Time to stop the metaphors of death about ministerial careers.
They're degrading and ultimately dehumanising.
Recently The Rest is Money, the podcast from Robert Peston and Steph McGovern, ran this ad for their next episode:
The answer? No-one, obviously. Liz Truss is currently out promoting her less than successful apologia of a book. Thankfully, no-one killed Liz Truss.
But this lazy language is typical of journalistic writing about ministerial careers. And some academic writing too.
On the morning of 21 October 2018, the Sunday Times ran a story written by its Political Editor Tim Shipman headlined ‘PM enters ‘killing zone’. (It’s slighjtly different online).
The language was lurid and violent:
An ally of David Davis, the former Brexit secretary who is tipped as an interim leader, said May was entering “the killing zone”. One who hopes to succeed added: “Assassination is in the air.”
An in-depth story in the paper written by Shipman and his colleague Caroline Wheeler was headlined ‘Four meetings and a political funeral’. The language in this was even more extreme. A former minister was quoted: ‘The moment is coming when the knife gets heated, stuck in her front and twisted. She’ll be dead soon’. In the Mail on Sunday, one MP was quoted as saying May should ‘bring her own noose’ to the meeting of the Conservative Parliamentary Party, the 1922 Committee.
The violence of the language was widely condemned across Parliament, including by senior Conservatives, with warnings that it was dehumanizing, that it was normalising political violence, and corrupting public norms. Many saw a gendered element to this, not least given the murder of Jo Cox, the threats of violence against other women MPs, and the wide range of online misogynistic attacks on women.
As I explain in my recent book, this was a particularly extreme example of the way in which the language of political mortality is applied in respect of political careers. Sadly, this language has been, and remains, routine in politics. It is freely used by politicians, including about themselves, by journalists and by academics. It depicts ministerial life as a kind of political Squid Game. It will only be eradicated if those active in politics or commenting on it resolve to eschew its use.
Journalists and sub-editors freely use metaphors of execution and mortality about ministers who are seen as vulnerable to sacking. After Damian Green resigned in 2017, The Times had a story headed ‘Damian Green: The time was right for a humane execution’. After Amber Rudd’s resignation as Home Secretary, former Conservative Minister Sir John Wheeler wrote an article headed ‘The Home Office is a graveyard for ambitious politicians’. After Oliver Dowden’s resignation as Conservative Party chairman in June 2022 following two Conservative by-election defeats, an anonymous Cabinet Minister said Dowden had been ‘on suicide watch for ages’.
Of course, politicians themselves use the language of mortality to articulate the loss of office. After his departure from office Chris Mullin wrote in his diaries ‘death comes swiftly in British politics’. David Gauke ‘had an unusual privilege as a minister of having quite a good death’. Jeremy Hunt felt fortunate to avoid ‘death in slow motion’ during the Leveson Inquiry. Following his electoral defeat in 2015, Ed Balls wrote in his political memoir ‘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’.
Academic commentary reinforces this. A widely-cited article on the Prime Minister’s power to dismiss ministers is titled ‘Off with their heads’: British Prime Ministers and the power to dismiss’. A well-read chapter on political leaders after their time in office is titled ‘Life after political death: The fate of leaders after leaving high office’ (Keane, 2009). An important article on politicians defeated in elections is titled ‘Death at the polls: Experiencing and Coping with Political Defeat’.
Dame Jane Roberts, former council leader and professional child psychiatrist, to some extent explains this when she says in her book Losing Political Office that ‘politics is all about the promise of the future’. It is not a comfortable subject for politicians to engage with. They do not want to think about the ‘death of a future’. The political philosopher Hannah Arendt’s concept of ‘natality’ can help us understand this more deeply. Writing about the active life – the vita active – 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 of, in the language of most politicians, ‘making a difference’ as a politician or as a minister. It is no wonder that many struggle, as Jane Roberts says, to find ‘a new narrative for the future’. In their political mortality is the loss of the possibility of natality.
Whether the metaphors of death can ever be eradicated seems unlikely, even in the context of murders of parliamentarians and rising stridency in language and threats on social media. But in Wales, the law has intervened. The tragic suicide of former Welsh Minister Carl Sargeant in 2017, four days after his sacking from the Welsh Government Cabinet, resulted in a high-profile inquest from 2018-19. Changes were made to the Welsh Ministerial Code. The North Wales Coroner had made a Regulation 28 Report to Prevent Future Deaths, to which the Welsh Government was obliged to respond. In his response, the then First Minister, Mark Drakeford, consulted former ministers and the family of Carl Sargeant, before framing a new section of the Ministerial Code, with specific obligations on the First Minister, titled ‘Ministers and their Wellbeing’, which includes the following:
the First Minister will ensure that the wellbeing of the minister or
ministers involved is fully taken into account as part of planning and preparation for reshuffles or other circumstances in which ministers may depart from Government. This will include ensuring that the ministers at the time are aware of the support services which are available to them to access. This will be the case particularly where departure is taking place in circumstances which may attract significant media interest.
Future reshuffles would be framed in a way that recognises the public service rendered by departing Ministers. Particular care would be taken to consider the wellbeing of a departing Minister if the circumstances of their departure are difficult and high-profile, such as an alleged breach of the Ministerial Code. The Chief Whip would have a specific responsibility for the wellbeing of departing ministers.
In my view, the time has come for commentators to drop the metaphors of death from our discussions of ministerial careers. Politicians themselves should take the first step, dropping the terminology from their gossip of who is up and who is down. If they don’t do that, then others won’t follow. But this language is degrading, and ultimately dehumanising. When politicians increasingly live under threats of physical violence, and sitting MPs have been murdered, anything which trivialises life and equates the loss of a job to the loss of life should be regarded as unacceptable. Only when we recognise political and ministerial life as temporary not permanent, only part of a potential way of living and not an absolute, will we deal with this, and politicians themselves need to be encouraged to think of political careers as contingent, temporary and recognise meaning in other careers and activities.
There is a call for more compassion in politics. This might be a good place to start.