Gina Miller is trying to convince me that she understands why I voted Brexit. The woman who went to the High Court in 2016 to effectively try to cancel my vote by insisting the EU referendum result be referred back to a Remain-dominated parliament, plunging Brexit into years of legal and parliamentary wrangling, says she feels my pain and always has.
How can this be? Well, maybe it’s just the magic of politics.
‘My case was not to do with Brexit. It was to do with parliament’
Ms Miller is attempting to turn her single-issue, referendum-wrecking fame into a broader platform, by standing in leafy Epsom and Ewell as one of nine general election candidates for her True and Fair party.
I arrive at her campaign HQ determined to demand how she can possibly call it true and fair to try to overturn the votes of 17 million people with R (Miller) vs Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union – an action which resulted in Brexit being put through the wringer for years before it squeezed through parliament.
But before I can do that, the sleek financier hurries towards me down the lanes of Epsom in a navy trouser suit and starts waving at me to park my car ‘here – no there, no here’. I say I will park it anywhere she wants. I don’t think you are meant to argue with Gina.
The way she sees it, she twice defeated the Conservative government in its unlawful attempts to bypass parliament. I tell her people like me wanted parliament bypassed, because we were never going to get Brexit through properly otherwise.
But she says no, that would have set a precedent. Yes, I say, a precedent of people getting what they voted for. I don’t think she’s listening.
‘My case was not to do with Brexit. It was to do with parliament,’ she insists. ‘The way it was portrayed, or talked about, actually endangered me and my family. People have actually gone to jail for trying to kill me. The worst experience of my life was opening a letter saying they knew where my children lived and they would be taken that day.’
She appears to bear the Brexit side remarkably little ill will, considering. The Remain campaign, however, she is scathing about: ‘I was one of the ones going round the country. Very few of the Remain campaign ever left London. I went to Minehead, to Cardiff, to Leeds, to York and I came back and kept telling them, “You don’t get it. People are hurting.”
‘I remember sitting with this old woman in North Wales and she was saying, our town has gone, we have no jobs for our young people. I kept coming back to London and telling them. That’s when I was shocked with the response. Why were they not listening? These people were hurting. They wanted someone to listen. It was a cry for help.’
Rather infuriatingly, Ms Miller is presenting herself as a passionate advocate for the disenfranchised who voted to leave the EU. She even has a Brexit voter standing as her candidate in Wirral West.
It’s confusing – until you look through her CV where, amid myriad glittering achievements, degrees and honorary degrees, the Vanity Fair Challenger Award, the theme that keeps recurring is branding. Miller was a marketing and events manager at BMW in the 1990s, then started a specialist financial services marketing agency. In February 2009, she co-founded the investment firm SCM Private, now SCM Direct wealth management, with her third husband Alan Miller, a multimillionaire hedge fund manager. She also set up Miller Philanthropy, rebranded to the True and Fair Foundation, which closed amid regulatory questions, but overlapped with the founding of the True and Fair Campaign, which had the stated aim of limiting mis-selling and financial scandals. In 2021 came the True and Fair party.
Instead of saying she wants to rejoin the EU, she steers me this way: ‘We need to start the road to rejoin, but it’s probably going to be a long road. But how do we repair some of the damage? Yesterday we launched this “Championing the Countryside” campaign.’
Rural issues are at the heart of her pitch for votes in Surrey. I point out that on her website she states she will raise taxes on agriculture, while in a tweet during a visit to Marlborough she said she wanted to support farmers. Which is it?
‘No, so, funnily enough,’ she says, hurriedly, ‘that one [the higher taxes] is not going to be in our fuller manifesto now we have consulted with the sector. We realise that would create an injustice for small farmers.’ One might almost say it was neither true nor fair. But at least she corrected it.
‘I’m learning all the time,’ she says.
She claims she was advised to hike taxes on farming by ‘the people who see farmers in a particular light, that they’re rich. These people have never been on a farm. They’re townies. They’re the environmentalists who don’t understand our farmers are the custodians of our environment.’ I ask if she is referring to her own glamorous friends in areas like Wimbledon, where she lives in a £7 million house and she nods, and laughs.
She says she’s been a vegetarian ‘for 40 odd years’ but does not agree with staunch veganism. ‘They would like to stop farming completely but you can’t do that. All these hobby lobbyists, who think they can shout the loudest…’ She rolls her eyes.
