Mother said 'I don’t want you in that dirty world of politics'

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12 April 2012

This, says 23-year-old Georgia Gould, was the toughest, most shattering experience of her life. She did not see it coming, she admits, because at first nobody paid much attention to her attempt, as the daughter of Philip Gould, Tony Blair's former chief pollster, to win selection for the soon-to-be-vacated Labour seat of Erith and Thamesmead, and to go on and become one of the youngest women MPs in history.

But as the Oxford-educated blonde emerged as the dynamic frontrunner among the more experienced but rather unexciting all-women shortlist, all hell broke loose. She found herself accused by local Labour left-wingers and the national press of "nepotism" and of using family connections to "parachute" her into one of Labour's safest seats.

"I was the victim of a well-orchestrated and vicious smear campaign," she says, speaking to the Standard in her first interview after her defeat last weekend to Teresa Pearce, a local 54-year-old tax accountant. "I was accused of using a professional PR company to run my campaign. Rubbish! They said that Alastair Campbell was phoning party activists to tell them to support me. Again, rubbish!

"Some activists were so determined to keep me out that they broke in to a sealed box of postal votes and tore them up in a deliberate act of sabotage, seemingly because word got out that I'd encouraged members to vote for me by post.

"Every day, I'd wake to articles in the media, and they came from both the Left and the Right, assailing me for being too rich, too young, too inexperienced, but mostly too well connected. There were days the flak got so bad that I became quite depressed, which is really quite unlike me, and I never wanted to get out of bed."

In the midst of this, she says, she took a night off from campaigning to accompany her mother, Gail Rebuck, chief executive of publishers Random House UK, to collect her award as Veuve Clicquot Businesswoman of the Year at the Saatchi Gallery in Chelsea.

Her mother had been against her standing. "I've seen politics up close and I don't want you in that dirty world," she warned her daughter. But that night Georgia drew strength from her mother's self-made success and from the wisdom of her Jewish grandmother, Mavis, who had grown up poor in the East End and become a hairdresser at 13, and who told her: "The women of this family, we never give up!"

Mostly, what kept her going, Gould says, was the raw anger she encountered on the doorstep as the MP expenses scandal began to unravel. "You cannot underestimate the fury that ordinary party activists and people are feeling. They feel betrayed, that the politicians are just in it to feather their own nests. There is a sense that something new and radical and totally fresh is needed to clean up politics.

"In Thamesmead, they tried to cast me as the Blairite because I come from a privileged background but it's not about Old Labour or New Labour, or Blairites or Brownites any more. These are old divides, a false split, a dead language, and they speak of a moribund politics that totally misses the point.

"Young people like myself have known for some time that we need a new agenda that has, at its heart, the environment, social mobility, and a more open, transparent style of doing politics. And it will be young people like me who come in to revolutionise the new Labour Party because we've never been compromised by the old."

How would she begin? "All MPs who've had to repay expenses should have to go back to their constituency and put themselves up for deselection. This includes those who have flipped homes and who have behaved totally disgustingly and unethically." Like Hazel Blears? "I don't want to get into individual cases but flippers are beyond the pale and should be punished. It should be up to the constituency Labour Party whether they should resign.

"But reforming MPs' expenses is just the beginning. We must think about moving to more open, democratic US-style primaries for selecting party candidates in the first place to replace our current closed system. And we must remember what Labour's really about: connecting to the community and reducing the gap between rich and poor."

But isn't fighting for social mobility a little rich coming from Gould, who, by her own admission, has just been gifted (with her 19-year-old sister, Grace) a £500,000 three-bedroom flat in Mornington Crescent by her multi-millionaire parents?

She blushes. "I've never denied that I'm incredibly privileged but that doesn't mean I'm not a hard worker or genuine in my beliefs. I was democratically voted head-girl at Camden School for Girls, a high-achieving state school, and I went to Oxford, so I could have gone for a high-paying glamorous career. But I do this because I am passionate about it and I love it! Though I do understand," she smiles, "that some people will call me a walking contradiction."

