I was minding my own business in a little shop on Saturday when my heart jumped out of my mouth and my soul exited through my ears: someone’s ringtone was the same music as my old “wake-up” alarm.
When I worked in Downing Street, that same noise went off every morning at 5.15am, brisk, cheerful and soul destroying. The moment I heard that awful sound, I glimpsed the ghost of government past, right there next to the fudge and fridge magnets.
Lots of industries are stressful. Politics is horribly ageing, and I say this from personal experience; there are pictures of me at family gatherings where I look like a skull with a layer of tissue paper on top.
It’s like a never-ending Ironman triathlon, interspersed with the occasional Olympic 100m sprint, while carrying an elephant on your shoulders and reciting prime numbers at the same time as Shakespeare. Throughout, tennis ball machines catapult human excrement at you. That’s an average morning in Westminster.
This isn’t meant to evoke pity, but it does perhaps go some way to explain those pictures of Barack Obama when he took office in 2008 compared to when he left in 2016. Two terms in charge is much closer to a “dog years” equivalent – one year of living through the stuff takes about eight off you physically.
I worked in Theresa May’s Downing Street from July 2017 to July 2019, and she had been PM for roughly a year before that. I’m not sure anyone would describe those three years as short. When she gave her resignation speech outside the famous black front door, she looked exhausted.
However, just three years later, in 2022, she was casting her vote on Boris Johnson’s leadership in a ballgown. These days, she is to be found in the House of Lords, Chatham House and Yale, and we can only speculate what moisturiser she uses. Whatever it is, it’s working for her.
It does things to a person’s body and spirit, that level of pressure. There’s the serious lack of sleep, partly from worry and workload, partly because your phone can’t be on silent in case the worst happens. There are the sporadic mealtimes and snatched caffeine. There are the periods of gloom and lethargy where unsolvable once-in-a-generation problems with terrible ethical implications knot themselves before you.
And, as I suspect the current prime minister is finding, there’s the awful dread that people are plotting to bring you down, forcing your body into an unbearable and constant fight-or-flight state. I had a period where I dreamed every night that Chris (now Lord) Grayling – a man I might have met twice in my life – was hunting me from the skies, Hunger Games style. Like I say, it does things to you.
This weekend, through our changeable weather, I’ve managed to get both sun and windburn. Still, my healthy glow is at the feeble end of the dimmer switch compared to a former Conservative MP who was holidaying in the same town as me. This, in part, is down to the new seaside trend of saunas and cold water swimming, which this former minister did with my husband on Saturday evening. Storm Dave was raging as I wondered how, keeping in mind the potential heart attack risk associated with extreme temperature change, the politician’s obituary might run: his glittering ministerial career, his impressive CV before entering parliament, details of his wonderful wife, and then the euphemistic yet truthful “found dead in a remote sauna with a younger male friend”.
I can’t tell you how well this guy looked. And I never considered him as one of the unhealthy or stressed ones when he was in government. He left parliament after the 2024 general election, so we are coming up to two years since he became a civilian again, and he’s basically Benjamin Button-ed. And he hasn’t retired. Unlike many former Tory MPs who have struggled to find work, he now has a very demanding job at a multinational company. That’s what a stint in government does to you. A massive job in the private sector feels comparatively soft.
Politicians get called lots of things, most of them unprintable. Former politicians are something else, though, best described as livers or lungs, the organs that can be abused by cigarettes or alcohol for years and yet have these amazing regenerative qualities – provided a major course of action is taken in time. Otherwise, they will eventually wither and blacken. Some MPs and ministers will be planning their next careers now. Some will find it comes as a great surprise, as big a shock as a balmy sauna to a freezing cold plunge. But how very invigorating and restorative. Plus, you attract compliments from younger male friends like you would not believe.
Cleo Watson is a former deputy chief of staff to Boris Johnson and co-hosts The Independent’s politics podcast, ‘In The Room’, with ex-deputy cabinet secretary Helen MacNamara. New episodes come out every Friday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube
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