“I cried last night, I cried with all the stress. I just thought, ‘God, was I ready to do this?’ I doubted. Should I have done it?” A week ago Karen Danczuk, 31, the wife of Simon, the crusading MP for Rochdale who has played a key role in forcing the government to address historical child sex abuse, spoke publicly for the first time of her own childhood.
In a front-page interview with the Sun, she described how she was raped between the ages of 6 and 11 by a friend of her family. It would always happen on a Sunday; the day on which she would have a bath. He would creep up the stairs of the family home in Middleton, Manchester, and abuse her in her bed unperturbed by her attempts to roll herself up into a duvet cocoon.
The paper’s headline reported: “Exclusive – selfie queen’s hell”, a reference to Karen’s penchant for posting slightly risqué photographs of herself on Twitter.
It was an extraordinary revelation from the MP’s wife, even by the standards of the Danczuks. The pair have seemingly courted controversy ever since Simon’s election in 2010. They have been roundly criticised for ruffling feathers, whether through the way that Karen, a Labour councillor, has used social media, or through Simon’s allegations that police in 2012 ignored the Asian ethnicity of gangs in Rochdale who were abusing young girls. He has also been a repeated and vocal critic of Labour leader Ed Miliband on issues such as immigration. But besides being tough, straight-talking northerners, what is their agenda? And why should people listen?
In their first interview as a couple, sitting on a sofa in the sparsely furnished front room of the couple’s three-bedroom bungalow on the outskirts of the former mill town, bought three years ago for £140,000, Karen appears uncertain whether she was really ready to speak about her abuse. She is yet to report the alleged crime to the police.
“That is a whole new ball game,” she says. “That is a journey that I will continue to take, but it is a journey that right now I am not ready to go down.”
She says she was driven to speak to the press because in interviews she was being asked about her childhood and was tired of shutting up shop. But was it a mistake? She doesn’t speak to her mother (“She didn’t do the small things like hug me. And tell me she loved me.”) and has never felt able to tell her father, to whom she is close, about the abuse. Simon broke the news to him over a pint at their local pub three weeks ago. “He was thoughtful and upset and that,” he says.
The memories have driven Karen to attempt suicide in the past. They triggered postnatal depression following the arrival of both her boys, Maurice, four, and Milton, six. After Milton’s birth she alighted on a way out. “Yeah, just being dead made more sense than being alive. I took tablets. The second I thought ‘Oh, I will kill myself’, it was like a load had been lifted. It was like, ‘Oh yeah, why didn’t I think of this sooner? This makes sense.’”
She adds of the overdose: “I was quite naive, I thought it would be pretty instant, but it isn’t instant. It is a long and drawn-out process. I started being sick anyway; and I just thought, ‘Yeah, this isn’t really working.’ I just effectively made myself sick then.”
The response from some quarters on social media to the story has been predictably unpleasant. “You are a narcissistic mess, another leech in the horrendous political machine, desperately vying for your day in the sun,” wrote one.
And the Daily Mail has bowled in, exposing the scale of the dysfunction of Karen’s family. They also asked: “Victim or self-obsessed fantasist?”
Karen says that the Twitter abuse doesn’t upset her, and even comments, in semi-maternal fashion, that “her trolls” can be entertaining. But the questioning of her story does. It has, she admits, been a “horrendous, draining” week. And some familiar emotions have drifted back. “I have slowly been feeling that I am quite depressed, actually,” she admits, with a look towards her husband.
“The difference,” Simon says, “is that we have conversations about it now, like we didn’t before. We don’t come from families where you have open conversations about feelings. But we do now.”
Simon, at 48 some 17 years his wife’s senior, and with two children from a previous marriage, adds: “I don’t think I was very compassionate when you were going through some of what you described.”
“No,” Karen responds pointedly. “He was like, ‘pull yourself together’,” she laughs.
“Yeah, I am not proud of it,” the MP admits.
In a political arena in which words are carefully chosen, PR narratives carefully designed, and human frailties rarely admitted, the Danczuks stick out. They both come from broken families, in which dependence on benefits was par for the course.
Karen, one of five children, was the only one to carry on her education after school and says she lives a life that her siblings wouldn’t recognise.
In her 20s she “had a really good job, company car, travelling the country” working for a used car dealership. More recently, until the couple sold up in January, she ran Danczuk’s Deli in Rochdale town centre and she remains a Labour councillor.
Simon, who says he endured a fairly miserable upbringing with his single mother, who never worked, was inspired by politics at 11 when his grandmother, Agnes, gave him a second-hand copy of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. He became a devotee of the author, dreamed of being an MP from the age of 16 and became a Labour councillor at the age of 27. But, in his words, Rochdale is a tough place to do politics. Seeking to be selected as the parliamentary candidate for the town, while running his own social research business, he received some outlandish death threats.
“The first week of January, as we are approaching the selection meeting, I got a phone call in the office saying, ‘if you don’t withdraw from the selection meeting on Saturday your body parts will be spread across the M62 motorway’.
“On the Thursday before the meeting I came into the office late, about 12, and another director took me to one side and said these funeral wreaths have arrived. It was ‘Simon’ spelled out in flowers. Over £600 worth of them. And a cross in flowers with a card saying, ‘We will miss your politics’.”
He didn’t pull out and was selected, taking the seat from the Liberal Democrats, albeit with a meagre 889 majority. But he has made his voice heard since.
His book, Smile For the Camera: The Double Life of Cyril Smith, prompted the inquiry into allegations of historical child abuse at Westminster. His crusade to expose child abuse wherever it may occur was sparked by the conviction of a gang of Muslim men for sex trafficking and abusing under-age girls in his own constituency.
Danczuk has been an outspoken critic of politics geared towards the metropolitan elite. On welfare, he and his wife agree that Labour isn’t tough enough. “Instead of people being sat around on benefits, if they are capable of work why not have them make a contribution locally and keep them in mind for work,” Simon says. “If you want to call it hardline, so be it.”
On immigration, Karen says Rochdale is at the “end of its tether”. Simon adds: “The liberal intelligentsia, this north London liberal elite, don’t have to live with the problem. Proportionally there are more asylum seekers in Rochdale than in London.”
The reason people should listen to them, they say, whether it is on child abuse or the problems of welfare, is that their views come from experience. “If my mum had been forced to work and not live her life as a single parent on benefits, she would have had a job and friends and a better life, which would have benefited me,” Karen says.
And immigration? A rich country like the UK should take in asylum seekers and economic migrants, Simon argues. But Rochdale’s cheap housing makes it a magnet. “I do feel that the strains and stresses being put on a relatively small town is unfair. It is all about fairness.”
The decision to talk about her abuse, was a tough one for Karen. “Should I have done it? I think of all the victims. It is a shameful feeling that you have. Some women might look at me and think, ‘she is very confident, very self-assured, she just goes with the way she looks’. Now they know where I come from, that victim can think, ‘why can’t I think that? Why do I have to be ashamed forever? Why can’t I just say this is me, this is my body?’ ”
It has been a difficult week, but there is no doubt that the Danczuks intend to keep on telling it as they see it.
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