The Conservative party is haemorrhaging MPs. Seventy-eight of my former colleagues will be standing down this year, after Rishi Sunak’s summer election. And who can blame them? I am tempted to say my own decision to leave parliament in 2019 was because of Boris Johnson and his approach to Brexit, and because of just how rough and humiliating X and Facebook can be. But these problems were instead symptoms of a system that made me feel like a fraud almost all the time.
As a British minister, for instance, I had to be at least three different things, in three places, at one time. I was an MP serving constituents in the Cumbrian-Scottish border; I was also paid to be a parliamentarian, voting 350 miles south in Westminster; and also a minister, often abroad, moving through five different positions in four years. How do you balance your obligation to visit a health project in Nigeria against being present in parliament to vote on assisted dying – when on the same day there is an event for a hospice in your constituency? When there is no time for such important things, how much time should you spend with your children?
