Losing is bruising

But there is life after politics.

I have to confess that I won’t be spending a lot of time fretting about the fate of a number of the Conservatives who may lose their seats this week - certainly not those who have been complicit in driving politics towards an unsatisfiable, and anti-democratic, and often racist, populism. But the former Plaid Cymru chief executive Dafydd Trystan was right to say this week that all those standing deserve a big thank you for making our democratic system work. So let’s spend a moment thinking about those who will lose this week, sometimes after years of public service, sometimes losing through no fault of their own.

Losing is bruising. I’ve been there. So have many others I know. I have a slide I have used a number of times over the last few years, when talking about the difference of working in a political environment, or about learning from failure, or what drives people in politics. The slide has a picture of Ed Balls in his Strictly Come Dancing finery, and I ask the question ‘what do Leighton Andrews and Ed Balls have in common?’ After explaining that no, I don’t dance, I say

We both lost our jobs on live television at 5 O’Clock in the morning!

It’s a brutal way to go, and worse if you’re not expecting it. Jim Murphy, former Scottish Secretary, lost his seat in 2015. He later wrote:

One of the personal downsides of defeat as an MP is immediacy. You make a speech in the middle of the night from a packed stage to a largely empty hall. Each word is offered from behind a fixed smile as you pretend to be delighted that someone else will be leaving with the job that you arrived with. For weeks afterwards friends talk to you as though you’ve suffered a terrible illness, whispering their best wishes for your full recovery.

I wrote a few weeks ago about the need to expel the metaphors of death from politics. But it is a recurring theme in losing ministerial jobs and in losing seats. Ed Balls wrote ‘Being present at your own funeral isn’t all it’s cracked up to be’. He rationalized it: ‘when you’ve held a senior position, and will in all likelihood never rise that high in politics again, the end of your career is treated like a death’.

Professor Dame Jane Roberts, former leader of Camden Council and a child psychiatrist, has written a book about losing political office. She undertook considerable research and notes that some of her research interviewsees were ‘emotionally very raw’. The manner of the defeat, the degree of planning by those who had planned for life outside politics, and levels of personal resilience, were key coping factors that were more obvious in those with a hinterland, with strong family and social networks, who quickly found a role, who had clear acknowledgement of their contribution or recognition of the skills they carried with them,. They were less subject to what John Keane calls ‘office dependency’.

I was fortunate. I had taught at Cardiff University before being elected to the Assembly, and I knew I wanted to go back there to teach and research. I had carried on academic writing as a backbencher, I had published a couple of academic articles, I had given lectures in university settings, and I had made notes on things I would like to teach. So I ended up doing what I hoped to be doing, only five years earlier than I had intended.

And that’s a lesson for anyone getting elected this week, some of whom would not have expected to be elected six weeks ago. The lesson is to remember that one day the elected political life will come to an end. So be prepared. Do not assume this will continue for ever. Think about what you would do if it came to an end. Maintain a hinterland and friends beyond politics.

Sometimes people go into an election expecting to lose, and then are surprised when they survive. That happened to quite a few Labour MPs in 2017, for example. They had held a wake in parliamentary bars when the election was called, then found themselves back after Theresa May’s disastrous campaign.

Unlike them, I went into the 2016 Assembly election not expecting to lose. However, three nights before the election, canvassing in Maerdy, I got a sense that things were not going as well as they had at the beginning of the campaign. I spent a largely sleepless night thinking about what I would say if I lost. So thankfully, I was prepared when the moment came early on the Friday morning.

I wrote after the event about losing my seat:

In 1992, Chris Patten, chair of the Conservative Party, delivered an overall election victory for John Major’s Conservative Party against Labour, but lost his own Bath seat to the Liberal Democrats. In 2016, as a member of Welsh Labour’s campaign committee, I played my part in helping to steer Welsh Labour’s campaign this year, where we held on to 29 of our 30 seats seeing off an expected Conservative challenge – but lost my own seat to Plaid Cymru.

