Isabel Hardman - Why We Get the Wrong Politicians

This thoroughly readable and well-researched book explains why parliamentary powers wont ever be used properly until parties change how they choose their candidates.

Lord Peter Mandelson

With humour and humanity, Isabel Hardman lifts the lid on the Houses of Parliament and shows with compelling authority how the structure and culture of our political system so often delivers the worst kind of results. This book has the power to fundamentally change how we do things in this country.

Emily Maitlis Presenter, Newsnight

Published in hardback in Great Britain in 2018 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright Isabel Hardman, 2018

The moral right of Isabel Hardman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 78239 973 5

E-book ISBN: 978 1 78239 974 2

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

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By necessity, a great deal of the research for this book has taken place in off-the-record interviews with politicians and members of their staff or families. Any quotes that are either unattributed or lacking a reference in the endnotes are from interviews with the author.

What have you done? Oh my God. What the fuck have you done? Anne Miltons best friend wasnt taking the news of her election as an MP very well at all. The new member for Guildford had previously worked as a nurse, but was now heading into Parliament to do a job that would be more bewildering than anything she had encountered on a hospital ward.

Soon, it would be voters who would be asking her and all her colleagues who had just been elected what the fuck they had done: with their money, their health service, and all the promises they were led to believe would be fulfilled if enough people backed their party.

Milton was about to enter the Westminster Bubble, a place popular folklore would have us believe seethes with venal, selfish characters who love nothing more than to ruin everyone elses lives, in between having affairs with their secretaries.

The Westminster Bubble first cropped up in the late 1990s as a description of the tight community of politicians, researchers, think tanks and journalists around Parliament. It has gained increasingly negative connotations as an insular community in which insignificant things seem enormous and the things that matter to everyone else are ignored. Bubble members are out of touch with the rest of the world, and their lack of understanding of the people they purport to represent leads them to make serious mistakes on a regular basis.

Voters largely agree with this characterisation. MPs are the least trusted professional group below estate agents, bankers and journalists with just 21 per cent of Britons saying theyd trust an MP to tell the truth. The public dont like politics as a line of work generally, but they also tell pollsters that the quality of the politicians is the feature they dislike the most. Voters are angry with politicians, ignoring their instructions, for instance, during the EU referendum of 2016, and then again in the snap election of 2017 in which Theresa May instructed the country to give her a bigger mandate.

What are voters most angry with? Often its the sex-and-sleaze scandals that make their way into the press. But perhaps even these wouldnt matter so much if the public had confidence that the people they were electing knew what they were doing and werent going to make ordinary peoples lives worse. When the government makes a mistake, it means people lose their home, or their ability to buy food, or their chance to have life-saving surgery. If the government making such mistakes is full of people who appear to be enjoying themselves rather too much, then that stings all the more.

But this book will not be a grand tour of thieving philanderers. In fact, its worth warning you now that while there are some venal politicians, there are many more who are decent human beings. And while the examples of wrongdoing over the years are spectacular, doesnt every walk of life have its villains? Teachers are rightly respected by society for doing an incredibly difficult job. But in 2016/17, the National Council for Teaching and Leadership banned 42 teachers for sexual misconduct.

Analysis by the General Medical Council of its decisions to suspend or erase doctors from the medical register in 2015 found that 24 of the people into whose hands we put our lives had been struck off for inappropriate relations with colleagues (five) or patients (19), and nine had lost their place on the register due to sexual issues. Those issues ranged from voyeurism to sexual assault, and one offence included a minor under 13 years old.

Listing these decisions by other professional bodies regulating public servants isnt an act of whataboutery, where someone tries to defend their actions by pointing to the actions of someone else. Just because there are teachers and doctors who act inappropriately does not make it acceptable that there are politicians who do so too. The question is whether politicians as a group are more likely proportionately to be evil, venal people or whether just as we accept that there will always be some bent coppers, we have to accept that not all the people we elect will turn out to be good eggs.

Unfortunately for those whod like a polemic about how very wrong so many of our politicians are, I dont think this is actually the most serious problem afflicting Westminster. I joined the lobby the group of journalists who work in and cover the day-to-day goings-on of Parliament in 2011, and while I have met my share of politicians who are either too selfish or too stupid to deserve the honour of representing their constituents, I have largely become more disillusioned by the way the vast majority of decent, well-meaning types are ill-used by Parliament itself.

So the next important question is whether Parliament turns good eggs into bad. Just take this exchange on the BBCs Question Time in 2014 involving the left-wing populist comedian Russell Brand. A member of the audience confronted the comedian, telling him to stand for Parliament. If youre gonna campaign, then stand, OK? You have the media profile for it.