“My heart would sink a bit,” said Alex Gordon Shute, a headhunter of 23 years, when I asked her how she would feel if the 66 (and counting) Conservative MPs stepping down ahead of the general election all came looking for work at once. “They’re a very eclectic group of characters. It’s not a skill set that means all of them can reincarnate the same way.”
Gordon Shute, along with two academics, Prof Meg Russell and Jane Roberts, gave evidence two years ago to a little-noticed parliamentary committee, which resulted in Charles Walker’s report Smoothing the Cliff Edge: Supporting MPs at Their Point of Departure from Elected Office. On its own terms, the question of departing MPs is both pretty niche – we’re talking about a problem for 300 people, tops – and an occasion for tiny, tiny violins, yet there are details that speak volumes about the state of the Conservative party, that of the Commons more broadly and the relationship between civil society and its elected representatives.
Research last week highlighted the fact that, even with the loss of just those 66 Tory MPs – who are not thought to represent the full extent of all those who will leave voluntarily, and of course don’t include the ones who will be voted out – the Conservative party stands to lose nearly 1,000 years of parliamentary experience.
However, that doesn’t sound as seismic as it once would have. The battle for the Conservative party in opposition is already playing out in broad daylight, with Kemi Badenoch and Suella Braverman regularly flexing their hardline credentials for an ever-more-radical leadership, and characters like Penny Mordaunt, who by any objective standards wouldn’t look remotely moderate, standing in as the outlying voice of reason in a completely transformed political culture. It is extremely unlikely that characters such as Theresa May or Robert Halfon would have any restraining impact on the new look Tories, and it is inconsequential, therefore, that they decline to try.
However, there’s a perception of a revolving door for all MPs, where they just walk easily into well-paid jobs in corporations. But that really isn’t the case in the normal run of things, Roberts said, remarking drolly, “if you are chancellor of the exchequer, perhaps, but few make it to be chancellor of the exchequer – except for recently, of course.”
The absolutely alarming churn in the highest offices of state, created over the past five years by one chaos monkey prime minister after another, is just the most obvious element of a broader disintegration in the quality of politics: a lot of the “red wall” MPs were selected solely for the zealousness of their attachment to one project, getting Brexit done, which of itself – it seems churlish to harp on, but it’s a fact – signals a lack of analytical skills and ability to think ahead. There is no reason why they’d walk into jobs with businesses who are at the sharp end of a project that had “fuck business” as one of its core principles.
Only around a third of voluntarily departing Conservatives have been in parliament under a decade. The rest have hinterland in the party deeper than the recent experience of lurching from one constitutional (or other) crisis to another, and may expect more favour from the professional world post-Westminster – may even have pre-existing professions to go back to. Yet the academics remarked that, even going back as far as the expenses scandal, the departing class of 2005 experienced a lot of ambient hostility: MPs simply haven’t been held in very high esteem, for a very long time. Russell described a brief lull in negative perception, between 2010 and the Brexit years, but since then there’s been so much bitterness and nastiness in “the overall culture of politics” that there’s “something vaguely toxic” about having an ex-MP on your payroll.
What’s interesting is that MPs at all stages of their parliamentary careers are looking at life beyond them, unenticing and not at all revolving as it is, and choosing to leave anyway. Are they disillusioned with the Tory project? That would be fair, given that its current, lacklustre iteration is surely miles away from what anyone signed up for. Is the experience of a divided party more wearing from the inside than it is from the outside? Or are they just absolutely certain of defeat?
What’s hard to imagine now, whether an MP is defeated or leaves of their own accord, is a Michael Portillo, let alone a Gyles Brandreth, trajectory – where a character deeply unpopular in many quarters in their own right, or ambiently unpopular as part of an ultimately hollowed-out government (that’s Portillo and Brandreth respectively), still retains enough recognition that, in the end, they probably meant well as public servants, meaning that they can redeploy their communication skills on the telly as national treasures. This isn’t to say that departing Tories won’t find a berth on GB News; but the sense of a world post-politics where politicians can re-enter the mainstream, old enmities set aside, feels impossibly distant, almost mythical, a thing that could only happen in the olden days.
If you wanted to personalise this distrust of elected officials, you’d surely pin it on Boris Johnson, who made a brand out of untrustworthiness. Many of us would date it more generally to Brexit; the most fairminded would track it back to the expenses scandal; you could also argue that respect has seeped away from parliament as legislators have become less powerful, relatively, than markets (evidenced most starkly by the short tenure of Liz Truss). But it’s an open question whether, by what means and over what time period, respect for MPs can be restored.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
