Hello and welcome to Ways to Change the World. I'm Krishnan Garimurthy and this is the

podcast in which we talk to extraordinary people about the big ideas and their lives and

the events that have helped shape them. My guest this week was the third black woman

to be elected as a Labour MP. She was the first black woman to speak at the dispatch box

as a government minister and she's just written a book called A Purposeful Life which

she started writing when she was recovering from cancer. Yet Dawn Butler is often attacked

if you tweet about her, if you tweet about interviewing her, you'll get a load of responses

back calling her a liar or somebody who makes things up. And her book is fascinating

because it takes all of these things head on and is like a sort of a series of stories

of aggressions and the way you've dealt with them. It's very fascinating I think. Thanks

for coming in. Ah, thank you, thank you for having me. I'm going to actually begin at

the end because you're wearing lime green and your chapter at the end of the book is called

the lime green suit. Explain the lime green suit. So the lime green suit is all of another

story of me buying a lime green suit and walking into an event and just the look on everybody's

face is like, what is she wearing? You know, how can she be wearing a lime green suit when

we are a grey suited organisation? And I could just see all the cogs wearing in their

heads. You know, it's like, oh my god, you know, she can't wear a lime green suit because

our customers expect us to all be in grey suits and it just made me think about how we need

to disrupt the grey suited organisation. Not try to fit in. Not try to fit in. Is it an acceptance

that you don't fit in and that you spent a lot of time perhaps trying to? Yeah, I mean,

in the beginning there's been times when I started my work in the city as a computer programmer.

So I've got plenty of grey suits and in the beginning you do try to fit in but the whole point is

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