On the evening of 7 May 2015, Vince Cable watched coverage of the general election at home. For more than two decades, he had been a Liberal Democrat MP for Twickenham; since 2010, a member of the cabinet, too. In the coalition government he was a long-serving business secretary, president of the board of trade and a privy councillor. Cable ran a constituency office, one in parliament and a major Whitehall department. He was responsible for thousands of staffers, plus a whole host of junior ministers.
Then, quite suddenly, he was not.
By the early hours of 8 May each of these roles and responsibilities had been swiftly removed from the former right honourable member. The general election results deftly demolished the coalition, leaving sweeping losses for the Liberal Democrats in their wake. Cable’s 12,000-majority seat was won by a Conservative party challenger.
The cut and thrust of the democratic process does little to ease this experience for those who hold top-tier public office. In a matter of moments, one can go from wielding the highest levels of political power and influence to almost none. Just a few fateful weeks ago, Liz Truss’s decade-long rise through ministerial ranks culminated in her becoming prime minister. Now, after 45 days, it’s all over. Cable may well know how she feels. His long career also came to an abrupt and unwelcome end. “That night was incredibly difficult on a personal and political level,” Cable says now, firmly retired from frontline politics. “We’d assumed the Lib Dems would do badly, but Twickenham was thought to be one of those that we would hold on to.”
Anyone who leaves a job – whether on their own terms or otherwise – may find themselves in a similar situation. For many, work doesn’t just dictate how we spend our time, it’s a defining feature of our personalities; a core facet of our identity. This is certainly true for those at the top of institutions or organisations where their names are so closely connected with their place of work. So, when titles we have held are suddenly stripped away and consigned to the past, it can feel a little disorienting; exposing, even. How do we begin to navigate that?
According to the psychologist Linda Papadopoulos, whether grappling with retirement, redundancy or resignation, it can be a struggle to adapt. “These changes are tough for humans,” Papadopoulos says, “especially when we’re in jobs where it’s bound up with our identity, and those on a treadmill of positions of power. There’s a shift in how we see ourselves, but how others see us as well.”
Moving on from such a public defeat, Cable adds, wasn’t easy: “It was tough walking through Twickenham to have people commiserate you. It was a constant reminder of my loss.”
Seeing so many of his fellow Liberal Democrat peers find similar fates was reassuring, though. “What made things easier is we all went down with the ship,” he says. “Had we been 56 Lib Dem MPs and only three had lost? I’d have felt it personally. But we were nearly all defeated – those few who survived were in fairly unique situations.”
Finding comfort in these comparisons, Papadopoulos suggests, is human nature. “Basic evolutionary psychology tells us we are status-driven creatures,” she says, “programmed to check out how happy we are in relation to others. It’s why it’s so difficult sometimes to feel good about yourself without looking to see if we’re running faster or jumping higher than someone else.”
For Jennie Formby, Labour’s general secretary for two years under Jeremy Corbyn, focusing on the challenges of the job after her departure was vital. In April 2020, when Keir Starmer won the Labour leadership election, Formby found herself on a call with the new leader of the opposition. “I congratulated him on his mandate, and explained we’d been preparing for the handover,” she recalls. “Immediately, he told me he wanted me to announce I was stepping down.”
“Of course it was a privilege,” she says, “but it’s not a great job. It’s tough. There are so many elements, competing interests and responsibilities. I’d been working every evening. Every weekend. Every holiday. Something was always happening. In 2018, I was on holiday in Turkey, and there was only one place in the villa that got a phone signal. I spent hours standing in that spot. I was ready to move on.”
For those more attached to their positions, however, this approach might offer little consolation. While Lord John Browne’s resignation as chief executive of BP in 2007 – after 12 years in the job and more than four decades with the company – was voluntary, it came after a messy legal battle that saw him ultimately outed in a kiss’n’tell story running in a Sunday tabloid. In the aftermath, he attempted to detach himself from his previous professional life entirely. “I suddenly had a clean sheet of paper,” Browne says. “I thought to myself: you have to look forward not backwards, as my late mother – a survivor of Auschwitz – always told me. So I did. I built a new career and a completely new life, nothing in common with that which came before. That certainly helped.”
Of course, the media continued to report on his case. “I was strongly advised by a journalist friend of mine not to read a single article in the papers about BP or myself for an entire year,” Browne recalls. “This friend kept them all for me, and said if I was still interested a year later I could have them. That was great advice. I quite literally started again, which was refreshing.”
Adjusting to a life without the trappings of the top job, Browne says, was trickier. “When you’re CEO of a big company there are all sorts of people looking after you and doing things for you,” he says. From reservations to research, every need catered for. “Then you’re all alone. I had no secretary, no staff, no support. I had to build that all up for myself.”
