Sharron Davies, Conservative Party Conference in Manchester Central, October 2025 (Credit: Bridget Catterall/Alamy Live News)

11 min read6 min

When Kemi Badenoch called Sharron Davies to ask her about joining the House of Lords, the outspoken former Olympian told the Tory leader she had two conditions.

“I said, ‘There are two things, Kemi, when I come in. The first one is, I’m not going to lie. Is that a problem?’ And she went, ‘No, that’s why I’m asking you,’ to her credit. And the second one, I said, ‘I have a grandma day, and I’m not prepared to give it up.’”

Baroness Davies of Devonport, 63, is a mother of three, all now adults, and grandmother of two little ones aged five and two. Although she relishes Mondays looking after her granddaughter Ariya, she has taken to her new role as a legislator with gusto and arrives with a definite agenda: women’s rights, children’s mental resilience and fitness for all.

Determined to spend two to three days a week in Westminster, she commutes from Bath for long days on the red benches: “I don’t think people realise how hard the people in the Lords actually work, and the amount of reading that’s required all the time.” And she must squeeze in the gym three or four times a week or she gets “cranky”.

Sitting in the peers’ guest room, Davies is immediately recognisable with her long white hair, piercing blue eyes and swimmer’s build. When she describes how, in an Olympic dining hall, you can easily guess each athlete’s sport from their body shape (“oh, there’s a gymnast, there’s a weightlifter, there’s a swimmer, there’s a high jumper”), The House can see exactly what she means.

Is it true, as has been reported, that she used to pee in the pool to put off competitors?

“That’s rubbish. It’s nonsense! I think it’s one of those stupid things where I went on a programme – I don’t know, They Think It’s All Over – in a jokey environment where you’ve got a comedian running the show, and somehow the whole thing goes to, ‘Who’s peed in a swimming pool?’, and I probably put my hand up.

“Bearing in mind I was spending six hours a day for 10 years of my life in the swimming pool, it’s really not unusual that I might have once peed in a swimming pool. I certainly didn’t do it to put competition off, and I certainly didn’t do it in a race. So, that’s garbage.”

“The psychological bashing was far worse than the physical bashing”

Advertisement

Davies talks tough and fast. Born in Plymouth to a big Navy family, she was coached in swimming from a young age. First by a professional who retired when she was about 10, and then by her ex-Navy father who learnt on the job, consulting books and personal trainers for advice.

She once broke both arms while tree-climbing. Her father sent her back in the pool with plastic bags over her casts.

“The thing is, though, elite sport is really hard. It’s not a walk in the park, and it’s not something where you can go, ‘Oh, I don’t feel like training today so I’m not going to go’. You’re not going to win if you have that attitude,” Davies explains.

“He got it in his head that one day missed was one day the opposition had against me. He didn’t really think that sometimes pushing when someone is very poorly… Funnily enough, the ‘two broken arms’ wasn’t the worst thing, because I wasn’t in pain once they were in plaster.”

What was the worst thing? “He trained me all the way through glandular fever.” He would motivate her by telling her she probably couldn’t do it. “And because I was bloody minded, I would do it.”

“The psychological bashing was far worse than the physical bashing, and it’s amazing, physically, what you can actually deal with. But mentally, that’s the bit that becomes much more delicate, really,” she continues.

“That happened in ‘79, ‘80, only six months before my Olympic Games where I won my medal. And that was really hard. On top of that, we had Mrs Thatcher trying to pull us all out of the Olympic Games. I’d been training for 10 years, and I was maybe not even going to get to go. Those six months leading up to that Olympics were mentally very, very tough.”

Aged 18, she won silver in the Moscow 1980 Olympics. Many countries boycotted the games, which took place during the Soviet-Afghan war, and the final medal tally was skewed amid widespread doping by East Germany and the Soviet Union.

German swimmer Petra Schneider took gold in Davies’ race, with a whopping 10-second gap, as well as setting five world records at the games. She later admitted to steroid use.

“These poor girls turned out with square jaws and five o’clock shadows. The gaps were massive. They would take 1, 2, 3 – no one had ever seen them before. That just doesn’t happen,” Davies says.

