by Rosa Prince
Two years later, when it became clear that there would be a by-election in the neighbouring seat of Brent East, Miss Teather found herself being ‘pestered’ again, and agreed to put her name forward for selection shortly before the death of the sitting Labour MP Paul Daisley was announced.
As in Finchley & Golders Green, the Liberal Democrats were in third place in Brent East, but it would prove to be a very different election, with a particularly fortuitous set of circumstances.
Not long before, and in the teeth of opposition from across the country, Tony Blair had taken Britain into war in Iraq. Unlike the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats had opposed the decision.
Miss Teather says:
I didn’t expect to win when I was selected, not at all. We were in third place, there was nothing going on, there was no campaigning, they hadn’t appointed an agent. Because it was an unwinnable seat, when Paul Daisley did die the entire campaign team were on holiday.
I understand that [Lord] Peter Mandelson [the former New Labour Cabinet minister and adviser] had advised Tony Blair to wait [to hold the by-election]. He thought that the public anger would calm down – and of course it didn’t.
It must have been about three weeks into the campaign [when] I thought: ‘I think we’ve got a chance.’ I had no idea before then that we might win. My best hope was that we would come second.
I chose to do then what I chose to do with all subsequent elections, which was not to think beyond election day and to focus entirely on election day and to work my socks off. We just solidly campaigned.
Miss Teather’s victory was one of the great by-election upsets of modern British politics, shocking Tony Blair and giving a huge boost to her party.
The attention was extraordinary, the entire country, it seemed, tuning in to watch as the 29-year-old, 4 ft 10 former scientist delivered a slap in the face to the New Labour monolith.
At the count in Brent East, Miss Teather was too modest to have written a victory speech until the very last moment. It would be her first experience of the dazzling glare of public attention – and she found it not to her taste. As the scale of her achievement became clear, a female journalist found her hiding away in the ladies’ lavatories:
It was quite overwhelming. And I had the most intense sense of responsibility. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I never really enjoyed being in the public eye. I don’t think I’d ever really thought that bit through.
It’s not that I hated the media, [it’s] the being at the centre of attention – I had never really considered that. It’s an odd thing about politics: you end up living completely vicariously through other people’s eyes. What becomes important is the perception of success.
I was aware even then that you represent something symbolic. It’s not really about you. That was one of the things I was hiding in the lavatories thinking about that night: ‘This is not really about me yet. What I do next really matters. This is a huge opportunity I have to make a difference, but this is not really about me, this is about a lot of other things.’
With another election likely within a year or two, Miss Teather was conscious that her time as an MP might be brief, and finding Parliament ‘weird’, she threw herself into constituency work.
Her first advice surgery proved to be a baptism of fire:
It’s indelibly printed on my soul I think. It was a total life-transforming experience. There must have been something like sixty people waiting at the Willesden Green Library Centre on that first Friday night, people from all over the world, in a thousand different states of distress. I had no idea what I was doing.
I was literally told story after story after story, all different in detail but all in a sense identical. They were all different stories of trauma. That evening I found my cause. I had a very strong sense of public service.
Miss Teather worked hard at the constituency and unexpectedly held the seat at the 2005 general election. When she came back to Parliament, she was promoted to the front bench. Given the nature of how she had become an MP, she was soon one of the most recognisable members of the party. But she was forced to put her high profile to unpalatable use less than a year after the election, when she joined colleagues in urging the departure of Charles Kennedy, the party leader whose judgment they felt had become impaired by alcohol. He was reluctant to leave and after weeks of machinations, it was Miss Teather’s intervention that proved to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. When she and a fellow frontbencher signed a letter saying they could no longer serve under Mr Kennedy’s leadership, he was gone by the end of the day:
By that stage, Charles was irrevocably wounded and I had a strong sense it just needed to be brought to a close.
Those things seem like they’re exciting until you actually get involved with them. What I remember from that period is [that] it was actually intensely painful for everybody concerned.
There was an enormous amount of soul searching going on behind the scenes about what the best way to do things would be.
And in the end, as always happens in politics, half of what came out ended up as it did because of one cock-up after another. People had great plans of doing something quietly and in a dignified way and politics just never works like that.
Miss Teather spent 2005 to 2010 in a variety of roles on the front bench, but always returned to the issues of housing, immigration and education. She was also preoccupied with securing the release of two constituents from Guantánamo Bay, who were finally freed in 2007.
In 2010, and following the abolition of her Brent East constituency, Miss Teather fought the new seat of Brent Central. She was not confident of victory, and despite the close nature of the polls nationally, and the not unlikely prospect of a coalition government, thoughts of a ministerial career were far from her mind:
There was a bit of a joke about some of my colleagues as we got towards the election that they were planning their government posts, but I really had no idea if I was even going to be elected.
