Women in Westminster: In Conversation With Alicia Kearns MP
Alicia Kearns MP entered the Commons in 2019 and rapidly made her mark, becoming the first woman to chair the Foreign Affairs Select Committee. As part of our Women in Westminster series, PoliticsHome sat down with Kearns to learn about her journey in politics and why she will never settle for “good enough”
“I think too often, as women, we are taught that your job is to never make anyone uncomfortable,” Alicia Kearns MP tells PoliticsHome. “Always be kind".
During her sit-down conversation with PoliticsHome, the MP for Rutland and Stamford is open and friendly rather than “unkind”. However, it is abundantly clear that she also has a relentless determination that makes her utterly uncompromising when it comes to advocating for her constituents and others.
In part, that drive to make a difference is what led Kearns to make the transition from civil servant to elected MP. That relatively unusual shift has furnished her with not just a depth of policy knowledge, but also a particular insight into the cultural differences between Whitehall and Westminster.
Kearns has many positive memories of the civil service where she had stints at the Ministry of Defence, Justice, and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office before a move to the private sector. However, she also believes that a civil service culture of “good enough” sometimes felt like a handbrake on her own desire to make a real difference.
“My great frustration about the civil service was I was constantly told, ‘Oh, that's good enough, Alicia’,” she tells PoliticsHome. “ ’You don't need to keep pushing.’ And I'd be thinking, ‘It's not good enough. It's not going to achieve what we're trying to do.’”
For Kearns, that drive, to overcome bureaucracy and push through boundaries, is absolutely core to the role of any elected MP. Whether it is dealing with the bureaucracy of government departments or of local organisations that are not helping constituents, Kearns clearly expects far more than “good enough” from both herself and others.
What also comes across during our conversation is that willingness to challenge individuals and organisations is something that carries a personal cost.
“I don't think this is a job that you can really enjoy because it is so tough,” she says. “It is so demanding and takes so much from you. You are constantly having to find ways to build your own resilience and rebuild your walls as they're knocked down.”
Part of that stems from the relentlessness of the role of being an MP. However, it also seems to be a product of the sometimes toxic environment of UK politics, particularly for our elected representatives.
When asked to describe the main difference between being a civil servant and being an MP, Kearns does not hesitate.
“There's a lot more hatred,” she says. “I mean, in the civil service, everyone assumes that you're automatically a good person at heart. As an MP, everyone assumes that you're corrupt.”
That strand of toxicity in the nation’s political life affects all MPs, regardless of gender. However, Kearns detects a specific brand of hatred preserved for women who are active in public life. This, she says, is all too often fuelled by a media that empowers misogyny.
“That is the biggest problem for all women in politics,” she says. “We are constantly demeaned and denigrated for our sex or our appearance. Unfortunately, when that happens, misogynists across the country are empowered. We need to challenge the willingness of media, in particular, to degrade us in that way.”
Kearns’ experiences in both the civil service and as an MP also suggest that, despite progress, outdated sexist views continue to persist across government. When she successfully ran to be chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee in 2022, she recalls, one of the other candidates commented that “people shouldn’t vote for me because I wear a skirt”.
“Without question, foreign policy is definitely seen as the purview of men, and so is defence,” she explains. “Men would say things when we went on trips on the Foreign Affairs Committee like, you know, ‘you're young and this is far beyond what you're capable of understanding.’”
Those are views and attitudes that Kearns was simply never going to accept. Her own childhood instilled an inner belief and set of core values that challenged any assumptions that placed limits on what a woman can do.
“In our household, there was no such thing as gender inequality or stereotyping,” she says. “My dad was the stay-at-home house husband, so I was never brought up with even the idea that women were the ones who were meant to stay at home.”
Those formative years also appear to have influenced Kearns’ view that women’s equality is something that men have a responsibility to fight for as well as women. She cites the important work that Sir Alec Shelbrooke and the late Sir David Amess did to raise the profile of endometriosis as a powerful example of the impact that men can have when they act as allies.
“I think it's a real shame that it often takes women to talk about issues that affect women most,” she adds. “The fact that it was two men talking about issues that only affect women. That is incredible. That's what we need more of in Parliament.”
Kearns also draws a parallel between men advocating for women and her own longstanding work campaigning for LGBTQ+ groups. “I think it's my duty to be a voice for everyone,” she points out. “Not just for myself.”
Ultimately, throughout our discussion, Kearns often returns to the same central, driving theme, that MPs from all parties are in a position where they can and should make an enormous difference.
“You can change lives in your local community, nationally, and internationally in a single day,” she says. “That is the most enormous privilege and honour.”
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