Gina Miller invites us to conduct the interview at her private members’ club in Mayfair. On arrival, as I register the heart-stopping opulence of the Georgian townhouse – where our bar bill for two small glasses of wine will come to £40, and the scented air smells too expensive to breathe – I think this is exactly what angry working-class Brexiters picture when they imagine the lives of London’s elite.
When Miller greets us, the concierge blanches at the camera equipment and says we can’t take pictures, so I suggest we relocate to a nearby hotel. “Its lounge is a bit deathly,” I say, “but it will do.” Miller’s smile freezes. “Ah. I’m afraid not. ‘Deathly’ is the word, you see. It isn’t safe for me to go outside.”
The online abuse and threats to her life began within minutes of last week’s high court ruling. Miller had taken the government to court and won; to trigger article 50 without parliament’s consent was, the judges agreed, unlawful. She didn’t take the death threats seriously at first. “It sounds awful, but they’re kind of normal nowadays, aren’t they?” Following her appearance opposite Nigel Farage show on last Sunday’s The Andrew Marr show, however, they began targeting her family and children, and Miller went to the police.
“It felt surreal. I thought: I did a court case about preserving the rule of law and the British constitution, and now on a Sunday afternoon I’m walking into a police station.”
She left her husband and children outside in the car, thinking it would take a few minutes. “And the next moment, CID are telling me to send them home because I’d be there for hours. They are taking it very, very seriously.”
She asks me not to disclose the full range of extraordinary security measures CID have imposed, several of which I had never heard of before, and she has been told to avoid all public places, even the tube.
With her office and staff bombarded by abusive calls and hate mail, Miller is having to run her life and her business from her club, less a VIP sanctuary for her than gilded prison. “We knew it would be bad. But nothing like this, obviously.”
In the past nine days, Miller has been attacked in the press as a “foreign-born immigrant” trying to “subvert” British democracy, and the three judges who ruled in her favour denounced as “enemies of the people”. Farage has called for pro-Brexit protesters to march on the supreme court in December when it hears the government’s appeal, and warned of anger “we have never seen in this country in our lifetime” and civil disorder if the ruling is upheld.
But when I ask if any bit of Miller was tempted to jump on a plane and go into hiding, she laughs at me in amazement. “Why? I’m absolutely stoic about this. It’s bullying of the worst degree, and I’m not going to let them win. This is not the society we have to live in. If anything, all this has proved, more than anything, is that I have to do this.”
She is disgusted with Liz Truss, the lord chancellor, for allowing judges “to be denigrated in this way by the press” and for releasing a mealy mouthed written statement only belatedly. “That is so shameful. She should have gone personally to a camera and said something straight away. I think it’s absolutely disgraceful that she did not defend the judiciary.”
Far from hiding from the press, Miller is determined to keep talking. “So many red lines have been crossed that people seem to think it is acceptable for politicians and the media to actually incite hatred and violence. Where in the press do you ever see ‘foreign-born Boris Johnson?’ It’s just fuelling all the nastiness, and it is disgraceful.”
Yet until last week’s ruling, the journalists Miller had approached had paid almost no attention to her case, “and didn’t really understand what I was talking about”.
The story began four days after the referendum, when the investment expert gave a talk on diversity in the City, organised by the law firm Mishcon de Reya. She got chatting to a partner afterwards, and discovered he shared her view that constitutional law did not allow the prime minister to remove British citizens’ rights by royal prerogative, without parliamentary consent.
Two other parties were also interested, instructing the firm to make a legal challenge, but ultimately were “too frightened for themselves and their families to put their heads above the parapet”. When both dropped out, “My question to Mishcon was: If I don’t do this, who will? And they said, ‘Either you do this, or it doesn’t get done.’”
Miller studied law at university, but spent her career in business and finance. “So I actually spent my summer reading case law.” She read Sir Edward Coke’s 1610 Case of Proclamations in the original. ”That’s how sad I am,” she says with a smile. “I’m afraid I’m a complete workaholic perfectionist. It’s how I operate in business in the City. I have to know more than everyone else in the room. In a roomful of men, I have to know more than them.”
Both the Referendum Act and article 50, she discovered, “are actually very poorly drafted pieces of legislation. Had the act made the referendum binding, not advisory – and they had that option, of course they did – all of this could have been prevented. But I think nobody ever thought they would lose the referendum. And article 50 was badly drafted by lawyers who thought it would never be used either.”
So watertight was her case, Miller was “quite surprised it went to court at all”. She thinks the government only fought it, and then appealed, in order to buy time. “The appeal is unwinnable, it’s just ludicrous. It is unappealable.”
In addition to two other individuals who have joined the case as interested parties, the Scottish and Welsh governments have signed up, and Northern Ireland and Gibraltar are expected to follow suit. They will argue that article 50 also requires the devolved parliaments’ consent, but Miller has her doubts about that. “We haven’t seen any legal arguments yet, but it doesn’t make sense to me. It’s still the mother of parliaments who make the decision, so I’m a little baffled by that.” She campaigned for remain, but wants to be very clear that her motivation is not political but legal.