“All of them were ill, and many of them have died, and several of them have had disabled children – all because the state wanted to win medals in major internationals.

“I had that 20-year period where they were my nemesis. They were there all the time. All of my major medals were behind East Germans – every single one. I’d have been European champion at 14, had it not been for East Germans, as well as Olympic champion.”

At the time, Davies “didn’t really speak” to her doped rivals: they were surrounded by guards and always kept on separate buses. She remembers bringing them gifts from the capitalist West, however.

“I used to take tights and make-up and magazines for the East Germans and the Russians,” she says. “One Russian lady I used to swim against all the time, I got on really well with, and I’d take her stuff from the West, because they had nothing.”

While travelling behind the Iron Curtain racing as a girl, Davies says, she saw “extreme socialism”. The experience has clearly shaped her politics. Although never a paid-up party member until last year, she has almost always voted Tory (apart from once voting for Tony Blair’s Labour). As a “big believer” in common sense and ambition, she sees herself reflected in the Conservative Party ethos.

Davies had just had her second child when the Berlin wall came down and she went over to meet Schneider. Her former rival, who couldn’t have more children, was “besotted” with Davies’ daughter Gracie.

“She’d been told it was too dangerous to have any more kids. She had one daughter. She really wanted more kids. She literally tried to give me her medal, which is very sad. She’s very poorly. She takes all sorts of pills, for kidneys and heart and goodness knows what.”

She still feels the unfairness of East German victories against her and her friends keenly, but there is empathy there too.

“What Petra said to me, which was quite interesting, and also against the rules at the time: they were winning cars and flats for their parents,” she says. “Who am I to say I wouldn’t have done exactly the same thing in their position? So, I never had a problem with her as an individual. It was the state and it was the IOC I had the problem with, who let this happen and did nothing to stop it for such a long time.”

 “We win races by hundredths of a second, and you’re saying we should potentially give away three-quarters of the length of the swimming pool”

Advertisement

For Davies, the lesson is straight-forward: fairness in sport can disappear quickly if governing bodies fail to act. “If you cut me down the middle, it would just say ‘fair’,” she says. The blatant injustices of the era in which she competed have made Davies vigilant about protecting women’s sport – and for her, the contemporary question of transgender inclusion is directly comparable to doping.

Over the last decade, prompted by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) removing its requirement for trans athletes to undergo sex reassignment surgery, she has campaigned against the inclusion of trans women in female categories, including in her 2023 book Unfair Play.

“Really, it’s never been my perspective wanting to keep anybody out of sport – the opposite. I want everyone to do sport, but I just believe that women and girls deserve their fair opportunities,” she argues.

“We get this tiny, tiny slither of the cake, and then we were told we can’t even have fair sport anymore. I just thought, I can’t sit and watch this happen to another generation of young women all over again.”

Davies is adamant that no peer-reviewed science shows it is possible to remove male physical advantage. (While research on performance advantages continues to be contested, and policies vary between sports, the IOC is thought to be moving towards her position on this same basis.) Tiny differences matter hugely, she points out: Michael Phelps, for example, was a swimming “superstar”, yet his world records have already been broken because the margins are so slim.

“At Olympic level, we’re talking between 10 and 30 per cent,” she says of the male advantage. “Even in swimming, which is the closest at 10 to 11 per cent, that’s nearly three-quarters of the length of the swimming pool. We win races by hundredths of a second, and you’re saying we should potentially give away three-quarters of the length of the swimming pool.”

The other side sometimes argues that elite sports already accept huge biological variation – wingspan in swimming, lung capacity in cycling – and those competing are already exceptional, so why should sex-linked advantages be different?

“That’s a rubbish argument,” Davies replies. “The category isn’t arm span; the category isn’t lung capacity; the category isn’t the size of your feet. The category is biological sex.”

Trans athletes have complained about the overly hostile nature of the debate and say there is too little understanding of the difficult situation they find themselves in. Not allowing them to compete in the category that matches their gender identity, they argue, is discriminatory and unfairly limits access to sport. What is her response?

