Being sacked is one of life’s great traumas, up there with divorce, bereavement and repossession. Being sacked on national television, by 75,000 voters, in front of your opponent’s cheering supporters, and having to pretend that you don’t care is surely, therefore, the worst form of purgatory. No wonder Labour MPs have been furiously calculating whether getting rid of Gordon Brown and replacing him with another leader would hasten or delay their political demise.
Here is Rod Richards, a Tory MP who lost his seat in the landslide of 1997: “It was ghastly, absolutely ghastly. I was standing there doing the usual gracious stuff but my guts were churning, because I had two kids in private school, a home in North Wales and a home in Richmond, and you just do this mental arithmetic while you’re trying to congratulate the chap who’s won. It was one of the worst experiences I’ve ever had in terms of stress and I’ve been an officer in the Royal Marines!”
If you’re a Labour MP with a majority of less than 10,000, look away now. Or, on reflection, don’t - because reading this may turn out to be as salutary as it is painful. The latest polls show that Labour would lose 156 seats if an election were held tomorrow. That’s 156 people on the job market, with similar qualifications, looking for similar jobs, in the depths of a recession, at a time when Labour will be seen as deeply unfashionable and Labour contacts will be close to worthless. Headhunters are already saying that MPs have been too discredited by the expenses scandal to be able to win decent jobs in the private sector.
There is nothing so ex as an ex-MP. One former Conservative minister remembers: “People I had dealt with as a minister never returned my calls. I became a non-person.”
Sue Doughty, the Liberal Democrat MP for Guildford who lost in 2005, was ordered to report for a suitability-to-work interview by the benefit office that she had opened only the year before. Stephen Day, the former MP for Cheadle, had to sign on the dole so that his insurance company would pay his mortgage. “That was an experience in itself. It felt extremely strange. One minute I’d been an MP and the next, people are talking about you...”
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He had been a sales executive before entering politics, but found it impossible to get another job. “All the technology had changed and all my contacts had moved on. Suddenly you find that nobody wants you. Losing my seat left a great hole in my life. I probably did drink a lot at first.” He is now trying to start a new life in Northern Cyprus.
John Taylor, the former Tory minister, speaks for many of his old colleagues when he says: “I made a great mistake in that I’d reached a point where there was no difference in identity between me and the MP for Solihull. So when that MP for Solihull died, there wasn’t much of me left.”
His use of the word “died” may have been inadvertent, but it can’t have been accidental. Many ex-MPs compare losing their seats to bereavement. A survey of former MPs by academics at the University of Leeds found that 40 per cent felt upset, 29 per cent shocked, 23 per cent emotional and 22 per cent angry.
A few, though, feel a sense of relief. Gyles Brandreth, who lost his Chester seat in 1997, had his defeat mitigated by his wife’s delight that he was finally out of politics. “She hated it. She was so keen for me to lose my seat that I had to persuade her not to put our constituency house up for sale during the campaign. The day I lost, we drove out of the constituency, stopped for a wonderful lunch and she sat there, saying, ‘Cry freedom!’” Whenever, after that, he expressed regret at being outside politics, his wife would remind him: “The people have spoken. Listen to the people!”
Dudley Fishburn, ex-MP for Kensington and Chelsea, chose to leave Parliament and has led a seamlessly successful life in business ever since. But he had a lot of business experience before entering politics and spent only ten years in the House. Too many MPs these days know nothing but politics. As Fishburn puts it: “The pressure is to be the ever-more professional politician and if you’re a professional politician, the moment you leave office, you don’t have a profession.”
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Former MPs who were lawyers seem to find the transition easiest. They can just go back to the Bar. Gyles Brandreth has gone back to being Gyles Brandreth: writer, wit, broadcaster, after-dinner speaker. But, as he points out: “MPs who are good at being MPs aren’t necessarily good at being anything else. They are good at absorbing what people say to them and good at drawing raffles, but it’s not a job that equips you for anything. They have no skill set, they’re the wrong age and they’re by definition unfashionable. They’re the unwanted people.”