No-one could fault our campaign:

Labour in the Rhondda certainly wasn’t out-worked by Plaid Cymru. The constituency had been canvassed thoroughly – twice- between May 2015 and polling day, with telephone canvassing on top. We had knocked on over 30,000 doors and spoken to 20,000 people. We had the most up-to-date data we had ever had.

Indeed, Plaid’s Dafydd Trystan told me he had run an ‘intensity analysis’ of campaigning in the Rhondda, which showed how close the campaign effort was between Labour and Plaid. Buffy Williams obviously subsequently won the seat back for Labour in 2021. However, let me confirm that ‘losing is bruising’.

Losing is bruising: first, there is the knowledge of rejection, and the enduring psychological impact of that: a place that you represented has rejected you, and doesn’t want you as their representative any more. Second, there is the publicness of defeat, in front of the cameras, on live television, which you know will be repeated on news bulletins on television and radio during the day. It is also, on the whole, not the time to look at social media, particularly Twitter as it was then. Although in reality the nicer comments outweigh the nastier, there are usually one or two who want to rub it in unpleasantly. Third, there is the disappointment, at not continuing in a job you have loved. Fourth, there is the loss of your expected future: in my case, I expected to continue in Cabinet - indeed, I had been told I would be. Fifth, and this develops in the weeks afterwards, the loss of your immediate social network, one which you have been part of for a significant time. Sixth, there is the overwhelming sense of having let people down, your supporters particularly, but also, of course, your staff, who also lose their jobs (though I was fortunate that mine found jobs with incoming AMs pretty soon).

But at the same time, the compensations slowly start to emerge, and even over the weekend after my defeat, I was starting to benefit from those. Time for family - I had one grand-daughter then, now I have four grand-children. Time to see friends - I set off on my travels. Some obligations were removed immediately - no longer a requirement to inform the First Minister if I was going abroad - and I had a ticket for Wales’s first Euro game in Bordeaux.

I decided quickly that I was not going to seek nomination to re-fight the Rhondda in 2021. That allowed me to start to reflect on what different opportunities might arise. I was fortunate to re-join Cardiff University that autumn, but that’s another story for another day.

Jane Roberts writes that ‘politics is all about the promise of the future’. Leaving office, particularly involuntarily, is not a comfortable subject for politicians to engage with. They do not want to think about the ‘death of a future’. As I write in my book, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt’s concept of ‘natality’ can help us understand this more deeply. Writing about the active life – the vita activa – Arendt says that ‘action’, which brings human beings into relationship with one another, is the key condition ‘of all political life’. Removal from political or ministerial office, then, removes people from the possibility of action, of beginning again, or as Arendt puts it, of ‘being born again’. Alternatively, it deprives you, in the language of most politicians, of ‘making a difference’ as a politician or as a minister. It is no wonder that so many former politicians struggle, as Jane says, to find ‘a new narrative for the future’ – what Yiannis Gabriel and his colleagues talk of as a form of ‘narrative coping’ to provide meaning and consolation. In their political mortality is the loss of the possibility of natality.     

Because politics is, as Jane says, about ‘the promise of the future’, political parties are not great at supporting those who have lost in the aftermath of their defeat. Politicians who have lost are something of an embarrassment. Political parties are much like other institutions in this. The institution endures with its own logic and momentum, beyond the engagement of any individual, no matter their past role. There is probably no point in being too sensitive about this.

Political loss of office is different from job departures in many other areas, partly because of its publicness, but also because it is the loss of a calling as much as a job. One way in which we might address that in the future is to discourage thinking about elected office as a career, with a sense of permanency. We need to encourage elected politicians to retain space for other things in their lives, to maintain a sense of other possibilities, and to refrain from seeing their political lives as the totality of their value. Harder said than done, when so many find the political life addictive. But there is life after elected politics, and politics outside elected representation too.

Six weeks after I lost my seat, the UK voted to leave the European Union. My defeat was a personal loss. Leaving the EU was a tragedy. I was soon campaigning again….

And that is an unfinished story.