Some of us like to think we know exactly why so many MPs are to stand down at the next election – if they’re Conservatives, that is. Better to quit than to be thrown out! Better to leave than to die a slow death in opposition! But pusillanimity and defeatism take us only so far. For one thing, not all of these people are in marginal seats; some have big majorities. For another, there’s the fact that whatever the public may believe about the lucrative roles former MPs tend to bag for themselves on the outside, not everyone is as lucky as George “nine jobs” Osborne. In 2023, the House of Commons Administration Committee published a report that looked at the plight of MPs who lose or give up their seats. As its title, Smoothing the cliff edge, implies, it is full of tales of woe. Here are phones that never ring; pastoral care that never arrives; a feeling that these institutionalised – even stigmatised – men and women cannot find a place out in the real world. For those with even the smallest chance of winning again, it really might be better to stay on and fight. Fighting, however, is the last thing they’re going to do – or so it would seem. Ninety-eight MPs have so far announced their intention of standing down, the majority Conservative (the latest is the former prime minister, Theresa May; the figure is likely to rise in the coming weeks). This isn’t the tidal wave it might appear: in 2010, 150 MPs stood down, mainly from the Labour party, which had been in power since 1997; an average of 87 MPs stood down in elections between 1979 and 2010. But in 2024, there is a notable difference. Many of those who are off are young: very young, in some cases. William Wragg, who has been the Conservative MP for Hazel Grove in Greater Manchester since 2015, is 36; his party colleague Dehenna Davison, the MP for Bishop Auckland since 2019, is 30; Mhairi Black, the deputy leader of the SNP in the House of Commons and the MP for Paisley and Renfrewshire South, is still only 29. Those who are stepping aside after several decades in parliament, such as Harriet Harman (the MP for Camberwell and Peckham since 1982), may represent the end of an era in more ways than one. Political careers are growing ever shorter, and while this might have some virtues, mostly it doesn’t seem to augur well in terms of parliament retaining talent, energy and continuity.
Why is this happening? Talk to the soon-to-disappear– “We are the living dead!” says one – and it becomes obvious immediately that this has little to do with being chicken. The causes are complex and, to my ears, incredibly depressing; eating Victoria sponge in a tearoom after one encounter, a vague sense of despair washes over me. And I’m struck, too, by the atmosphere in Westminster. It is budget week in an election year and yet the undercurrents feel more rehearsed than febrile. Doubtless some Labour politicians are politicking like mad, hoping to be ministers in the new government. But elsewhere, a kind of frantic listlessness prevails. “On a good day it’s like a zombie film,” says Harman. “On a bad day, it’s worse. We’ve got ministers, but they’re sort of holograms.” MPs from the other side don’t seem to feel very differently. “I’d just like it to be over now, I think,” says Wragg, of the wait for the election to be called. “The trouble is that we can’t make any plans about when to start winding our offices down,” says Caroline Lucas, the only Green MP (Lucas has represented Brighton Pavilion since 2010). In her office, Dehenna Davison curls her legs beneath her on a sofa, seemingly oblivious to the whopping great Dr Martens on the end of them. “Colleagues keep saying: ‘You’re counting down the days,’” she tells me. “But we don’t know how many days are left.” Does anyone have a hunch when the election will be? “I think it’ll be November,” says Charles Walker, who has held Broxbourne in Hertfordshire (majority: 19,807) since 2005. He throws up his hands. “But I don’t know anything!” So, around the place they all wander, wondering about their futures, and trying not to worry. To go back to Osborne and his bulging portfolio, it’s striking that none of those I meet has anything concrete lined up. “I’m trying to imagine and sort of prefigure myself into what it’s going to be like,” says Harman. “But I can’t. I’m so institutionalised. When the doors of a long-stay institution swing open… I don’t know how I’m going to set foot outside.” Her plan to wind down gradually – to enter a kind of transition zone – was derailed by her job as the chair of the Privileges Committee; its judgment that Boris Johnson misled the House of Commons over Partygate led to his resignation as an MP last year (it also enforced the crucial principle that MPs must tell the truth in the chamber). She’s now hard at work on amendments to the Criminal Justice bill. But even were she less busy, she wouldn’t be thinking too hard about what lies ahead. “It’s going to be such a huge adjustment,” she says. “I feel slightly light-headed [at the thought].” Mhairi Black has no plans. “If you hear of any jobs going, let me know,” she jokes. Davison will move abroad with her partner, a diplomat, but beyond this, she has no idea what her future holds. Lucas wants to work “on nature”, but her immediate priority is to “take a few months to just breathe and take stock a bit”. Wragg will go back to his house on the edge of Derbyshire, but beyond looking forward to its peace and quiet, the road is wide open: “Maybe something in education.” As for Walker, by his own account he is caught somewhere between euphoria and panic. “I announced I was going in February, 2022,” he tells me. “For about two weeks, there was this sense of relief and release. But then reality crowds in. I’ve been asked about 793 times what I’m going to do. People no longer see politics as a vocation, you see. They regard it as a profession… but it’s not like moving accountancy firm, is it? There aren’t a lot of other parliaments out there.”
