Sarah Olney

An MP since the December 2016 by-election, Sarah Olney won with a majority of 1,872 votes, taking over from Zach Goldsmith. But the tussle with Goldsmith was not over. In the 2017 general election, Olney narrowly lost her seat to Goldsmith, who stood as the Conservative candidate. She won it back in 2019, after a stint as chief of staff for Vince Cable. Her position as the Remain candidate was one of the deciding factors in her December 2016 win against Goldsmith, and she cites her best media moment as her contribution to the article 50 debate in 2017, where she announced that she would oppose any parliamentary vote to trigger article 50. However, like her opponent, she was vocal about her opposition to the building of a third runway at Heathrow. The only female MP for the Liberal democrats from 2015-17, Olney tells Mace that Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own had a huge impact on her. ‘It opened my eyes to the way that women are routinely treated as less important than men, and how that treatment shapes their own expectations,’ she says. While access to housing and education, improvements to air quality and tax reform are top of her domestic agenda, globally, she would like to see improvements in the education of women and girls. Richmond Park is her stomping ground, but in parliament, she can be found in the terrace cafeteria, which she likes ‘for the salad bar’.