It was all about working with the whips to get Portcullis House ready,” she recalls. Pay was the first to move in, becoming “the guinea pig on the first floor”. After the rooms were refined, 211 MPs followed, and Pay is clearly proud of the role which PCH plays in Parliament. “Nowhere else has that interaction, and the glass corridors where you can see who is meeting who.”

After the opening, Pay moved to become an executive officer to the then Serjeant, Michael Cummins, and when a vacancy arose she applied for, and became, the first female assistant Serjeant at Arms. When Cummins’ successor Peter Grant Peterkin quit in 2007, Pay, encouraged by colleagues, put her name forward. Eventually, “there were two candidates left: me, and someone from the Army. We had interviews with the Speaker, and I got it.” She says that Michael Cummins “was, and still is, a great mentor”, but otherwise she was very much on her own as she began work as the first female to hold the role since its creation in 1415.
“My appointment was announced at 12 noon on 30th of January 2008, and at 12:05 I was expected to be the world expert at the whole job,” Pay recalls. “There was no induction at all, and the expectation was that you knew it all. That was quite interesting…”

As was the reaction to Pay's arrival in post, with the non-military appointment again rattling parliament's more traditional elements. "My style is different from military people, but surveys suggested that the Serjeant's office had this negative image – there was a lot of work to turn that round," Pay argues, describing her approach as "more facilitating". Which means? "It’s a no, but an elegant ‘no’, with an option. It means pointing out that 'actually that isn’t a good idea, but have you thought of this?'." As she hands over her responsibilities, she warns that what the Serjeant-at-Arms is responsible for “must be made absolutely clear to everyone so that is there no misunderstanding or mystique".

After leaving Parliament, Pay will work on a literary project in a school in Battersea, join an opera appreciation group (she is trying to learn from scratch), and intends to be a “better friend – something which I haven’t had the time for”. And while she can reflect on the experience of sitting in the Chamber during historic votes, and the grand occasions such as President Obama’s visits but, she adds, “the most rewarding part of the job is seeing other people develop”.

She leaves with one complaint: there are still not enough women in Parliament. “It’s still a man’s world, so we have to be twice as good,” says Pay, adding with a smile: “fortunately we are”. Breaking a 600 year-old glass ceiling is testament to that.