"He was the future once": is youth good or bad?
We seem to be conflicted about young MPs, admiring their vigour and idealism but worrying about their callow and reckless nature: it will all balance out in the end
When the House of Commons returns from its summer adjournment on Monday 4 September, three new Members of Parliament, victors of by-elections held on the last sitting day in July, will seek to swear the Oath of Allegiance or make a solemn affirmation. If they swear on a religious text—a selection of the most frequently required can be found inside the despatch box on the government side of the House—they must hold it in their uplifted hand, or else swear “in the Scottish manner”, hand held up but not holding the text. Whether a Member swears or affirms, he or she must do so in English at least at first, though it is now permissible to repeat the oath or affirmation in Welsh, Gaelic or Cornish.
The three debutants, Sarah Dyke (Lib Dem, Somerton and Frome), Keir Mather (Lab, Selby and Ainsty) and Steve Tuckwell (Con, Uxbridge and South Ruislip), will be keen to get their names on the register (or rather the Test Roll, the parchment book in which Members of Parliament are listed), because until they do so, they cannot take their seats, speak or vote in the House or, importantly, receive their salary. In that last respect it was unfortunate that the by-elections were held just as the House adjourned for the summer and the new Members have had to spend the summer without responsibility but also without remuneration. But for one of them, Keir Mather, there is the additional (informal and unpaid) title of Baby of the House, that is, the youngest Member of the Commons.
Mather was the subject of a (rather kid-gloved) profile in Saturday’s Times Magazine by Robert Crampton. He is 25 years old; readers anything like my age will feel a stab of dismay that he remembers but was not really old enough to care about the 2010 general election which saw Gordon Brown ejected in slow motion from Downing Street and the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition. Mather succeeds, or rather undercuts, his 26-year-old Labour colleague Nadia Whittome, the Member for Nottingham East since 2019; before her was Mhairi Black, SNP MP for Paisley and Renfrewshire South (born 1994); Pamela Nash, Labour MP for Airdrie and Shotts (born 1984); and Chloe Smith, Conservative MP for Norwich North (born 1982), who is now at the other end of parliamentary career and will leave the Commons next year. But then, we must remember that the prime minister was only born in 1980.
We are often dazzled by prodigious youth: among former babies of the House we can see Liberal Democrat grandees and one-time leaders Jo Swinson, Charles Kennedy and David Steel; current shadow foreign secretary David Lammy; Conservative cabinet minister, select committee chairman and one-time aspirant speaker of the House of Commons Paul Channon; Labour heavyweights Roy Jenkins and Tony Benn; and a Conservative MP who was once a smooth, popular and well-regarded rising star, John Profumo, before his flexible attitude to truth and integrity brought him low.
(One extraordinary man, now largely forgotten to history, had the distinction of beginning his career as Baby of the House and ending it as Father of the House, the Member with the longest continuous service: Edward Turnour, 6th Earl Winterton. Initially using the courtesy title Viscount Turnour before succeeding his father in an Irish peerage which did not disqualify him as an MP, he sat for Horsham for 47 years, from 1904 to 1951. He spiralled gently and ineffectively up the political ladder, serving twice (1922-24, 1924-29) as under-secretary of state for India; he was not initially preferred by the National government, but flitted briefly through the cabinet as chancellor of then Duchy of Lancaster then paymaster-general. Standing six-foot-four and retaining the high-buttoned jackets and narrow trousers of his Edwardian youth, he was a fairly useless minister and a dismal performer at the despatch box. Sir Henry Channon described him as an “absurd dissenting nanny goat”, while the Dictionary of National Biography primly noted that he exhibited “all the virtues of and some of the supposed vices of the aristocrat in politics”. He was a near-fanatical hunter of foxes and a similarly committed opponent of legalising what he called the “filthy, disgusting, unnatural vice of homosexuality”.)
Keir Mather’s youth was seized on a weapon after his by-election triumph by the veterans’ minister Johnny Mercer, who remarked on Sky News that while the injection of fresh blood into politics was always welcome, “I think we mustn’t become a repeat of The Inbetweeners, you have got to have people who have done stuff”. Mercer added that Mather had been at university longer than he had been in employment, and concluded that his youth and lack of life experience would make him easily manipulated by his party and keep him as an on-message automaton. It did not entirely defang Mercer’s attack that one of Mather’s prominent defenders later that day was his mother.
This line of attack is not unique to Mather. When his predecessor as Baby of the House, Nadia Whittome, announced in May 2021 that she would be taking some time away from her parliamentary duties after being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, some critics felt it was a demonstration of emotional fragility characteristic of Generation Z. The right-wing political website Guido Fawkes, owned by British/Irish libertarian gadfly Paul Staines, pulled no punches.