“Why does the conversation always turn around to men in women’s sport, who we’re supposed to feel sorry for?” she shoots back. “Why is your first instinct to say, ‘but the poor men can’t be in the women’s races where they want to be’, rather than ‘the poor women are losing their medals and opportunities’? Why are women taught to put themselves second, third and fourth all the time?”

The solution she champions is two categories: one female category and another open and inclusive. Not all sports governing bodies agree: some still allow trans women to compete if they suppress testosterone for a period of time; others, as in rounders, are not considered sex-affected sports, which Davies rejects. “We already have legal precedence which shows that the pool is a sex-affected sport, so you can be damn sure hitting a ball with a bat is sex-affected.”

President Trump has reversed Biden-era rules around trans inclusion in sport, decreeing that schools which “let men take over women’s sports teams” risk their federal funding. Davies is highly supportive – but what does she make of Trump generally?

She hesitates for the first time. “He’s definitely a polarising character, isn’t he? There’s a lot of things about him I don’t like. But obviously, with regards to protecting women’s sport, he’s absolutely done the right thing.”

Davies is enthusiastically pro-Badenoch, having worked with her on these issues when the Tory leader was equalities minister: “I have great faith in Kemi. Kemi is probably the biggest reason why I said yes. I really like Kemi. I like her scruples. I like the way she thinks. I like her honesty. I think she’s a great leader. She would make a great prime minister.”

The campaigner enters the Lords with certain priorities – first, “to ring-fence women’s sport and create better opportunities for it”. She would like to bring in a British equivalent to the American ‘Title IX’ law, which requires equal provision for men and women in sporting facilities.

And, notwithstanding her own fondness for posting online, Davies urges girls to get off social media and into sport. “We used to lose girls from sport at about 14, 15, when they discovered boys and makeup… Now we lose girls at 11.” She wants to find new ways of engaging them. “If that means hair dryers and changing rooms and Zumba classes, then let’s think outside of the box.”

Davies may only just be settling into life in the Lords, but she is already considering the legacy she wants to leave there – and pursuing it with characteristic tenacity.

Dr Austen Morgan is a barrister at 33 Bedford Row Chambers.  He is the author of: Pretence: why the United Kingdom needs a written constitution, London 2023.

The abandonment of the English IRA victims’ claim, against Gerry Adams, being heard by Mr Justice [Jonathan] Swift in the high court in London, on the last listed day, came as a surprise.  There will be no judgment to debate (or appeal).  But the three ageing claimants had risked losing their costs’ protection.  And it was Gerry Adams – importantly – who ended the fight.

The context of the McCue Jury & Partners unusual tortious claim needs to be appreciated.  This was private law, against an alleged natural tortfeasor (the IRA having no legal existence).  And the context was the conservatives’ 2023 Northern Ireland legacy act (public law), which the feeble Starmer government set out to repeal and replace (now paused), in order principally to please the Irish government and reset relationships with the EU.

The three claimants (who gave evidence) – John Clark, Jonathan Ganesh and Barry Laycock – had been caught up respectively in the 1973 Old Bailey bombings, and the 1996 (London) Docklands and Arndale (Manchester) IRA attacks.  One was left in no doubt – listening to their testimonies – about the lifelong physical and especially mental injuries of innocent passersby.

Gerry Adams – who was cross-examined relentlessly over two days by Sir Max Hill KC, a former director of public prosecutions – told us a different story: not only was he not a member of the army council in 1973 and 1996, and therefore not personally responsible (arguably) for the bombings; but, having joined Sinn Féin in 1964, he did not join the new provisional IRA in 1969 – he went through the troubles of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s as a political activist while others did the killing and were killed!

Memoir evidence was adduced from Seán MacStíofáin, the English-born IRA chief of staff, and William Whitelaw, the secretary of state, about the secret Cheyne Walk talks in 1972, facilitated by the RAF, where Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness were the youngest members of the Irish delegation; MacStíofáin, and especially Whitelaw, agreed that the UK government had negotiated with the IRA (not euphemistically with the republican movement).

Adams tried to allude, from the box, to the first Jonathan Swift, the Irish whig and hardly a republican, but his lordship was having none of this Irish familiarity and blather.

