Four corridors converge on the famous central lobby of the Palace of Westminster. Atop the doorway to each is an intricate mosaic of one of the patron saints of the four nations of the UK.
“You know the running joke about these, don’t you?” a chuckling peer said to me one day as he waved up at the coloured glass. I did, but I could also tell he enjoyed telling the joke.
“St George for England sits over the corridor to the House of Lords – the English are all obsessed with toffs. Over the corridor to the House of Commons there is St David for the Welsh – all they want is to listen to their own lyrical voices in endless debate. St Andrew for the Scots is over the corridor to the bar. And St Patrick? He is over the exit, because most of the Irish just want to leave.”
Unfortunately for the Scottish, the parliamentary bar, Strangers, is currently closed by order of the speaker after a woman alleged her drink was spiked by a man, possibly an MP. St Patrick, meanwhile, is the patron saint of Northern Ireland as well as the Republic. This just about explains his inclusion in a mosaic finished in 1923, the year after most of Ireland got its independence and quit the UK.
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Many Westminster politicians have their own little version of this story about the barely politically-appropriate if wonderfully-crafted mosaic of St Patrick. Yet they rarely mention the woman standing just to his left – St Brigid, whose feast day at the weekend was a celebration of women.
Brigid was said to be a Kildare woman. Her links to London don’t end with a glass painting in Westminster. A mile-and-a-half up the river Thames, then a five-minute walk northwards from its bank, there lies a little church tucked way off Fleet Street: St Bride’s, named after the woman herself.
St Bride’s is known as the Journalists’ Church, given its location near the street that was once home to all the great English newspapers. To this day, it frequently hosts ceremonies for deceased journalists. On Saturday, it also hosted a service in memory of its “matron saint”.
There was a prominent Kildare presence in London in recent days given Brigid’s links to the Thoroughbred County. David Mongey, the chairman of the Into Kildare tourist board, was in town with Aine Mangan, its chief executive, for a promotional event at the church.
They were also among the crowd at the Irish Embassy in Belgravia on Monday night for its annual St Brigid’s event, which after a musical introduction featured a series of panel discussions. One of them, appropriately enough given the saint’s links to the Fleet Street church, was on women in journalism.
Nuala McGovern, the Dublin-born presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, hosted a lively discussion with Belfast woman Ailbhe Rea, a political journalist with Bloomberg; former Daily Mirror editor Alison Phillips; and Sophia Smith Galer, a former BBC journalist who was among the pioneers of British journalism delivered on TikTok.
They spoke about online attempts in Britain to silence women journalists and the reams of abuse to which they are sometimes subjected. Phillips recalled instances during her time as an editor when she was, disturbingly, asked by some women to leave their bylines off certain stories on hot-button topics to save themselves from the inevitable deluge of critical comments.
Yet as much as being a woman in journalism clearly brings its unique challenges, outsiders who wander into the London media bubble may also notice the solid and growing presence of women in some of the most powerful positions in the industry.
The chief executive of Britain’s biggest newspaper company, Rupert Murdoch’s News UK, is Rebekah Brooks. The editor of its biggest selling title is Victoria Newton. The former editor of the group’s best quality paper, the broadsheet Sunday Times, was Emma Tucker, who two years ago (on St Brigid’s Day, as it happens) left to become editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal.
Katharine Viner is the editor of the Guardian. Roula Khalaf edits the Financial Times. One of Phillips’s successors as editor of the Daily Mirror is Caroline Waterson.
The biggest British political story of the past five years, Partygate, was broken by Pippa Crerar when she was political editor of the Daily Mirror. Now she holds the same role for the Guardian, giving her a seat at the top table of the famous Westminster Lobby.
The BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg is probably the top political interviewer in Britain, with Sky’s Beth Rigby not far behind her along with Newsnight’s Victoria Derbyshire.
Meanwhile, Emily Maitlis, the former BBC journalist who famously skewered Prince Andrew, is now more regal in her profession than her quarry is in British life.
St Brigid might approve.
