Arise, Baroness Sharron of the Swimming Lanes? The wags in the online comment sections have been having great fun suggesting a title for Olympian Sharron Davies when she takes her seat in the House of Lords next year.
Traditionally, new peers can pick their own titles, within reason and subject to heraldic rules.
Yet the former champion swimmer turned thorn-in-the-side of the sporting establishment, says her three grown-up children – who have been in on the secret of her impending peerage since June – have already bestowed their own title upon her.
‘They’ve been calling me Baroness Dogsbottom,’ she confides, as one of the family dogs clambers onto the sofa behind her during our Zoom interview, unaware of the solemnity of the occasion.
Quite how much family life influences careers in politics – perhaps particularly if you are woman – was underlined when Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch called Sharron and asked her if she’d consider being a Tory peer. Her first thoughts went to her grandchildren, Ariya, five, and Ovi, two.
‘One of the first things I said to Kemi was, “I’m a Grandma. I look after my grandchildren one day a week and I can’t lose my Grandma day”. She said “No, no, you can work around it. We can work out the best days to be in Parliament”.’
A total of 34 new life peers were announced this week, most destined to join the Labour benches. Sharron, 63, will be one of just three new Tory peers, and no she didn’t foresee this coming either.
‘Oh God, no. If you told me 30 years ago that I was going to be doing this, I’d have laughed at you,’ she says.
It feels like a very timely appointment, and a significant one. Is this the same Sharron Davies who, just a few years ago, seemed to be on the ‘cancelled’ list in public life, facing financial and reputational ruin when she became one of the first high-profile sports stars to publicly say transwomen had no place in women’s sport?
Oh, the irony of a former champion swimmer now being recognised precisely because she refused to stay in her own lane.
It was Sharron’s relentless fighting on the frontline of the gender war – particularly in the sporting world, but not exclusively so – that has propelled her into politics, and her appointment tells a larger story about the cultural battles shaping Britain today.
She tells me she would never have said she was a dyed-in-the-wool Conservative. ‘I’ve voted both Conservative and Labour in the past. I voted for Tony Blair. But I vote with my emotions. I vote based on common sense and my own personal experience.’
She and Kemi Badenoch go back a long way; the respect flowing both ways, it seems.
‘I first got to know her when she was Equalities Minister and what struck me was how hard she was working behind the scenes. She always had time to listen to me. I’d speak to her maybe twice or three times a month and she always took my call.’
She was particularly struck by the Conservative leader’s embracing of an anti-woke agenda and determination to call a spade a spade (or, more pertinently, a transwoman a biological man).
When Badenoch called with the offer of a peerage, she asked what the job actually involved.
‘I did say, “Hang on, what powers come with this job? What does it all mean?”. Kemi said, “You can say to people that they need to come and see you, and they can’t really ignore you. You can write to people and they HAVE to give you an answer”.’
She grins. ‘So now, the people who have been avoiding me won’t be able to avoid me quite as much. People who don’t want to look into my eyes and say “Yes, we are letting women in sport down” won’t be able to simply ignore me.’
If you are on the ruling body of a sporting organisation in the UK, Baroness Sharron is coming for you.
What a powerhouse Sharron Davies is, perhaps even moreso out of the pool than she was in it.
She doesn’t actually swim much these days, because what busy woman has time? ‘It’s a palaver to get to a pool, in, out, get changed again.’
But thanks to a rigorous gym routine she still has the body of a honed athlete. She exercises her mind each morning by reading all the papers – ‘even the Guardian!’. If she ever goes on Mastermind, her specialised subject will be ways the sporting world has tried to squash women.
Although she started to emerge as a gender-critical activist circa 2019, the seeds were sown way back in 1980 when she lost out on a gold medal in the Olympics, coming second to Petra Schneider, an East German swimmer whose victory was drug-enhanced.
To this day, she has never got over the flagrant unfairness of a system which, as she puts it, was put in place by men trying to make women ‘more like men’, courtesy of testosterone injections.
That was a very different world, but when Sharron started to see a younger generation of sportswomen being ‘cheated’ out of medals by trans-identifying athletes she saw parallels. Her objections about the erasure of women from their own sports brought her death threats and vilification from LGBT rights groups. In 2023, she responded with a hard-hitting book Unfair Play: The Battle for Women’s Sport.
When Kemi Badenoch first tried to tempt her into politics, it must have seemed that the cultural landscape had shifted.
In April, when the Supreme Court ruled that trans women were NOT women, Sharron was among those feeling most vindicated. In September, the Football Association banned trans women from playing in professional women’s teams.
And yet, how much has changed? We speak in the week where Sandie Peggie, the Fife nurse ‘hung out to dry’ (Sharron’s words) after complaining about being forced to share a changing room with a biological male, reveals she’s appealing her tribunal ruling. Although claims of harassment by the health board were upheld, allegations of discrimination and victimisation were dismissed.
‘The law is there but it is not being implemented, because this government is frightened of its backbenchers,’ says Sharron. ‘So it’s being left to the Sandie Peggies of this world, or the Darlington nurses, to have to crowd-fund to get the laws applied. What a crazy world to be living in that women have to crowd-fund to get laws applied that protect women.
‘I wake up some mornings and can’t understand how we are here. So we have to keep fighting. I do think we’re winning, but it’s like pulling teeth.’
She rails at those in authority ‘constantly passing the buck, taking the path of least resistance’, to the point where ‘we’re actually almost giving the authority to these 20-year-old DEI (Diversity, Equality and Inclusion) officers who don’t know the law. People in charge are shirking their responsibilities. And I think we’ve got to get back to sacking people who don’t apply the law.’
