A faithful fighter for penal reform
Rachel Billington tells Hugh David why she is following in the footsteps of her father, prison reformer Lord Longford

27 November 2009

Rachel Billington says her father has been portrayed wrongly as a 'typical wet, liberal do-gooder'

Rachel Billington is well accustomed, after four decades as a successful writer, to the suggestion that she is following in the family footsteps. When she published her first novel All Things Nice, as a 27-year-old in 1969, she immediately found herself featured in a Foyle's Bookshop's lunch as one of "the literary Longfords". Her mother, Elizabeth Longford, was a celebrated and award-winning historian, as was her older sister, Antonia Fraser, while brother Thomas had that year produced an admired account of Ireland's 1798 uprising. Writing, it was said of this high-achieving clan, ran in their blood.

More recently, though, she has been walking in another set of well-worn family tracks - those of her father, the Labour Cabinet Minister and penal reformer Lord Longford, who died in 2001. Billington is co-editor of Inside Time, established in 1990 as the first-ever national newspaper for prisoners, and next week will be up on stage at Church House, Westminster, just over the road from her father's old stamping ground of the House of Lords, chairing what has become a popular annual event on the political calendar, the annual Longford Lecture on prison reform.

"I was always conscious as a child growing up at day school in London [More House on Cromwell Road, founded by the Canonesses of St Augustine] of odd people coming to our house to meet my father," she recalls as she sits in the bay window of her flat just off west London's fashionable Portobello Road, with the city skyline as a frame. "I mean odd in the sense that a child would use the word. They seemed unhappy and anxious. Gradually I realised that something bad had happened in their lives, that they'd been to prison."

Billington's father had started befriending prisoners as a city councillor in Oxford in the Thirties and continued until weeks before his death at 95. "As an adult I was more aware of what he was doing. I was young and married with four children [her husband is the film and theatre director, Kevin Billington] at the height of my father's involvement with Myra Hindley in the Seventies, so I didn't get involved but I was in favour of his stance [he wanted Hindley released on parole]. What I do remember, though, is getting taxis to my parents' flat in Chesil Court in Chelsea and, as soon as I gave the driver the address, he would tell me how Lord Longford lived there and how wrong he was to have been taken in by Myra Hindley. I was usually rather cowardly, I'm afraid, and would only admit that he was my father as I was getting out of the taxi."

If Lord Longford's prison crusade was always bobbing away in the background of his daughter's life, in 1990 it rose to the surface. Billington was researching her latest novel, Bodily Harm, which had a prisoner as a central character, and wanted to meet someone who had been inside. Her father arranged it for her, through New Bridge, a charity which supports ex-prisoners which he had set up in 1956. "And, by chance, it was around that time that New Bridge's director, Eric McGraw, had conceived the idea of setting up Inside Time as the first-ever newspaper for prisoners. Knowing I was a writer, he asked me to get involved."

Today, the paper is thriving, not least as a result of Billington's tireless journeying around the country to cover in her column events, exhibitions and conferences on and at prisons. The paper, originally a quarterly, now comes out every month and has 52 pages of letters, articles, reviews, stories and poems by prisoners. It has also published books, including Inside Poetry, and, just last week, Inside Information, over 800 pages of guidance about prison and related topics.

"I started off going into prisons with my father," Billington recalls, "which was always an interesting experience. He was never one, when asked by a prison officer to take off his shoe so he could be searched, to do it quietly. 'I'm a peer of the realm,' he used to protest, which never seemed to impress them. If anything I was on their side. Meeting prisoners with my father was instructive. I think many people have an image of him as a typical wet, liberal, do-gooder - which was the picture presented in Longford, the television film [written by Peter Morgan, who also wrote The Queen and starring Jim Broadbent], where he was shown as a dithering person easily taken in by the people he went to visit. In fact, he was pretty tough on them. He didn't sit listening to their sob stories. He wasn't unsympathetic, but what motivated him above all was taking action to help them, to make their conditions better. He never forgot that the word 'rehabilitation' is up there on the wall of every prison as part of its purpose."

That practical approach has evidently passed from father to daughter. "A lot of people assume that if you are sympathetic to prisoners, it doesn't go much further than sympathy, but I believe firmly that it is all about trying to see that justice is given and used in the best possible way."

It was to further that commitment that Billington - along with her brother, Kevin Pakenham, her other siblings and admirers of her father, such as the broadcaster Jon Snow - set up the Longford Trust in 2002. It awards scholarships to young ex-offenders to help them continue their rehabilitation by studying for degrees at university. Each is assigned a mentor and so far over 50 have been on the programme. "I think he'd be very, very pleased with what the Trust has achieved," she says. "He valued education very highly."

As well as the scholarships, the Trust also organises a prestigious annual lecture, sponsored by the Independent newspaper. Past speakers have included Archbishop Desmond Tutu, President Mary McAleese of Ireland and Cherie Booth QC. This year Billington and her fellow trustees have invited Sir Hugh Orde, the new president of the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), to the lectern. Billington - who is described by friends as the one among Longford's surviving children to have inherited his natural gift as a public speaker - will be chairing the event. "Jon Snow normally does it but, with the Copenhagen summit on climate change coming up, he is going to be presenting Channel 4 News from Brazil that week," she explains.

Why Hugh Orde? "Well, before he took over at ACPO, he was Chief Constable of Northern Ireland for seven years and he is going to be reflecting on his experience of tackling the legacy of sectarian murders there during the Troubles now that peace has come. My father, of course, always considered himself to be Irish - though he didn't have a drop of pure Celtic blood in him - and believed passionately in a united Ireland."

And was he fond of policemen? Billington pauses to consider. "I can't remember him ever being anything other than fair-minded about policemen. He was certainly on good terms with the ones at the House of Lords and, I think, some from the Sussex police force played in the annual cricket match in his home village, maybe even on his side."

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Spending more time visiting prisons hasn't halted Billington's success as a writer. As well as over 20 novels, some of them bestsellers, there have also been children's books, some of them on religious themes, plays and non-fiction, plus a stint as a reforming president of the writers' association, PEN.

The literary and prison strands of her life must, I suggest, fight for time. "I find that they link in together more and more," she corrects me. "One of the characters in my latest novel, Lies and Loyalties, is an inmate at HMP Holloway at the start of the book. As a novelist, I have always believed it is important to show readers another side, to reach out beyond all of our narrow experiences, and describe something other. So I naturally latch on to the stories I hear in prison. I realise that there is a voyeuristic element in this, looking into the world of the have-nots - because that is the background of most people who are in prison today - but I hope this is balanced out by the practical work I do through Inside Time and the Longford Trust."

As we turn to discussing the current problems faced by prisons - notably overcrowding - Billington mentions that she is about to attend a conference where the former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith, will be a speaker. He has done much good work of late in the area of social justice. I can't help wondering aloud if Catholicism - the common thread that links Billington, Duncan Smith and Lord Longford - may bring with it a predisposition to the cause of prison reform. She laughs. "Well, I'd like that to be true, but, to be honest, it hasn't always been my experience. I was one of the speakers some years ago at a debate organised by a Catholic organisation on capital punishment. I was against it, but the vote went against me. My Catholic audience clearly believed in forgiveness but there was also a strong sense of the need for retribution still there too."

She doesn't look perturbed by the memory. Being in the minority is clearly something that Billington takes in her stride. It goes with walking in her father's footsteps.


Rachel Billington will be chairing the annual Longford Lecture on Wednesday December 2 at 6.30pm at Church House, Westminster. Tickets are free but must be reserved either at www.longfordtrust.org or by ringing 020 7625 1097