It’s tempting to think of Caroline Lucas as a kind of spirit of place in Brighton. She has arrived first at Food for Friends, the oldest vegetarian restaurant in the city, and there is something almost mythical in seeing the pioneering Green MP in its window seat, facing the Lanes, framed by trailing foliage. She has been coming here for as long as she can remember, she says – the restaurant opened in 1981 and used to have folk queuing around the block. She recommends the blueberry and ginger “nojito”, orders the Thai noodle salad and crispy tofu, and half apologises for still being “a vegetarian on the road to veganism” without quite yet arriving at that destination.
It’s nine months since Lucas stepped down after 14 years in parliament as her party’s first and, in that time, only MP. I sense that she is still getting used to this kind of thing – leisurely lunches on a weekday, without somewhere to dash off to. She is, rightly, adamant that she has not retired. Far from it: she remains a tireless activist on the issues she cares about – the environment and the climate crisis, and Britain’s return to Europe (among several other patron and ambassador roles she is co-president of the European Movement with the former attorney general Dominic Grieve). She is writing a children’s book, and has an acclaimed adult one already out – called Another England, and one reason for our lunch. It’s about the idea of England, and “how to reclaim our national story”.
She talks animatedly about the joys of her new home near the Seven Sisters cliffs, along the coast at Seaford, where she walks her labrador puppy on the beach – but she resists my suggestion that relief must be her overriding emotion after leaving parliament.
“I’m finding it much harder to adapt than I thought I would,” she says. “On the one hand, it is liberating not to have to haul yourself up to Westminster and spend hours and hours in the chamber trying to get speaking time, and then not getting seen by the speaker. But I suppose inevitably you miss the platform, which is an enormous privilege.”
One of her reasons for standing down was that for all that time she was the Greens’ one-woman spokesperson on everything from health to education to the economy to defence. It is a measure of her effectiveness between them that she has been replaced in the current parliament by an unexpected four new Green MPs, who can divvy up those briefs between them between them. “When I heard how they were able to split up all the different portfolios, I burst into tears thinking back on it,” Lucas says. “On that responsibility of feeling that if there was going to be a green angle in any debate, then the only person who was going to give it was me.”
Some of her conclusions about the frustrations and challenges of those feverish years – through the coalition government, austerity, Brexit and Covid – are expressed in her book. Like everything that Lucas articulates, it is a mix of nuanced hope and sharply informed anger about the state of the nation. The new paperback edition comes with an afterword that is damning about the early Starmer government’s lack of conviction, its weak compromises on environmental commitments (this is even before news of the third runway at Heathrow) and its avoidance of the issues that Reform UK so cynically exploits, including the vexed question of English identity. Lucas believes passionately that the idea of England must be reclaimed from the far right, and that it can be progressive and pluralist and comfortable in its own skin (of whatever colour). “Patriotism isn’t boasting that your country is ‘world beating’ at this or that,” she says. “I like Billy Bragg’s definition, which is, basically, just giving a shit about your country. Wanting it to be as good and fair as it can be.”
One of the themes of her book is that Labour has no vision of what this might look like, no story to tell: “They are much less ambitious than their voters.” She thinks it ‘bloody scandalous’ that with their 170-seat majority they are talking so much about cuts, rather than a wealth tax or land reform. Before Lucas became a politician, she gained a PhD in English literature (her dissertation was on writing for women in Elizabethan times) and her polemic is deeply informed by the tradition of dissenting English writers engaging with the social and environmental issues of their time – John Clare’s impassioned poetic manifestos against the Enclosure Acts, for example, the fencing off of the English imagination’s right to roam. “I think if more of our politicians knew fiction and poetry, we’d have better politics,” she says. “We are a country of nature lovers. We’re also one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. And it’s just like, how does that happen?”
With our plates full of fabulous locally sourced veg, we talk a little about how one aspect of that depletion is the fact that, as a society, we are so divorced from the ethics and production of what we eat. (Last year, Lucas resigned as vice-president of the RSPCA over exposed failings in its “RSPCA Assured” accredited abattoirs. At the time the RSPCA defended its record and said there were “differing views on how best to address the incredibly complex and difficult issue of farmed animal welfare”.) She regrets to say that she is not much of an enthusiastic home cook – her husband Richard Savage, a recently retired English teacher and one-time professional cricketer, does most of that – but she does love making things that last: batches of marmalade and preserves – “I love to see the jars lined up” – or a Christmas cake.
One of Lucas’s proudest achievements in parliament was helping to create a new GCSE in natural history. It was designed to bring young minds in closer touch with their environment, and to help them understand sustainability through applied science and literature (a course Wordsworth would have loved). Though ready to be rolled out by the Tories, Labour has, to her dismay, shelved it. Another significant parliamentary legacy, the climate and nature bill – which seeks to bring government policy in line with its international commitments, and link the renewal of nature with the climate crisis for the first time in law – was also, shamefully, scuppered by the government when it was due to be voted on last month.
Equally scandalous, it seems to me, I suggest, is the fact that Lucas was not elevated to the House of Lords on leaving her seat in the main chamber. Doesn’t it make a mockery of the second house if there is no room for someone of her conviction, expertise and popularity? She doesn’t elaborate – “that’s not for me to say”.
She is used to being the committed outsider, though she wishes it otherwise. Lucas grew up in Malvern – Elgar country, where her dad ran a small central heating company and both parents voted Tory. Though there was a sense of freedom in the hills, she was hemmed in by the narrowness of attitudes.
What did her parents make of her career?
“They were bemused by most of it,” she says. “It was like, ‘When are you going to get a proper job?’” They were a little more sympathetic when she became an MP. “I can’t imagine they ever voted Green,” she says, “but perhaps they became slightly less antagonistic.”
She recalls, with a smile, the time she was arrested protesting against American cruise missiles at RAF Molesworth. Her father contacted her from his Rotary club, wondering if there was anything he could do to bail her out. She has maintained a belief in non-violent direct action – she was arrested again in an anti-fracking protest in 2013 – and has been a rallying voice against the draconian sentencing of Extinction Rebellion activists.
That consistent rage against the kind of denialism that threatens the planet has found another expression for Lucas since she gave up full-time politics – she is training to become an end-of-life doula, spending time counselling people in hospices and families facing the death of a loved one.
“I’m on a mission,” she says of her training with the organisation Living Well, Dying Well. “We are not good at talking about death. But I do love the way in which, with people towards the end of life, you can cut through the crap, you know, and get to what’s important.”
The tragedy, she suggests, is that more of us do not get to that realisation about what really matters so much earlier – stop and smell the roses, while there are still roses to smell.
We’re finishing up a fabulous shared pineapple tart while we dwell on the big questions. “My biggest fear,” she says, before she goes, “would be to be on your deathbed and regret that you hadn’t done enough.”
Another England by Caroline Lucas (Cornerstone, £10.99) is out now in paperback