Emma Reed Turrell is a psychotherapist, author and podcaster. How we respond to these endings, she suggests, often depends on how prepared we are for that event coming round. “Humans aren’t good with things we didn’t see coming. If we expect something to end,” she says, “our nervous system can prepare for it in advance. Either way, we have a set of reactions and we’ll grieve: there’s still a transition cycle of shock, resistance, sadness then finding new meaning. But being ready for such a change means we likely won’t face the trauma of an unexpected loss.”
This is precisely how Alexandra Shulman explains her departure from British Vogue, where until 2017 she had been editor-in-chief for 25 years. “I decided to leave Vogue of my own volition,” Shulman says, “which meant the process wasn’t painful but exciting. And I didn’t leave feeling I had unfinished business, having been there for such a long time.”
Still, that’s not to say leaving such a career-defining, high-profile gig was straightforward. For decades, Shulman had been synonymous with the magazine she edited. “When you leave a job that’s more than a job but a role,” she says, “you have to be sure it’s the right decision.” As soon as you leave, Shulman says, all that comes with it disappears. “Anyone who thinks it’ll stick to you is wrong,” she says. You realise the invitations, access and status don’t come with you. “It really is: ‘The king is dead, long live the king.’ People are often shocked by the suddenness with which that happens.”
“It’s odd for your caption to always be ‘former’ something,” Shulman adds, “rather than a present or actual something. It amuses me, but one could find it annoying. I’ve accepted that’s what people will think of me as.”
And then comes the challenge of your replacement defining their new leadership, which often means contrasting it in opposition to what came before. “You don’t realise how quickly people are going to want to reposition what they’re doing as the important thing, rather than what you did,” Shulman suggests. There were reports of a rift between Shulman and her successor, Edward Enninful; in a 2020 interview, Shulman said she was made ‘persona non grata’… “And that’s tough,” Shulman says. “Obviously, you think you’ve done a good job. You have to be prepared to be thick-skinned.”
Formby describes a deep sense of frustration with the Labour party’s new leadership (“there’s a lack of honesty now at the top of the party, a selling out”); Cable laments the dismantling of his legacy – the sale of the Green Investment Bank; the scrapping of his industrial strategy – with similar anguish. “After the defeat I had coffee with Sajid Javid who was at the time, briefly, business secretary,” says Cable. “Javid told me that [the industrial strategy] had my name and my party’s name all over it, so the Tories wanted to bury it. Cynical, yes, but that’s how they were. It was difficult to see legacy issues being trashed.”
Ultimately, it’s pragmatism that prevails for most; accepting that change is inevitable. “Humans come unstuck when we don’t change,” says Reed Turrell. “We are meant to move and evolve. Society has created a negative connotation that something ending is a loss and a bad thing, but there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be the beginning of a new chapter instead.”
Sometimes, that’s not limited to the person stepping down. After 14 years at the helm of Greenpeace UK as executive director, John Sauven saw his resignation as a positive step forward and a necessity – for his future and that of Greenpeace.
“It’s a privilege to run an organisation like Greenpeace,” he says, “with access to those people and resources. When you step aside you lose that ability for impact. But there are also a new range of experiences open to you, whether advising your successors or starting things afresh.”
When weighing up his future, this lifelong Arsenal fan looked to Arsène Wenger for guidance. “He did a great job, of course, as manager,” Sauven says, “but really I think a lot about how he should have left a few years earlier on a high, rather than being forced out, and having fans chanting in the stands for him to leave. It’s all about timing. Staying around until you’re pushed out, or the organisation goes into decline, is never a good idea.”
At his leaving party, Sauven reflected on his years in the NGO top job. “I gave a speech at the end,” says Sauven. “I said I was leaving Greenpeace and my wife was, too. It was tongue in cheek, but you’re married to the job. There were three of us, really in our marriage. When you run any sort of organisation, it can become all-consuming. Going from full throttle on the accelerator to being still – as you do the day you leave – was a major change. You take a breath, and step back to look around in a way you don’t otherwise have the time to.”
In 2017, Cable returned to Westminster as Twickenham’s MP – and soon became his party’s leader. In 2019, he stood down from both positions of his own accord. Perhaps Boris Johnson had this in mind when he considered a rapid return to Downing Street last weekend.
“Retirement can be a deadening experience,” Cable says. Trying to have a positive mindset from the outset at the end of his career was essential in offering him direction and solace in the days after that transformative defeat, Cable says. “We went off to my wife’s farm in the New Forest, and plotted a nice holiday in Corsica, and the things we’d do next. You can’t just sit around and be an old man waiting to pass on into the next world.” Years on – and a world away – from that night in May 2015, he’s sure that “having a forward project” kept him going. What did that look like for Cable? He got to work writing a political thriller and “started dancing lessons”. We’ve all got to start again somewhere.