Adams was good on the historic crimes done Yeats’ Cathleen ni Houlihan (realized in 1902 by his unrequited love interest, Maud Gonne), even singing the praises of Dolours and Marian Price – the prison hunger-strikers after the Old Bailey bombing – who went on to oppose publicly the Irish Nelson Mandela (as Adams is characterised by some gushing identitarians).  Dolours, the older of the two, breached the republican code of omerta, by identifying Adams as her IRA commander, but the latter went again to gaol as an alleged dissident republican.

Closing submissions began on the Thursday of week two, and that is when the case started to go wrong.  Adams’ lawyers from Matrix chamber (including originally a certain Richard Hermer) had never tried to strike out the claim, one of the grounds for trying to do so being abuse of process because of the delays from 1973 and 1996 causing prejudice to Adams defence.

Observing from an overflow court, it seemed that the learned judge and Edward Craven KC for the defendant joined in confusing issues, when the question of the Limitation Act 1980 section 33 (discretionary exclusion – a statutory right – of time limit for actions in respect of injuries or death) should have been legally deconstructed.  (Adams had portrayed himself as the Irish peacemaker – laughably from the early 1970s at times – , and it is difficult to see how he was prejudiced as a defendant from 2022 after the acquiring of this historical reputation.)

On the Friday morning, having undoubtedly discussed matters with Adams, his legal team offered to ‘drop hands’ – essentially walk away from the court.  The claimants’ costs’ protection, granted by an earlier judge, had overnight become uncertain, because of the discussion of abuse of process.

The claimants’ solicitors (judging by their press release) are critical of the judge – the word unfairness has been uttered – but they would professionally have been required to bring their barristers and lay clients together on the last day on the risk of Adams demanding his not-inconsiderable legal costs.

The really perplexing thing about the case, is why Adams chose to fight in the royal courts of justice.  He had two alternative options.  One, he could have refused to leave his ‘Ireland’.  The claimants securing a punny judgment in default in London would have permitted him to lecture them about the need to move on.  Second, he could have taken ‘the fifth’ (in US speak): come into court and answered; on the advice of counsel, I decline respectfully to answer all questions on the ground that I might incriminate myself – the no comment defence.

Adams has been accused frequently of hubris.  Members of the public, and the very many journalists in court, heard Sir Max Hill’s seemingly endless flow of questions and Adams staccato ‘not true’ replies, where every witness – from rehabilitated republicans to military intelligence officers, anonymous and identified – was contemptuously dismissed as part of a UK conspiracy of liars out to do down the bearded one.

I learned something from the two days of cross-examination.  Perversely, Adams seemed to want to acknowledge the demonic figure created in the minds of his critics who had sworn to tell the truth.  That is why he came to London.  But in his consistent denials – counter-interrogation training anyone? – he turned himself into the major victim of the UK occupiers of his country, the habitué squatting in his mind for decades.  He was fighting still, and selflessly, for Cathleen ni Houlihan.

The claimants’ perpetrator was really the victim, according to the defendant.  An English high court judge would not be allowed to determine Gerry Adams’ involvement in the 1973 bombings, if not the 1996 ones.  That is why he dropped hands.  But, like the heroic victim, he was prepared to endure the four years of ‘torture’ constituted by the claim.  That is why he sat in court for two weeks, with anti-national types (in his judgment) rubbing shoulders with his close-body protection.

Martin McGuinness – who claimed unconvincingly to have left the IRA after Bloody Sunday – acknowledged his IRA membership on his gravestone in Derry in 2017 (having enjoyed Lord Saville’s earlier grant of immunity and still not broken his IRA oath).

Will Gerry Adams (in the continuing absence of a united Ireland by consent and still maintaining the code of omerta), then give us the finding of fact we might have obtained, but did not get, from Mr Justice Swift?

Rachel Reeves has changed her mind. Since becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer she has come to realise the British state cannot compensate people for every misfortune they may suffer as they go through life.

There is no money, as an earlier Treasury minister confided on leaving office in 2010. But this is a lesson which successive Governments have been reluctant to proclaim.

Within a few sentences of starting her statement yesterday in the Commons on the economic impact of the war in the Middle East, Reeves declared that the Government will be sticking to “our ironclad fiscal rules”.