Isn’t it her intention to block Brexit? “No. I just want MPs to do their job.” If they vote to block it, would that be democratically legitimate? “I find that question so baffling, because we have a representative democracy. People keep asking me what I think of direct democracies, but that’s a different discussion. That is not what we have now in Britain. MPs are paid to be representatives of their constituents. They have to do that job. They need to find out what their constituents want. They have to put their own egos and ambitions and interests and power struggles to one side. They have to. And if they get a resounding ‘No, we want to leave’, well then they have to do that as well.”
What if parliament votes for a second referendum before triggering article 50? “I’m not a politician, it’s up to whatever they decide. My argument is simply that it is not legal for the government to use the royal prerogative. Once we’ve asserted that, it’s up to the politicians.”
Like many people, I had been both impressed and slightly bewildered by Miller’s intervention in the politics of Brexit. How and why had a 51-year-old businesswoman dedicated her time and money to an obscure point of constitutional law? But she finds such puzzlement equally peculiar, and says it isn’t shared by anyone who knows her. A friend told her recently, “Gina, the problem with you is you’ve always been a bloody modern day suffragette.” She laughs. “The word they tend to use is ‘incorrigible’.”
Miller was born in what was then still British Guyana, the daughter of a lawyer and politician who served as attorney general. “He was a fighter for social justice. He was my inspiration, he’s instilled everything I believe in.”
When she was 10, political unrest persuaded her parents to send her to England. They considered the heavily traditional Roedean boarding school near Brighton, “But it looked like Colditz prison, and I absolutely refused”, so instead she enrolled in an “eclectic” day and boarding school in Eastbourne called Moira House, nicknamed Moron House “because it produced some very strange girls. We were all very single-minded.”
So single-minded was Miller, in fact, that at 12 or 13 she’d had enough of boarding, and with her 15-year-old brother moved into a flat in Eastbourne alone. Guyana was by then “on lockdown” and her parents were unable to get funds out of the country, so Miller dressed up in high heels from a charity shop to make herself look older, and got a part-time job as a chambermaid.
In the press she is described as a “former model”, but rolls her eyes at this. “The inaccuracies are just unbelievable. I did some work as a model at university because I needed to make money. I held down three jobs at university, leafleting outside Pizza Express – whatever it was I would I do.”
Her first marriage broke down while she was still a student, leaving her a single mother of a young daughter with learning disabilities in a one-bedroom flat. “And I remember vividly, I’d have a loaf of bread and baked beans to live on for a week. I know what it means not to have any money.”
Miller wanted to be a criminal barrister, but was put off by the discrimination against women at the bar, and set up various marketing companies before gravitating towards investment management. After a difficult second marriage, in 2006 she married Alan Miller, then a hedge fund manager, with whom she has a son and daughter.
The family live in a £7m Chelsea townhouse, so my eyebrows go up when she attributes the public anger fuelling Brexit to inequality created by the financial crash. “I absolutely understand why people are so angry. The divide is getting worse because businesses have not operated as they should. A lot of the people having stones thrown at them deserve it, because they have been irresponsible with their success. They pretended to put things right after the crash, and they didn’t.”
But look around us, I say, at this room full of sumptuous City affluence. If people are right to be furious with the monied elite, isn’t she part of the problem? “No, I’ve worked for everything I’ve got, and I class myself as a conscious capitalist. Every business should have a triple bottom line – profit, people and the planet.”
Her husband gave up hedge fund management 10 years ago when the couple set up the philanthropic True and Fair Foundation, and she campaigns against mis-selling and hidden fees in the investment industry, and the boardroom bonus culture.
“I’m absolutely hated for it in the City, because my view is there should be no bonus culture at all. Ten years ago, no FTSE CEO walked away with million pound bonus packages. Now it’s normal. No, I’m sorry, you get paid to do a job. Why do you then need another bonus package on top of it? The majority have not thought about what they are doing to people. They are just a disgrace.”
I cease to find it at all surprising that the most powerful response to the referendum result has come from Miller when she tells an anecdote about queuing for a flight and seeing a stressed mum with three screaming young children slap one of them round the face. “And I felt so awful, so I went over and said: ‘Can I help?’ And she just screamed and shouted at me. My husband said to me, ‘You shouldn’t do that, she might hit you too.’ But I said: ‘That’s all right,’ and so I persevered, and said: ‘Are you okay?’ And she really wasn’t coping. She was waving her arms about, and giving a bit of racial abuse – but that’s just the easiest thing to do when you feel like that. So I just walked up to her and hugged her.”
I cannot remember meeting a more impressive woman. She has always voted Labour, and I wish she would go into politics. It says something about the state of our political culture that the suggestion appals her. “Oh no, no, no. I think our political system is pretty broken.”