The prospect of freedom is also enlivening, though: “I find it very odd when political journalists say Tory MPs are leaving a sinking ship. Well, why shouldn’t we? You want people in politics to give 110%. I can only give it 95%, so it’s time to go. I mean, I could stick around in my safe seat and pick up my salary, but that would be a fiction. It would be wrong. I’ll tell you what: I’m 56, and I feel alive again, because I’m frightened about what I’m going to do. Am I going to get another job? I don’t know. But it’s actually lovely and very exciting in your late 50s to feel alive again. Does that make sense to you?” Walker chairs the committee that drew up Smoothing the cliff edge, and he tells me that in this parliament, outplacement services are finally to be introduced: MPs will get help with such things as their CV. In the next parliament, vocational accredited training will be available. “People should be thinking about their last day in parliament on their first day,” he says. “Because it really is very transitory.” In 2007, I interviewed some of Labour’s female MPs – the so-called Blair babes – 10 years after their election to parliament. One of the things that has always stayed with me was how much those who’d later lost their seats had struggled (to take one example: after she lost Newark in 2001, Fiona Jones drank herself to death before she was 50). A lot has changed since then, but a lot has stayed the same, too, as some of those I meet will describe in the interviews that follow (what a radical experience to talk to MPs who are prepared to be so frank). It’s a privilege to be an MP; the job is often interesting and exciting. But it also, perhaps, comes with a price. “I don’t want to sound like I’m getting the little violin out,” says Wragg, “but I’ve spoken to a number of former members of parliament who have some form of PTSD [post traumatic stress disorder], and I can understand it.” Already, he’s trying to change the way he thinks of himself. “It’s a bit subtle, this, but when I introduce myself to people, I say: ‘I’m William Wragg, and I’m a member of the Houses of Parliament. I don’t say: ‘I’m William Wragg MP.’ Being an MP is all consuming. It’s your identity, and when you lose that, there’s a danger you’ll be bereft. That’s the change to come, and it’s going to be the hardest hurdle.” * * * Harriet Harman, Labour I would have gone earlier but the party was in such bad shape under Corbyn’
Harriet Harman has a glorious office with wraparound windows that overlook Parliament Square. She calls it “embarrassing”, but I think it’s fair enough, after 40 years in this place – and in any case, she’s all about perspectives. Don’t despair! The House of Commons really has, she insists, changed “out of all recognition”, and so much for the better. And it will go on doing so. “There are large numbers of absolutely fearless women in this place,” she says. “Things always take ages, but they’re not going to accept the status quo.” Harman was elected in a byelection in 1982, her predecessor having died. “I was supposed to have my baby before the election, but there I was, pregnant. In the Labour party, and in the women’s movement, there was a spirit that we were not going to take no for an answer, and it made us unrealistically bold. I knew everyone [else] was thinking: this is mad, and I was also thinking that sometimes. I remember the prickly pregnancy heat under my red velvet maternity dress, and feeling so out of place, male MPs banked up on every side. When I used to go through the division lobbies, I was the only woman. But the whole project was to change things!” She went on to have three children, and it was exhausting. “Many times I thought: this can’t be done. The house was sitting all hours of the night; I was on the frontbench. I’d often say to friends: I’m going to give this up, and they would say: but you’ve got the recess coming; you’ll feel better after a holiday. No one was letting me give up! I’d move towards the exit door, but that was the door I needed to keep wedged open for other people.” But she has no regrets. “I don’t do regrets, because that way, I would fall off a precipice and into an absolute pit.” She understands, however, how some younger female MPs feel. “There is something about a woman speaking out with authority that triggers misogynist men into wanting to shut them down, and social media amplifies that. This misogyny is there before you’ve done anything, and it’s a dragging anchor.” What’s to be done about it? “We need male allies! In the olden days of the women’s movement, we wanted men to shut up: you’ve been talking for centuries, we thought. But now I think we’re confident enough to turn around to men, many of whom were brought up by feminists, and tell them that not harassing women and not discriminating against them isn’t enough. We need them to step up. We’re fed up with the fact that not only do we have to campaign for maternity rights, we have to campaign for paternity rights, too.” Why is she going now? Wouldn’t she have liked to see in a new Labour