Her Majesty’s Lord Chancellor for England and Wales flashed up on my phone. He wasn’t in some ancient part of Parliament, clad in the traditional robes and ceremonial wig, intoning with expertise on an obscure point of law. Instead, the Right Honorable Sir Robert Buckland KC MP was calling from the Mickey Mouse Theatre at Disney World in Florida, besporting a cap, shorts and t-shirt, valiantly battling the humidity.
Robert’s wife and two teenage children patiently waited for the phone call to finish so they could get back on the teacups. It turned out to be one of many interruptions to an annual holiday that was eventually cut short because of a political crisis now lost in the sands of time.
As Robert found out just days into his career as a Cabinet minister, a member of the government is never truly on holiday. Days later, Boris Johnson’s chief of staff Dominic Cummings told us special advisers, weary from the relentlessness of the 2019 election campaign and, in some cases, the madness that was the Theresa May administration, that we were to cancel all holidays that summer. God forbid anyone in Westminster, especially in a new administration, take a break.
Just as the sun comes out each summer, so does the criticism. Today, Lee Anderson, the Reform UK MP, is slamming Prime Minister Andy Burnham for daring to go on a “jolly” with his family. “Two weeks into the job and Andy Burnham has already had enough,” thunders Anderson. “After dropping a number of unfunded commitments and overseeing over 2,000 illegal migrants breaking into our country he’s bunked off for a jolly abroad. This isn’t a Prime Minister that’s serious about leading.”
I have worked with some seriously workaholic politicians. Former prime minister Rishi Sunak called in his advisers and officials for 8.30am meetings on a Sunday morning when he was chancellor. One of my old bosses was frequently on the phone after midnight. When foreign secretary, Dominic Raab was also a workaholic, but took his relentless focus on his work to other parts of his life, slotting in a sacrosanct, immovable “gym time” to his diary, his staff under strict instructions never to move it. I’m not sure any of this made either of them better at governing.
Yes, the Prime Minister has only been in Downing Street a couple of weeks and perhaps it is curious he is choosing this early point to take a holiday. But it is also the summer, Parliament is in recess and Burnham – whether you agree with what he has announced or not – has put forward a raft of policy.
Margaret Thatcher famously hated holidays and took them under duress. She also survived on very little sleep. Theresa May takes the same walking holiday in Switzerland each year. Harold Wilson loved sailing off his beloved Isles of Scilly, something which endeared him to the public and made him seem more relatable.
Harold Wilson relaxes on the Isles of Scilly in 1963 (Photo: WATFORD/Mirrorpix/Mirrorpix via Getty Images)Yes, there are times when politicians should cut their holidays short, as crises develop. The aforementioned Raab was foreign secretary when the Taliban was advancing on Kabul five years ago. He admitted in subsequent interviews that “with hindsight”, he should have come back to the UK earlier from his family break abroad. His opponents accused him of “lounging on the beach” as Kabul fell, paddleboarding in the face of a crisis. Raab denied this, saying he couldn’t have been paddleboarding because “the sea was closed”.
The fact is that senior politicians – who I have seen up close as special adviser to four of them in four departments – live incredibly busy, demanding lives. Whether they are good at governing or not, whether they are nice people or not, the demands are great. They make sacrifices with friendships, family time, hobbies and having a private life – I remember one Labour MP telling me: “I can’t have an argument with my boyfriend in Sainsbury’s because someone will film it and put it online.”
Their kids act up, they have financial worries, they argue with their spouses and they have bad days like the rest of us. The scrutiny we place them under puts good people off entering politics and slagging off politicians for going on holiday isn’t going to help us get the right politicians; it is only going to deter good people.
Yes, there are harder jobs than being a politician – they’re not nurses on their feet all day, farmers up at the crack of dawn to spread slurry, or carers on minimum wage doing the difficult role of looking after the elderly. So perhaps the smallest of violins is striking up an aria, but politicians deserve a break too. It might even make them better at their job. And that’s good for all of us.
Peter Cardwell is a presenter on Talk and the author of The Secret Life of Special Advisers. His second book, Political Animals, is out in paperback on 1 September
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