And do it better, claims Jones, the Green candidate in the London mayor election. After the 'old hippy' suggested they all publish their tax returns, she found herself in the thick of it
The St Pancras Cruising Club is not as interesting as it sounds. It's a place where people with canal barges moor them on a long-term basis, and it's where I've arranged to meet Jenny Jones, the Green party's candidate for mayor of London. She and her partner are taking their barge – the Arthur Dent, named after the hero of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy – east along the Regent's Canal and I'm joining them on the trip, conducting a relaxed interview over lunch as we go. That, at least, is the plan, but it doesn't quite work out.
It's the day after the Newsnight hustings in which Jones, fed up with the endless fuss over the tax affairs of Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson, suggested that all the candidates publish their earnings and tax returns, and be done with it. The other candidates agreed, and now everyone wants to talk to her about the story. Her phone rings constantly; we have to make regular stops for her to be interviewed by waiting film crews; the Green party's youthful media person arrives; a security guard at one of our unscheduled stops objects to the presence of the film crew; I end up holding on to the boat while she talks to ITN and argues the toss with the jobsworth. This is not going well.
It gets worse. The Guardian photographer arrives and wants her in what he calls a Titanic pose at the prow of the boat; four friends of her partner turn up and start eating the lunch; another friend and a child come on board; an interviewer from Radio 4 pitches up, and Channel 4 are lurking somewhere upstream. A canal barge is very narrow, claustrophobic even, and it starts to resemble the crowded cabin in the Marx Brothers film A Night at the Opera. Having started the interview on the sofa, we have to complete it perched on the tiny bed at the back of the boat, which at least allows me to study her small pile of bedside DVDs, which I notice includes The Thick of It.
Jones, who has been a London Assembly member for 12 years and is now pitting herself against Ken'n'Boris, is very much in the thick of it, yet she's still far from your conventional politician. She has a flat in Camberwell, south London, but spends as much time on the boat as she can. At 62, she calls herself an "old hippy", and tries to live the green life as well as preach the party's philosophy. She says the St Pancras Cruising Club is like an old-fashioned community in which everyone looks out for each other. "It's like stepping back to the 1950s," she says. "As members, we have to help out doing the garden, cleaning and painting, and clearing the gutters. I love it." It sounds like a vision of how she thinks society might work if the Greens were in charge.
Her great problem in the mayoral election – the dilemma facing all five of the other candidates – is that Ken and Boris bestride the political waterfront: larger than life, macho, maverick figures who, as David Aaronovitch said in the Times this week, "are bigger than their parties and know it". The week has been dominated by their bust-up in the lift at broadcaster LBC, when Boris fired expletives at his rival and called him a liar for suggesting that he, too, was not above a bit of creative tax avoidance.
As the media concentrates on this Punch and Judy show, getting attention and switching the discussion to policy is not easy, and on Newsnight Jones looked irritated as Livingstone and Johnson, positioned on either side of Jeremy Paxman, traded accusations like punch-drunk boxers. "I got extremely fed up at one point," she says, "because it's not the first time I've heard them arguing over their tax affairs. I don't know what the truth is. I'm finding it really boring, and I don't want to hear it any more." Hence her suggestion that they publish their tax returns, an idea she is now regretting. "I almost wish I hadn't said that," she says, "because there's now even more friction about it."
She clearly gets on better with Livingstone than with Johnson. "I know it's not a fashionable thing to say," she says, "but I do trust Ken. He's never promised anything to me or said anything to me that he's gone back on. I know we can work with him. I want to get things done. I'm not in politics for the money or the media attention. I'm in it so I can achieve things, and the four years Boris has been mayor have been very frustrating because I couldn't work with him. He's very funny and very charming when you meet him, but the minute I realised we couldn't work together I stopped finding him so funny. He can be quite patronising to the women on the assembly. His tone is a little bit: 'Don't worry your pretty little heads about this.' It's casual sexism."
In the Newsnight hustings, Johnson tried to paint Jones as an adjunct to the Labour campaign on the strength of the year she spent as Livingstone's deputy mayor in 2003-4. Isn't it dangerous for her if that sticks? "When I was Ken's deputy, I think I met him three times, and one of those was in a lift." Most key meetings in London politics seem to take place in lifts. "I wasn't close to him at all. I used to deputise for him at events and would say: 'This is what the mayor would like me to say, but this is what I think.' Ken was completely cool with that. He's a grownup politically, and understands that other political parties have different beliefs, whereas Boris wouldn't have liked it if I'd said anything against him. He's quite a sensitive bunny. He likes to be liked."
