For Winston Churchill it was the “black dog” – for others, nervous exhaustion. But whatever you call it, stress and politics existed as a natural pairing long before the arrival of Brexit or the coronavirus. These days, politicians are more willing to talk about the effect working in Westminster can have on their mental health. And there’s plenty to discuss.
A study in July found three out of four MPs probably suffer poor mental health. It’s not just elected politicians. In the past year, work-related stress, depression and anxiety among civil servants increased by 45 per cent – with workloads and pressure blamed for the rise.
Just as three years of infighting and government meltdown over Brexit began to draw to a close, the coronavirus pandemic serves as another reminder of the relentless, high-stakes nature of politics. Westminster can act as a Petri dish for strain on one’s performance, health and family. MPs are catapulted into a high-up job without any training that also takes them away from family and friends for four days a week.
“When you work in politics you don’t realise how bad it is for your mental health,” admits Jason Stein – a former special advisor to Amber Rudd and a spokesman for Liz Truss – who left government in 2019. “You sleep less and you probably drink more – it’s a constantly stressful situation. You are busier than in any other job and when you do have time off you spend it with people also working in Westminster.”
Stein worked in government at a time when it became the norm to see government aides use Westminster watering holes as second homes and paranoia was rampant among cabinet ministers as they battled over Brexit. “At one point I thought my phone had been bugged,” he admits. “I wasn’t the only one.”
“The truth is, being an MP is a stressful job and I think the last three years, with Brexit, it’s been particularly challenging for a lot of colleagues,” says Tracey Crouch, a former minister who has previously spoken about her own mental health challenges. “But as somebody who has suffered from anxiety and depression while being an MP, I don’t think of it as any different to an ordinary job, with the same stresses you have in any other business, it’s just that we deal with it in a very public way.”
Former Labour MP Luciana Berger, who quit the party after suffering anti-Semitic abuse, says the public nature of the job adds to the strain. “You can never be wholly private. You’re accessible, you’re on TV all the time, your voting records are available. I think it’s very important MPs have surgeries that are open every week, but it means you’re constantly available and public.”
The pressure is particularly great in frontline politics – as Amber Rudd discovered when she became home secretary in 2016, a job she soon discovered was “endless”. “If you’re somebody who has mental health issues, politics is going to make them more challenging, because everything about politics – and the higher up the totem pole you get, the more this is – is designed to challenge you and for you to question whether you’re doing the right thing the whole time,” Rudd says.
“People say to me, ‘Did you get training? Did you get support?’ No. It was straight in and expectations are high from yourself and everybody. It’s quite difficult to get the judgement right of leading the team, holding your nerve and showing empathy but not weakness. All these things and you just have to go with your instinct I’m afraid.”
Instinct wasn’t enough for Rudd, who resigned in the wake of the Windrush immigration scandal after she accidentally misled MPs over whether the Home Office had removal targets. “I prioritised domestic abuse and events that came at me – the terrorism events – but, of course, I didn’t prioritise immigration. My eye was not on that ball, so I would say very candidly that I missed it,” she says with hindsight. “There’s one thing I learnt, which is that good government involves experienced cabinet ministers.”
One person who also has personal experience of living through a political crisis is Nick Timothy, Theresa May’s aide in the Home Office and Number Ten. “I wouldn’t say my mental health was on the line, but trying to get things done in a department is an incredibly stressful thing – and there were definite consequences to that. I mean, literally my hair fell out in the Home Office – my dad has more than me,” he says of his time in government.
For Timothy, the worst came after he left in the aftermath of the disastrous 2017 snap election in which the Tories’ lost their majority – and the manifesto he wrote was squarely blamed. Timothy has since written a book – Remaking One Nation: The Future Of Conservatism – in which he reveals the mental toll the episode and negative publicity had on him. At points, he would find himself in physical pain and believing his family would be better off without him.
“I think it’s important that people understand that in the middle of these shitstorms there are individuals with families and there are very human consequences,” he tells me. “There’s a ratchet effect in politics. Criticism might start off as completely legitimate, but within not many iterations of that narrative all of a sudden you can become evil and toxic.”
While this may paint a bleak picture of politics, every person spoken to for this piece also describes their experience of being a cog in the machine as an honour. “When I came in in 2010 it wasn’t anywhere close to being as toxic as it was when I left in 2019,” says Berger. “But I would do it all again for all the challenges that came with it. I don’t regret it and it was difficult, but the positives outweigh the challenges.”
It follows that the conversation is now about how to help those affected cope better with the demands of the job. Sometimes that can simply mean saying no. Crouch turned down an offer to serve in Boris Johnson’s cabinet to focus on her young family. “Every parent has some sort of guilt about not being there for their children. I’m no different in that respect, but I also have an opportunity to make a decision on how involved I want to be,” she says of the decision.
She thinks that for all the problems MPs may face, they actually have it better than a lot of people. “I think we get better support – we are lucky enough to have support here for us,” Crouch says. “The occupational help here is good: we have a doctor on site and access to therapy if we need it.”
So, how should an individual best cope with a high-stress job? There’s a consensus that exercise can be key. “I used to go to the gym but it was always slightly alarming when the protection officer was on the running machine next to me,” says Rudd. “I would go to the theatre, as I thought you couldn’t really be interrupted there, but it turned out I was wrong – I did get called out once or twice.”
In his lunch break, the health secretary Matt Hancock boxes. And he’s famed in Westminster for making his staff take a similar approach; when they’re with him they all take the stairs to the ninth floor the department is on. Shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry has her own unique balance: “Cycling helps quite a lot – but so do the Silk Cuts and the gin.”
Exercise aside, Crouch says that the most important act of self-care can simply be MPs accepting they’re not superhuman and can be vulnerable. “I don’t necessarily think we’re any different to other organisations. We are in the public mind, but we also fall in public and that’s no different to a professional sports player or newsreader, so actually you have to remember that you’re not special. I think sometimes the problem colleagues have is that they think we’re extraordinarily special and actually we’re no different to the rest of the world.”
Mental Health At Work is an online support network, curated by the charity Mind and funded by the Duke and Duchess Of Cambridge’s Heads Together campaign, which delivers relevant resources for professionals. mentalhealthatwork.org.uk
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