government? She shakes her head. “I would have gone earlier, but the party was in such bad shape under Corbyn. I felt the ship was rocking.” On election night, she will still be up until dawn, touring the TV studios as a commentator. But beyond that, she cannot quite see. There is the Fawcett Society, which she chairs (the group campaigns for women’s equality). And perhaps, too, there is work to be done on widowhood. Harman’s husband, Jack Dromey, also an MP, died unexpectedly in 2022 – “his office was right there, next door,” she says – and this has brought her to think about women who find themselves in the same situation. She is 73, which is no age at all these days. “There used to be a cultural norm about widowhood, which was that it’s a very sad and terrible thing; that the good part of your life is over. But my mum lived for 30 years after my dad died. You can’t say that a third of your life is going down the drain. We need a feminist take on widowhood. This is the next chapter of our lives, and we’re going to do it very differently.” * * * Dehenna Davison, Conservative There have been moments when the abuse has been so vile. There’s definitely an element of misogyny’
Dehenna Davison’s office is in a building whose long, rather desolate corridors resemble those of a three-star hotel, and it’s so small: as we talk, our knees are practically touching. She seems very young – she’s sipping a drink via a straw from a huge, multicoloured plastic cup – and if not vulnerable, exactly, then like someone who hasn’t had the easiest time since she won Bishop Auckland just over four years ago (for the 84 years before her election in 2019, the town had always had a Labour MP). She took the decision not to stand again in part because she felt that by devoting her 20s to politics, she’d missed out on “normal adult life”. But the longer she talks, the more obvious it becomes that the bigger factor by far may be the abuse she receives online. “You have to have a thick skin to go into parliament,” she says. “And I’ve always argued that the internet is a great thing. But the level of abuse online is something I never anticipated. There have been moments when it has been so vile. I’m not talking about policy stuff. We’re always going to have people who disagree with us; that’s legitimate. It’s the personal attacks [that are upsetting]. There’s definitely an element of misogyny there. When I posted a memorial to my father who passed away in 2007 [he died after being punched in a pub], I got one message that said: ‘I bet he’d be turning in his grave, knowing you’re a Tory.’ Another one said: ‘You’re such a slut, I bet he’s looking down, and seeing all the disgusting things you’re doing – though maybe he likes that.’” One troll received a police caution, having posted 100 messages online in 24 hours. Another, she says, is subject to a restraining order. What support does parliament offer in this situation? She laughs. “When I was elected, I sat down with the police. They gave me some general advice: not to be controversial, and not to post in real time where I am.” Davison wasn’t intimidated when she arrived: she’d been an intern in Westminster, and knew her way around. But her status as a rising young star who’d won a seemingly impossible seat made things difficult at times. “I got a lot of media attention, which I hadn’t sought. I think my colleagues thought my motivation was the limelight. It became very isolating as time went on, hearing indirectly what people had been saying about me, all the backbiting.” Like her colleague Charles Walker, she likes the division lobby: the chance to brush shoulders with cabinet ministers and even the prime minister. But the system of whipping leaves a lot to be desired. “When I was elected, my whip asked me in for a chat. His first question was whether I wanted to be prime minister.” Was he trying to weaponise her ambition? She nods. “You know that [if you rebel] you’re putting down a marker against yourself getting any kind of future promotion.” When she once voted against a government motion, a male politician “stood too close to me, being quite aggressive”. Davison insists the Tories can hang on to Bishop Auckland, and that a lot can change electorally in six months: “Don’t believe everything the polls say.” But about the future of the party, she sounds less certain – especially if there is a Labour rout. “Then there’ll have to be some soul searching. It will be interesting to see who’s left, and in what direction that takes us. I’ve a suspicion the membership would want to see a move towards the right, a more authoritarian approach. Whether that’s the right thing in this age, I can’t say. I find myself economically pretty rightwing, but socially I’m very liberal, so I wouldn’t want to see us doing a massive shift to the right.” She smiles. “But you know, by that point, I’ll be just another member…” She slurps on her straw. Her heart, I sense, is already elsewhere. * * * William Wragg, Conservative I was in a depressive state and I asked myself: is this how I want to continue?’
