Inside an MP’s inbox

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.

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.