Baroness Valerie Amos
The Guardian
What holds, and what fails, under pressure, standards and accountability.
Baroness Valerie Amos is a Guyanese-born British peer and public servant whose career contains a sequence of institutional firsts of uncommon density.
“Baroness Valerie Amos: There was huge excitement in 1997 when Tony Blair won the election, and it was on the back of that that I was asked to go into the House of Lords. A year later, I was asked to join government. Patricia Scotland and I were the first two Black women in the House of Lords.”
“There are advantages to being first because nobody has trodden that path before you, so you can do it in your own way. But it also brings a great deal of scrutiny. It also brings very personal pressures, because you feel that you have to do it well. One of the things I know is that to get better at what we do, we have to make mistakes.”
“How did you navigate your way into that role, and what pivotal moments shaped you there? Baroness Valerie Amos: I had seen myself as having a career in local government, having started in the London Borough of Lambeth and then worked in Camden and Hackney. I felt very comfortable in local government and could see myself succeeding there.”
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