Guido has no insight into what ails the youngest MP in parliament, Nadia Whittome, such that she needs to take a break from parliament due to PTSD. Parliament may be daunting though nothing akin to the trenches of the First World War. The shells lobbed on social media may ruin your day, they don’t kill. The human mind however can be fragile and politics is a contact sport, which social media makes feel like a 24/7 activity. Taking a break may help one gain more perspective. Having more years of life experience outside the political crucible might just give aspiring politicians more much-needed perspective.
Before Whittome, Mhairi Black, elected in 2015 at the age of 20 after unexpectedly defeating Labour cabinet minister Douglas Alexander, was accused of lacking judgement and maturity, especially when the media found remarks she had made on social media in her teens which displayed the wisdom one would expect of someone of her age. She had spoken rather floridly of her attachment to Partick Thistle Football Club, as well as saying flippantly she wanted to “stick the nut” on Labour councillors in her area.
(As a non-playing observer, I do have to reflect wryly on the fact that one of Black’s great supporters and sources of sympathy in those difficult early days was the SNP Member for Banff and Buchan, Dr Eilidh Whiteford, a very warm and good-natured academic who had, however, withdrawn from the business of the House of Commons Scottish Affairs Committee in 2011. Her casus belli was a remark the chair, Labour’s Ian Davidson, had made about her having “had a doing” (his version) or being in line for “getting a doing” (her version) for the disclosure of private deliberations within the committee. Eilidh felt that Davidson was threatening her and the SNP’s Westminster leader at the time, Angus Robertson, made a formal complaint to the speaker.
I took over as clerk of the committee in 2012, by which time the SNP had suspended all participation, and I do not know what exactly was said by anyone. Eilidh genuinely felt threatened and upset by Davidson’s words, which she interpreted in a misogynist and bullying way, and he eventually apologised in a somewhat roundabout way, though that did not satisfy the SNP who wanted him to resign; but it is only fair to note that other members of the committee, Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat, supported Davidson’s recollection of events and denied having witnessed any form of threat or intimidation. The whole saga does, at least, indicate that different constructions can be put on the same form of words, and while one can reasonably expect more wisdom and circumspection from the chair of a select committee than a teenage party activist, these matters are rarely clean-cut and without any possibility of misinterpretation. But I digress.)
Although some politicians are, fairly or not, criticised for unusual youth, I don’t think it’s wholly a disadvantage. It is true, very basically, that being strikingly young, which, for Members of Parliament, probably means under 30, is a way of getting noticed. Politics leans heavily on visibility, on being able to stand out from the crowd, and that is true at every level: prospective parliamentary candidates jostle to be memorable and emerge from the background to become the nominee; nominees try to differentiate themselves from the their opponents and become the MP; MPs fight amongst themselves to look like promising ministerial material; ministers then turn on the other to seek to climb the ranks, and so on.
Whether you’re trying to keep yourself at the forefront of the minds of a selection panel or your party’s chief whip in the House of Commons, you should never underestimate the importance of having a memorable charateristic, a shtick, a calling card. It might be almost any attribute, from an ideological position, like Steve Baker’s enthusiasm for returning to the gold standard, to a sartorial marker like the sleekly tailored suits former Labour MP Chuku Umunna used to wear (he is dressed by my friend Alexandra Wood, one of Savile Row’s first female tailors). If fate has given you youth as a distinguishing characteristic, you would be ungrateful to ignore it and unwise not to exploit it.
There is some evidence to suggest this works. The current average age of the House of Commons is about 51, so if you are nearer half that you will stand out. Think about Dehenna Davison (Con, Bishop Auckland), elected in 2019 at the age of 26 and given a ministerial position after less than three years in the House (albeit she has decided to stand down next year). Or think of Chloe Smith, elected at 27 and made a Treasury minister two years later (albeit under David Cameron’s mistaken belief that she was an accountant rather than a management consultant). On the other side of the House, Chris Leslie won Shipley for Labour in 1997 when he was only 24 and joined the ministerial strength of the Cabinet Office, Whitehall’s central nervous system, before he turned 30. Likewise, David Lammy, mentioned above, joined the House at a by-election when he was only 27 and became minister for public health just a few months before his 30th birthday.