By making this promise, she sought to reassure the bond market. Her officials will have impressed on her how vital it is to do so.

As the Shadow Chancellor, Mel Stride, pointed out in his reply, Britain now has the highest borrowing costs in any major advanced economy, with gilt yields higher than those of Greece and Morocco.

Our public finances are so rickety that we are each year paying over £100 billion in interest on our debt. We would be in extreme peril if we tried to run an even larger deficit, and with the word “ironclad” Reeves indicated that she knows this.

If she had gone on to take the House and the wider public into her confidence, she would deserve credit for honesty, and might have wrested back the political initiative.

For no political party is yet being quite straight with the voters about this. Everywhere one finds a disinclination to express inconvenient truths, a sense that discretion is the better part of valour.

Reeves could have seized the initiative, and thrown the Conservatives off balance, by announcing that it is quite wrong to go on with the public finances in so shaky a condition that we have nothing to fall back on in an emergency.

Once the Government demonstrated both by its words and its actions that it recognises this, our borrowing costs would quite quickly come down.

A virtuous circle could begin, and a start could be made on tax reform, including the removal of various cliff edges which act as a disincentive to earn more, to expand a small business, or indeed to look for a job at all.

Reeves instead tried to justify the change in her position by attacking the Conservatives:

“As we respond to this crisis, we must learn from the mistakes of the past.

“The previous Government pushed up borrowing, interest rates, inflation and mortgage costs with an unfunded, untargeted package of support under Liz Truss that gave support to the most wealthiest of households.”

One could tell from the faces of Labour MPs (see the photograph above) as they listened to Reeves how depressing they found her statement. The Government feels compelled to make gestures of help: it has offered £53 million to be distributed among low-income households which depend on heating oil.

Gavin Robinson (DUP, Belfast East) pointed out that Northern Ireland’s share of this sum would amount to £34 per household, and that there is no data to target the support.

Simon Hoare (Con, North Dorset) observed that Dorset Council’s share of the money is £474,000, “which really will not touch the sides”.

We found ourselves invited by the Chancellor to enter a world of futile gestures, where the Government pretends to help, without actually being able to do anything that would make a noticeable difference.

Reeves’s predecessor as Chancellor, Sir Jeremy Hunt (Con, Godalming and Ash), said:

“Could I gently ask the Chancellor to be less partisan at a time of crisis? If she brings before the House difficult measures that are right for the country, she will have the support of the whole House, but if she is partisan, she will not.”

This was advice Reeves was unable to follow. She uttered no national rallying cry about uniting round difficult measures.

The Father of the House, Sir Edward Leigh (Con, Gainsborough), suggested:

“Is there not a sensible, middle-of-the-way approach here? We should by all means proceed with green energy—such as offshore wind, in which we lead the world, in the North Sea off the Lincolnshire coast—but we should also keep an open mind about new extraction from the North Sea.”

Reeves could not agree to keep an open mind on this, for at Energy questions, held just before her statement, Ed Miliband, Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, had once again shown that his mind remains firmly closed to the possibility of new extraction from the North Sea.

Miliband suggests by his haughty demeanour that he considers himself cleverer and better informed than anyone else. This could be true, but does not, unfortunately, mean he has better judgement.

Tony Blair used to convince Middle England that he must be sound because at frequent intervals he annoyed and distressed Labour MPs. Sir Keir Starmer, Reeves and Miliband instead go out of their way to appease Labour MPs, with the result that they look narrow and partisan at the very moment when the nation might unite, as Hunt said, round difficult measures.

For one day under Liz Truss as Prime Minister the ten year UK government borrowing rate of interest hit 4.38 per cent. Thirty year money cost 4.8 per cent. The government did not actually borrow at these rates.

The Bank of England changed its policy from selling government bonds to buying  them again and the interest rate subsided as the bonds rose in price in relief.

These longer term rates of interest are settled by the bond market. When the market loses confidence in the government and the Bank, and or fears inflation will rise, bond prices fall as more want to sell than buy. When the markets think the government is controlling the amount of debt sensibly and inflation is under control the price of bonds rises as more want to buy.

