The stampede of Tory MPs has only just begun. Yesterday the 15th was Matt Hancock, just after Sajid Javid, with more expected to flee electoral Armageddon at the last minute. A crop of older Tory retirees have served their time, but there are also young quitters – the likes of Chloe Smith, William Wragg and Dehenna Davison. Another high flier flitting off is Rishi Sunak’s net zero tsar Chris Skidmore, 41, not concerned enough about the climate to seek a seat again.
This seems to be their message: who wants to be an MP if you can’t be in the cabinet? No one in their right mind wastes years on the losers’ benches. Politics is for winners, or get the hell out to make money and have fun. Of course there are Conservative MPs serious about getting things done. But too many treat the Commons as the next prize to win, the place to be, not a democratic vocation but just another career choice, like the bar or the City. George Osborne and David Cameron oozed that laconic sense of parliament as their winners’ birthright. Asked why he had wanted to be prime minister, Cameron drawled: “Because I thought I’d be good at it.” He wasn’t. He and Osborne are to blame for the shocking state we’re in, their austerity and their arrogant presumption they’d win a Brexit referendum.
Matt Hancock is a typical “being” not “doing” MP. Bumptious and unctuous, he’s off to find “new ways to communicate with people”. But what and why? His excruciatingly vacuous weeks in the jungle revealed he had nothing at all to say, not a thought or idea: being in the public eye itself was worth every bowl of animal anuses. “I have discovered a whole new world of possibilities which I am excited to explore – new ways for me to communicate with people of all ages and from all backgrounds.” Please, no.
Did he jump before he was pushed? His spokesman said last week he meant to stay; others said that, with the whip removed for deserting to the jungle, he was off anyway. The i newspaper revealed the president of his West Suffolk Conservative Association had written to the chief whip to say Hancock was “not fit” to represent them. Meanwhile his Pandemic Diaries are being picked apart by all those – care workers especially – he attempts to blame for excess deaths, crony contracts and zero preparation.
Javid, disappointed to be left out of Sunak’s cabinet, departs with similar unctuous dishonesty: “Being the local MP and serving in government has been the privilege of my life and I am immensely grateful for the opportunity to serve.” Yet he manages to drag himself away from serving the people of Bromsgrove when the hot prospect of jobs back in the finance world looks a lot more tempting than the chilly opposition benches.
Compare these Tories abandoning their sinking ship with some retiring after a lifetime of hard graft. Consider Harriet Harman, Margaret Hodge and Margaret Beckett, among many who will be missed. Harman, mother of the House, will have spent 29 years in opposition, and only 13 with her party in power. She wasted not a minute of it, running loud and successful campaigns for women from the opposition benches: her first speech was on childcare, to hoots of derision from Tories who thought it was nothing to do with politics. In opposition, Hodge was a remarkable chair of the public accounts committee, scourge of offshore tax cheats and global corporations shunting profits into Luxembourg.
To be an MP is not a career, a job or a performance art. It really is a vocation, and a very hard one. Voters can sack you, you may never win promotion however deserving you are, your group within your party may be out of favour, your party may be out of office in your prime years. Of 650 MPs, many will never get a sniff of a red box, yet they take brickbats for policies made by their leaders: rebellions are strictly rationed or chaos leads to defeat, as now. Instead of lofty matters of policy, in your constituency surgeries you try to sort local problems that used to be a councillor’s responsibility, back in the days when even Barbara Castle, heroine that she was, only deigned to visit Blackburn once in a blue moon. To survive all that, MPs need to be driven by a strong sense of purpose.
The young Tory deserters have had a surprising amount of sympathy from their own press, commiserating with the tough life of an MP, the hardship of family parked elsewhere, with no weekends, while the internet’s anonymous cowards knock seven bells out of them. True. Though they were all eager enough to make those sacrifices for glory when power was with their party. Now headhunters are plagued by scarpering Tory MPs expecting to glide effortlessly into boardrooms. They are getting dusty answers: used Tory MPs are not in great demand.
In a world where politicians are reviled as venal, I have always argued with cynics that politics is an honourable calling. Most who do it are committed and could earn far more outside. It’s a near universal peculiarity that democracies worship and go to war to defend the ideal of democracy but detest and despise its practitioners: see graffiti from ancient Greece and Rome.
But making the case for the essential good intent of most MPs has been harder in this Tory epoch, because of Boris Johnson and because of his ejection of the reasonables, the likes of David Gauke and Dominic Grieve, even expelling Ken Clarke and Michael Heseltine. The current cadre of Tories emits very little sense of mission, except for the ultra-Brexiteers. Labour has had its chancers, but the sign of its MPs’ good faith has been their willingness to fight on in bitter years of opposition, as well as in the few sunlit years in power. Serious politicians stay, rebuild their party and do the opposition work of challenging government. Expect many more Tory skedaddlers, guilty men and women escaping the scene of destitution and destruction caused by them: this ratting of the Tories shows what rotten mettle they’re made of.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
