A prime minister, a plotter and others say farewell as British MPs

Many mps, particularly from the Conservative Party, will lose their seats in the election on July 4th. But another 132 are stepping down. Some of those retiring have health problems; others dislike the job, dread a long spell in opposition or reckon they would lose. A few are well-known. Others are not, but they should be. Here is our pick of the crop.

In a not terribly strong field, Michael Gove has been the Conservative Party’s most effective minister of the past decade and a half. He pushed through colossal education reforms, which removed schools from local-authority control. England’s relative improvement in international maths and reading tests suggests they have worked. During a two-year stint in the agriculture ministry, Mr Gove laid plans for farmers to be paid not for cultivating land, as they had been for decades, but for delivering public goods like trees and bird-nesting sites. Despite loud grumbling from growers, his successors have stuck to it.

The temperamental opposite of the gregarious Mr Gove, Theresa May ran the Home Office like a hermit kingdom in the early 2010s. She attempted to hit an impossible target set by the then prime minister, David Cameron, to slash net immigration to the tens of thousands by cracking down on foreign students and creating a “hostile environment” for illegal immigrants. The hostile environment trapped some elderly Caribbean migrants who had a perfect right to be in Britain. Yet Mrs May could be principled and fearless. She castigated the police for racial profiling and infuriated them by defending budget cuts.

Her spell as prime minister, from 2016 to 2019, was among the most turbulent in the history of the office. Perhaps nobody could have charted a sensible course between aggrieved Remainers and headbanging Eurosceptics, but somebody with Mrs May’s lack of imagination and charm stood no chance. Disastrously, she triggered Article 50, which started the clock on Britain’s withdrawal from the eu, before Britain knew what kind of relationship it wanted. She tried to win a bigger parliamentary majority by calling a general election in 2017, and ended up with none.

If anybody could make Mrs May seem personable, it would be another Conservative mp, Dominic Raab. Civil servants complained about his behaviour as a minister, triggering a report that described his “interruptive style” and “somewhat absolutist approach”. He promptly stepped away from front-rank politics. As foreign secretary, though, Mr Raab did something that will change Britain permanently. In 2020, as the Chinese Communist Party prepared to enact a security law, he announced a special visa scheme that would allow many Hong Kongers to move to Britain and become citizens. More than 200,000 visas have been issued so far. If a Raab statue goes up in a British suburb at some point, do not be surprised.

Freedom of a different kind was the goal of another Tory, Sir Bill Cash. The son of a captain who was killed in Normandy in 1944, Sir Bill voted for Britain to remain in the European Community in 1975. But he then turned against the European project with the fervour of a convert. He was a leading “Maastricht rebel” in the early 1990s and made a thorough nuisance of himself over the following decades by analysing the multitudinous threats to British sovereignty (as he saw it) that emanated from Brussels. Now that Britain has left the eu, he can retire happy.

In 1982 four men appeared on television to debate politics. Two of them were associated with Militant, a far-left group that was rapidly gaining ground in the Labour Party. On the opposing side was a man with a red beard and glasses that made his eyes look tiny. Ignoring jeers from the crowd, he argued that Militant was a “conspiratorial Trotskyist organisation” that despised democracy. Its members were “parasites” on the Labour Party. They ought to set up their own party—which, he predicted, would receive the sort of “derisory vote” that such extremists always did.

The man was John Spellar, a trade unionist who became a Labour mp in the West Midlands. He fought Militant and its ilk both openly and stealthily, organising secret meetings with sympathetic Labour figures. His enthusiasm for manoeuvring against the far left could cause embarrassment. But Mr Spellar helped clear the way for moderates such as Sir Tony Blair and Sir Keir Starmer to win power. Every party needs people like him.

In the early 2000s the far right, in the shape of the British National Party, posed a bigger threat to mainstream politics than the far left. That vile outfit managed to win a dozen council seats in Barking and Dagenham, in east London, where the Labour mp was Dame Margaret Hodge. She responded by inviting her constituents for tea and biscuits, in the belief that people who feel ignored are easier prey for extremists. Later she confronted Labour’s leader, Jeremy Corbyn, over antisemitism.

In 2010 Dame Margaret became chair of the Public Accounts Committee. It was a moment of strutting power for select committees, which had just acquired elected chairs and often seemed more exciting than the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government. She hauled in executives from Amazon, Google and Starbucks, and demanded to know why they paid so little corporation tax in Britain. She needled, interrupted and told witnesses that their stories were implausible; later, she explained that she had been channelling her tough-talking constituents in Barking. It is hard to imagine her settling into a peaceful retirement.■

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