Luke Black is the Chairman of the LGBT+ Conservatives.
MPs have been through a rough time this election, more so than previous elections. Jess Phillips had to call the police at her count because of appalling intimidation from extremist volunteers towards her and her team. Outgoing Conservative MP Katherine Fletcher had literal faeces pushed through her letterbox, her posters defaced, and received threats.
These are just two examples – but elections are getting more dangerous, more unpleasant, and more gruelling.
However, you’ll struggle to see much sympathy from the people whose entire career relies on these individuals: political media hacks. Instead, MPs are increasingly framed as if they are all conniving Disney villains, desperate to drain the public purse of every dime through complicated and covert schemes. This is shown most recently in Sky News’ incorrect reporting of MP’s expenses, in which they wrongly implied that Caroline Nokes was personally pocketing the salaries of her staff.
Somewhat antithetically, they are also presented to be deeply incompetent individuals – scolded in successive TV debates like naughty schoolchildren. TV audiences sat with their arms folded, like a Head of Year waiting for his Year 9 pupils to sit in silence until they could leave their assembly for lunch.
Contempt is too often rewarded by TV producers. “Question of the night”, according to Christopher Hope, was when an audience member told Rishi Sunak he’d been a good Chancellor but a “mediocre Prime Minister” and accused Keir Starmer of being too weak to stand up to senior figures in the Labour Party.
“Are you two really the best we’ve got?” Robert Blackstock asked to a wave of gasps and exuberant applause. It was a gratuitous, rent-seeking, rude question. Blackstock since told the BBC he was “loving” the attention he received after the debate.
Yet can anyone seriously say this, when thousands of miles away the USA is deciding between two deeply unsuitable octogenarians, and France also between a man who makes Jeremy Corbyn look moderate and the far right? In Germany, Olaf Scholz makes Starmer look charismatic.
In the Netherlands, it has taken seven months to form a government, with none of the winning parties able to find a popular candidate for prime minister. In the end, they had to nominate DIck Schoof, a civil servant, to run the government. Blackstock doesn’t know how lucky he has it, I think.
As I have stated previously, we, the public, are making this role more unattractive. The result is that we will get poorer-quality MPs. Our demands are increasingly high, not just on the private lives and privacy of MPs themselves, but also our cakeist demands.
We want the public services of a large welfare state yet also the tax regime of the United Arab Emirates. We want MPs to be from all walks of life and experiences but bemoan MPs from having any personal wealth. We want MPs to be ‘experts’ in various fields, whilst simultaneously being a hyper-local super councillor. MPs can’t have ever made a mistake or have a picture of them getting drunk as a university student, yet simultaneously need to be to be ‘down to earth’ types you can ‘imagine having a pint with’.
The more we expect this, the more careerist types we will see in Parliament. People who have never put a foot wrong, or perhaps never lived long enough to do so, airbrushing their lives from an early age in their long-term goal to be an MP. With a 22-year-old who hasn’t ever worked elected in Cambridgeshire by just 39 votes, I’ll leave ConHome readers to decide if this trend is likely to continue.
So, what can we do? Public perception and media narratives will not change overnight. Nor will the security threats to MPs, or the loss of their privacy. But what we can change, and decisively, with such a large majority now in the Commons, is the perks of the job and its remuneration.
How will this help? Well, many MPs take large pay cuts. Look at some of our party’s newest MPs and decide for yourself. Blake Stephenson leaves a decorated career as a solicitor and advisor in the City. Patrick Spencer, Conservative MP for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich, worked at a PE and VC firm in London as well as holding several trustee and fellowship roles in not-for-profit organizations. Shivani Raja, newly-elected Tory MP for Leicester East, worked for several multinational corporations before setting up and running her own local business.
It is fantastic to see such new talent on the Conservative benches, but how many more talented people from good careers outside of politics are there in the public willing to take such a difficult job at such a large personal and financial expense? I’m not sure.
But if we can pay London’s Nightlife Tsar Amy Lamé £132,000 a year for posting a few tweets and painting a mural in Bromley, can we not pay the people who, you know, run the country, at least the same? I know what I think.
