A lot of the things I have done so far in my life were ‘impossible’ until I did them: heiress Caroline Murphy on Parliament, sexual violence and building herself a new future

Caroline Murphy wants Parliament to get flexible. After the 31-year-old heiress to a construction empire walked out of the family business in March, she was widely expected to be on Ed Miliband’s speed dial to become a Labour candidate for 2015. Yet when it emerged that Frank Dobson would retire at the next election — meaning a selection process in Murphy’s local constituency of Holborn and St Pancras — she declined to run. As a sufferer from post-traumatic stress disorder, Murphy says she can’t work full-time as an MP.

“The lack of flexible working doesn’t just affect me,” she says. “There are an awful lot of people who aren’t well represented in political life for whom it’s a barrier. We’d benefit so much from hearing more from disabled people, carers, women: any of the groups who don’t want — or aren’t able — to do more than a part-time role.”

She notes that ministers often talk about the need for flexible working in business yet Parliament won’t lead by example. “It’s one thing to say it and another to demonstrate it. And the Commons isn’t so different from the corporate world. In the business community we all feel our jobs are too important to be divided, but the reality is that you can split roles.”

But what about all the critics who say it’s impossible to have job-share MPs? “A lot of the things I’ve done so far in my life were ‘impossible’ until I’d done them,” Murphy responds. “Any campaigner is in the process of changing the world, so if you don’t hear the word ‘impossible’ thrown around, you’re probably not doing the right thing. In some ways it’s an encouragement. When somebody says ‘it’s impossible — that’ll never happen’, I think: ‘file that to look back on when we’re doing it’.”

It’s easy to see why so many people wanted Murphy in the Commons. She’s driven, articulate and warm. For every barrier, every hurdle, every problem, she offers a solution. “I’m always having ideas,” she laughs. She’s also that rare creature: someone on the Left who truly understands business, a woman as comfortable around a boardroom table as she is at a Unite meeting (she was recently elected to the union’s political committee for London and the South-East).

It’s obvious Murphy’s heart lies more in activism than infrastructure, though. Just peruse the long list of causes she supports: workers’ rights, LGBT rights, women in construction, mental health in the workplace, survivors of sexual violence and employee ownership.

It’s the last on that list that has put her in the spotlight. The company she quit, Murphy Group, was founded by her father, John, in 1945 to help clear bomb sites after the Blitz. In the years leading up to his death in 2009, the firm’s racing green vans became ubiquitous — often spotted at the front of traffic jams. Although she has two surviving brothers, Caroline was heir apparent. But her dream — which she attempted to execute after her father’s death — was to turn Murphy’s into a co-operative, the John Lewis of construction. She believes this is the logical extension of her father’s pro-worker philosophy. But when the rest of the family failed to back her plan, she stepped down.

She insists the split wasn’t acrimonious. “It sounded very dramatic — like tools were downed, doors were slammed and hair was swished. But it wasn’t a knee-jerk decision; it was boringly slow. It took me two or three years to come to that conclusion.” She is still pushing for her shares to be transferred to an employee structure from outside the company. “There’s got to be a cold, hard business case for employee ownership — and I’m satisfied there is,” she argues. “With co-operatives, people always ask ‘won’t [staff] just pay themselves everything and vote to do no hours?’ But the opposite is often true. Once people understand the sort of strategic decisions that need to be taken, there are loads of examples of people voting to work more hours for the same pay.”

Murphy knows the construction world inside out. She didn’t simply stumble into the industry in the footsteps of her father. As a teenager she went to work on a rival firm’s building site so there could be no whispers about nepotism. She did manual labour there until an accident left her with a crushed hand. Later, she studied civil engineering at Bristol, before joining the family firm. One of her hopes is that more women will consider construction as a career.

“There tends to be a revolving door for women in construction,” she says. “They don’t stay long in large site roles; they tend to group together to go to people’s houses. So there’s an issue not just about recruiting women but also about then retaining them.”