Last month, with her friend Tracy Edwards, the trailblazing yachtswoman, Sharron set up the Women’s Sports Union, a not-for-profit organisation advocating for ‘fair and safe sport for women and girls’.
The plan is to take legal action against sporting bodies she argues are discriminating against female athletes.
‘When my mother got married she wasn’t allowed to have her name on the mortgage, even though it was her money that paid for the deposit. People like her fought so hard for women’s rights. The generations behind us don’t realise how easy it is to lose those rights. And there is more misogyny around today than I’ve ever witnessed in my life – but it’s sort of hidden.
‘Where is this evidenced? ‘Places like the nursing unions which didn’t support their own nurses.’
Every week she is contacted by parents whose daughters have been pushed off podiums in the name of equality. She tells them to mobilise, fight.
‘I think girls have got it much harder at the moment. Girls have been beaten over the head with the “Be Kind” thing for years now. And it’s almost like we programmed girls to think they’re supposed to put themselves at the back of the list.
‘What the statistics tell us that it’s only women’s sport that gets affected. Men’s sport doesn’t get ruined. There aren’t thousands of trans-identifying women all over the world stealing prizes and prize money and places from men in sport. It’s not happening there.’
Sharron Davies could have had a nice life over the last few years. She once had a healthy salary, courtesy of gigs like the TV show Gladiators. She was a regular commentator on the BBC. Pretty much all her contracts were pulled when she started to speak out about the gender war.
She only survived financially because her mother had left her an inheritance. Money is still an issue.
‘I’m lucky in that I had had a good career, so I didn’t have a huge mortgage, but now I live in a lovely Georgian house which I can’t afford to heat because my heating bills have gone mental like everyone else’s. I have been sitting here in my electric blanket in the kitchen today.
‘But I learned a long time ago that money doesn’t bring happiness. What I am doing now gives me a sense of purpose.’
It’s perhaps no coincidence that she is heading into the political fray at an age where a lot of women feel invisible.
‘I think there are a lot of us around, though,’ she says. ‘There are women of our age who say “You can call me whatever you want. It’s not going to stop me doing the right thing”.’
She says she will be flying the flag not just for women but for common sense. Actually there is a real flag on display behind her; no qualms about displaying patriotic pride. ‘I am patriotic. I wore the Union Jack from the age of 11. I swam under that flag.’
She hopes the Lords will benefit from her life experience, and you can’t quibble that she has plenty of that.
She has been married three times (‘no relationship now, no. Never say never, but I don’t have time’). She would have liked more children but to have her third baby she underwent eight rounds of IVF. ‘It was sheer bloody-mindedness in the end.’
She says public life needs more people who have lived. ‘I’m not saying a 40-year-old doesn’t have life experience but…’
She vows to bring ‘common sense’ to the Lords. She will push and push to get more girls into sport, ‘but I’m pragmatic about how. We used to lose girls at 14, now it’s at 11. We have to find ways of getting them back. If it’s because they don’t want to do muddy cross country, we need to look at bringing in Zumba teachers and hairdryers in changing rooms.’
There is no apology for the fact the personal has coloured her politics. Her scepticism about socialism is a case in point.
‘There is that very famous line about how socialism only becomes a problem when it runs out of everybody else’s money. My views are formed of my personal experience. When I was a young girl I raced all over the Eastern bloc and I saw what socialism did. It was horrendous.
‘I used to take suitcases full of makeup and tights and all sorts of girly things out for my Russian and East German competitors because they were desperate for stuff they couldn’t get behind the Iron Curtain.
‘I personally am quite grateful for the House of Lords right now because I think it’s curtailing things that would otherwise literally just fly through and become even bigger problems than they already are. The euthanasia bill, for instance. It’s a slippery slope if we don’t get it right. And what I see the House of Lords doing is trying to get it right, and there are so many good people in there.’
One of the last high-profile appointments was Baroness Michelle Mone, though. There is no rush to align herself there.
‘I wouldn’t have done what I’ve done over the last ten years if I was doing it for money, would I? I’ve lost ten years of work. I’ve lost a fortune.’
One of the first people Sharron told about her peerage was her dad Terry, perhaps the man who did most to mould her into the fighter she is.
He was, famously, her swimming coach, the man who refused to accept defeat when she fell from a tree and broke both arms.
Training continued, nonetheless. ‘He wrapped the plaster casts in Tesco bags so I could still get in the pool and do leg training,’ she says, conceding that it was beyond brutal, ‘but it taught me about resilience and about what humans are capable of.’
Her dad is still coaching four or five times a week at his swimming club.
‘But he’s 90 now. I told Kemi I absolutely had to tell him in case something happened. I couldn’t bear it if he hadn’t known. He’s very proud, and he has been very supportive and understands why I’ve needed to fight. He’s a fighter, too. Dad was one of the few who stood up to what the East Germans were doing. He was never picked as an international coach because he spoke out.’
He was cancelled too, before ‘cancelling’ was a thing. ‘Very much so,’ she agrees.
Will she ever get her gold medal? Touchingly, Petra Schneider has since offered to give Sharron hers. And Sharron’s children once offered to have her silver one gold-plated. She said no, and still thinks the onus should be on the International Olympic Committee to right that wrong.
‘I’ll probably never get it,’ she concedes, but points out that there is an upside to being fuelled by a sense of injustice your entire adult life.
‘It’s a cliché isn’t it, but it’s the journey that makes us. It turns us into who we are.’
