Wednesday morning, 9.30am. I am at the London Aquatics Centre in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, a building so vast and light, it makes my eyes hurt. In front of me is the swimming pool, a smooth, blue oblong, where Rebecca Adlington won a bronze medal for the 400m freestyle in 2012 and Ellie Simmonds won two golds. There is nobody in it. Several light years away is a diving pool; behind it, sunlight dazzles. Around the main pool are circular tables. At each table sit six or so schoolgirls aged 14 to 17, and one older woman. It’s like a municipal version of a Miami nightclub.
At the far end, where the DJ should be, stands a woman in well-cut trousers and heels. This is Miriam González Durántez, international lawyer, lovely-haired wife of Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg and campaigner. At least, I think it’s her: the size of the centre makes it difficult to tell. González Durántez is making a short speech about her organisation, Inspiring Women, the reason we are all here. Unfortunately, the acoustics and her Spanish accent make it hard to understand much of what she’s saying.
Inspiring Women is a simple idea: get professional women to talk for one hour to teenage girls about their jobs, so the teenagers hear for themselves about a variety of possible careers. That simplicity, however, comes heavily sprinkled in PR pizzazz. Thus the women will not be just talking, but “speed-mentoring”, meaning they’re each assigned a table where they chat to the girls (300 in total) for 15 minutes, then move on to talk to another group. They have been collected together in terms of their careers: all the women here except González Durántez have jobs in sport, hence our venue. Clare Balding is hosting alongside González Durántez; everything is being filmed by BT Sport; other Inspiring Women sports-speed-mentoring events are being held simultaneously across the country.
All very exciting, but behind González Durántez and Balding, atop a diving board reached by what seem like the stairs from A Matter Of Life And Death, sits a whopping distraction: teeny tiny Tom Daley. Daley trains in the diving pool every day. Earlier, to oohs and aahs, we watched his dolly frame spin and twirl through the air, then splash into the water. I worry about the feminist implications of one man taking attention away from hundreds of high-achieving women, of Speedos trumping speed-mentoring. But perhaps I’m overanalysing.
Someone rings a bell for the event to start and I walk over to González Durántez’s table. She is talking to a group from Caterham High. The girls all have questions, which they read out in turn.
“How do you prepare for your job?” one girl asks, carefully. I’m not sure she knows what González Durántez’s job is. González Durántez doesn’t mind. She is welcoming, smiling throughout. She explains that she is a lawyer and says she ended up becoming one “by chance”.
“It’s not whether you are smart,” she says, “it’s whether you make an effort. I worked hard at school, so I had the discipline to work hard in my job. I know if I put eight hours in, it’s better than four hours.”
The girls lean in, not because they’ve read Sheryl Sandberg, but because it’s the only way to hear. I check out a few other tables. There is talk of physiotherapy, of sports agents, of presenting, of lobbying organisations. The speakers are sensible, inclusive, goal-oriented; the girls, keen but slightly shy. It is an odd event. The scale of everything – the hugeness of the pool, the height of the ceiling, the number of people, how small everyone is and how far away – messes with your head. Also, although everyone is thoroughly well-meaning, the atmosphere is a bit stiff, and not tailor-made to engage teenagers. After half an hour, some of the girls seem a bit glazed.
Inspiring Women is led by someone who clearly fits the bill herself. From a small village in rural Spain, Miriam González Durántez is now a successful lawyer, a partner specialising in international trade regulations. She’s mother to three boys aged six, 10 and 13. She speaks three languages: her native Spanish, plus English and French. Since she launched her initiative last November, she has got 12,000 professional women to talk to 180,000 girls (her aim is to get to 15,000 and 250,000 respectively).
But she is also Nick Clegg’s wife. And this means that, unfairly – because that’s how power works – her deputy prime minister husband and their relationship are often the bits of her life that get the most attention. No matter how well she does, whichever good causes she supports, González Durántez is still partly regarded as his missus. How galling.
So it’s refreshing to see how often she makes teasing statements about her husband’s job. She refuses to say that it is more important than him dropping his kids off at school, for instance. “Every single politician would learn more about the state of the country outside the school gates than sitting in hours of meetings,” she remarked just the other week. And: “Men want to be with their children… Lots of men are feminists.”
She is not a political wife in the old tradition. Not for her the silent sidekick role, gazing supportively at her husband while he does all the talking. This goes for Samantha Cameron and Justine Miliband, too, but they are not quite as high-achieving as González Durántez, and both are more willing to do the media grip-and-grin. They’ve both stood next to their husbands during party conference speeches (González Durántez remained seated); they’ve both been in full family portraits with their kids (González Durántez said nope to that, too).
“No, our kids have never been in any pictures with us, never,” González Durántez says firmly. “I’m like a tigress when it comes to my children. That is my top priority, and Nick’s, too. What I am focusing on right now is how to protect them during the next few months’ campaign. Last time, I sent them to Spain, but now they are older, and one has exams.”
