By the time Jacqy Sharpe walked into the Palace of Westminster as a young woman in 1969, she already knew she belonged there.
“I was just 10 when I first visited,” she recalls. “I saw the building and thought: this is where I want to work.”
A decade later, she returned not as a visitor but as one of only two women to join the House of Commons Clerk’s department – the first female clerks since the second world war. It was a moment that quietly marked the beginning of a new era inside one of Britain’s most tradition-bound institutions.
Today, Sharpe is retired after more than 40 years of service, her career spanning the transformation of parliament itself – from a place still shaped by Edwardian hierarchies to a modern legislature wrestling with diversity, transparency and public trust.
And yet, she insists, the essence of the Commons has never changed. “It’s the people,” she says. “That’s what makes it work.”
A girl from the north, heading south on New Year’s Day
Getting in was never easy. The recruitment exam for the Clerk’s department took place on New Year’s Day – which in her home in northern England was very much a holiday, though not in London. “Just getting there by public transport was an ordeal,” she laughs.
Candidates were grilled by panels, forced to defend debating topics of their choice. Sharpe, finding the seriousness of it all slightly absurd, opted for: Easter bonnets are an expensive anachronism.
“They never did ask me to argue it,” she says, with obvious relief.
There were more rituals, too. Women were expected to wear hats and white gloves. Sharpe ditched the hat – she was afraid it would fall off during the interview – an irony not lost on her later, when she found herself required to wear a judicial-style wig as part of her Commons uniform. “I always worried that would fall off too,” she says.
It was only at the very final interview that she discovered what she was really walking into: a department that had not appointed a woman clerk since 1945.
“I hadn’t realised we would be the first,” she says. “But once we arrived, we were simply treated as colleagues. I never felt unwelcome.”
Bottom of the ladder, heart of the machine
Her first job was in the Public Bill Office – at the very bottom of the hierarchy. One of her duties was to read out every word of every bill sent from the Commons to the Lords, checking it line by line against the official text.
“We literally read it aloud to a colleague,” she says. “The Misuse of Drugs Bill was particularly memorable – so many long, unpronounceable chemical names.”
There were also late-night division duties, often running well past midnight. One marathon sitting on the Industrial Relations Bill stretched through the night into the next morning. “We worked two hours on, one hour off. By 6am, you didn’t know what day it was – but I knew every MP in my half of the alphabet for the rest of that parliament.”
It was exhausting. It was exhilarating. And it was democracy, in its rawest form.
Inside the committees where Britain argues with itself
Over the years Sharpe moved through the institutional bloodstream of parliament: the Table Office, the Committee Office, the chamber itself.
She clerked committees on everything from youth employment to the Channel tunnel, from race relations to the British film industry. She sat through inquiries on transport, heritage, finance and public spending – often when the issues being debated would shape national life for decades.
“The Private Finance Initiative was one of the most challenging,” she says. “We were right at the centre of something that would change how the state works with private companies.”
She worked on the Treasury Committee, the Liaison Committee, and joint committees spanning both Houses. It was the kind of behind-the-scenes labour that few people ever notice – yet without which parliament could not function.
“The clerks don’t make decisions,” she says. “We make sure the decisions can be made properly.”
At the Table, three feet from power
For years, Sharpe was part of the Table team – the clerks who sit in front of the Speaker in the Commons chamber, guiding procedure as laws are made and governments challenged.
From there, she watched history unfold: votes, crises, filibusters, late-night dramas. The hardest shifts were between 3am and 6am during the Consolidated Fund Bill debates. “They’re mostly formal now,” she says. “The real challenge was staying awake.”
Her final job brought her full circle. As Clerk of Legislation, she headed the very office where she had started as a junior more than four decades earlier.
“I never imagined that,” she says. “But it felt right.”
More than a workplace
Sharpe rejects the idea that parliament is cold, elitist or detached.
“It’s a friendly place,” she says. “It really is. You’re working long hours under pressure – you have to rely on each other.”
And she is clear about the deeper significance of her own career.
“When I arrived, there were no women clerks. When I left, that had changed. Quietly, slowly – but it changed.”
She pauses.
“I wouldn’t have missed a minute of it. Not even the all-night sittings.”
After more than 40 years in the heart of British democracy, Jacqy Sharpe still sounds like the 10-year-old girl who first walked into the Commons and thought: This is where I belong.
And she was right.