For Conservative MPs, the summer of 2022 was stormy – and it took its toll. “It was after the confidence votes in Boris Johnson,” says William Wragg. “I got back for the summer recess, and having come away from all that energy, tension and adrenaline, I just felt as if the ground from under me had opened up. I was in a depressive state, and I had to take some time out. It was then that I asked myself a blunt question: is this how I want to continue? Because it wasn’t going to be sustainable as a working life.” He waited. Best not to rush into anything. He told himself he might be able to push on. But it was no good. “We went through another tumultuous period. The party turned very introspective. The thought settled in my mind. I wanted more autonomy over my own life.” Wragg has been open about his struggles with his mental health. But while this is the single most important reason for his decision to leave parliament, he doesn’t want to be defined by it. Does he think life as an MP is particularly hard for those prone to depression? “It’s hard on anybody, and it’s changed very much in the time I’ve been here.” Social media in particular has made life more difficult: “Maybe it’s one of the effects of the Brexit referendum, but the discourse doesn’t allow for any nuance.” The general public, he tells me, struggles to remember that MPs are human beings too: “A lady came to see me after I’d announced my decision, and she said: ‘You know, Mr Wragg, there’s no way I’m going to vote Conservative, and that’s how I’ve voted all my life. What have you got to say to that?’ When I said, ‘Well, it’s not just voters that can become disillusioned’, the look of surprise on her face…” Wragg is one of those who thinks long careers in politics may belong to the past. “No one is indispensable. But it’s a shame. There’s a lot of people with a lot more still to give who are leaving.” Wragg, to me, is a fascinating case. He maintains a boyish enthusiasm for politics; he looks so at home in his office in the Palace of Westminster, where he makes me a mug of tea, and we sit in fat armchairs listening to the chimes of Big Ben. He’s gentle, warm and self-deprecating. But there’s no doubting the disillusion that rises from him. When he arrived in 2015, he was on the same corridor as Rishi Sunak – and just look at their career trajectories. “I pretty much knew in the first months I wasn’t going to be a minister. I remember being asked by whoever was on duty in the Commons to go in and make some interventions [in a debate], to interrupt a more senior colleague’s speech, just to keep business going, and I couldn’t do it. I thought: no, I’m not going to play games. I was the first of the 2015 intake to move an amendment against the government, so my card was marked. How many times have I heard colleagues around the time of a reshuffle say they’re desperate for a job, at which point I might subtly remind them they already have a job? Being a member of parliament shouldn’t be to rely on the whims of patronage, or the repaying of services rendered.” He’s concerned about the timidity of some. “I had a conversation, I won’t say with whom, but this is illustrative. It was about supporting one thing or another, and they said to me: ‘I’m getting mixed messages [from the whips].’ I said: ‘Well, you were sent here to exercise your judgment. What’s your own view?’” In the end, though, his decision has little to do with other people. He wants, he says, to swap the raging highs and lows of politics for a life that is more “undulating”. It’s about perspective, and calm. “I sometimes joke I can’t always be the best caricature of myself,” he says. “I’m very much aware of the performance here. You need to project voice and image and everything else, and if, behind that, you’re more of a reflective character… there can be a large gulf between the image and the inner self, and I think that gap, that tension, has a volatility to it at times.” * * * Mhairi Black, SNP It’s like a boys’ club. And when folks are comfortable with that, why would they want to change it?’
