Natalie Bennett interview: I've lost track of the last time I saw my Dad but it's not because I refuse to fly

Green leader prefers to stay clear of her 'painful' family memories but is more open about 'utterly unreasonable' personal attacks, her New Year's resolution to join the Green party and much more in her interview with The Independent

Natalie Bennett is interviewed by The Independent's Matt Dathan

Natalie Bennett says she has “lost track” of the last time she returned to her native Australia to see her father, and he has not visited her in the UK since she moved here in 1999.

The reason is not because the Green party leader has an absolute boycott of flying – she says she last flew six years ago – but it is to do with her father’s personal circumstances, which she insists are “not a matter of public record”.

It is clear that talking about her family is a sensitive topic, understandably so considering her mother died in a car crash 26 years ago. Ms Bennett, then 23, managed to drag her father to safety but her mother died instantly. She has said it is a pain that “sits in the pit of my stomach” that “will never go away”.

It was her parents who sparked her initial interest in politics at the age of five when they denied her a bicycle because she was a girl. From that moment a deep-rooted feminism was born.

'I might have voted for Labour'

The same cannot be said of her Green politics. She decided to join the Green party as a “New Year’s resolution,” on January 1 2006. She has always voted for the Green party “when I’ve ever had the opportunity to,” but admits to not remembering who she voted for in her first General Election in the UK in 2001, and says it might even have been Labour.

“The first time I voted was in Walthamstow and there wasn’t a Green candidate, which was disappointing,” she recollects. “I can’t actually remember; I either voted Labour or I didn’t vote for anyone.”

The TV debates have propelled Natalie Bennett into the public eye as never before (Getty Images)

Just six years after joining the Greens Ms Bennett found herself elected as leader, a thankless task considering she will almost certainly not be representing the party in Parliament after the election. It is her own fault – she decided to stand in the Labour strong-hold of Holborn and St Pancras as it is where she lives and a seat she fought in 2010.

But the fact that she lacks an elected office is a “huge advantage,” she claims and it adds to the influence and fun she enjoys as she travels across the UK to meet a whole range of different people, “from Carlisle to St Ives and pretty much everywhere in-between”.

Unlike her predecessor as leader, the Green party’s only MP Caroline Lucas, Ms Bennett is afforded the freedom to roam “every corner of the country” and boasts that she now knows every main train station in the country inside-out.

'I get stopped everywhere I go'

The ‘Green surge', which saw the party’s membership more than double to more than 60,000 in one year, has been accompanied with fame and she now finds herself having to add extra time to her travel plans to cater for selfies and chats with fans and curious bystanders.

Natalie Bennett is interviewed by The Independent's Matt Dathan

“It takes quite a bit of extra time to go everywhere,” she says. Public awareness in Ms Bennett has shot up this year after the media coverage of the Green party’s initial exclusion and subsequent inclusion in the TV leaders’ debates. She finds herself increasingly booked up with events and has to travel abroad for holidays in order to avoid the temptation of agreeing to more speaking engagements.

'I don't have a social life'

For now, the thought of holidays is far from the mind and even free time seems foreign to Ms Bennett. “I don’t have a social life at the moment,” she admits, racking her brains to try and remember the last time she went to the theatre or cinema. “I do believe in a work-life balance; I just don’t have one,” she jokes. “It was true before and it’s even more true now.” She did reveal however that she found enough time to watch the film Paddington earlier this year, which she said sent a “strong message about welcoming migrants”.

Natalie Bennett, Leanne Wood and Nicola Sturgeon embrace at the end of the 5-way TV debate (PA)

When the election is all over – as well as the potential post-vote negotiations and even perhaps a second election – she will be going to a holiday house in rural France without any electricity and equipped with a stack of books that have “absolutely no relation to politics whatsoever”.

Rising fame attracts personal attacks

The sudden rise in media attention was difficult to begin with, Ms Bennett admits and it took “a few weeks” to get used to the inevitable personal attacks and scrutiny that came way from certain sections of the press.

Her infamous interview on LBC Radio, in which she admitted suffering a “mental brain fade” as she struggled to explain how her party would fund the Green party’s pledge to build 500,000 council houses, was described by some political commentators as one of the worst interviews in British politics.

listen to ‘Incredibly Awkward Interview With Green Party Leader Natalie Bennett’ on audioBoom

But she has now learned to treat negative coverage in the media as a sign she is succeeding in her job.

The Green party leader punches the air to show how she celebrated “another swing at me” over the weekend, adding: “it shows we’re having an impact”.

To reduce the emotional effect of personal attacks, she has learned not to take it personally. “It’s an attack on the fact that the green party calls for real change,” she says. “It’s upsetting the status quo and the vested interests; that’s something that you just come to accept – it’s great that they’re feeling threatened,” she adds and describes the obsession in the press with demonising the lives of politicians and celebrities as “utterly unreasonable” and “a very disturbing aspect of the British media”.

Her boyfriend's 'rape fantasies' blog

It is not just the “right-wing” media that attacks Ms Bennett however, as she found out over the weekend when the Sunday Mirror published details of her boyfriend’s controversial blog called The Daily Maybe. Jim Jepps uses the blog to defend “rape fantasies,” describes paedophiles as “complex human beings” and says he is “ambivalent” over teachers having sex with pupils.

However Ms Bennett dismissed the story from the “strongly Labour newspaper” and refused to comment on her boyfriend’s publicly-made views. “My boyfriend is a private person who has no involvement in party politics; I won’t be commenting on anything he has said or written,” she insists.