It’s a different day and we are at her place of work, Dechert (pronounced Dekkert), a legal firm in the City. González Durántez and I – plus three of her people and a minder from the Lib Dems (the smartly-suited embodiment of an elephant in the room) – are in a glass-walled meeting space.
González Durántez, a strikingly handsome woman, brings with her a friendly manner, a warmth, but also a sense of urgency. She grips a BlackBerry; she’s going to have to take a call at some point.
I’ve seen González Durántez speak at an awards ceremony where she was charismatic, even mischievous. Today, her charm is tempered by what she wants to get across. “When we do press, Inspiring Women gets a surge in women signing up as mentors,” she tells me, and hits me up for contacts for a future event. She is very careful and deliberate with her answers, conscious of how what she says may come back to bite her, or her husband. After all, she is a lawyer married to a politician, and a general election is coming up.
She’s more than happy to talk about feminism, and has some sobering figures. For instance, although women make up 49% of the working population in the UK, 75% of them are employed in one of five “C” professions: caring, catering, cashiering, cleaning, clerical. “I do believe very strongly that there is still residual sexism,” she says. “A lot of progress has been made – obviously more for some women than for others. But at a general level, I think we have 10%, 15% sexism in the workplace that is holding some women back. And a lot of it translates into lack of self-confidence, which is an issue with girls. With self-confidence, I think, if you don’t have it, you have to fake it. But self-confidence is the product of your experience. At the end of the day, the more you do something, the more confident you are.”
This is one of the reasons she wants to reach schoolgirls. It’s also why she emphasises hard work. We have a small disagreement about this: I say that often it’s sparkiness and extroversion that gets you noticed in jobs, rather than silent diligence. González Durántez says maybe, but not at school. “In a school, you have to learn very well a few basic skills, and also to develop your thinking, and work hard. Working very hard doesn’t mean you will do only whatever you have been asked to do. No matter where you are, you try a little bit harder.”
González Durántez’s work ethic is perhaps the reason her campaign has been such a success. She also enjoys it, telling me that it’s not only the girls that benefit, but the speakers, too (she thinks that many women are too modest about their achievements). She says that the girls, when asked who they look up to, often say Beyoncé, but just as many say their mum or grandmother (“I want to give them a hug for this”).
“It’s just about inspiring the girls by the very simple concept of ‘I cannot dream it unless I have seen it’,” González Durántez says. “We are, I guess, hoping towards the future. Some girls approach you afterwards and say, ‘This is fantastic. I am going to try this or that.’ But, for many, you are just hoping that you leave a seed. If in the future they think, ‘Well, I will want to be an astronaut’ and they happen to have met the first female astronaut from the UK… It’s a bit of a leap of faith.”
It’s interesting that she has such a passion for supporting young girls, being the mother of three boys, but she tells me that the boys (Antonio, Alberto and Miguel) have been supportive of her new initiative, giving her ideas, offering help when it comes to making promotional films. “We don’t treat our children any different than if they were girls,” she says. “I don’t have a project of indoctrination for them to be feminists, but I think that you show by example.”
González Durántez organises her work around her children: every day, after getting up around 6-6.30am, she or Clegg takes them to school, and she makes sure she can be back for bedtime most evenings. Afterwards, she carries on working: her legal speciality is international trade compliance, so she finds that, due to time differences, this works fine. She learned to bend her job to her needs when she first had a child. She was working in Brussels, in external relations, and friends with Anna Lindh, the Swedish foreign affairs minister (who was later assassinated, in 2003). Lindh told González Durántez to set her own boundaries when it came to her kids, to organise meetings rather than go for dinners.
I’ve been told that the Cleggs all speak Spanish at home, but she tells me this isn’t true: González Durántez speaks Spanish to the boys, Clegg English, and they speak English to each other. They met in Bruges, in 1991, at a scholarship programme at the College of Europe, in a class on European law and politics. When she first saw him, González Durántez says she thought, “Wow!” (This makes me laugh.) But their first conversations were stilted, as they had to be conducted in their only mutual language, French, which neither spoke brilliantly. They dated for some time before they married and had children.
She has said in the past that choosing the person you have kids with is the biggest decision a woman will ever make. How do you know who to choose, I ask. “Well, you do your homework when you buy a car,” she says. “Lots of women feel that it’s important to have the discussion [with their partner] as to what you do when you have children. For me, it’s much more general than that. It’s just to be respected. If you feel respected, everything will be fine. And if you don’t, think twice.”
She is so sensible, González Durántez, that she can appear sheltered, almost naive. When we talk about role models, she says, “Women who are role models are like mushrooms,” and doesn’t follow it up with the usual joke about being kept in the dark and fed shit, but with: “The more you look for them, the more you find.”
She doesn’t seem to have a cynical bone in her body: she really does believe in hard work, respecting others and commitment. “Well, I apply myself to things. I make an effort on everything and I don’t do things lightly. If I commit myself to something, I am willing to do it. Also, I am an organised person. I am practical with my clients, I look for solutions. But my weakness is I am impatient. I want results quickly.”
