Tory MP Harriet Cross on how ultra marathons prepared her for Westminster
Harriet Cross MP on the House of Commons terrace. Photography by Louise Haywood-Schiefer
10 min read
Ultramarathon runner and new MP Harriet Cross talks to Tali Fraser about how the election postponed her engagement, fighting for oil and gas jobs in her constituency, and settling into her second life. Photography by Louise Haywood-Schiefer
Harriet Cross says she is “comfortable with being uncomfortable”, introverted as it is possible to be and as determined as they come.
The 33-year-old new MP for Gordon and Buchan decided she wanted to be a Member of Parliament, and she made it happen, by 878 votes.
As a teenager she wanted to be a professional sprint athlete, and she began competing internationally, gaining sponsors. It was only tearing her hamstring that stopped her from pursuing it further. Even then, she knew she still wanted to run, so she started doing ultramarathons, securing first and second-place finishes in the two she has competed in.
Winning the Bennachie Ultra Marathon in 2023 within what is now her constituency, Cross tackled elevations exceeding 1,600ft. “I appreciate that my fun is going and doing that, versus most people’s fun is, like, going out for a drink,” she says with a laugh.
“With ultras it’s not necessarily who’s fastest, either. You’ve got to compete with your head together, and you have to be comfortable being uncomfortable. I’m pretty fine with that. You can set yourself up well. That’s pretty much why I just fell into it, but that’s probably the wrong way to say it because you don’t accidentally fall into a 33-miler.”
We meet in Cross’s Parliament office. It is small, but she is pleased because she doesn’t have to share it with anyone, and it has a window that opens.
“At my old job they had you do these personality metric tests. On the introvert/extrovert scale I was a two, which is basically as introverted as you could possibly get,” she says.
You would never know it. Gregarious, smiling and charming, Cross immediately seems at ease in the interview and is already doing a number of media appearances. But she maintains she is good at having a switch to turn it on and off.
You have to be comfortable being uncomfortable
Take the Tory MPs’ running club that meets one morning a week. It is a nice idea, she says, but “a morning run is time to have for myself and my own head”.
Cross has been going for an hour-long run along the Thames every morning since becoming an MP. “Everyone says work-life balance, or any sort of healthy lifestyle at Westminster is impossible. It’s not impossible. You just have to find the time.”
She even uses her sporting prowess as an analogy for her Conservatism: “A government gives the opportunity, you bring the ambition. I think that’s completely true. That’s like with sport; the opportunity could be there if you’ve got the talent, but you have to use it. There will be many more people in the world, probably faster than people who got medals at the Olympics, but they haven’t used it. They haven’t used their talent, their ambition.”
Cross has entered Parliament as one of five Tory MPs in Scotland, 121 Tory MPs overall, and eight new female Tory MPs.
“Having a small group of 26 new Tories means that we all now know each other really well. Our 26 are a really good, tight group.”
The eight new female Tory MPs have formed a WhatsApp group and have already had their first group dinner.
London living is not quite made for Cross: “I think you’re either a city person or a country person, and it’s very hard to pretend you love it. You can exist in the other place. We can’t really be properly invested in the other place. If I had the choice to get home, then I’d be there in a heartbeat.”
Having studied zoology at Imperial College, she has lived in the capital, and even rowed down the river, but she is no city dweller.
“A week in London is fine and then I get to go home to normality and sanity.”
Spending most of her childhood in rural south-west Ireland, two hours from the nearest big town, Cross’ family later moved to similarly rural Scotland: “My mum’s Irish and my dad’s Scottish. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but apparently they flipped a coin when we were younger to decide which order we would live where.”
Cross is one of three siblings. Her parents live just 45 minutes away from her constituency home in Aberdeenshire, and Cross’ brother and sister live in England. Her commute to London takes five hours, door to door, but that is if there aren’t any delays or cancellations to her flights: “In the first 10 days, I had three cancelled flights.”
When in London, she says, “I miss the hills, miss the quietness, miss my dog”. Cross has a two-year-old black labrador called Mia, who is related to her parents’ two black labradors, Mia’s father and brother.
She took her out on the election campaign: “I don’t know if she was necessarily a good campaigning dog but she was an enthusiastic one! She sits on the doorstep, the door opens, and she just runs in.”
Cross was selected to contest her seat in the summer of 2023, although neither she nor her boyfriend at the time, now fiancé, Tom, a geologist, realised how soon the election would be – and how it would interrupt some big plans.