It is the same privacy she is determined to give her father, who has not seen for “eight or nine years”. “I’ve lost track of the last time I went back to Australia,” she says. Does he visit her in the UK? “No,” is the answer. “I think again his personal circumstances are a not a matter of public record.”

Caroline Lucas, Natalie Bennett's predecessor as Green leader

What happens after the election?

In what is perhaps a reflection of her personal experience, it was the many tragic news stories she covered in her 25 years as a journalist that drove her into a political career.

“You cover a great deal of very many depressing stories and you get to a point where in secession you’ve done another African famine story, another story about political turmoil and another story about hideous violence and you just think ‘I just don’t want to do this anymore, I want to change this,’” she says.

The Green party holds a leadership election every two years and although Ms Bennett insists she will continue on until at least the next election in September 2016, she hints at the prospect of standing down next year.

“I think that’s a long way away; we’ll see what happens at that point, there are at least two major elections between then and now. Working a lot of hours on the road, a lot of hours on trains.”

Working below the minimum wage

Those long hours, combined with her relatively miniscule salary of £24,700 (compared to the other party leaders) means she is effectively working for below the minimum wage, which the Green party wants to turn into a mandatory living wage, paid at a rate of £10-an-hour by 2020. Ms Bennett would also significantly contravene another key Green policy of introducing a maximum 35-hour working week.

“I was much better paid as a journalist, I confess,” she says. “There are a lot of people in London living on less than that though.

“Yes, I think if you worked my hours out I probably would be [below the minimum wage], which of course I entirely don’t approve of at all but it is my choice and actually I’m not paid a wage, I’m paid an allowance so it’s slightly different.”

About a sixth of that goes on her grocery shopping, which she does at her local People’s Supermarket, a cooperative in central London she is a member of, which may explain her relatively expensive weekly food bill.

Her job leading an election campaign means she has been slacking off her duties working on the till in the supermarket however, with members required to work a minimum of four hours a month.

'I smoked marijuana at university'

Her grocery bill includes alcohol, which she admits is her “drug of choice”. Asked if she has tried the kinds of illegal drugs her party wants to decriminalise, such as cannabis, she reveals she smoked marijuana at university but stopped because of its effect on her lungs. She says she has never taken class A drugs.

Her work-life balance is not going to improve in the immediate aftermath of the election if the Greens get their way and are involved in negotiations over supporting a minority Labour government. But if she fails in her difficult task of becoming an MP, will this undermine her credibility in leading her party into post-election talks? “No,” comes the straight answer, insisting she has been “very clearly fronting her party’s policies” in the run-up to the election.

“What will happen, as always happens with the Green party, is a team of people – MPs, myself, other people elected within the party – will come together as a team.

“The media is very focussed on individuals and in the Green party policies are made by our members, direction is given by our members – that’s now more than 60,000 people. I might be the person standing up in the leaders’ debate but behind me are those 60,000 people and that’s far more true of the Green party than other parties because our members decide our policy, decide our direction.”

Green candidate Darren Hall on the doorstep in Bristol (Tom Pilston)

The party is focussing their resources on 12 target seats at the election. Along with fighting to hold onto their single seat in Brighton Pavilion, the party’s next two priorities are Norwich South and Bristol West, where Green candidate Darren Hall is hoping to take advantage of students angry at the Liberal Democrats by booting out their party’s local government minister Stephen Williams.

'Disappointing' record on black and ethnic minority candidates

However the party has come under fire for the lack of black and ethnic minority candidates it is fielding at the election, and this is a problem Ms Bennett admits needs fixing.

Only 4 per cent of Green candidates are from minority communities, according to a study by University College London – the lowest proportion of all the other major party, including Ukip.

She pointed out the party’s better record on gender balance – four in ten of their candidates are female – and says the party will use the same measures it used to promote gender equality in the party to improve its BME record.

“I would agree that our percentage of BME candidates is disappointing and it’s something we very much want to focus on,” she says.

“I’m proud of the fact that we have 38 per cent female candidates and we’ll be looking to use some of the many same mechanisms we’ve used to promote female candidates to ensure that in future elections we’re promoting BME candidates as well.”

Why is she fighting an unwinnable seat?

As for her own prospects in Holborn and St Pancras, she has the typical underdog approach of Parliamentary candidates up and down the country, insisting she and her team is working “very hard to be MP” and “we’ll see what happens”.

But, unlike some of her party’s policies, she is realistic about her chances of winning a seat where she gained just 2.7 per cent of the vote in 2010 and therefore lost her deposit. She hopes to win a lot of Lib Dem votes and says the fact the incumbent Labour MP Frank Dobson is standing down means there is a “huge opportunity” for her to win over people who voted for him personally, rather than voting for Labour.

“I went for Holborn and St Pancras because it’s where I live, it’s where I’ve been a community campaigner, it’s where I stood in 2010 and there are huge possibilities in this seat,” she explains. “Frank Dobson has been the MP here for more than three decades; he’s now standing down and a lot of people tell us on the doorstep ‘I’ve voted Frank for years, not I’ve voted Labour for years’, so there’s a huge personal vote for Frank that’s going.

“There are also a lot of people voted Lib Dem – more than 28 per cent voted Lib Dem in 2010. I get an awful lot of people on the doorstep saying ‘I voted Lib Dem in 2010 but I won’t make that mistake again.’”