There is nothing so ex as an ex-MP, Tam Dalyell used to say. Now that parliament has returned from recess, and the newly elected MPs are no longer described as ‘newly elected MPs’, it may seem that the old contrarian had a point. But the truth is that being an ex-MP’s staffer is as ex as it gets.
I worked for Derek Thomas, the Tory MP for St Ives from 2015 until this year. The day after the election – our man lost to the Liberal Democrat, to make it even more humiliating; like being dumped for a librarian – the emails and the phone calls stopped. Even the woman who rang every day to tell us that the nurses on her ward were working for Isis (and she ought to know, she had been recruited by the CIA as an asset some years ago) had taken us off speed-dial.
An MP can act like an accountability conductor, stepping in where the system fails
Right up until that point, the office had been receiving hundreds of emails and phone calls every day. There was a member of staff whose full-time job, pretty much, was to triage the correspondence – since even the CIA sleeper agent might, somewhere in her counter-intelligence debriefing, mention she had not been given her medication, which would necessitate a phone call to the hospital.
You might think it is not part of an MP’s job to ask the hospital to check on a patient or to chase up an appointment, or find a house, or complain about an energy bill; these things are the responsibility of the NHS or the local authority or whoever. But accountability and responsibility are two different things and, as the world becomes more complex, organisations rely on ‘accountability sinks’ to shield managers from the decisions for which they are, or should be, responsible.
The phrase has been coined by Dan Davies in his new book, The Unaccountability Machine. He gives the example of 440 squirrels arriving in Schiphol airport without the correct paperwork. They couldn’t be sent on to Athens, and they couldn’t be returned to China; and there was no one who could overrule the Dutch agriculture ministry’s policy that undocumented livestock should be destroyed; and so the ground staff threw them all into an industrial shredder.
It was masterful of Davies to choose dead animals as his illustration. When Afghanistan fell to the Taliban, we had 30 times as many emails about Pen Farthing’s bloody rescue dogs than about the Afghan interpreters whose lives were in danger. If the Schiphol incident had happened at Gatwick, it would have filled our inbox for months.
What an MP can do is act like an accountability conductor or accountability syphon, stepping in where the system fails and where there is nobody whose job it is to fix it. One of my colleagues says that he spends much of his time managing people who should have managers – not to overturn the rules, but to adapt them to circumstances. Take Universal Credit: this is based on your monthly income, but some employers pay wages on a 28-day month; this may seem like a rounding error until someone gets paid twice in one calendar month. A phone call from the MP’s office can persuade a DWP official that a constituent’s income hasn’t doubled overnight.
The odd thing is, people like accountability sinks. When Natural England declared a large chunk of the constituency to be a Site of Special Scientific Interest, they included farmland of no particular interest, scientific or otherwise. When the member objected this could put farms out of business, Natural England said that wasn’t their problem.
So, being a good constituency MP, he introduced a bill to syphon accountability to the secretary of state. And we immediately got emails from midwits accusing him of ‘bowing to the landowning elite’. In fact, the big landowners could afford to pay hydrologists to show how Natural England’s methodology turned up false positives. Inevitably, the Liberal Democrat’s first question in parliament after he was returned was to ask the new government to confirm that it will not be interfering with this accountability sink.
I never worked out why we would get so many identical emails from campaigning organisations – every guide to political campaigning I have read says that sending mass emails doesn’t work. Why were we getting hundreds of identical messages asking us to commit to free parking at hospitals for staff on night shifts, say, when this has been NHS policy for the past decade?
And then I read a guide to communications for charities. Every email you send should have a ‘Call to Action’, which will drive engagement – and clicking on a button to send a letter to your MP is an Action (and please fill out your address so that we can find your MP for you; you don’t mind if we keep that for marketing purposes, do you?). But, of course, you can never say that.
I once drafted a response to an RSPB campaign, which had accused the government of an #AttackonNature, saying it was all vibes and driven more by an attempt at engagement than any real concern about investment zones. Mistake. I had committed news. The letter was reprinted in the Guardian the next day, along with a comment about how disgusting it was that Conservative Central Office had organised a smear campaign against a well-respected organisation. As if Central Office ever told us anything: we often heard about policy announcements after the opposition. At a conference discussing the success of the campaign, the RSPB boasted it had gained 20,000 new Twitter followers in a week.
I realised at a governor’s meeting in my local school that I could not remember a single letter about school funding. I assumed it was because parents have better things to do. The majority of our correspondents were retired people with the time for emails about inappropriate planning applications, with only a small minority asking what could be done about the housing crisis in Cornwall.
A teacher friend of mine had a simple explanation. When something’s wrong with the school, you go to the head; she’s accountable and available and might even be around for a word at pick-up time. For every other public sector organisation, you go to the MP. He may not be responsible – but then the member was not responsible for the prime minister he submitted a no-confidence letter about. Those of us working in his office were not responsible. But we were held accountable, and that is democracy.
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