MPs should plan what they will do after leaving public office on “day one” of being elected for the first time, former Government chief whip Simon Hart has said.
Hart, whose diary of life as a Cabinet minister and Government chief whip – “Ungovernable” is out now, said that he treated his time running the whips’ office as like a hospital accident and emergency unit as MPs came to him with their problems.
And he revealed his “agitation” that some Tory MPs treated receiving a honour from the Queen or the King as a “God-given right”.
Speaking to GB News’ Choppers’ Political Podcast Hart – who quit the Commons at the election last July – said that “a lot of colleagues who haven’t worked a day since last July”.
Simon Hart said that he treated his time running the whips’ office as like a hospital accident and emergency unit as MPs came to him with their problems
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His advice to MPs was not to leave planning an exit from political life “until the end”.
He said: “Plan your exit on day one of your time in Parliament. Don’t leave it until the end. Deal with it when you go in, start planning your exit and what you’re going to do, how you’re going to do it when you want to leave, what your pension arrangements are.
“Because it comes very quickly – and it’s brutal when it happens and the telephone doesn’t ring off the hook. You don’t get festooned with offers of lovely positions on well-paid boards – and like you might have done in the old days.”
Hart said there were “a lot of colleagues who haven’t worked a day since last July. And it’s not a sob story for Tories. And I know there won’t be a lot of public sympathy for that.”
Hart added that “one of the things that does worry me is that gene pool politics is getting smaller.
“All of this noise, all of these difficulties, just mean that fewer and fewer people want to do this job.
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Hart said there were “a lot of colleagues who haven’t worked a day since last July”
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“And if the gene pool gets smaller, it’s harder to get the best people into government, and voters will ultimately be feel that they’ve been shortchanged. So it’s important we get it right.”
One of Hart’s roles was to recommend Tory MPs for honours, and he said had had got “quite agitated about the fact that honours are not a God-given right. If they happen, they happen. If they don’t, they don’t.”
He added: “It used to annoy me that people would literally thought it was something which you would almost sort of contractually obliged to do.”
Hart tells in his diary of how in one instance a Tory MP had to be rescued from a brothel where they were with an apparent KGB agent, while dealing with other examples of misconduct among his ‘flock’ of Conservative MPs.
He told the podcast: “I literally had to almost keep an hour or two of my diary free every day we come… We used to call it the ‘s*** happens’ bit of the diary, because we knew that s** would happen at some stage during the day, so we needed an hour or two in the diary to be able to deal with it.”
Hart says he found it “incredibly serious and it was incredibly disturbing and it was incredibly difficult at the time” to deal with, adding: “I compared the whips office in this book to a sort of A&E department where people came in, we patched them up, we sent them on their way.”
Asked if MPs were representative of the UK, Hart said: “Parliament is 650 individual members of Parliament drawn from society.
“It’s exactly what democracy is intended to be, which is a broad cross-section of people bringing with them all of the talents and frailties of human life.
“To that extent is it so different from a newsroom or is it so different from a big from a big factory?”
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