Sport and politics are really similar, Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson tells Michael Hayman in an interview for City AM
“The moments I’ve got to bring about change could be few and far between… make the most of the time you have.”
A message about the urgency of political transformation. Words that any new government should heed from Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson, one of Britain’s greatest athletes and today, one of its most active parliamentarians.
Parliamentarian is the word Grey-Thompson uses to describe herself on the Change Makers podcast. Not an athlete or a serial winner – 11 Paralympic gold medals speak for themselves – but someone for whom the day-to-day is spent campaigning from the benches of the House of Lords for change.
“You’ve got to be more than the athlete,” she tells me in the heart of what is now the London Stadium – the home of the 2012 Games that Grey-Thompson helped bring to the city. The point being that if all you think about is the day to day of competing, it’s hard to have a perspective on life.
It’s a style that has served her well. As an early champion for London 2012 she was one of those who stood firm against the early doubters and remains steadfast about its legacy.
Outside of the stadium, the Olympic bell, forged for the Games captures this spirit through the words of Shakespeare’s Tempest: “Be not afeard, the isle is full of noises”. Bravery counts and as the Bard says courage brings “sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not”.
The sound and drama of the stadium is something Grey-Thompson reflects on but concludes that “win or lose, you (should) behave the same”. It is an ethos her parents inspired her with from a young age, alongside that passion for making a difference in a world that she says is built to exclude people like her. As she’s said herself previously: “My dad was an architect. He knew how inaccessible the world was as he helped design it”.
I ask if she would describe her family as a team. She agrees observing that she is the “most privileged disabled person that I know”. It’s a privilege that she has put to work. From her family threatening to sue the secretary of state for Wales over her initial rejection from mainstream education, through to her thrusting the elite nature of para-sport into the spotlight, to taking to social media to call out train companies for their failure to meet accessibility requirements – she has used her voice to call for change.
“I’m a forward-looking person,” she explains. “I wake up every day and think, what have I got to do today?”
But while she does not spend her time looking backwards, Grey-Thompson uses the best of what she learned as an athlete to inform her approach to policymaking. “Sport and politics are really similar. The resilience you need. You’ve got to have a level of ego to put yourself in that position.”
She compares the tedium of training with the long hours spent preparing for a major speech: “But then you have three minutes to take people with you”. The adrenaline rush is the same, as is her post-match analysis. “I’m my own biggest critic,” she says. She’ll review a speech just as she would any race, asking what she would do different next time.
In sport, you can’t afford a bad moment. Grey-Thompson knows that all too well from her experience in the 2004 Paralympics in Athens, where one mistake saw her finish seventh in an event she won four years earlier. Similarly in politics, “there will be another opportunity, but you don’t know when it is. Next year or in 10 years. So you’ve got to be creative in terms of finding opportunity to get your point across.”
The charge of a lack of creativity or positive message has weighed heavily on the recent political past. The answer to this seeming stasis may well lie in including the outside voices of our sporting and business leaders – like James Timpson, now minister of state for prisons – who bring different perspectives and the life experience to inform a new approach.
And it turns out that the world of track and field is good training for the red benches. “There’s more politics in sport than in politics…way more”, she observes wryly. It leaves me with the thought that we need a Team GB for UK politics.
They used to call that the ‘government of all the talents’ and I am reminded of it when Grey-Thompson points to the House of Lords not as a relic to be reformed but where much needed diversity of thought and balance lives.
Despite her father’s prediction when she was 21 that her future lay in the House of Lords she says that she has been pleasantly surprised by her experience. For this campaigning champion for change, parliament is still a place where you can use the time you have to make a difference.
Michael Hayman presents Change Makers and is co-founder of the campaigns firm Seven Hills