The prices of the very long bonds change a lot to change the interest rates. If the government borrowed £100 through  a 1 per cent bond with no repayment date at a price of £100, it would pay the holder £1  of interest every year. If the market then decides the interest rate should go up to 2 per cent because it is concerned  about developments, then that £100 bond can only be sold on to another owner at £50 or half price, so the continuing £1 of interest being paid is then 2 per cent of its new value.

When markets forced up the interest rates in 2022 Rachel Reeves said Liz Truss had crashed the economy. Rachel Reeves  said 4.38 per cent for ten year money was too high and would leave the government paying too much interest. It would also mean dearer mortgages and company loans whose interest levels reflect the government borrowing rates.

So we have to report today in her own words that Rachel Reeves has crashed the economy more seriously and for far longer than Liz Truss did. Today the ten year rate is at 4.95 per cent and the thirty year rate at 5.6 per cent, rates 13-16 per cent higher than 2022.  Indeed the Truss effect was so short lived no lasting damage was done. Rachel Reeves has presided over 10 year and 30 year rates higher than the worst day of Liz Truss for most of the last fifteen months. She has been borrowing large sums at these rates and lumbering future taxpayers with heavy bills to pay the elevated interest charges.

She seems unwilling to accept this, though her own words in 2022 condemn her actions since. She seems unaware of the role she has played in driving down the price of these bonds and therefore driving up the longer term rates of interest. We see the results of her work in last week’s withdrawal of many mortgage offers, as mortgage banks seek to increase the rates they are going to charge borrowers.

There are three main reasons why she has lost control of the bond markets. She has put up public spending and borrowing too much. The market worries about just how much she plans to borrow over this Parliament. It will mean massive new bond issues in excess of what savers are willing to lend at the old prices.

The market is alarmed that she put inflation up from the 2 per cent she inherited to nearly double as a result of allowing large managed price rises for water, energy, rail fares and Council taxes. The  government decided to allow large rises in public sector and utility costs and allowed some of that to be passed on in price rises. Government policy is to import much more of our energy, accelerating the shut down of domestic oil, gas, coal and fossil fuel electricity. The current world energy crisis leaves the UK badly exposed to having to pay ultra high prices for imports in a world of shortages.

The market is also concerned that instead of delivering faster growth as promised the government has slowed our growth almost to a standstill. Higher taxes on jobs, on family farms, on business premises, on producing and using energy have led to many business closures, lost jobs and less activity. As growth slows the state has to borrow more. Tax revenues are less with no growth, and  more people are out of work needing benefits so the government deficit goes up. The state has to issue more bonds to pay the bills.

This leaves the government in a bind. They would like to cushion consumers from the surge in imported energy prices, but do not have the money to do so. They want to reassure the bond markets that the deficit is under good control, but economic developments mean it is not. As consumers pay more for their energy they have to cut back on other things, slowing the economy more. The deficit rises. As the bond market takes fright so interest rates go up. People have to pay more for their mortgages and companies more for their loans. That can cause a further reduction in growth.

There are no good options once the government is in such a doom loop. The best course is to cut out wasteful and less desirable spending before the bond market insists on spending  cuts as it did to past Labour governments in 1975-6 and in 2008-9.

The government needs to set out a growth plan which will work, as its present one is delivering the opposite. It needs to take the cost of living pressures seriously, commencing by getting value for money in the public sector and keeping down state and managed prices.

An easy option is to allow more oil and gas extraction in the UK, easing the need for imports and bringing in large extra tax revenues from products that are very heavily taxed. The investment would also create more well paid jobs. Cancelling the proposed fuel tax rise this autumn and reducing the current tax  rate to allow for the extra VAT coming in as a result of higher fuel prices would also help.

A necessary tougher option is to find ways to restore lost public sector productivity, which has cost us at least £20bn of extra spending for no extra output. Is it so difficult for this government to get us back to 2019 levels of public sector efficiency?

The sooner the government acts the better it will be. We cannot afford current levels of borrowing and cannot afford current levels of interest rates on the new borrowing. The two go together. Controlling spending, boosting growth and raising public sector productivity combine to ease the pressures. Failure to act could end in a bigger bond market sell off and great difficulty in the government borrowing to pay all those spiralling bills.