PAULA SHERRIFF ON HER LIFE AFTER RED WALL CRUMBLED
As the ‘red wall’ crumbled, Paula Sherriff was one of the Labour MPs in Yorkshire to lose her seat in the General Election. She spoke to Rob Parsons.
PAULA SHERRIFF grabbed onto a friend’s hand as the seconds ticked down to 10pm on December 12 and the nation’s main broadcasters prepared to announce the General Election exit poll.
Defending a majority of just 3,321 from two years earlier in her constituency of Dewsbury, the Labour MP was determined to fight to the end despite disheartening moments on the doorstep when ex-coal miners in her Labour heartlands told her they were backing her Conservative opponent.
On rainy November days like those she was convinced she’d lost, while on other days when she spoke to previously Tory voters who agreed to support her the flame of hope briefly flickered despite worrying signs from national polls.
“I didn’t have a day off in the entire six- or seven-week campaign, I didn’t even take half a day off,” she tells The Yorkshire Post. “I was out there with my activists morning, noon and night. We were out in the dark, in pouring rain. I couldn’t have done any more.”
All hope was extinguished when the exit poll dropped and showed the Conservatives to be heading for a healthy majority.
“When it came through I swore,” she says. “I knew then that I had lost.
“The exit poll was slightly worse than the actual outcome, but I knew then that we couldn’t retain Dewsbury. It was about national swing, unfortunately. Everybody in the room was saying ‘you’ll be fine’. They said Dewsbury will buck the trend. I said ‘we’ve lost, we need to accept it’.”
All that was left to do at that point was turn up at Cathedral House in Huddersfield to have her fate confirmed. In the early hours of the morning, it was duly announced that Conservative
Mark Eastwood had won with a slender majority of 1,561 votes.
”It was heartbreaking,” Miss Sherriff says. “The worst part for me was not getting to the stage to hear the result which was tough, but it was just before they actually declare the result publicly and you are called over to look at the results from the returning officer.
“It is just written on a piece of paper, and all the candidates and agents are called up to look, that for me was probably the hardest
moment. Actually seeing it written down in black and white, I think that’s really, really tough.”
Reflecting on the loss of a seat she has held since 2015, Miss Sherriff says: “I’m disappointed for Dewsbury and I’m disappointed for all the charities I work with and things like that.
“Of course I wish Mark (Eastwood) well, I hope he’s an independent voice and he isn’t just at the behest of his party.
“Politics is absolutely brutal, you can’t compare it to anything.
Other jobs are harder and people get paid far less for doing far worse jobs, but it is the actual nature of politics and the way you get an email within a couple of hours of losing saying come and clear your office out, you’ve got five days.”
Miss Sherriff leaves Parliament with a notable list of accomplishments to her name from her four years as an MP.
Not long after being elected in 2015, she secured an agreement from WH Smith to reduce the
price of their goods in hospitals, to aid vulnerable patients and their families.
And she became the first backbench MP in history to have an amendment to a government Budget resolution successfully adopted when her motion to abolish the so-called ‘Tampon Tax’ – the five per cent sales tax applied to sanitary products – was passed.
She says the tax itself was less important than “having a Parliament where we could talk
about things that matter to real people”.
“Of course it’s important that we talk about the economy, we talk about infrastructure, we talk fiscal issues and things like that, but equally it’s really important that Parliament needs to get into the 21st century”, she said.
Miss Sherriff talks of her pride at having gone into bat for a young boy in her constituency who was struggling to get help for his additional needs.
She has also worked on increasing the number of women who get smear tests, helped secure extra funding for the debilitating condition of endometriosis and campaigned for greater workplace protections for women during the menopause.
”The women’s health stuff is something I’m incredibly proud of,” she says. “I genuinely don’t want to sound pious, but to be honest, I probably gave it too much, I sacrificed a lot in my personal life to be a good MP, it was my life and that’s why I feel such a crater-sized hole right now, because part of the thinks I should still be down there championing stuff round here.”
Politics is absolutely brutal, you can’t compare it to anything. You get an email within a couple of hours of losing saying ‘come and clear your office out, you’ve got five days’.
Paula Sherriff, former MP for Dewsbury