It doesn’t have to be disastrous. Half the MPs in the Leeds survey found a job of sorts within three months - though that was at a time when the economy was booming. A couple of years on, 40 per cent said that they were worse off financially, 20 per cent “about the same” and 36 per cent better off. Of course, there is also a fairly generous pension awaiting an MP when he or she retires. The average MP sits in Parliament for 13 years, so he or she gets a pension worth one third of final salary - just over £20,000. MPs who step down or lose their seat also receive a “resettlement” grant from six months to up to a year’s salary for those with 15 or more years of service and aged between 55 and 64.
The biggest mistake, it seems, is to hanker after political involvement after you have been booted out of Parliament. One ex-MP told the survey: “There remains a view among sitting MPs that those who have left are non-persons. It is a sort of British equivalent of when they took down Stalin’s picture in the Soviet Union.” Another one added: “Politics is harsh. When you are done, you are done. That is it - over and out.”
Best, perhaps, to follow Brandreth’s example. “When people ask, ‘What do you do?’, to say you’re an ex-MP just advertises your failure. So I started to say, ‘I’m a dentist.’ I loved watching their reaction.”
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Rod Richards
For the former Wales minister, losing his parliamentary seat led to divorce, bankruptcy and alcoholism, plus a couple of brushes with the law.
Before Richards entered politics, he had been a BBC newsreader and in military intelligence. Neither were jobs to which he could return. “So I fished around for some work and being an ex-Tory MP and an ex-Tory minister was about as popular as a rat on a communion plate. There wasn’t a door that I pushed that would open.”
He remembers a sole meeting for defeated MPs at Conservative Central Office. “Peter Butler said to me, ‘You know what the trouble with the Conservative Party is? General William Hague leaves his wounded on the battlefield to fend for themselves’.” Richards wanted to get back into the House of Commons, but the next best thing was to become a member of the newly established Welsh Assembly, where he was elected leader of the Conservative group.
He had already had a drink problem when he lost his seat in 1997. “I got my act together and stopped for about two years. Then things started to fall apart in the assembly and the drink started to move in again.”
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Richards was accused of grievous bodily harm, breaking a woman’s arm. The case came to court and he was acquitted, but he still had to stand down as leader. Then his wife left him and sued for divorce.
Meanwhile, his debts became overwhelming - he had owned a pub whose tenants did a “midnight flit” and left owing him tens of thousands of pounds, which then Whitbread tried to reclaim from him.
Knowing that he was about to be declared bankrupt, he resigned from the assembly in 2002. Since then, he says: “I don’t have enough to do. Financially, it’s hard going. I can’t even get a penny overdraft, let alone credit.”
Now 62, he lives on a meagre pension, supplemented by the odd newspaper or broadcast fee.
Last year, he was taken into custody again for common assault, when he “clipped” a Conservative canvasser, but was let off with a caution.
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How does he feel now about politics? Rueful and nostalgic still: “I loved the House of Commons - I had found my niche in life. I was going to stay there till I died.”
Angela Knight
Turn on the Today programme these days and the voice that you’re most likely to hear, after Robert Peston, is Angela Knight, chief executive of the British Bankers’ Association (BBA). A feisty female ex-Tory MP, in the Margaret Thatcher/Edwina Currie mould, she talks in a brush-yourself-down-and-get-on-with-it way.
Knight, who was Economic Secretary to the Treasury, had a pretty good idea that she was going to lose her marginal seat in 1997. “I felt really sorry but it wasn’t some great bolt from the blue.” She started job hunting the next week, knowing that it wouldn’t be easy because “I’d fallen out of what had been an extremely unpopular government”. But she had two young sons to support and needed a decent income.
