Why NOT to be an MP.

People occasionally* ask me whether I would like to run for Parliament. Others, such as the Moai when I first got to know him, ask me when I am going to run for Parliament. And those people are often surprised when my reply is extremely fucking negative. And then they ask me why.

Well, this story, via Iain Dale, gives a good reason. The House of Commons, and the local party associations, come across as utterly odious institutions. Reading the article, you actually end up wondering why anyone would ever want to go into Parliament.

I have been involved in local politics, and have campaigned for three Tory candidates for Parliament (two actually got elected). I have seen amount of tedious campaigning and events that they have to attend to get into Parliament. I have first hand experience of the dull, self-important and back-biting people who gain positions of influence in local party associations** – those types who have to be appeased to enable selection and re-selection as a candidate for Parliament. And the whole process just leaves me cold. I would find it dull, frustrating and aggravating.

Once you get into the Commons, what great benefits do you gain? You have to keep on campaigning, keep on answering those constituency issues. But you are now part of a hard drinking, backstabbing, vicious old boy’s club – with cliques, pointless archaic rules and cripplingly anti-social hours. An old boy’s club run by bullying, self important whips.

And if your philanthropy is so strong that you still want to endure the constant headache of heading up a local party association and the odious environment of the Commons, then what, precisely, do you do to get your beliefs into policy? You need to be in a senior position in Parliament. So you need to shed everything that may be even slightly controversial, completely restrict your behaviour and interactions with others, and become a policy vacuum rather than a functioning politician or a real person.

Put simply, why would anyone want to be a politician in this country?

Along with a lot of other guff, Plato wrote in The Republic about Philosopher Kings. Now, the concept of a navel gazing philosopher as king of anything other than pontificating fills me with fear. But there is some merit in his assertion that the people who are capable of running a country are actually the people who run the country. The glaring problem with our political system is that anyone who might be vaguely capable of running the country is put off running***.

So the next time you wonder why our ruling class seems to be populated with the image obsessed ideological vacuums or the utterly inhuman then think about Fiona Jones’s tragic story and think about the hoops MPs have to jump through and the compromises they have to make to get to the top. Those who manage to claw their way to the summit of the political game are those incomplete human beings who are not capable of taking on the responsibilities they gain.

*I was going to write often. But that would make me seem big headed. And I would hate that…
**I am not saying everyone in a local party is like this, but some certainly are.
***I am not saying that I am suitable for running the country simply because I am one of the ones put off doing so. For the record, I could run the country. Just very, very badly.