González Durántez grew up in Valladolid province, Spain. Both her parents were teachers, though her father, José Antonio González Caviedes, who died in 1996, became better known as a politician – he was mayor of Olmedo for many years. Her mother was the object of some local sympathy. “People felt sorry for her because she had to work,” González Durántez says, “but she wanted to. My mother has taught three generations in the village. I am never going to make so much of a difference.”
Actually, many of the women González Durántez knew had jobs – they just weren’t paid. Both her grandmothers came from rural communities where women laboured in the fields. Her maternal grandmother brought up eight boys (one died) during the Spanish civil war. “She was a tiny, dynamite woman,” González Durántez says. “Always vivacious and positive, a lesson in life.”
Though democracy came to Spain after Franco died in 1975, old-fashioned attitudes took a while to wither. At her school, “when boys did sport, girls did knitting. And boys, when they behaved badly, were sent with the girls.” González Durántez enjoyed reading and music – she played an hour of piano every day (“I say this to my children, who do half an hour a week!”). As the eldest child of the mayor, she was very much part of village life: “I organised things for the little kids, I helped my father in politics, I tried it all. A race or something, there I was. I wasn’t very good at running, but I tried it all.”
The village was small: “Three thousand five hundred people – it’s like a big family. The gossip in my village makes the Daily Mail pale by comparison.” But González Durántez’s mother had an outward-looking approach. She sent her daughter to France and to Ireland for extended stays. (In Ireland, her main cross-cultural discovery was “Mars bars: amazing!”) Perhaps as a result, her ambitions were wide-ranging. “I wanted to be a doctor, and then the first time I hurt myself and I saw the blood, it was a disaster. Then I wanted to be a writer, I wanted to be a diplomat, I wanted to be a politician.” After school, she studied law at the University of Valladolid, got a scholarship to the College of Europe. And then, after she graduated, she tried to get a job.
It was 1992. Spain had just hosted the Olympics in Barcelona. Democracy was established. Optimism was in the air. González Durántez sent her CV to “at least 100 companies”, but got not a single reply. She talks about this both to me and to the girls at the sports event. It was clearly an enormous shock to her; she had to move back home to live with her parents.
“I wish somebody had told me that I had to be more realistic. I was part of that generation in Spain that came just after democracy, and there was this feeling that, if you studied, with an education, you could get anything. As a result, we had huge expectations, and it took me some adjustment to come to grips with reality.”
She eventually got a job in Brussels at the European Commission, inputting data; and from there she moved up, becoming a leading negotiator for the World Trade Organisation on the subject of telecoms. This seems to me an astonishing career progression, but she says, “You get a lot of amazing opportunities in Brussels.”
Once established, she travelled a lot for work. But after she and Clegg married in 2000, and had their first two kids, she realised that her job wasn’t compatible with small children. “I don’t feel any more or less of a woman or a feminist for that. It was our decision, not anybody else’s.” Plus her husband wanted to pursue a political career, so in 2005 they moved to London.
Now their life is, she insists, pretty similar to that of many working couples. “Where you have children, it’s more or less the same way for everybody. Sometimes you have particularly busy times where it’s like, ‘Oh my God, I don’t have time to think. How do we handle this?’ and at other times, it’s easier. Nick has a particularly demanding job, and we all work around that. At the end of the day, you are not just yourself, you are you and your circumstances. Whatever happens, my family and I decide what is the right thing for us. That’s it.”
Of course, the Clegg-González Durántez circumstances may change soon. Her husband will almost certainly have a less powerful job after the election. But when I mention this, the Lib Dem man furrows his brow and González Durántez shuts me down. Has she discussed what lies ahead? “I don’t have a 10-year plan,” she says. “My plan has changed a lot of times; I don’t even do plans any more.”
Though she is careful not to talk too much about her family, it’s when she does that I get a sense of the real Miriam González Durántez. Despite her carefulness, her capacity for work, it’s the subjects of liberty, choice and opportunity that get her going. She wants all women to be able to make their own decisions, in work, within a relationship, with a family or without.
“You know, I love the freedom in this country,” she says. “The very first five minutes when I came to live here, I felt a freedom that I had never felt before in my life, a freedom to be myself. I come from a culture, in Spain, in Brussels, where, if you want to be a lawyer, you study law, if you want to be an economist, you study economy. Whatever you do early in your life determines what you do later on. When I came here, I went for lots of chats with people because I didn’t know what to do. And pretty much all of them said, ‘What do you want to do?’ And I was like, ‘Me? You want to know what I think? I have a choice?’ Now I take it for granted, but it was a complete shock to my system. I still think it today: if I wanted to change my job, everyone would say, ‘Great, good for you.’”
She sounds almost incredulous. The hard-working schoolgirl from a village where working females were pitied has been allowed to achieve, a person who can organise her working life and family life as she feels fit. No wonder she’s so keen to promote these choices to teenage girls. There’s a part of González Durántez that still can’t believe how relaxed the British are when it comes to self-determination. “The value that is given to the individual here is very wonderful,” she says. “I’m very lucky to have it and to share it. I think, you guys, you don’t appreciate how wonderful it is.”
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