POLITICS
No money. No power. No sex. Who'd become a Conservative MP today?
BORIS JOHNSON
You have to wonder why anyone should want to replace them, these great men now giving up their seats. Hurd, Baker, Renton, Biffen, Walden; yes, and more wide- ly across the Tory benches, it is as if the old boys are waking up with a start, glancing at their watches and realising they have been there for about 25 years, and Good Lord! it is time to collect their K and make way for a younger person. As local Conservative asso- ciations begin casting around for candidates, one ponders the unceasing miracle of the party's regeneration.
For it is a miracle that anyone should want to embark on the struggle to power, with that rather expensive weekend at the Slough Marriott with a hundred other kee- nies wearing their names on their lapel badges, there to be catechised by the exam- ining panel for the slightest sign of Euro- scepticism, and thence, assuming you pass, to begin the humiliating crawl towards the Palace of Westminster. It is a common prejudice in that building that there has been no worse time in Parliament's history to try to become an MP, and not just because of the Conservatives' likely fate at the next election.
`There's no money,' says George Walden, who has just issued a fairly dyspeptic expla- nation for his reasons for standing down at the next election. By 'no money' he means that the salary stays at a measly £32,000 per year, and one sees his point. 'There's no sex,' he goes on; by which he means not just no illicit sex, but not even blameless diffi- culty with girls, not with impunity.
Listen to Walden, 0 ye generation of thrusters. Heed him well. Your private life will indeed be taken away from you and pushed back through your letterflap one morning in the italicised innuendo and non-sequiturs of journalism. As a result of this drip-drip-drip denigration, the public now conceives there is something ribald in the very concept of a male Tory MP. 'Peo- ple don't respect you as much as they used to,' says one member Eeyoreishly. 'It used to be something to be an MP. Oh! An MP! Best table in the restaurant, that kind of thing. Now they just snigger.'
You must resign yourself to inhuman patterns of work, small offices, sometimes overbearing secretaries, a phenomenal mortality rate, almost certainly assisted by beer and boredom. Under a rule devised in 1885, debates continue after dinner until ten o'clock, and, indeed, sometimes last all night. The job, in general, is increasingly like being an MEP without the travel, or the Strasbourg food.
And at the end of it all, my friend, you must prepare for failure. All political careers end in tears, said Enoch Powell. He might have added that a good many parlia- mentary careers hardly get going. It is a regular complaint that there is no such per- son in Britain as a successful non-ministeri- al parliamentarian. Apart from Bill Cash, Frank Field and one or two others, few backbenchers establish themselves as inde- pendent figures, respected for their mas- tery of a certain issue. Therefore, you must spend years oiling up to the whips, in the hope of securing a Red Box, or even attain- ing the bogus rank of PPS; and heaven help you, as Geo. Walden points out, if you show anything approaching independence of thought.
Consider Mr kin Duncan-Smith, one of the brightest of the 1992 intake. Because Mr Major continues to punish this sage for his doubts about the Common Market, and has refused to promote him to ministerial office, Mr Duncan-Smith is likely to have to wait until the party gets back into office — in, what? five, ten years? — before he has a sniff of power.
Did someone mention power? Hah. Above all, at least according to the Walden analysis, the job has shrunk. Britain is rela- tively poorer, and less important in the councils of nations. Power is seeping away from the House of Commons. The sovereignty of parliament is now disputed with the judiciary, and above all with Brus- sels; which may explain why so many Tory MPs have fastened on 'Europe', as an object of resentment.
When Patrick Cormack stands up to talk It's an old age traveller!' about Bosnia, he is heard respectfully, with only the most discreet rolling of the eyes. But no one believes that it matters much what he says. The continent of Europe does not hang on the words of a British MP, as it did when Gladstone took a dim view of human rights abuses in Naples or Athens. Far from twanging their braces and survey- ing the horizon, MPs complain that they are treated as glorified social workers. 'My constituents ask me about their marriages? What am I supposed to do about their mar- riages?' says Eeyore. To cap it all, Lord Nolan now hovers over everything like some puritanical bird of prey, ready to snatch the tiniest crumb of financial conso- lation from their lips.
Why, to repeat our original question. would anyone want to do it? There arc many layers of gratification. There is vanity. In almost all of these MPs, I think, though, there is at least a tiny grit of an instinct to public service. Probably most of us should be gently dissuaded from becoming an MP, just as we should be dissuaded from writing a novel. But, as with writing a novel, there is a thousand to one chance that you will hit the jackpot. There is a chance that you will have a role, like Mrs Thatcher, or Nor- man Tebbit, or Nigel Lawson, in briefly shaping the destiny of the nation. The only place to do that is in the upper reaches of government.
That is why beneath them, as they pre- pare to depart, Cranley Onslow, John Biff- en and the rest can already hear the drum- ming roar of Young Men in a Hurry, des- perate to take their places. We are fortu- nate, in a way, that so many relatively good people are prepared to risk the tears and disillusion with which their careers will undoubtedly end.
The nation is lucky that so many relative- ly bright people will not be happy unless they are able to haul themselves to their feet at- 3.15 on a Tuesday, with the square eyes of a select band of BBC2 viewers upon them, their pate burnished by Trumpers, waistcoat flatteringly tailored, and say, 'May I ask my Rt Hon. friend to what he attributes his great gifts of leadership?' That is still an honourable ambition. With- out politicians, after all, there would be no political journalism.
Boris Johnson is assistant editor of the Daily Telegraph.
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