When I congratulate her on that stance, she says she does not disagree with veganism either. ‘We need a national food plan. We’re importing 46 per cent of our food.’
I mutter that this is because her townie friends hate farmers so much. She carries on: ‘It’s not just that we need to grow more potatoes. It should be the Fens where we grow them.’
Miller produces policies in a scattergun, contradictory fashion. She says on her website that she’s going to have a ‘truth’ law, to make lying while in office an offence. When I ask how this would work, she says: ‘Not lies. We’ve not quite phrased it that way. It’s ethics rather than truth because when we tested it that was doable.’
What about this one, I say, reading it out to her: ‘Fast track overseas doctors into the NHS’?
No, that has been dropped, she says, ‘having now spoken to people in the NHS. We have got a problem with retention. I worry about the fact that we’re bringing too many people in to work in our NHS. We have to train our own doctors more.’
She’s performing U-turns so fast I worry that she won’t have any policies left by the end of the interview. She says it is because she has ideas and then they are examined by expert teams.
She wants to merge income tax and national insurance, to make the poor better off, while raising capital gains tax and corporation tax, to fund social care. She wants a ‘sensory term’ added to the school year, so that children can learn ‘non-academic’ things like arts, crafts, music. People in the arts won’t be pleased at being called non-academic, but maybe her heart is in the right place – or should I say left place.
She readily admits she will be voting Lib Dem in Wimbledon. She wants PR, but after holding citizens’ assemblies, not a referendum. She thinks emissions charging is the right policy at the wrong time. She drives an electric car, but concedes they are too expensive. She would prioritise other measures to combat carbon, like planting more moss in walls.
Let it go, I tell myself, because we’ve only got an hour.
Miller seems to have an idea a second. She thinks Epsom and Ewell could be a spa destination. ‘You’ve got proximity to London and the provenance of Epsom salts. And we as a nation need to do something about our health and happiness. And that’s what Epsom should be – the home of health and happiness.’
Maybe it should, I end up thinking, because who am I to contradict Gina?
She does not have strong views on horse-racing. But she wants Epsom to be known for more than the handful of days a year when it hosts the Derby Festival, which sounds to me like she doesn’t like horse-racing that much. The sitting MP, Chris Grayling, she dismisses as ‘the least successful minister of the 21st century’, which seems a bit harsh.
She would prioritise other measures to combat carbon, like planting more moss in walls
I point out that Grayling is state school-educated whereas she went to a sea-view private boarding school that sounds like Mallory Towers – pony rides from its very own equestrian centre.
She grew up in newly independent Guyana, the daughter of a barrister who would become the country’s attorney general, and was sent to England to be educated aged ten. She took a summer job as a chambermaid when she was 14 because currency controls prevented her parents sending money.
Or, as she says on her website: ‘Gina fled a dictatorship as a child, and faced many hardships growing up in the UK… She found the strength to not just carry on but win many battles and accolades, for her bravery, determination, honesty and integrity.’
Tory insiders are quietly jubilant about her decision to stand. I tell her Grayling sees himself as more meritocratic. ‘Who says that? Him?’ She seems annoyed.
She says she is not going for that narrative but if she were: ‘I had to work my way up from being a survivor.’
She has various ‘survivor’ incidents she talks about, one of which relates to domestic violence in a previous marriage, one to an attack which happened during her time at university. ‘I’m a fighter. I don’t tend to stay down. I have a strong sense of injustice.’
She puts her success down to ‘hard work, being in the right place at the right time. I could have been a lot more successful than I am. Certain things I will not do, sell my soul. Financial services, I could have gone on. They were looking for a woman of colour to be on boards. I didn’t like the products. I have to be comfortable with the choices I make.’
She does a show called An Evening With Gina Miller, ‘where people come and ask me about anything. We did this one, why Britain is a nation of animal lovers. We talked about cats and I told them cats were actually pests. Then the drawings of one person made them look cute.’
I find myself wondering if it’s possible that she is naive in some respects. She produced a leaflet called The Great Reset, about her political views, and had to withdraw it, because she didn’t know it was the name of a right-wing conspiracy theory, and it went viral.
‘When did that start? Is it still going now?’ she asks me. She talks at breakneck speed and one idea crashes into another. ‘The world is going to carry on becoming more difficult. We can’t keep up with it.’ I can’t keep up with her.
I keep coming back to her party’s name: True and Fair. It seems a big idea. But I’ve no doubt she will try her best to sell it.
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