The former Conservative minister Rory Stewart has said some fellow MPs came very close to killing themselves when he was in the Commons, and the life of a politician placed an “almost unsustainable” strain on people.
Stewart, who was international development secretary and stood to be Tory leader before leaving the Commons in 2019, said other former colleagues experienced “total breakdowns in public”.
Speaking to GB News before the publication of a new memoir, Stewart discussed the mental health toll on MPs. He said: “I don’t want to talk about the specifics because this is deeply personal to people but, yes, colleagues tried to kill themselves.
“These are people I knew. And in very serious ways – I mean they almost killed themselves. It’s a miracle they aren’t dead. There were other colleagues who had total breakdowns in the most humiliating, personal, embarrassing fashion possible, in public.”
Stewart said the nature of a politician’s job often had an impact on their mental health. He said: “I think it is because the gap between the way that MPs are encouraged to present themselves to the public and who they really are is almost unsustainable.
“It’s mad, because you’re pretending to be all-knowing, perfect, dynamic, confident. You are pretending that you’ve got the answers to everything, and that I know where we’re going. The truth is, this is a country of 70 million people, and politicians don’t really know what’s going on. And yet we pretend to the public that we do.”
Stewart said that as his nine-year career in the Commons went on, he “ended up despising myself” for trying to advance his career.
He said: “I would find myself sort of creepily trying to sit next to David Cameron at lunch, and I’d send these texts saying, you know, ‘congratulations on your latest policy’ that I didn’t really believe in.
“And so I began to feel that I was being made, in my early 40s, into some kind of child. I’d been the acting governor of an Iraqi province responsible for 3 million people, and a Harvard professor, and I’d run a charity in Afghanistan. I thought that I was a reasonably substantial person. And I realised that, as soon as I became an MP, all that was wiped out. Nobody takes you seriously any more.”
In a separate announcement, the health department has set out a new national suicide prevention strategy to reduce England’s suicide rate over the next two and a half years.
It sets out more than 100 measures, including an alert system to inform organisations such as schools, universities and charities of changes to suicide methods or new risks, and improved surveillance of changing trends in suicides.
The department said wider changes to NHS mental health provision would give better access for schoolchildren to dedicated mental health support teams, with at least half having this by the end of March 2025.
Steve Barclay, the health secretary, said “It’s imperative we support people earlier to prevent them reaching the lowest point, while tackling emerging methods of suicide, and eradicating harmful material online. We’re working at pace to achieve this, and we continue to invest billions of pounds to transform and improve our nation’s mental health services, and – most importantly – save lives.”
• In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. The youth suicide charity Papyrus can be contacted on 0800 068 4141 or email pat@papyrus-uk.org. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
