What does an MP do in an average day?
One of the things about being an MP is that you often don't have an average day. The working day usually goes on very late... very, very late. That's the worst thing about an MP in my view, was that you don't have evenings. Forget having an evening. You work a normal day like everyone does and then you work all evening too. And you work most of the weekend as well. For me, a normal day, I would, well I would obviously have to, the very latest I would ever leave the house like most normal people would be about 8 AM, be at Westminster for 9 AM, be doing some of the post, obviously that comes in. There were points when I was getting 300 letters a day, that's not including the emails, the faxes, the phone calls. And then I would go to meetings. Select committee maybe for two or three hours, and then I would go into the chamber to ask ministers about whichever issue was up that day. It might be foreign affairs, it might be transport policy, it might be health. And then you might do an interview with a journalist that's pursuing you on a certain topic. And then you would, at a certain point throughout the day you would be voting. You would be meeting constituents, especially if you're a London MP and you're in Westminster, on an average day you would meet a constituent or a constituency group. And then you might you might be in the tea room at the House of Commons getting a bit of an egg sandwich, egg and chips, whatever, to keep you going. And then you would go up to one of the many meetings on the committee corridors that are on just every subject under the sun. An all party group meeting. I set up an all party group on genocide prevention and I chaired various other all party groups. And then you will continuously be going back into vote, in and out of the chamber to vote. You walk round and round in circles, literally and metaphorically often, until 11 PM. When I started being an MP, we were there often until 2 o'clock, 3 o'clock in the morning, sometimes right through the night. And then you'd get home, you don't say hello to your partner because you're too tired. You haven't seen the kids if you've got them. And you fall into bed worrying about all the things that you haven't done and you wake up at about four hours later quite stressed and start it all again.