The theme that ties Murphy’s many missions together is the idea of empowering those whose voices don’t usually get heard. There is no more stark example of this than her campaign against sexual violence. Murphy was once raped — the reason she suffers from PTSD.

She is particularly incensed, therefore, about cuts to the funding of women’s refuges. “You need specialist services available in the local area. Not everyone has the same legacy of an attack as everybody else, but for me, travelling a long distance around London on transport was an issue — it was overwhelming. I also had chronic fatigue, so I didn’t know when I was going to drop from tiredness.

“It’s horrendous to think we are living in a society where some women are just surviving each day when they could so easily be thriving, contributing to their community, with really not a lot of support in terms of the resources needed.”

She is speaking out to combat “survivor stigma” and has studied for a masters in violence against women and girls. “It’s very easy as the victim to feel like there’s something shameful on your part in an act of sexual violence, which isn’t the case. That acts as a barrier to talking about it. It makes it easy to have a certain image of what somebody should be like or is like after that experience, and I don’t think that’s terribly helpful. You can be a strong businesswoman, you can win all sorts of awards and you can still be a victim of sexual violence — they’re not mutually exclusive.”

Murphy argues that surviving sexual violence doesn’t intrinsically make you a strong or weak person. “I used to have this image that people start as victims and go through a process and emerge as survivor superheroes at the end of it all. But the survivor idea can be limiting — it’s still defining people by this one thing that’s happened to them. And it doesn’t allow for the fluidity: you can feel strong a lot of the time and then have a day when you don’t.”

In the aftermath of her own ordeal, Murphy says she was “just surviving” and suffered flashbacks. “There’s no opportunity to thrive in your life — it’s only possible to emerge from that with the right support.”

She threw herself into her career to cope, working 16-hour days, seven days a week. “That was partly because I was really passionate about what I did and was getting amazing results,” she recalls. “But on the other side, one of the ways to manage the flashbacks is to be constantly active, which I did until I had taken the time to develop other ways of handling it.”

Some time later, her father died. Murphy was then hospitalised with burn-out. “I wasn’t working in a sustainable way. I didn’t have the habit of taking breaks — I had to set alarms on my phone to make me take them. I got physical signs from my body that I wasn’t managing my life in a healthy way — my memory, which had always been very good, started faltering.”

She believes that her coping mechanism — extreme hard work — isn’t so far removed from other forms of addiction.

“Of all the ways to escape what’s going on in your head, it’s one our culture and society rewards. There are people I met when I was hospitalised who used drugs and alcohol to self-medicate. It seems to me they were doing the same thing I was, just theirs wasn’t socially acceptable and mine was.”

She says she recovered “very slowly” from PTSD. “I don’t do a lot of things slowly, so it was the antithesis of anything I wanted to do. I wondered: ‘How actively can I recover from this? How many books can I read?’”

For her, the triggers were seeing sexual violence on screen, or reading about it in books. “My partner will start at the end of a book so she would know if particular story lines were going to be triggering for me.”

Murphy proposes the creation of a resource online where PTSD sufferers can check if there are common triggers in films and TV.

More generally, she is fighting to reduce stigma around mental illness in the workplace. “People hear ‘mental health’ and what they take on board is ‘this is an unreliable person’. And that’s not necessarily the case. If anything, people who know they have a mental health issue and have done some work on it are more self-aware of when they’re struggling than an awful lot of people who suffer from stress but have never sought help.”

Her own life is much happier now. In November she’s set to marry her partner — something finally made possible by the same-sex marriage legislation. Even here, though, she notes the battle isn’t quite won. She points to difficulties for transgender people.

“I’m glad to be having a same-sex marriage but it isn’t yet equal marriage. My work in the LGBT community absolutely includes the transgender community. Maybe it’s on the theme of people who often get left out.”

With Murphy taking up their cause, I’m sure it won’t be that way for ever.