LONDON POLITICS:Dee Doocey was raised on Pearse Street in Dublin, and now she sits in the House of Lords. She has been at the centre of London's Olympics preparations and a cornerstone of the Liberal Democrats party for decades. She talks to MARK HENNESSY, London Editor about her life in Dublin and in London, and the fine art of negotiating the rules of the British political elite
ENTERING THE HOUSE of Lords in the Palace of Westminster, an air of the English boarding school emerges; lines of coat-hooks on age-old timber frames, each carefully named and numbered, each neatly filled.
Baroness Dee Doocey of Hampton is waiting inside. Born Deirdre O’Keeffe in Dublin in 1948, she is one of the newest members of the British upper-chamber, having taken up her robes of office last December, following an approach from Liberal Democrat deputy prime minister Nick Clegg.
“I got a phone call from Nick Clegg four-and-a-half months before it happened. It was the longest four-and-half months of my life. I didn’t even tell my son. It has always appealed to me. I would have liked to have been an MP. The culture here is quite extraordinary. The people are hugely friendly and terribly polite. Really, really nice. People are so welcoming, it is unbelievable, but it is different, so different to anything that I had seen,” she says.
Today, Doocey, who regrets losing touch “with the huge circle of friends I had in Dublin as a girl”, sees herself having dual-nationality.
“I see myself as both. Somebody said to me that you can’t be both, but that is what I am. I am as much Irish as English. I think I am first and foremost a Londoner, but I am both and always will be.”
Currently head of the London Assembly, she is a veteran of local government politics, one who was in the vanguard when the Liberals took control of Richmond Council on the edge of London in the 1980s – its first modern-day local government victory. Used to a more adversarial approach, Doocey says the House of Lords “is sedate, but slightly less sedate, I understand, than it used to be”. Nevertheless, the old customs and “huge numbers of unwritten rules” are rigorously enforced.
The L-shaped Lords dining room particularly intrigues her, where peers dine at the Long Table each evening. Peers can enter by its two entrances, at either end, but they can only bring in guests through one.
“A friend of mine was meeting his brother for lunch and had booked a table on the other side and he walked him through the Lords bit and there were five formal complaints to the lord speaker the next day. So people feel very, very strongly about tradition and rules, and though nobody would ever be rude to you in a million years you will find that you break the rules at your peril. I find it extraordinary.
“I think there is a place for some of it. I love history, I love tradition, but if you walk the wrong side of a dining room and get pulled up for it, then that to me is utterly mad. Why would anybody make a fuss?
“I have only been here for five minutes and I love 99 per cent of it. But there are some rules that I have great difficulty understanding what the hell they are doing there. God knows how many of them I have broken in the last few months without knowing about it.”
Born in Drumcondra, she was raised from the age of two in Pearse Street by her parents, Jo O’Keeffe and Sheila, née Griffin – her father was a saxophonist, while her mother was an actress and a singer. “She was very famous. I have seen the billboards, absolutely amazing. She had absolutely the most extraordinary voice and she was always billed as ‘Ireland’s Vera Lynn – only better’, which she was very proud of.
“She toured with two very famous comedians, Jimmy O’Dea and Frank O’Donovan. She was also on in the Abbey and the Gate,” she remembers, sitting in the reading room, just yards from former European commissioner Leon Brittan, as he quietly peruses the day’s papers and files.
“She had quite a glittering career that would have gone very well, expect that she had me, who was born with very severe double club-feet, with no ankle on the right foot, and the right foot is still three sizes smaller than the left.
“The doctors said that I would never walk when I was born. And my mother was a very, very strong person and she said, ‘Not alone will she walk, she will dance’,” says Doocey. Each day for 18 months, her mother brought her to an orthopaedic hospital near Sandymount, where her feet were massaged by a nurse so that “I got a heel on my right-foot”.
“I have a scar here,” she says pointing to her tibia, but 90 per cent of the change is as a result of manipulation, so they managed to get the heel from there to where it is now, perfectly normal. I wear normal shoes, but one of them is size 5.5 and the other is 2.5, but it has never bothered me.”
She fondly remembers her cousins chasing her around her grandmother’s table calling her Hopalong Cassidy. But not all memories are happy ones, particularly those of a term spent in hospital in Castlebar, Co Mayo at seven years of age, while her father, travelled around the country during pantomime and summer season.
“The nurses were absolutely vicious, absolutely vicious. My parents sent me a food-parcel every week of sweets and grapes and whatever else. The nurses didn’t give them to me and said my parents had abandoned me,
“If it hadn’t been for my grandmother who came to see me on a regular basis travelling from Dublin I wouldn’t have seen anybody. It is a very vulnerable age to have to cope on your own. Of course, my parents didn’t have any idea that I wasn’t getting the letters or the parcels. I wasn’t telling them, since they were on tour.
“However, the nurses must have done a very good job: they sorted me out. If it hadn’t been for my mother’s foresight and determination I probably could have been a cripple for the rest of my life,” she says, and remembers receiving her first shoes – a pair of pink sandals – when she was 11.
Her mother had to resort to subterfuge on occasions: “She had tried to get me to do the exercises that the hospital had insisted I must do, but I just wouldn’t, so she came up with this wonderful idea of sending me to dance classes. She worked on the principle that if I danced I would exercise without realising it. Of course, I fell in love with the dancing.”
