Rebecca Paul: Without The NHS, I Doubt I Would've Made It To 20
Rebecca Paul MP (Photography by Dinendra Haria)
12 min read
Conservative MP Rebecca Paul tells Sienna Rodgers about her working-class upbringing, how the NHS saved her life as a child and why she campaigns on women’s prisons
Kemi Badenoch, having taken up her role after a general election, has never presided over candidate selections, which give leaders the opportunity to reshape their parliamentary party. But The House can imagine that, if she were given the chance, the candidate list would feature a lot of people like Rebecca Paul.
The MP for Reigate is a traditional conservative whose background led her to value aspiration above all and who puts cultural issues at the heart of her politics – particularly the subject of gender and sex. In these ways, it is easy to draw parallels between the opposition whip, a self-described “big fan of Kemi”, and her boss.
Paul grew up in Stevenage, a new town in Hertfordshire, where she had an “ordinary background”. Her parents left school at 15 without qualifications but were “real grafters”. Mum worked in a shop – BHS then John Lewis – and dad, determined to provide for his young family, trained to be an engineer.
“I was always taught that if I wanted something, I needed to work for it,” she says, sitting in the study of her beautiful cottage near the Surrey Hills. She has lived here, in what is now her constituency, for about a decade after moving from a two-up two-down in south London. She shares it with her husband and three children.
“My dad taught me to look up and never see a limit.” Even becoming an MP was not considered out of reach. “I wasn’t surrounded by that in Stevenage. I grew up with all these people that actually just accepted their lot.” Some of her “really bright, really talented” friends have had very different outcomes as a result, she says, and it has taught her that “influences are really important”.
“I went to an ordinary school: the local junior school down the road, then the local comp. They could be quite rough. Again, the attitude was not ideal in the school. For example, I was naturally quite bright, and my dad, as you would expect, was like, ‘Cambridge – go for Cambridge.’ Straight away, it was like, ‘Oh no, people don’t really go to Cambridge from around here’.”
She applied anyway. Without advice, however, she chose the most popular college and went into the interview clueless. “No one sat me down at any point and said, ‘These are the type of questions you might get asked.’ I turned up with my bright red hair and my accent, which has gone quite a lot now, and not wearing a suit,” she recalls, adding: “Back then, state school pupils weren’t given any kind of preference.” With “a few tweaks”, she reckons, “the outcome could’ve been different”.
In the end, she went to Nottingham. After a happy upbringing, she found leaving home difficult – and was suddenly in an unfamiliar crowd. “They were all very well-educated, different background to me, and at that point I found that quite difficult,” she says of the other students. “I probably just fundamentally didn’t feel good enough.”
But she made friends and realised “there was a world outside Stevenage”. She also learnt that being clever was, in some circles, cool. “I was like, ‘Oh my goodness, there are schools where being clever and talented is celebrated, and the other kids won’t bully you for it!’”
Her main challenge as a young person was not any of this, however. It was that, for many years, she was extremely unwell – something she has not talked about publicly before. From about the age of eight, she kept passing out and having to take time off school.
“People weren’t sure what was happening. I was very, very, very thin,” Paul says. “I collapsed. I was taken to hospital a number of times in ambulances. This went on for years.” Stuck looking about 10 years old, being very short (she is tall now), as a teenager she had to watch the other girls talk about boys and clothes. They were turning into young women, and she was missing out.
“It turned out I had stomach cancer,” she says. Aged 15, they realised the problem: she was losing a lot of blood through her stomach. They assumed it was polyps – stomach cancer is rare, and “for a child to get stomach cancer is virtually unheard of” – but when surgery came, they found tumours instead.
“The NHS saved my life, without a doubt”
“They had grown because it had been years, unfortunately, where that had been happening, and it had grown all through the stomach wall and spread to the bowel. So, I had most of my stomach removed, about three quarters of it; some of my bowel removed. I had that going on GCSE year, and it was a quite a full-on operation, really horrible to recover from.”
Determined to get good exam results despite missing lots of school, because that was her ticket out of Stevenage, she sat them and “did okay”: “Back then I had an amazing memory.”
“The NHS saved my life, without a doubt. If they hadn’t discovered it at the point they had, I doubt I would have made it to 20,” she adds. But they didn’t get to choose which bits of her stomach they removed, and the structure was messed with. Even now, every day, she must eat carefully.
Because Paul cannot sit for hours without eating – or she won’t get the calories needed to function – she has told the House authorities about it, who have been “great” and allowed her to pop out of the Chamber to eat without losing her place to speak. She has to tell others, too, including in the whips’ office, “in order for people not to be fearful and be calling ambulances” when she gets ill – which can happen when she eats too much, or stands up too soon after a meal, or something just disagrees with her.
“I spent my whole life not really talking about any of this, because I saw it as a bit of a weakness, and I didn’t want it to affect how someone saw me, or even take away an opportunity,” she tells The House. Nobody could suspect it from her parliamentary work, either – which is no coincidence.
“I’m not focused on this issue. I’m not focused on rare cancers. I’m not focused on the NHS in particular.” Why not? “I just spent quite a chunk of my life with it affecting everything I did, and I don’t particularly want to think about it.”
