Spare a thought for ex-mps
Never mind endangered species and people in need. Show some sympathy for the has-beens of Westminster, says Austin Mitchell
There’s nothing so ex as an ex-mp. TV abounds with moving appeals for help for mountain leopards, elephants and distressed gentlefolk, but there’s a total lack of charity for those who once twinkled briefly, and occasionally brightly, in Britain’s political firmament. Please spare a thought for us former MPS.
EX-MPS are not in danger of becoming an extinct species, though a few uncharitable souls might like that. In fact, Nick de Bois has just written a jolly account of his brief career as Tory MP for Enfield North from 2010 to 2015: Confessions of a Recovering MP.
Nor is it that the once-great exes are living in poverty or inconveniencing cleaning departments by begging in public places. It’s rather that the poor dears have nothing to do to keep them off the streets.
This represents an enormous waste of public money. Think of the cost of training 650 aggressive extroverts to be halfdecent MPS. Millions were spent on providing accommodation in London, millions more in sending us round the world in a remorseless search for useless facts, and more again on carting us up and down Britain to tell constituents what they don’t want to hear.
Add in more to pay advisers to help us do our job, search out facts for us to distort, or accommodate us in plush offices in Westminster. You’ve paid this huge bill, and all just to turf the beneficiaries out into the streets, unemployable, unloved and unwanted, into the care of a community that doesn’t care. There must be something useful for them to do to justify the huge costs?
The Americans let legislators take their titles to the grave with them. Once a senator or a governor, always a ditto. But British MPS – even Right Honourables, who’ve rarely been right and only occasionally honourable – fall from the political firmament to nowt.
One minute, we’re demi-stars, pursued for our opinions by local radio stations and the Ormesby Gazette, hectored by Andrew Neil, or telling awed constituents what wonderful things lie ahead if only they vote right, or how many jobs we’ve created in supermarket shelf-stacking, and how many questions we’ve asked the prime minister. The next we’re buried, staff redundant, office wanted for someone else. The only reward for years of devotion is an entry in the roll call of parliamentary history no one ever reads.
You’re even appalled at the price of everything, now you actually have to pay for it and buy your own duck house.
You’re nobody. You’re constantly asked what you used to do for a living, and occasionally greeted by people with Zimmer frames asking, ‘Didn’t you used to be…?’, before tailing off, wondering who it was you exactly were.
There’s an ex-mps’ periodical for comfort, but it’s full of obituaries of people you didn’t like and improbable tales you know not to be true. You’re allowed back into the Palace of Westminster, but only when no one’s using it. The occasional reunions of old girls and codgers are embarrassing – old hatreds linger. (The deputy-governor of Wandsworth Prison told me one of his two Labour prisoners refused to share a cell with the other, because he was a ‘left-wing bastard’.)
Worst of all, you can watch the news and see what a mess they’re making of things since you left. Ex-labour MPS realise they’d have been in the Shadow Cabinet for at least a couple of weeks, had they stayed – because of the mass defection from Corbyn’s team in 2016. Ex-tories must feel they could have done it better than Theresa. Sadly, no one’s interested. They weren’t before. Why should they be now? Organisations that once clamoured for you to open their fêtes (some worse than death) or speak to their dead-chicken dinners, don’t want to know you now.
The Washington Speakers Bureau seems to have lost your address. Big names get to speak on cruises, but no one seems interested in your struggle to get the Netherthorpe bypass through. There may be an invitation from a Mothers’ Union to speak on the ‘Funny Side of Parliament’ (no politics, please) for £20 (no travel expenses).
Once your every word was printed in great green volumes. Now no one’s interested in anything you say, and the volumes’ sole resale value is as room décor.
It’s even more infuriating seeing others make a success of the afterlife, as Ed Balls and Ann Widdecombe have done on Strictly Come Dancing and Celebrity Big Brother. No doubt there would be several parliamentary recruits if they were asked to do Celebrity Love Island. After all, Edwina Currie did Strictly and I’m a Celebrity.
But there’s no Strictly Come Politics. If there were, a production company would run it as a pillory, with an audience liberally supplied with tomatoes.
It’s a grim prospect. The sole consolation is that it would be worse to have stayed on as a member of a failed and reviled political class: suspected of being corrupt, in a deadlocked Parliament, grappling with impossible problems and wasting what remains of your life in endless committee meetings which achieve nothing, hanging around for votes which decide nothing, and explaining to unhappy constituents that you’re doing your best, even if you’re not quite sure what it is.
Still, you’ve rejigged the world to penalise the young and benefit oldies. So lie back and enjoy it.