I tend to think there is also—at least sometimes—a tendency for very young politicians to be treated more gently by the media than their more grizzled colleagues. Of course the opposite can be true, but young MPs often attract the attention of journalists outside the strictly political arena: we seem to have an endless capacity at wondering at the fact that a Member of Parliament can have interests or hobbies unrelated to their political lives, one with which we can identify. Dr Stella Creasy, an academically gifted and good-looking young woman, was elected as Labour MP for Walthamstow just after her 33rd birthday, and, perhaps because she shares a demographic with a lot of political and other journalists (and me: she is only six months older than I am), she is able to attract publicity for non-political reasons, such as her passion for indie music. In 2012 she wrote the sleeve notes for a vinyl issue of Seamonsters by the Wedding Present, and it is a quirkier and more relatable achievement than, say, Dame Angela Eagle’s authorship of The New Serfdom, a 2018 work on social justice and democratic socialism.
The Times profile of Mather this weekend was a case in point. His achievement in overturning Nigel Adams’s majority of 20,000 in Selby and Ainsty is certainly remarkable and speaks to formidable campaigning and communications skills, but would he have been sympathetically profiled in a weekend supplement by a journalist who was from outside the political commentariat (though the son of a Labour MEP) and who had grown up in the same part of the country (and in a similar Labour tradition) if he had been 45 rather than 25? Would they have provided, if they had run a feature at all, a ready-made ally? It seems unlikely to me. Before he even takes his seat, Mather has achieved a degree of what the advertising industry calls “cut through” and a significant level of sympathetic coverage which derives, if we are honest, from his youth.
It is worth noting one more advantage which most younger MPs will enjoy over the older colleagues: energy. While the House of Commons no longer sits very late very often—it only regularly sits till 10.30 pm on one day a week, Monday, and continuing beyond midnight is now vanishingly rare—nonetheless the business of politics can involve a punishing schedule, with dozens of meetings requiring shifts of mental gear and very few opportunities to catch your breath in between. It is true that the formal obligations on MPs are not onerous, but there are hardly any Members who perform the bare minimum, and it is much more likely than an MP, especially an ambitious one, will try to stretch the fixed hours of the day to accommodate as much as possible. Most people begin to experience the beginning of a decline in their energy levels in their mid-30s, so to have a decade of parliamentary life before that is even a prospect is no small advantage.
Should we seek to have more young Members of Parliament? For those who regard absolute statistical representation as important, undoubtedly we should. The average age of the House of Commons is 51, whereas that of the UK as a whole is only 41. (Of course, one has to bear in mind that the average age of the populace goes from the most recent newborn baby to Ethel Caterham, a former army wife now living near Guildford who turns 114 later this month. Unless we are proposing to have MPs drawn from infants, children and the very old, we will never achieve nor would we want absolutely accurate representation. In terms of under-represented groups, I would be much more interested in working to find ways to allow more women and ethnic minorities to stand for election than I would those from, let’s say, 18 to 25.
I’m not against a periodic leavening of young MPs. In general I take the least prescriptive view on eligibility for membership of the House of Commons: I don’t believe in an artificially higher minimum age, I don’t support a maximum or retirement age and I’m utterly opposed to term limits. It is not a universal approach, of course; in the US, you must be over 25 to be elected to the House of Representatives and have reached 30 for the Senate, but American political institutions prize length of tenure very highly and often lean towards a sclerotic gerontocracy (as we might well see next November if an all-but 82-year-old incumbent takes a 78-year-old challenger for the presidency). And while Congress doesn’t have term limits, according to the Supreme Court’s Thornton decision in 1995, 15 state legislatures do. For what it’s worth, I think that if we place so much store by the democratic rights of the electorate, as we should in a free society, it is not then for the rules of the political club to limit their choice of representative outside certain basic qualifications.
Besides which, any limitation is arbitrary and (usually) chosen because it is an appealingly logical round number in our system of arithmetical calculation. This is not to say that I reject all the arguments people may adduce to support these ideas; I see that a politician who overstays his or her welcome can become stale and sterile, and that aged, long-term incumbents militate against the opportunities for young people to seek office. But there seem to be so many exceptions. Winston Churchill, for example, was 65 and had been an MP for 40 years when he was invited to take the office of prime minister after Neville Chamberlain reluctantly agreed to step down. Lord Hailsham of St Marylebone’s second term as lord chancellor (1979-87) took place in his mid-seventies. Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as president of the United States a few weeks short of his 70th birthday. As I say, I am not especially comfortable with the state imposing so many conditions to “protect” the electorate from itself; I would rather that judgement, and any consequences which flow from it, lie with the voters.