To be fair, although Gould will never need to raise a mortgage, she does not come across as overly materialistic in her Marks & Spencer lime-green jacket and black skirt. And she insists that the story that her mother bought her a toy office "staffed" by Barbie dolls for her sixth birthday is apocryphal. "Perhaps that was for my sister. I was a tomboy, I hated dolls, and have no recollection of it whatsoever."

Is going into politics like going into the family business? "I was Labour even before I knew what Labour meant," she says. "I've been going to party conferences since I was three. For me, being Labour meant going on rides in Blackpool. Later I became Labour in a conscious way when I joined the party and became an activist at 15, and then at 18 I spent a year as a full-time party organiser."

She grew up, she says, with political chatter bubbling up around her. She has "totally unremarkable" memories of a much younger Tony Blair hanging out and talking political strategy with her dad in the living room of their plush Notting Hill home, then years later, as Prime Minister, when her family moved to the Camden catchment area and into a £2 million house near Regent's Park.

At four, she was the cover-girl for the Labour Party manifesto.

And since age five, holidays have been spent at their 15th-century villa in Majorca with Alastair Campbell and his partner, Fiona Millar.

Her friend at high school was Alex Birtles, daughter of Patricia Hewitt, the former health secretary, and at Oxford, she followed Blair's son, Nicky, 23, another childhood friend, as the chair of the Oxford University Labour Club.

Yet it was her connections, or rather her injudicious use of them, that soured her relationship with Erith and Thamesmead Labour Party.

When, at Gould's request, Tessa Jowell, the Olympics Minister, pitched up to campaign on her behalf, the retiring Left-wing MP, John Austin, went ballistic.

He accused the national party of attempting to hijack the contest and threw his support behind the eventual winner, Teresa Pearce.

Was inviting Jowell a mistake? "No, no," she protests, "I wasn't trying to demonstrate my connections, just trying to create a buzz and re-energise the local party." Really? She pulls a mea culpa face. "Well, if I'm totally honest, maybe it was a mistake to bring in Tessa and use my family connections.

"It created the wrong impression. I was at my best when I was on my own going door-to-door and making personal contact."

She admits seeking advice from her father, who in 2004 was given a peerage and became Lord Gould. So is her dad, a man who should know a thing or two about how to win elections, paradoxically the reason for her defeat?

She laughs (something I discover she does a lot). "Of course I talked strategy with dad but mostly his advice was fatherly. When things got hard, he told me to stand tall and keep going.

"I'd seen him deal so bravely with getting oesophagus cancer last year, and enduring an operation and chemotherapy, which has thankfully put the cancer into remission. It gave me perspective.

"We're a very supportive family. You know, my mum is totally inspiring. And dad and I are close, too, and mad-keen season-ticket holders at QPR and attend almost every home game together."

She takes her religion from her (Jewish) mother, she adds, but her looks from her father. "Like dad as a kid, I have dirty-blonde hair and sticking-out ears. Actually, my ears have got better as I got older and as I've grown into my face."

What's next? Will she target a seat vacated by one of the sleazy MPs now being deselected? She prevaricates.

Her immediate aim, she says, is to complete the June exams for her masters in politics at the London School of Economics, and to continue working a day-and-a-half a week (for £12 an hour) at Tony Blair's Faith Foundation. "And after that? I will stand again. Definitely. But I'm not sure whether it will be at the next election."

Why not? Was the contest too bruising? "No, I've come out of it stronger. I'm young. Time is on my side."

Her top job? "Oh, that would be Minister for Education," she says but immediately clamps her hand over her mouth like a naughty schoolgirl, aware of how ambitious it sounds.

Her mother, she'd told me earlier, never let anything stand in her way. "But of course, that's an impossible dream. What I really want is to be a Labour MP, a really good Labour MP."

No doubt, in time, the bitterly fought battle for Erith and Thamesmead will go down as a footnote in the history of Labour but for Gould it will always be writ large as her baptism of fire.

"I like to think that the campaign was invigorated because of me," she laughs. "But next time, I will be wiser. And I will know exactly what to expect."

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