She thought that she might find a job running a company - that was what she had done before entering Parliament. What she ended up with, having answered a newspaper advertisement, was chief executive of a small trade body, the Association of Private Client Investment Managers and Stockbrokers - or, at least, “It was quite small then but it was much bigger by the time I left”. In April 2007, just four months before the credit crunch struck, she joined the BBA. Now she is earning more than she did in Parliament and is relishing the challenge.
Her advice for existing MPs? “If you believe people telling you you’re wonderful, it’s a big mistake. It’s all transitory. The fact is that life moves on and either you throw your hands up in horror or you just get on with it.”
John Taylor
When John Taylor unexpectedly lost Solihull, “It was like a colossal car crash. I’d worked an 80-hour week for most of my adult life and I suddenly had to think of three good reasons to get out of bed in the morning.”
He had been a junior minister under Margaret Thatcher and John Major, but it didn’t help. “I thought the phone would start ringing with people saying, ‘Come and be a consultant or a non-executive director’, but it didn’t. I applied for all sorts of jobs for a year, sometimes six in a week, but I didn’t get anything. I was a qualified, industrious man. But I was white, middle-class and a Conservative donor - every kind of pariah for public appointments.”
Taylor had had a distinguished career: he had practised as a high street solicitor for 22 years, led his county council, served in the European Parliament and written a book before entering Parliament. “I’d had no experience of being unemployed,” he recalls mournfully. “Most of my life, I’d had two jobs.” Eventually he found a little consultancy work, “but then that work suddenly came to an end and it was like another jilting”.
Now aged 68, he occupies himself doing creative writing, literary criticism and natural history with the University of the Third Age, chairing his local residents’ association and negotiating on behalf of his fellow leaseholders to buy the freehold of their block of flats. But his experience carries lessons for Labour MPs fearful for their seats. “My job and I had become the same thing. I’d neglected Denis Healey’s important advice: make sure you have a hinterland in case politics goes away. My local rector eventually said: “You’ve got to rediscover those parts of yourself that aren’t the MP for Solihull’.”
William Waldegrave (Lord Waldegrave of North Hill)
If you’re going to be thrown out of Parliament, it helps to be a Fellow of All Souls and a heavyweight Cabinet minister. But William (now Lord) Waldegrave didn’t expect to lose his seat until the last days of the 1997 campaign.
“It was very depressing. You have the feeling that you’ve been hit by a tidal wave, that’s not your personal fault. It was consoling to be beaten in a historic huge defeat, but it takes some time to readjust.”
He was lucky enough to have a wife who was earning a reasonable amount, so he decided at first to live “a more gentle and agreeable portfolio life”, writing a column for The Daily Telegraph and sitting on a couple of boards. Then he was approached by Dresdner Kleinwort Benson to be a managing director in the UK investment banking division. He did some heart-searching and consulted his mentor, Douglas Hurd, who said: “You’re only 51. You’re young enough to climb another mountain.”
Scrambling up the new slope was “very alarming. I knew nothing about banking at all. I found myself sitting exams - which, when you’re 51, you promise you’ll never do again - in a room with a lot of 24-year-olds. It was like a bad dream. But I’d said I didn’t want to be a dignified luncheon host. I wanted to do it properly.”
After five years there, he moved to UBS to be vice-chairman. The job was very stimulating and often stressful, but had its advantages too. “Once I started banking, I didn’t wake up at 3am thinking, ‘How am I going to pay the bills?’, which I did sometimes as a junior minister trying to educate four children. And I didn’t get woken up with the news that there was an uncomfortable story in the Daily Mail.”
He also learnt to love his new-found anonymity. “You’re like someone who’s been in early episodes of Coronation Street. People know they’ve seen you before but can’t think where. The regaining of privacy is a most wonderful thing.”
Compared with most former Tory MPs, Waldegrave has landed on his feet. At the end of last year, he stopped working full-time for UBS to become Provost of Eton. His formidable brain and his contacts have been a great help. But, he concedes: “I was conscious of being very lucky. Fifty is just young enough to start again.”