The fundaments of the issue, I think, are this. Our elected legislators are, in statistical terms, slightly older on average than their constituents. Given their role, that is not an unhappy outcome. Sometimes, however, we see candidates of unusual youth emerge and become MPs, sometimes on the basis of their talents and sometimes because circumstances turn out in an unexpected fashion, such as a candidate winning a seat which was not thought to be competitive. Young MPs have some disadvantages, such as a lack of experience of the world (which is an inevitable function of their age), or a certain recklessness of judgement which has been smoothed and polished in older men and women—though anyone who imagines that recklessness and unpredictability are the provinces only of the young should examine the career of Anthony Wedgwood Benn, as he once was.
In general, though, young MPs have a lot of advantages. They are seen as more relatable by some parts of the electorate, though the bull’s-eye is to come from the same age demographic as political journalists and therefore share with them a substantial cultural, social and professional hinterland and a more immediate sympathy and connection. For every older voter who complains of callowness and shallow life experience, there is another who feels a warmth and goodwill towards a young MP and invests them with a certain dynamism and glamour (yes, even in British politics). As simply as anything, young MPs have in their very youth a recognisable characteristic, a calling card, a prompt of their identity for the public consciousness. And it can be exploited as a connection with voters beyond the Westminster bubble, achieving that rare and precious cut-through.
So long as they remain rare, young legislators gain far more than they lose, in professional and political terms, from their age. I do not begrudge them that, just as I am not so flinty-faced as to stamp out a rare flicker of charity and goodwill towards politicians from the electorate.
I will observe one contrast, which I was unsure of raising. While Keir Mather, Nadia Whittome, Dehenna Davison, Mhairi Black and others have attracted praise and admiration from at least some sections of the political community, that generosity of spirit has been shriekingly obvious by its absence in the nomination to the House of Lords of Lord Gascoigne (40), Lord Houchen of High Leven (36), Lord Kempsall (31) and Baroness Owen of Alderley Edge (30). I make no argument for or against any of these people at this point, because that is not the point. But, as I wrote at the end of June, these are to an extent crocodile tears of fury. The young peers are condemned ostensibly because of their youth, because that suggests the motivation behind nominating them must have been shadowy and disreputable. But if MPs can carry out their functions in their 20s, and often gain plaudits for doing so, it cannot logically flow that peers may not; indeed, peers are making fewer decisions of finality, as the Commons will always, if necessary, prevail over the Lords.
Ah-but, came the response, MPs have been elected so that have a legitimacy which appointed peers do not. That is certainly true; not only true but desirable and necessary. Nonetheless, I don’t see how we can make a link between a mandate from the electorate, and the ability and focus to scrutinise legislation and hold the government to account. You can object to Boris Johnson’s nominees on any number of grounds, but if you think they are not fit people because of their age to sit in Parliament, then you really must be consistent and deplore the presence in the Commons of MPs in their 30s or even 20s. “What has Charlotte Owen ever done to deserve a seat in the Lords?” was a constant complaint. Well, in terms of professional standing and experience, more than Keir Mather. One or the other may be more talented, but that is not a function of their age.
While I’m sure he has no need of my sympathy, I do feel slightly sorry for Keir Mather. If the general pattern of dramatic by-election victories is repeated, Selby and Ainsty will tip back in the direction of the Conservatives and he will lose his seat. That will sting but he has all the time in the world to soothe his wounds, and (if that is his choice) to find a more ideologically sympathetic constituency, perhaps still close to his childhood home of Brough. If he may prove sometimes to lack a sense of caution or perspective, that is not a fatal flaw, and he will no doubt show qualities which act as a counterweight. Just the same, though, I wish Baroness Owen well, and hope she was either weathered or simply ignored some of the viler, cruder and more misogynistic barbs hurled at her in recent weeks.
Our legislative institutions represent a kind of mixed economy. Thanks in part to our de minimis restrictions on who may be candidates or nominees, they cover a substantial age spectrum, though of course other diversity metrics lag some way behind. We should welcome that, I think, while accepting that some young legislators may be exceptionally good and some may be unusually bad. Politics is a long game, so let the young people have a try-out from time to time and accept that the results will not be uniform. Certainly let’s not try to imagine that this is a major flaw in or challenge to our constitutional norms. Perhaps some Members of Parliament may begin to seek election young, serve one or two parliament before seeking a fresh challenge and perhaps even come back. In any event, let’s sit back and let things fall as they will. We will need energy for outrage a lot between now and the general election in 2024, so we may as well hoard it now and save exhausting ourselves in the end.
Thank you for this interesting read. I'm sure that Mhairi Black would be horrified to find out that you've mislabeled her here as a Rangers fan - she is in fact a very proud Patrick Thistle supporter.