Mhairi Black agrees there is something topsy-turvy about the prospect of being an ex-MP before you’re even 30 (though she may well have hit that milestone by the time of the election: her birthday is in September). But then again, she belongs to the generation that works to live, rather than the other way round. “It’s a real honour to be there,” she tells me. “I mean it’s significant, and a bit stellar. I don’t regret it because I’ve proved that it can happen: you don’t have to have been at Eton to be elected an MP. But the baseline for my decision [to stand down] is really that I just want to live a bit more.” That said, her frustration with parliament is also obvious. “In terms of the big picture, if you’re a representative of Scotland or Wales, you’re unlikely to change anything here. Numerically, you’re insignificant.” It’s for this reason that she still believes “wholeheartedly” in the SNP as a “vehicle for political change” in spite of its recent troubles. More than this, though, it is the atmosphere of the place that she dislikes: the entitlement, the bullying, the harassment. “It’s like a boys’ club. And when there are folks here who are comfortable with that, why would they want to change it? [When people have talked down to me], I’ve always nipped it in the bud; folk don’t tend to do it again. But there have been quite a few other incidents, none of which I’m ready to share yet: you know, good old-fashioned intimidation.” No wonder, then, that the only thing about which she has changed her mind since she arrived in 2015 relates to MPs’ staff. “I used to be opposed to MPs hiring family. But as time has gone on, I’ve seen the benefit of having a wife, a son or a sister-in-law involved. It’s vicious. It’s good to have somebody you can talk to and completely trust.” In 2015, Black arrived at Westminster on a wave of yellow, having beaten the then shadow foreign secretary, Douglas Alexander, at the ballot box. But appearances were deceptive. “I got to the airport. All my new colleagues were there. Once the flight was moving, I thought: OK, cool. But then we arrived in London, and honestly, the cameras. It was like I was Brad Pitt. And then I got to Westminster, and the first thing that strikes you is that it is just a stunning historical, iconic building – until you go inside, and very quickly, you see the cracks and the mess and the ‘Do not enter: wonky floorboards’ signs.” She seems to have kept herself apart from it all, to a degree. “My closest friends are the ones I had before I was elected… I know it sounds cheesy, but the only thing I will miss is the House of Commons staff, because they really look after you.” How will it feel on election night, as a non-participant? She smiles. “Ah, it’s going to be great,” she says. “I won’t have to be suited and booted, and going over my key lines. I can be a political geek again.” * * * Charles Walker, Conservative I called my wife from a service station. “I can’t do this any more,” I said’
When Charles Walker found himself getting crotchety with his constituents, he took it as an early sign that his time in parliament might be coming to an end: “My stepfather was an MP, and he said that once you start getting short-tempered, it’s time to go.” In 2019, he was at a political event – admittedly, this was not in his constituency – and it struck him as “one of the most unpleasant evenings” he’d ever had. “They thought they could be as rude as they liked,” he says. “So I basically told them what I thought of them: find yourself a new guest speaker, I said, because I’m going home. I called my wife from a service station. ‘I can’t do this any more,’ I said. She was the one who pointed out that I would have to do it for another five years because my name was on the ballot paper, and the nominations had closed two weeks earlier.” Walker loves the House of Commons. He has never been a yes man, intent on clambering the greasy pole: on his first day in parliament in 2005, he got into a “terrible row” with his fellow Tory MPs when he said that they had to give up their outside jobs, and focus on the task in hand. He had no ministerial ambitions; he wanted only to be a good parliamentarian. “And I have been.” He is the fourth longest-serving select committee chair in the House, a former vice-chair of the 1922 Committee, and he has often amended legislation. In this sense, he has no regrets. But there is, he thinks, a problem. “I’m going to say something very controversial, which is that we’re far too close to our constituents. MPs’ offices are nearly all now staffed by five caseworkers, who just plough through the inbox, solving people’s problems. That’s a very noble thing to do, but ultimately, it’s not the role of a member of parliament. We’re here to legislate. I know it sounds like heresy, but we have to put some distance between ourselves and them. Most constituents are self-sufficient. So you end up working for about 1,000 people.” Walker believes passionately that more homes need to be built. Conservative MPs, however, are stymied by their constituencies if they talk about the green belt. “The Tory party has had numerous housing bills, but when it comes to the crunch, we find ourselves campaigning against them.” His low point in the almost two decades he has been here was, without question, the period of the pandemic. Walker suffers from OCD. “I would happily have had the vaccination up my nose, or on a brioche… But I am needle phobic. It was absolutely awful when we started getting aggressive with those who hadn’t