‘Well, I was wondering if you fancied coming along to a meeting in the town hall with me tonight. After we’re done here. It’ll just be an hour or two. It’s for women only, and they’re going to talk about the NHS, education, childcare. That sort of thing. How we might be able to change them, with independence. There’s some good people talking at it.’

Adele was making her mouth into the shape of a no when Ash handed her phone screen over. Cliodhna’s face, spliced into a picture with three other women Adele didn’t recognize.

At the town hall, the applause had been loudest for Cliodhna, introduced as ‘the woman who got us dancing in our teens and had us cheering last week when she faced down the mansplainers on Question Time’. Ash, sitting beside Adele, had actually gone ‘Wooooo!’

‘I went to school with her, you know,’ Adele had said, nudging Ash.

And Cliodhna had spoken. She talked about the ways that men in power had tried to squash the politics out of her, all her life; she talked about the ways that women could do politics differently, by sitting down and talking to each other. She talked about the things a country with women’s interests at its heart would prioritize. Then she began to mention the little town she grew up in, how it had been pulled apart by Thatcher, by the contempt – less than that, Cliodhna said – by a deliberate refusal to acknowledge poor working people as human.

‘I’ve seen strike action fail. I’ve seen governments ride roughshod over the will of the people, from the miners to the anti-Iraq War protesters. And it seemed like we’d all just given up, didn’t it? Until recently. Maybe until this. In a smaller country, one that never votes Tory, that will always vote at least a centre-left government in,’ she said, ‘we could look our politicians in the eye and hold them accountable. Make them do the jobs they promised to do when campaigning.’

Adele thought about the scandal, about how some of the old men back home would feel hearing ‘that wee Johnstone hoor’ casting up their struggle. And then she thought about all the mistakes she herself had made at sixteen, and the very different person she was at forty-six.