Becoming An MP
Why did you become an MP?
I became an MP - really unoriginally because I wanted to change the world. And, possibly, also because I was a bit of a maladjusted little kid. What little kid, you know, wants to be an MP or prime minister when they're four or five years old? I think that there's something a bit wrong there. Because it was like I felt things were unfair and my mum had a really big impact on the way I felt because she would always say to me "this isn't fair, that's not fair" and "look there's children starving on TV. Why? Because the politicians aren't doing their job properly." and so I kind of felt maybe if I was a politician and I tried to do my job properly, maybe I became an MP because I just wanted to please my mum, I don't know.
What makes a good MP?
A good MP is one that will actually really look at the lives of their constituents, be part of those lives, and you've got to live in the constituency, You also need to understand what goes on in the constituency and really care about it. But caring isn't enough. You've got to be able to deliver things. You've got to work out how the system functions. You've got to be able to persuade ministers. If you're in parliament and you can't persuade ministers, government ministers, to change things, then I don't see the point in being in parliament.
What are the responsibilities of an MP?
An MP has responsibilities towards the people they serve. Quite often, especially if you represent a tricky constituency which has got a lot of deprivation, you will get an endless stream of people coming to your door. Your responsibility is to work out who you can help, who you should be able to help, and who it's not your job to help. Your responsibility also is to scrutinize government. I was on the Select Committee. There are many ways you can scrutinize the executive, but that's another responsibility. You also have responsibility to your party as well. You have responsibility to the constituency, the electorate, to Parliament, so that you are scrutinizing government, and then also to the political party, to make sure that you think your party is pursuing the right policies and is in a position to put their manifesto into practice.
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.
Are there busy and quiet periods during the year?
There are definitely quieter periods during the year. August is the one month when it's called silly season. In theory, politicians are allowed August off. But constituents would say to me, "God, it's outrageous, you get three month holidays," as an MP. But that's only when Parliament is sitting and, in fact, that was changed. MP's might be away from Parliament in August, but often you're still dealing with correspondence and you're always dealing with local groups and local issues.
