Think before you post

What an ill-judged blog post tells us about political priorities

The first time I can remember doing anything remotely impactful as a new-ish Labour policy officer back in 2008 (I was new-ish, and New Labour was not really new-ish any more) was when I noticed something someone shouldn’t have written. It was my job at the time to read everything then-shadow Health Secretary Andrew Lansley wrote. Mostly, this was very dull. But on one occasion, he wrote a blog post on the Conservative Party website for an audience that would have been zero if it hadn’t been for me.

“Interestingly, on many counts, recession can be good for us”, wrote Lansley. “People tend to smoke less, drink less alcohol, eat less rich food and spend more time at home with their families”. I read this, clocked that it was not a particularly wise thing for Lansley to have written and passed the quote up the line, and within a few hours the news that a top Tory was pro-recession (yes, I know he was trying to say something more complicated than that) was being widely reported, Lansley had apologised and the blog post had been deleted.

The point of this anecdote is less to big myself up,¹ and more to highlight that the danger of writing something is that someone might read it. One of the many reasons Lansley shouldn’t have written that blog post was that - unless it accidentally said something silly, which as it turned out it did - it never had a chance of having more than a tiny readership, and so the effort-reward ratio was poor.² This is particularly the case given that one of the tiny readership was always going to be someone paid by the Labour Party to check if it accidentally said something silly, which as it turned out it did.

If politicians are so often bland, it’s because the alternative is to be interesting. And there are people whose job it is to notice if you say something interesting.

Former Tory minister George Freeman wrote something interesting last week. Too interesting. He wrote on his new Substack that he had resigned from his ministerial job “because my mortgage rises this month from £800pcm to £2000, which I simply couldn’t afford to pay on a ministerial salary”. I don’t know whether the first person to notice that he had said this was a Labour staffer whose job it is to notice this kind of thing, or someone else, but somehow or other the news has reached a wider readership than the subscribers of Innovation Nation, “a newsletter about Building a Science Superpower”.

The reason this is interesting is that ministerial salaries are, in the grand scheme of things, quite large. As a junior minister, Freeman reportedly earned around £118,300. According to an online tool being heavily advertised to me on Twitter by The Daily Telegraph,³ which I filled in pretending to be a pre-resignation George Freeman, that is more than 97% of people in Britain (strictly speaking, it’s more than 97% of the people who earn enough to pay income tax; people earning less than £12,570 a year don’t even count as part of the population you might be richer than so far as the Daily Telegraph is concerned).

Now, I don’t say this to call into question Freeman’s claim that he can’t afford his increased mortgage. £1,200 extra per month is a big chunk of almost anyone’s money, and I can well believe that finding it is a stretch for him, even if it would be even more of a stretch for most other people.

I am not convinced, though, by Freeman’s argument that, given this additional cost, “We’re in danger of making politics something only Hedge Funder Donors, young spin doctors and failed trade unionists can afford to do”. For one thing, one of these things is not like the others (Hedge Funder Donors do, presumably, have lots of money; I can tell you from experience that young spin doctors earn a hell of a lot less than £118,300 a year, and “failed trade unionists” looks like a political attack that’s found its way here from an argument that’s not about rich people).

For another, more important thing, looking at this (real) problem and thinking about it in terms of barriers to access to a political career is to miss the wood for the trees. The real story here is not that it’s hard being an MP. The real story here is that, all of a sudden, within the last year or so, someone earning a six-figure salary couldn’t afford to pay his mortgage. And another way of telling that story is: oh boy.

There are a lot more people who are finding that they suddenly can’t pay their mortgages than there are people who have unfulfilled ambitions to hold political office. Most of those people (for the sake of argument, let’s say 97% of them) earn less than George Freeman did. As George Osborne might have put it, we are all in this together. And that’s the problem. Freeman has noticed the personal and missed the political.

In his Substack post, Freeman lists “the progress, successes and key reforms I’ve been lucky enough to be part of”:

Shaping our Life Science Industrial Strategy to

Founding GEL, 

Launching the Dementia Research Institute,

Establishing DSIT & the S+T Framework,

Negotiating our Horizon ReAssociation and

S+T partnerships with Israel , Switzerland and Japan ,

Establishing ARIA and

Launching our Fusion Industrial strategy and  £2.5bn Engineering Biology and Quantum programs) 

I admit that I don’t know what all of these are, but look, they sound impressive and I’m sure they’re important to him. And I’m prepared, for the sake of argument, to allow both that they are achievements he should be personally proud of and things for which the Conservative government deserves credit. In the end, though, for the minister responsible for them, they weighed less heavily than the fact that his mortgage was rising from £800 to £2,000 a month.

The fact that Conservative achievements count for less than the state of the economy and the cost of living, and that when you can’t afford your mortgage it’s hard to care about positive tweaks to government policy, is an important political insight. But - as even he might now acknowledge - it’s not one that George Freeman should have written down.

A reminder that The Election Tricycle, a new podcast following this year’s elections in India, the USA and the UK presented by Emily Tamkin, Rohan Venkat and me, launched last week and you can listen to it, as they say, wherever you get your podcasts (including on Spotify, Apple and Acast). There will be another episode this week, and indeed every week until we stop. Do please listen, subscribe and so on.

1. One of the many reasons this is not written to big myself up is that while it was clearly embarrassing for Lansley, it was not career-ending for him, or election-losing, or massive-and-pointless-NHS-reorganisation-preventing, and so there are limits to how proud I can be of myself.

2. I can’t believe I just wrote that you shouldn’t write blog posts if they’re only going to have a tiny readership and then carried on writing this blog post.

3. They’re advertising it with this baffling graphic, in which the stages of wealth range from “small car” to “yacht” with the median earner being a horse, for some reason.