The Jackdaw: Staffers Had It Hardest

Marie Le Conte | Comment, Policy & Think Tanks, Political Consultants, Politics

From the Archive

Over the last year we’ve seen dozens of MPs switch parties or go independent. But how does such an unexpected move affect their hard-working staff?

Over the last months of 2019, following politics felt rather like watching one giant, green bench-based game of musical chairs. Some MPs lost the whip and learned to embrace the purgatory of independence; others went from one party to another; a handful left their party to create another one, before deciding to move on again.

Hundreds of column inches have been dedicated to those MPs: what they believe in, how they thought they could achieve their aims, and whether they left their original parties or their original parties left them.

What we forget, however, is that it isn’t just about individual MPs; others are involved too. When a Tory becomes a Lib Dem, the people in his office must follow suit; if a Labour MP decides that she has had enough, her staff will also be expected to leave the nest. And then these long sufferers had to endure the election result itself.

Parliamentary assistants are rarely in the spotlight, but that doesn’t mean that their lives are unaffected by these changes. “I had been working on the Benn bill behind the scenes,” says one aide to an MP who went independent, “and the weekend before, I couldn’t sleep and was very anxious because I knew something was going to happen. About 10 minutes before the vote, he rang the association chairman to say, “I’m going to do this.” He was very upset, and he went off to vote and we got him a big glass of wine for …

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