Even after [the election when] I voted for the coalition, it still didn’t really occur to me that I’d be a minister. I went back into the constituency office the next day and my staff said: ‘Are you going to be a minister?’ And I said: ‘I really don’t know.’
Funnily enough, Nick [Clegg, the party leader and new Deputy Prime Minister] offered me the only job I would have wanted, which is to be in the Education Department. It was a similar experience personally as the experience of being elected, of an overwhelming sense of responsibility that I was very aware that you shoulder on your own.
To begin with, Miss Teather thrived in the new coalition government, even forming friendly relationships with her Conservative colleagues at the Department for Education.
But within two years she was brought to the brink of resignation. As a minister, she was required to support all government legislation, but felt unable to back provisions in the Welfare Reform Act of 2012, which resulted in benefits being capped.
Back in 2010, however, she found the new job a positive challenge, and felt a particular, personal satisfaction in bringing forward legislation to transform the teaching of children with special educational needs:
I have rather an odd educational background. I was very ill as a teenager [and] I missed four years of school so I suppose I have a particular affinity for children who, for one reason or another, had not found education an easy process.
I spent a lot of that time wheelchair-bound. For me it was a bit of a passion, that reform on special educational needs and disability.
The[n there was the] key work around the ending of child detention in the immigration system, which I negotiated. It was a tough old fight behind the scenes, my first bloodying in the coalition. It was one thing to get that into the coalition agreement, it was another to persuade the Home Secretary or, indeed, Home Office officials that this was doable in practice. They were pretty determined not to do it.
My relationship with [Education Secretary] Michael
Gove was actually extremely good. I found that I was able to have perfectly frank conversations with him about things that were important to my party and things that were red lines.
I had profound difficulties with a number of directions of travel [and] the way the government was going but it wasn’t all personally difficult. In the beginning it was OK. It got progressively more difficult during my time in government [but] in the beginning there was an enormous amount of goodwill.
The Welfare Reform Bill cropped up in April 2012 like the iceberg before the Titanic – and Miss Teather’s career was sunk:
It’s not just a question of the impact on individuals. For me it was about motivation and why we were doing it.
That policy was a deliberate policy focused on headlines. It didn’t save any money and it didn’t have any good effect and all the impacts were negative. That night [of the final vote] I had to respond to an adjournment debate from the front bench and I was absolutely 100 per cent convinced that I was resigning the next day.
I had a set of conditions, and they were that I was never going to vote in favour of it, I was never going to evangelise about the policy, I wanted concessions in terms of mitigating funding for those who were affected and I wanted a review of the policy after a period of time. And I got those concessions.
In a way, I’m quite sympathetic to the plight of Nick [Clegg] in this situation. We had had some quite big rows in private about what the concessions should be and what was acceptable as a changed policy, but Nick was actually significantly more sympathetic than many other colleagues.
And Nick was in quite a difficult position. He had a minister who had been saying for nine months that she wasn’t prepared to support this policy. He was doing his best to negotiate.
The process of trying to work out what you really think in that situation and what your red lines are was for me quite purgative in its way.
I properly examined myself and my own motivations for being in politics and it felt a little bit like I’d taken all the pieces of myself out and laid them out on a table. I’d discarded pieces along the way and when they went back in they [were] in a different order.
And it wasn’t that I wasn’t at peace with the decision that I’d made; I’d very carefully thought through what I thought were acceptable conditions, and I’d met them and I knew that I’d done the right thing to stay in, but I knew that I wasn’t the same human being that I was before.
I threw myself back into the work on special educational needs but I went away in Easter to see a friend who lives up in Cumbria and I moaned at her for about three hours and she said, ‘You don’t want to stand again, do you?’
And I said, ‘I don’t know.’ But then I realised I was exhausted and thought, ‘This is not actually a very good time.’ You shouldn’t make big decisions when you’re in such a state – that’s not wise.
There’s a short-term thing where you fling your toys out of the pram and you walk, and everyone parades you as some kind of hero briefly and that’s not very attractive. Because the truth is much more complicated than that – the truth isn’t very black and white. And people who think it is have never had a difficult decision to make and probably ought to think that the world is a bit more complicated than that. I focused on finishing the stuff on special educational needs but, ironically, I knew my decision to stay in was still going to result in my being sacked.
I was pretty confident that I would sacked in the reshuffle. I’d been a pain and for a brief period of time I’d brought quite a lot of things to a standstill.
If you’re leading a party and you’ve got stuff to do, you can’t really be dealing with that.
I’m more sympathetic to Nick than you might imagine. I can see from his point of view how it was a monumental draw on his time and I dare say they probably thought, ‘There are worse things than this coming down the line. Frankly, if she couldn’t stomach this, she [can’t] really be dealing with anything else.’ We’ve had profound disagreements [but], on a personal level, I’m hugely fond of Nick.
