Lots of Conservative MPs are leaving parliament at the next election. By choice, that is. It may be that many more will be invited to leave by the electorate but, possibly in a spirit of jumping before being pushed, about 40 have already announced their intention not even to seek re-election.
That’s on top of the ongoing attritional losses from groping, plus all those MPs who quit in sympathy with Boris Johnson: namely Johnson himself, whose sympathy for his own cause knows no bounds, Nigel Adams and Nadine Dorries. Though, at time of writing, Dorries still hasn’t actually resigned despite having resolved to do so “with immediate effect” on 9 June. She has spent a month in a state of imminent resignation and it remains to be seen whether she plans to push that into the next parliament.
So I suppose it is basically just Nigel Adams so far. Still, that’s not to be sniffed at. Quite the testament to a career of international statesmanship at the top level: when Johnson went, it will always be said, it sent shock waves through the western political establishment to the extent that Nigel Adams resigned. I’d like to see Sunak limping back into power without Nigel! There’s a huge Nigel Adams-shaped gap in his ranks. Former ministers of state without portfolio at the Cabinet Office like Adams don’t just grow on trees.
Adams and Johnson have already gone, Dorries will joining them in a twinkling of a tectonic plate but, most interestingly, dozens more intend to follow suit, venturing out into the real world before the next election. A lot of them aren’t particularly old. They’ve got significant sections of their working lives ahead of them. Why are they going?
It seems they’re sick of it all. Politics has felt as bleak, acrimonious, stressful and futile as it’s looked. Most of them have been there through the divisive Brexit referendum, Theresa May’s misjudged snap election, the failure to get Brexit done, Johnson’s jammy landslide, the slapdash sort-of-getting of Brexit done, then Covid, the secret parties, the fallout from the secret parties, Liz Truss’s calamitous blip, and now Sunak ploddingly ticking off the government’s priorities nought by nought. Plus, there are forthcoming boundary changes, shit polls and growing public contempt for any representatives of a political system that’s failing the country to a devastating extent.
It’s understandable that they want out of all that nastiness. But what does this mean for Britain? Are these people, who can’t stand it any more, the very representatives we want to keep? Decent folk with relatable human reactions? Are these a better, more ethical cohort than those remaining in parliament? Well, considering that Johnson, Dominic Raab, Matt Hancock and Chris Pincher make up 10% of them, you’d have to hope not. If such losses reduce the average level of decency of the serving MPs, we might as well nuke ourselves now.
And what do they want to do next? Get lots of “nonexecutive directorships” I expect. That’s a phrase I’ve heard. Maybe the occasional executive directorship too, so as to have access to the executive lounge. But what if there aren’t enough to go round, like operations on the NHS? The economy’s in terrible shape despite 13 years of government that was supposed to put business and growth before all other considerations. The other considerations have absolutely gone to the wall but without generating the hoped-for prosperity. It’s as if they’ve engendered the worst of all possible worlds. What went wrong? Brexit, basically. The one thing they believed in other than money. That’s what you get, guys, poor romantics that you are, if you prioritise xenophobia over profit.
So there may be a limit to how much free money is available to a bunch of middle-aged people with little or no business experience, whose key resource is the mobile numbers of a handful of opposition frontbenchers. If they’re not careful, they may be reduced to working as lobbyists for a consortium representing manufacturers of the world’s smallest violins.
But there’s always the media. Matt Hancock has shown the way: go on ITV and eat humble pie, the recipe for which turns out to involve cockroaches, camel penis, cow anus and sheep’s vagina. Then a book! Just hand your phone to the least trustworthy person in the world and tell her to bash out 3,000 words a day. It’s a great way of finding common ground with your wife and children because now you too know what it feels like to be betrayed.
When it comes to a TV career, they can’t all be Michael Portillos. And he spent quite a while sanitising his brand, sitting next to Diane Abbott while New Labour fizzled out. If even a handful of these departing Tories want to make as much television as Portillo, they’re going to need their own channel: UKTV Eurosceptic Documentaries.
But who is going to commission and pay for it? Advertising revenues are plummeting because of the UK’s terrible economic performance under the stewardship of this little group of jobseekers. Andrew Neil’s Channel 4 show has been either paused or axed as a result. He’s an experienced broadcaster: if he can’t get a gig, what hope is there for Sir Graham Brady?
There’s always the BBC. Its funding is less susceptible to the fluctuations of a wrecked economy. Still, it’s a somewhat battered institution having endured a succession of secretaries of state who showed few signs of believing it had the right to exist. If Nadine Dorries wanted a show on a channel that anyone actually watches, she should have got it in writing while she was still in the cabinet.
The corporation’s resources are limited too, having had to accept licence fee settlements that were solidly this side of the dreams of avarice even before mismanagement of the economy sent the spending power of sterling through the floor. Still, in TV, there’s always money for the right idea, and I may have it. We get all of them to squeeze into one of those boats they failed to stop arriving on the south coast and row their way to France where, thanks to their own political movement, they no longer have any right to live or work. That might win a Bafta.