Jones is at first unwilling to talk about the set-to in the LBC lift, but does eventually draw a picture of a furious, white-faced, red-eyed Boris squaring up to his accuser. "It was quite shocking," she says. "It was a tiny lift" – even tinier than this houseboat. "I'm not going to be sharing a lift with them again. Now we're seeing each other quite a bit, there's a sort of weird intimacy about all being on the campaign trail."
How did Ken react to the stream of expletives? "He stayed extremely calm." Do the two men really dislike each other? "I think it could almost turn and be friendship," she says, two large egos and political populists finding common ground. But please, she asks, can we talk about something else? She fears the episode will overshadow the issues she wants to talk about – reducing fares, affordable housing, raising the congestion charge to discourage car use and ease pollution, rebuilding relationships between police and the public.
Jones joined the Green party in 1988. "I came to it through lifestyle," she says. "In the late 60s and early 70s, I was having children. It was the era of EF Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, and when you have young children you start to worry about the future." Born into a working-class family in Brighton, she didn't go to university, married young, and had children at 20 and 22. Her husband was a water engineer, and the family spent time in Lesotho and the Seychelles, where he worked, before returning to live in Herefordshire.
She got divorced when she was 40, an experience she says was both horrible and liberating. Divorce and the decision to become a mature student – the only real choice she says she has ever made in her life – was a watershed. She came to London and started again, studying archaeology at University College London and then working on digs in the Middle East during the 1990s. Though frequently out of the country, she remained active in Green politics, chairing the party in the mid-90s before becoming a full-time politician when she won a London assembly seat in 2000.
"I didn't make a very illustrious start," she says. "After a year the Evening Standard ranked the assembly members in terms of visibility, talent and so on, and I came 25th out of 25. I hadn't got to grips with it; I hadn't found my voice." She says she was trying to ape the confrontational style of other politicians, whereas she needs to be more collegiate. That said, she can be uncompromising when she must, and the Standard now reckons her surface approachability masks an inner steel. One of her two daughters is a senior editor at the Guardian. Mother and daughter are similar, and the combination of tenderness and toughness, quick brain, penetrating voice and disarming directness is alarmingly familiar.
She can be sharp and funny. She suggested that, instead of building a multibillion-pound, high-speed rail link to Birmingham, the government should invest in high-performance alarm clocks for executives so they could catch their trains half an hour earlier. She opposes what she sees as vanity projects such as "Boris Island" (the proposed new airport in the Thames estuary), is not afraid to call the Olympics a "huge planetary drain", supported the Occupy camp at St Paul's, spending a night there, and says the hypercapitalists in the City have to realise growth can't go on indefinitely and that embracing a green agenda can be good for business, as the German experience has demonstrated.
Her great-grandfather was the first Labour councillor in Brighton, but Jones says she never wanted to belong to any party other than the Greens. "I'd got the whole thing right from the early 70s. I realised we were damaging the planet with our lifestyles and our greed, and that we had to do something about it." I suggest that, despite Caroline Lucas becoming the first Green MP in 2010, the party has declined in electoral terms in recent years, and that Green politics feels indulgent in an age of austerity. "That's a common view," she says, "but the way Greens see it is that you can't get out of a crisis like this without being aware of the environment."
The party combines environmentalism with a commitment to social reform, but I wonder whether the latter gets obscured. "The Green party has two philosophical planks," says Jones. "One is environmental justice and the other is social justice. If people are poor and can't pay their bills, they are not going to care about the planet; they don't have the mental space to care. So you have to do the social justice stuff. I feel very strongly about that, and we have to get better at getting our message out."
The forerunner of the Green party, called People, was founded in Coventry in the early 70s, and I suggest that some of that populism – not to mention geographical breadth – has been lost as the party has become white, professional and southern. "We have been very white and middle-class," she admits, "and quite educated – there are a lot of people with two degrees in our party. We're moving away from that, and have more and more ethnic-minority candidates. But these things take time."
What will constitute a good result on 3 May? "It would be fantastic to be mayor of London," she says. "If that's not possible, I would like us to do well on the assembly list. If we had more assembly members [there are now two out of 25], we'd have a much stronger Green voice. Another one or two assembly members would be brilliant. If I get more than 5% of the vote, we get our deposit back, and £10,000 to the Green party is a lot of money." Then a final dig at Boris. "When I first started, I could not imagine myself doing the job of mayor, but now I can. The chances are astronomical against it, but I can see how a Green mayor would do it, and do it well. If Boris can do it, I can do it, and I can do it better."