An MP’s office is a busy place at the best of times. As soon as Olivia was elected in the early hours of Friday 13 December, people began reaching out to her. Forty-eight hours later, as she made her first trip from Sheffield down to Westminster as a new MP, her inbox and parliamentary postbags were already filling up. Strip away all the traffic generated by parliamentary business in Westminster and what remains is the precious correspondence from an MP’s constituents. Since the election we’ve received well over 5,000 contacts by email, phone and post. Each separate issue raised by a constituent – which can be several letters or emails – is organised as a case. By the end of March, we had opened 1,147 cases, or 328 a month. During April, this case rate tripled. We opened 1,117 new cases as the Covid-19 crisis took hold. People got in touch about food support, the furlough scheme, small business loans, PPE, testing, and for help to get stranded loved ones home from overseas. Through May, things had settled down a little. That was until the Dominic Cummings story. Late on Saturday evening, emails with subject lines “Dominic Cummings”, “Johnson and Cummings” and “Outraged” began appearing faster than we could clear them. By Monday our inbox was overwhelmed, and we’d received so many emails with the subject line “Dominic Cummings” that the parliamentary spam filter had incorrectly started to classify them as spam. An MP can only represent his or her own constituents, so we are set up to match names and addresses against the electoral roll – these are real people. My previous life was as a data scientist, and the urge to quantify what we were seeing was instinctive. Graphing the average (three-hourly) case load, the intensity is drastic. In the past few days we have regularly experienced rates well above 10 times the baseline, and that in already busy times.
The first spike corresponds to the immediate hours following Johnson’s press conference on the evening of 24 May. The following day, on Monday 25, this built again and culminated in a second spike through the immediate build-up and aftermath of Cummings’ rose garden address. Things have showed little signs of abating in subsequent days, either. Graphing cumulative case loads, the impact appears equally drastic. Without the Cummings story, we were on track for around 450 cases in May. In just five days, a single issue in itself will have not far off doubled our case load for the entire month. That is, of course, not to mention the strength of feeling. So many people had their own stories of suffering. Many started by saying it was the first time they had written to their MP. Every single email was written personally. For all Boris Johnson’s insistence that Cummings had relied on his “instinct” as a father, so many instinctively felt what he had done was wrong. In fact, just three people came out in support.
Counting the cases gives a real sense of the scale of people’s feeling. The content, of course, must be read carefully and acted upon by an MP and their team. When things settle and time permits, data scientists may well measure the sentiment contained within the unstructured text data itself – analysing the frequency of words such as “disgusted” and “outraged”. I’m certain they’ll find it’s off the charts. • The final graph in this article was amended on 1 June 2020 to correct an error in the labelling.