Thus her mobility was restored – but her mother’s career did not resume: “By that time my father had gone to live in England because he couldn’t get work in Ireland, so she was stuck with three kids. It really wasn’t an option. I think she spent the rest of her life regretting – not so much regretting, perhaps – but wondering what life might have been if things had turned out differently.
Doocey attended Sandymount High School, “which we couldn’t afford but my mother somehow managed to pay the fees with the help of my grandmother”, but it was a strange existence. “Everyone there had houses by the sea and went on holidays and had cars, and I didn’t. But I learned at a very early age how to deal with people of every level and it was something that really helped me,” she says.
Eventually the family moved to London, to be together. “It was the worst thing that could have happened, because there I was with my mother and father, but not knowing a single other soul. It was the loneliest period of my life.
“It was just horrendous. One day I saw an advert in Tesco for shelf-stackers. I went in, applied and got the job and went home. My mother cried, she was absolutely horrified – an expensive education just to be a shelf-stacker.
“But it released me, I was so happy, because suddenly I was mixing with people of my own age, I had something to get up for in the morning, it was just wonderful. I met my future sister-in-law, Rita. She was a cashier, frightfully posh and through her I met my husband, Jim.”
Through her future sister-in-law, Doocey got a second job at night as an usherette and ice-cream girl in the local cinema, further causing tensions at home with her parents who wanted her to go to university. “But I had never been happier.”
Following a night-time secretarial course, she got a job in a solicitors’ office, but decided within a year – 1969, just as the Troubles were exploding in Northern Ireland – to seek something better, so she went to an agency.
“They said, ‘We’ve got an unusual job, but how do you feel about politics, being Irish?’ In those days, everybody thought (a) that Ireland was Northern Ireland and (b) that everyone was shooting at each other.
“I said that I had never had anything to do with politics and that I had never had a political thought in my mind. They said, ‘Oh, good, you’ll be perfect. We have got a job with the Liberal Party,’ ” she says, with a deep laugh.
Turning up for an interview at the party’s then-headquarters on the Strand, she was greeted by “old George”, the fundraiser, who offered her whiskey, because “we haven’t any tea-bags”, while full of apologies because her interviewers had forgotten to turn up.
Returning a day later to be interviewed by Pratap Chitnis, who is now also in the House of Lords, she was quickly offered a job as a clerk at £20 per week; some 23 years later she was director of finance and financial adviser to the parliamentary party.
Life in the Liberals was “interesting, if difficult”, because it did not have any money. “I was hugely impressed by everybody there. They were people who were committed to a cause, just like my mother was committed to the stage. Jeremy Thorpe [the party leader at the time] was inspirational. He had a memory the likes of which I have never seen since. He could come and have a chat with a telephonist and come back a year later and say, ‘How is Auntie Flo? Did she ever get over that chest?’ He really loved people, absolutely incredible.”
Her own political awakening came in time: “The passion was immediately understandable to me. I didn’t have the deep-seated commitment that some people had, but I have always had this desire to help people who can’t help themselves. That is what I am in politics for. I’m not in there to get somebody a parking place for their second Volvo.”
For a Liberal, Richmond in the 1980s was the place to be: “It was a hot-bed of liberalism in those days. It was the first council we controlled. Five of our current peers all served with me in Richmond, it was quite amazing.”
Richmond brought her into contact with Vince Cable, who is now secretary of state for business, innovation and skills “and the politician I most admire”.
She organised his first campaign in 1992: “Although we didn’t win, our high-profile campaign established him as a serious challenger to the Conservatives, who were at that time regarded as immovable in Twickenham. He was elected in 1997, and the rest is history.” Doocey has served as his election agent since that campaign.
In 1993, Doocey left to run a fashion company , which had operations in London and Hong Kong, although by then, Hong Kong was becoming expensive, and Western companies were moving to China.
Her first trip to Guangzhou was an eye-opener: “I remember going to visit the factory and we were in this flash car and the guy just stopped and said, ‘Walk’. The road had run out. It was fascinating, everything was so new. There was no buying of tickets for the train, for instance, you had to get one on the black market. There was somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody who could get you a ticket, so you wouldn’t know until the last second You’d stand and there would be thousands of people milling around and then somebody would thrust a ticket in your hand and off you went. Talk about opportunities, it was mind-blowing,” she says.
Her next job was as a management consultant for Pricewaterhouse Coopers and BP Amoco, before deciding to nurse her own political ambitions in 2002, when she opted to contest, successfully, the London Assembly 2004 elections. Since then, her life has been dominated by the Olympics, through chairing an assembly committee, sitting on the Metropolitan Policy Authority and, more recently, on the Olympic Security Board of the Home Office.
For Doocey, the legacy left to London by the games is all-important, particularly the creation of vibrant communities in the years afterwards: “The area is so amazing, it has nine train lines, plus the Eurostar. It is the same size as Hyde Park.”
The mixture of communities will be key, since it cannot be another Canary Wharf “which I often described as an oasis surrounded by seas of desperation”, but nor can it be blocks of 1,000-strong council flats.
More public funding is needed but she is confident. “This is a 30-year project. I don’t think people have grasped that yet, they think the Olympics will finish and then you will have the legacy the following week. It will take longer than that but it is going to be just amazing.”
