Caroline Lucas: Green moderniser who made parliament listen

One day in 1986, Caroline Lucas went looking for the Green party headquarters, finding them in a “shoe box” on Clapham High Street in south London, and immediately signed up as a member.

Thirty-seven years later, Lucas has announced she will stand down at the next election as the party’s only MP after decades as its highest-profile member. In that time she has been one of its MEPs, its only MP, and its leader on two occasions, and has spearheaded its core strategies of social and environmental justice to achieve some of the party’s best ever election results.

As she prepares to concentrate on her environmental work, Lucas leaves behind a bigger, more established and more professional party. She also leaves a parliament where the causes she has championed for years, from ending coal power to banning fracking, have been taken up by the UK’s two biggest parties.

“It has been about putting things on the political agenda that would not have been there without me,” she says, hours after announcing her intention to stand down. “On coal power, on fracking, on drug policy, I have worked very hard to make these things issues for mainstream political debate.”

Lucas, the child of two Conservative voters, was involved in a variety of progressive causes when she was younger, from women’s rights to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

She says Jonathon Porritt’s book Seeing Green convinced her that these causes were all linked, with ecology and environmentalism at their core. After finishing the book, she immediately joined the Green party.

Not long after, the party achieved its best ever election result, winning 15% of the vote and coming third in the 1989 European elections. That result, however, failed to translate into a single seat, thanks to the wide dispersal of Green support across the country.

Over the subsequent two decades, as Lucas rose up the party ranks, she began to modernise the party and put it in a better position to win seats. The rotating “speakers” who convened the party were replaced by a leader who had to be re-elected every two years and resources were put into places the party felt they could win.

“Amongst a lot of Greens, these sort of changes rang alarm bells, but in terms of modernising the party, making it fit for the 21st century and making it a mass membership party, they were essential,” says Jonathan Bartley, who co-led the party with Lucas from 2016 to 2018.

In 1999, Lucas was elected as one of the party’s first two MEPs. Just over a decade later, she narrowly beat the Labour candidate to gain the seat of Brighton Pavilion. That victory, and each of her subsequent three election wins, have been built on the back of a strong local support base.

Natalie Bennett, who succeeded Lucas as leader in 2012, says: “I remember one time when we were door-knocking during the 2015 election campaign, a man stopped his car in the middle of the street, left his door open, rushed over to us and said: ‘Caroline, you’re wonderful.’ Then he got back in and drove off.”

But her biggest impact was in parliament, where for 13 years Lucas acted as a one-woman party, taking on every brief from foreign affairs to welfare policy.

“What really stuck out was that she had to cover every ministerial department as a frontbencher, and was keen to have in-depth discussions about every single issue,” says Matthew Butcher, who worked for Lucas in parliament and now works for the New Economy Organisers Network.

Those who know Lucas describe her intense work ethic and long hours, often starting at 6am and working into the early hours. After more than a decade in power, Lucas says this has taken its toll. “I have had 25 years of working crazy hours,” she says. “My staff and I would spend hours and hours making sure we understood every issue I had to vote on.”

For the past 13 years, Lucas has been either the actual or de facto leader of the Greens. Her party now faces the daunting task of achieving the same national prominence with far lesser-known candidates.

“This has been the Greens’ catch-22 for years,” says Bartley. “We knew we needed to bring forward more people in leadership roles, but so much of the party’s success and political capital has been tied up in Caroline.”

Tom Burke, a co-founder of the environmental thinktank E3G, says: “She has shown her party it can be done. If they don’t keep doing it, it is not the public’s fault, it is theirs.”

The party has just achieved its best ever local election result, winning 241 council seats and majority control of its first ever council in Suffolk. Members now hope they can use that strength in local politics to win more Westminster seats at next year’s general election, even without Lucas as a candidate.

But whatever the results of the election, even Lucas’s political opponents admit she has helped propel her causes and her party into the centre of British politics.

Nigel Farage, the former leader of the UK Independence party, says: “While it is very difficult for small parties to win seats under our outdated electoral system, there can be no doubt that both the Green party and Ukip have changed the national conversation.”

Lucas says: “My view is always to err on the side of being hopeful. The arguments have been made, and they are being listened to.”

cover photo:Caroline Lucas: ‘It has been about putting things on the political agenda that would not have been there without me.’ Photograph: Ian Forsyth/Getty