ON BEING A MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT
Stit,—'When you become a Member of Parliament,' writes David Price, 'you cease virtually to have any private life at all.' True or untrue? Untrue. 'You gradually lose touch with most of your outside friends': untrue. You can never plan your life from one week to the next': untrue. 'On five days a week you are doing well if you get home by eleven o'clock at night': for five read two. 'ft takes a very strong marriage to survive the strain': Good heavens! Mowing for essential expenses, an MP 'is paid slightly less than a manual labourer': a monstrous piece of special accountancy. 'Members have no opportunity to think, to read, to converse, to travel or even to rest': but these are their five main
activities; they do little else. • A legend is growing, the legend that MPs arc de- pressed. overworked and unconcerned with the things that really matter. It isn't true, but its reitera- tion will make it come true. Lively people will not enter the House of Commons if they think it dull. How can it be dull when almost anything that can happen to anyone is debatable in Parliament, when one associates daily with men who have great power in their hands, and when the place closes down com- pletely for five months in the year? A catalogue of lawyers' or doctors' grievances could be made to sound just as forbidding and with more reason : long hours, drudgery, ungrateful clients and patients, 'your time is not your own,' cramped chambers and surgeries. But lawyers and doctors take these things in their stride. So does David Price. except when he is out-tapering Taper. No back-bench Member has made better use of his opportunities than he has. He loves the place, and he finds it stimulating because he is himself a stimulating person. Why this pretence that he finds it almost intolerable?—Yours faithfully,
Previous page