Having, she says, lost all personal ambition amid the drama of the welfare reform legislation, Teather had a quiet word with Clegg, telling him she would like to be left in her post in the Education Department when next he came to reshuffle his team of ministers. It was not to be.
In September 2012, he asked her to stand down from the government:
I was quite well prepared for it. I tabled the draft legislation the day before on special educational needs, I finished all my parliamentary questions the day before, I finished all the signing. I was ready for it.
There was a part of me that was hoping to carry on, because I really wanted to see the special educational needs legislation through. I was genuinely sad not to get to finish that because that was my work and I had started it. But that was a lesson in humility, to hand that over to someone else.
When I first left I thought again, ‘This is not a very good time to make a decision [about standing down from Parliament].’ So it felt a little bit like I’d had this decision pending for ages and it was never quite the right moment to really sit and examine it.
You shouldn’t examine it after a period when you’ve been utterly miserable because that’s just a really bad time to take a decision and you shouldn’t examine it immediately after you’ve been sacked from government, even if you’d been expecting it, because that’s also a really bad time to make a decision.
But I really did need to make a decision. I set myself a process … which is that I was going to go on retreat, which is what I did. If you’re religious, it has an aspect on everything you do. It’s integral to who I am and how I make such a sensitive decision.
And because I’d had that, kind of, I suppose, vocation, it was important to me that I made that decision in that kind of context if I was going to leave.
The first time I went on retreat to Loyola Hall, your meals are taken in silence and I could tell that somebody round the table at lunchtime had recognised [me] and I just thought: ‘There’s nothing you can do about it, because we’re all in silence. It doesn’t matter what you think because I don’t need to hear it.’
You have to hear what everybody thinks all the time [in Westminster], and [on retreat] you didn’t, which meant I could actually work out what I thought.
I felt completely constrained [by] that period inside government, and even worse after government, because the direction of travel changed after I left. I came away thinking that it was time to leave [but] at that stage I had no idea what to do next, literally no idea. It was very strange – a total blank sheet of paper.
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Sarah Teather: CV
Raised in Leicester; attended Cambridge University; worked as a charity worker for the Royal Society.
2001: Unsuccessfully fights Finchley & Golders Green
2003: Elected MP for Brent East at by-election; becomes ‘baby of the House’
2005: Becomes party spokesman on communities and local government
2006: Signs letter that results in leader Charles Kennedy quitting over his drinking; becomes education spokesman
2007: Helps secure release of constituent Jamil el-Banna from Guantánamo Bay; becomes business spokesman
2008: Becomes housing spokesman
2010: Elected MP for Brent Central following abolition of former constituency; becomes Children’s Minister
2012: Comes close to resigning over opposition to Welfare Reform Act; sacked in reshuffle; returns to back benches
2013: Announces she will stand down at 2015 general election
JACK STRAW
Jack Straw, sixty-eight, was Labour MP for Blackburn (1979–2015).
‘I still get shouted at on the Tube and called a war criminal – but I have to take the responsibility of Iraq.’
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How did you end up in Parliament?
Coming from a strong Labour family, [I got] the politics bug when I was thirteen at the 1955 election, reading one of the lea
flets I was having to deliver in the rain and thinking I’d rather be doing what the chap on the leaflet was doing, which was to become the Labour MP for what is now Epping Forest.
It’s a bit like youngsters wanting to play soccer for England. Given my background, a council maisonette in Essex … the prospect that I could go on from there to [Parliament] was really rather distant. But I really wanted to be a Member of Parliament. I had this romantic idea.
How did you feel on first becoming an MP?
Fantastically excited. All of a sudden I was a Member of Parliament. There was a hell of a wow factor for that.
I’d been here before [as an adviser], so I knew my way around. Making a maiden speech was a big deal. And in those days the whole focus of this place was on the chamber, because there weren’t any select committees. It was terrific. My mum was in seventh heaven.
Best of times?
I think the best of times was the period between ’94 and 2001 on the Home Affairs [brief]. We worked like stink on that programme. We did an astonishing amount of work. We were very well prepared.
Worst of times?
As the party was collapsing with the formation of the SDP in late January ’81, a few months after that I got this terrible infection that knocked out my ear. And I got very, very seriously depressed because there was a worry the other ear would go. And it seemed to become an allegory for the state of the Labour Party.
The other acutely bad moment was in October 1995 when I screwed up in a debate with [Home Secretary] Michael Howard. Almost everybody forgot about it straight away … but I remembered it. I wasn’t properly prepared. But the chronic period was in ’81. It was terrible. The poison that was around inside the party was awful.