In an otherwise relatively bare office, there is an extravagant bouquet of flowers on her shelf from Tom Tugendhat – the candidate she is backing in the leadership race, introducing him at his launch – congratulating Cross on her recent engagement.
Cross’ fiancé had asked her father for permission to propose more than a year ago, and had set himself the end of last summer as a deadline. He proposed on 31 August on a walk over the hills.
“It was perfect,” she says, but it could have been a very different story. “He was asking what I wanted to do, clearly trying to set the groundwork, and I said we needed to go to the tip! So I set the scene for that wonderfully.
“Tom was planning to do it at the start of summer, but the election got in the way… then my brother got engaged a few weeks beforehand, so I think he was probably more annoyed at that, because then he was asking: ‘Can I do that?’”
She laughs: “Dad apparently kept being like, ‘Is it still happening? Have they fallen out?’”
His parents are dairy farmers and, due to their commitments, the wedding will likely be near enough to the farm that they can get back to do the afternoon milking. “The effort and time and commitment and emotion that goes into it, it completely takes over,” Cross says of the farming life.
Having most recently worked as a rural surveyor, it is something she understands through her own career, too – and Cross wants to bring that experience to Westminster.
“When you’re a surveyor, you’re working with a lot of businesses, you’re reacting to what is being imposed on you, and you’re just helping them react to that,” she says.
Her focus is on “letting people go on with their job… stop imposing a hundred more different targets, which ultimately just ends up with more paperwork and stops people actually doing what they want to do”.
People do business differently as a rural surveyor, she says: “People don’t necessarily want you to come up being really proper and smart. No, they want you to sit at their farm table with them, have a proper conversation, ask them how their herds are first, and then get to the issue.”
“It is like I have a second life,” Cross adds. “There’s Aberdeenshire me, and there’s London me, and they are different people. Make-up, dresses, hair down is for here, none of that has to be done at home.”
She says with a grin: “I don’t need streetlights, I’ve got a head torch.”
For her constituency, oil and gas is a huge industry. “Under every oil and gas job, there are tens, if not hundreds, of supply-chain jobs, hospitality jobs. Everything up in my area is linked in some way to oil and gas.”
There’s Aberdeenshire me, and there’s London me, and they are different people
Over the summer she wrote to Chancellor Rachel Reeves about Labour’s plans to hike the windfall tax on North Sea oil and gas companies.
“That was before summer recess,” Cross says. “I’m yet to hear back; we have chased”.
The week we meet she has sat down with an oil and gas investor considering leaving the UK, and has had another email since. “They all say the same thing: we need clarity.”
Cross adds: “The jobs of oil and gas workers cannot be expended to increase the rush towards net-zero because, for one, those are the jobs of today. We don’t need to worry about jobs of tomorrow if we are not protecting the jobs of today. And two, they’re the people who are actually going to make the transition faster, fairer and more efficient. You can’t sacrifice them if you want to get your end goal.”
She is willing to work with unlikely political allies to push on this, citing GMB union chief Gary Smith as someone who shares her concerns.
“We’re not trying to be unconstructive. But there is such a risk and we can only do this once. It has to be done right the first time, because the longer it goes on being uncertain, or as soon as there is any uncertainty that gives businesses an issue.”
Cross has been interested in politics ever since her time at university but did not get involved with the Conservative Party until she returned to live in Scotland. She stood for a seat in the Scottish Parliament in 2021, as “very much a paper candidate”, and in 2022 for the local council after messaging her MSP, “naively”, to ask for a meeting for some advice on how to stand. It all happened quickly from there and she was directed to the party’s assessment board.
“I knew Westminster was what I had my eyes set on,” she says. “My heart was never set on being a councillor.”
Her family are all Conservative voters, but she doesn’t recall conversations around the dinner table about politics in that way: “It was more my mum was a nurse, which she gave up when we were born, and then once we had gone to school, she became a lifeboat mechanic. My father was a local community pharmacist. They’ve worked incredibly hard. They came from nothing, like empty-wallets nothing, and they worked up. They did incredibly well, effectively, all by themselves, just by working hard.
“The opportunities are there – go find them and make the most of the ones you get. Don’t keep wishing that someone else is going to give you something to help you up. Go find it.”
She has finally found her thing in Parliament: “I feel now as if I’ve landed. Finally, I have a job and work that feels right.”
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