Paul spent years as a chartered accountant, driven by the desire to become financially secure. As head of UK tax at Diageo, she was doing 60 hours a week. “If I didn’t hit my target on the effective tax rate, that was me done,” the MP recalls. “I worked my socks off. I loved it, thoroughly enjoyed it, and got myself into a position where I could buy a house, afford a family, and be comfortable.”
“That happened under us, the women’s stuff. We should have knocked that on the head straight away”
Born in 1979, she is a child of Thatcher – and a child of Thatcherites. But this has changed: her mum is leaning Reform, while her dad, “interestingly, has gone really left-wing”. A Jeremy Corbyn fan? “Not quite there, but definitely Labour and supported Labour at the last election.” They have had to ban politics at family meals: “It can get a bit fraught.”
“My dad probably got frustrated with the Conservatives for all the same reasons that lots of people got frustrated with the Conservatives over the last 14 years,” Paul says. She can relate: it was frustration with the direction of the party during maternity leave with her third child that prompted her to get politically involved and become a county councillor, a position she still holds.
Under David Cameron, she became disenchanted: “I just felt like we weren’t being Conservative.” More recently, it was the battle over sex and gender that vexed her. “That happened under us, the women’s stuff. We should have knocked that on the head straight away. It’s now really, really difficult to sort that out.”
Paul’s predecessor was Crispin Blunt, a passionately pro-trans Tory. How did she feel about him as her MP? “I remember having a conversation with him in a coffee shop, and it was frustrating to be honest with you, because he didn’t understand where I was coming from on it, and I felt a little dismissed in terms of my concerns.”
What did he make of her views? “His first thought was that I’m worried about women getting raped in toilets. But it’s actually a lot more nuanced than that.”
While safety is critical, she says, it is about “privacy and dignity” too. “It’s that time where you’re having a period, and you bleed through onto your skirt. All of us have had that, and have stood at a sink washing your skirt out and using the hand dryer,” she explains.
“Also, as a mother, how many times when I had a baby and a toddler, did I have the door open? I’m trying to go to the toilet, keep an eye on the baby in the pram, because I can’t get them into the cubicle, I’ve got my toddler… People forget about these things. They jump to the extreme of rape, sexual assault, and of course safety is a key part. But there’s all these other day-to-day things.”
The pro-trans side will often say women are “radicalised” on Mumsnet, and Paul is happy to admit she was a reader: “To be honest with you, I just thought the world was going mad… I was ‘peaked’, shall we say, on Mumsnet.” (‘Peak trans’ is a term used by ‘gender-criticals’ or ‘Terfs’ – trans-exclusionary radical feminists – to describe the point at which they stopped agreeing trans women were women.)
“I’m just a woman that understands the truth and is willing to say it. This is not that difficult. A woman can’t become a man; a man can’t become a woman. That does not mean people can’t dress how they like, present how they like, sleep with who they like, as long as it’s consenting.”
It is an adult’s right “to believe in gender ideology”, she says, but under-18s are another matter: “There are young people that have gone through a physical transition, which is, I believe, in a lot of cases, very harmful to their physical health and their mental health, off the back of a lie that once they do they will literally become the opposite sex, and they’ll be able to do everything that the opposite sex does. They’ve been sold a lie.”
Other than campaigning against puberty blocker trials for under-18s, Paul is primarily focused on women’s prisons. HMP Downview in her seat has a trans-only facility, E-wing, but the MP – who has paid it a visit – is concerned that trans prisoners are mixing with women from the rest of the prison during the day.
She has pressed the government repeatedly on whether it is moving biological males into the prison, to which ministers say, “we have put no biological males into the general female prison estate” – because they do not count E-wing as part of it. “They’re just not wanting to admit that they have moved a trans woman into a female prison, which I find immensely frustrating. This is why people dislike politicians.”
Some will counter that a trans prisoner who has fully transitioned and presents a low risk should be accepted. (Even Reform’s justice adviser has said there should be no blanket ban on trans women in women’s prisons.) Would that case be different?
“No, because you’ve got to draw a line somehow,” Paul replies. “Disabled men, very, very young men, gay men, physically small men – they are all vulnerable in the same way.” She adds: “I’m not saying they should be put in the main males estate. I’m saying there should be a wing for them – it’s just E-wing shouldn’t be in the women’s estate.”
The MP says she would support a new trans-only facility: “That way everyone gets what they need. But where we’ve got to is a lot of this is about validation… Women aren’t props to validate men.”
Badenoch made her name with similar arguments. But since becoming Tory leader, she has found it hard to cut through with arguments around culture, and generally struggled in this fast-moving, online age.
Paul points to “the rise of online” as the cause of a bad shift in politics: “All of a sudden, a majority of politicians – not all, but a majority – are trying to keep everyone happy. I really respect the politicians that don’t try to keep everyone happy.” This group includes Nigel Farage – “he just gets out there and says it, and I think that’s one of the reasons for his popularity” – but also the Conservative leader.
“It’s one of the reasons I’m such a big fan of Kemi. She’s a principled politician. She says what she thinks. She’s not looking to say what she thinks the audience wants to hear from her. She doesn’t sugarcoat it,” Paul enthuses. “I hope most people will respect her for doing that, because it’s not an easy thing to do.”