had a vaccination. I just hated it. The lack of empathy. The lack of humanity. All these nice middle-class people with their gardens lecturing others. I thought that was obnoxious.” But he thinks he began to “fall out of love with parliament” in the period after Brexit (he was a Brexiter, though he is much more agonised now about how it all played out). “I remember in a meeting of the 1922 Committee Theresa May being reduced to tears by the brutality of some colleagues around that table. If you were a shrink, you’d say that’s when I really started thinking I’d had enough.” Some other complaints and observations. Boris was “chaos”, though he had “the Kryptonite of political stardust… and Truss was just a disaster. I mean, it really was, wasn’t it?” However, the media, with its obsession with gotchas, must also take some of the blame for the low quality of political debate: “The biggest decision any presenter of the Today programme has ever had to make is: what do I ask next?” He worries that parliament no longer attracts the brightest or the best. But so far as reform goes, he is resolute. Those who complain about outmoded practices “clearly don’t understand how the place works”. He likes nothing better than a vote in the division lobby, where anyone is free to nobble the secretary of state for this or that. How does he feel about the election, whenever it may be? Does he fear a rout? “I’ve always said that while governments come and go, parliament is a constant – and that’s fantastic. I really don’t know what’s going to happen, but I do know how democracies work, and that’s a cause for celebration, not regret.” * * * Caroline Lucas, Green It is utterly, utterly dysfunctional. I mean really, it’s loopy’
After 14 years as parliament’s only Green MP, what Caroline Lucas looks forward to most in the afterlife is head space. “It’s frankly outrageous, but only parties with three members or more have whips, so I don’t have one, which means I’m not party to the usual internal information processes. The only way I can find out what’s going on is by putting on the radio. It’s going to be good to get up in the morning, and go to bed at night, without all that noise and chatter, without wondering all the time what I’m going to need to respond to because I’m the only one here.” Lucas previously served as an MEP, and thanks to this, she has a lot to say about how badly the Commons needs to be modernised. “When I arrived, it was like the first day of school, except at school no one is actually setting traps for you. There are a huge number of rules here, but you will never find out what they are except by breaking them.” Parliament, she says, works against transparency and even simple understanding, rather than for it. “In the European parliament, you’re required to include an explanatory statement to any amendment, saying in 50 words what you’re seeking to achieve by it. Here, that’s not the case, so unless you’ve done a lot of work to understand exactly what the implications are, you don’t know how to vote on one. When I arrived, I thought it would be a good idea to introduce explanatory statements here – but the backlash! You would not believe the backlash from MPs and in particular from the whips, who’ve no interest at all in enabling people to know what they’re voting for, because that’s more likely to make them stroppy and possibly less likely to do what the whips want them to.” The whips, she says, dislike experts, and actively seek to appoint non-experts to bill committees (an MP who previously worked as a doctor, for instance, would not be thought suitable to scrutinise a health bill). And then there’s voting: “We waste hours and hours voting in the lobby, when it could be done electronically – which, in turn, means the speaker can put forward only a certain number of amendments. When I was in the European parliament, we could have six votes in a minute or so.” Lucas thinks she has been able to change things: “We’ve now had a parliament that has declared a climate emergency, which would have been surprising to me in 2010. I’ve been able to put green issues on the agenda.” But events such as prime minister’s questions she still finds highly toxic, something that perhaps works against a general improvement in behaviour in the Commons. “I’m not sure it has got worse, but it certainly hasn’t got any better either. In any other walk of life if people behaved as they do here, they’d be out on their ear.” There is, she says, a “good chaps theory of government”, which only works until a rogue prime minister comes along, at which point the system swiftly collapses (as it did, she feels, when Boris Johnson was prime minister). “It is utterly, utterly dysfunctional,” she says. “I mean, really, it’s loopy.” Tomorrow, for instance, she will have to leave a prayer card on a green bench before 8.30am – this being the only way to reserve a seat for the budget debate, and those without seats are not permitted to speak. She will then, having left this card, have to return for prayers at 11.30am (whether she wants to pray, or not). Lucas is ever poised – she could be on television at this very moment, for all that we’re sitting in a windowless business centre in the bowels of Richmond House (a building that may, or may not, be a contingency chamber for the crumbling Palace of Westminster). But beyond her professionalism, I do sense real anger and frustration. Is there any will for reform in the future? After almost a decade-and-a-half in this crazy place, she’s not sure that there is.