JOHN MACLEOD: Sacked on live TV as folk cheer... losing your seat as an MP is a brutally chastening experience

It was around half two on Friday morning, as the gush of general election results became a torrent, when my mobile pinged.

It was my outgoing MP, Angus MacNeil. Though the Western Isles count had hours to go – a little plane had yet to make the dash to collect votes from Uist and Barra – he confided bluntly he had lost. ‘3rd, probs – Labour over 50 per cent.’

In fact, our new MP fell just short of that absolute majority and, in subsequent and majestic Highland dignity, Angus declined to be interviewed along oh-how-I pity-me lines about his redundancy.

The result, for many of us, was a shock. Angus had dominated the ground war, many local SNP stalwarts publicly rooted for his run as an independent, and he had so wiped the floor at several debates that his chief opponent declined to do any more of them.

But when the political tide turns remorselessly against you, naught availeth, and the wider stats of the night suggest that, even had MacNeil remained the official SNP candidate, it would not have saved him.

Chipper, upbeat and rather enjoying relief from the exhausting, largely thankless job of representing a huge Highlands and Islands constituency, Angus MacNeil will be OK.

Still only 52, he is young enough to enjoy, say, a career in Gaelic broadcasting or even resume his pre-2005 career as a teacher.

But, amidst the excitement of a new government and the colourful cohorts of the recast Opposition, it is too easy to overlook the quiet human tragedy of Friday morning.

Hundreds of MPs lost their seats: each employed two or three staff who, likewise, find themselves suddenly jobless.

On Tuesday, many were back in Westminster clearing out their offices – after the quiet small-hours horror of being sacked, live on television, as at least half the people in the room were cheering.

Only in very recent years has Parliament addressed the delicate problem of ‘non-returned Members’, to use the exquisite euphemism – after decades when men and women, shorn suddenly of their last name of MP, have been known to trudge into their local job centre because they could not think of anywhere else to go.

These days, the House of Commons lays on ‘advice on HR, security, pensions and their health and wellbeing’. They and their staff have 12 months of access to a support service offering counselling and financial advice.

There is also a career transition scheme being delivered by Right Management Ltd which will offer them ‘career planning, coaching and CV writing.’

If one looks back to the last comparable extinction event for the SNP – nine of its defending MPs lost their seats in 1979 – the tale is sobering.

Weeks after losing her Moray and Nairn redoubt, Winnie Ewing won the Highlands and Islands division in the first direct election to the European Parliament and reinvented herself as ‘Madame Ecosse’ for the next 20 years.

Andrew Welsh and Margaret Ewing, as by then she was, wrested their return to the Commons in 1987 and, in 1999, George Reid ended two decades in political exile by winning a regional list seat in the new Scottish parliament.

Arguably the best leader the SNP never had, Reid had briefly returned to journalism before a 12-year stint as Director of Public Affairs for the International Red Cross.

And when, in 2003, local Nationalists in spiteful caucus bumped him down that regional list, Reid responded by winning Ochil outright – as you do – and saw out his last Scottish parliamentary term in the pomp of its highly esteemed Presiding Officer.

Others of the 1979 ousted were less fortunate. Sometime Argyll MP, the late and convivial Iain MacCormick, fetched up in the SDP.

A cruel joke did the rounds: he’d thought the initials stood for Social Drinking Party. But he returned to his old party in time and, not 48 hours from death and ill as he was, toting an oxygen-tank, MacCormick voted Yes in the 2014 independence referendum.

Another of that 1979 contingent, ex-Galloway MP George Thompson, was a decade later ordained as a Catholic priest and is remembered fondly in his assorted parishes.

Much of the glee locally surrounding the ousting of Angus MacNeil – and, indeed, the crowing elsewhere as this or that Member of Parliament bit the dust – I found almost as disquieting as those new MPs who overturned Labour incumbents on the cause of Gaza. 

A war that seems to obsess them far more than, for instance, the untold Muslims slain in Syria, the persecution of thousands more in what used to be Burma or the incarceration of more than a million Muslims in China.

The world’s oldest hatred is alive and well in British politics. But it was hard not to feel – watching Liz Truss’s stony countenance – that she showed more dignity than anyone else in the hall.

Being an MP in modern Britain is a job where you sacrifice all privacy and, increasingly, live with menace. 

The Prime Minister refuses to allow his children to be photographed or even publicly named.

More and more MPs – especially women – have panic buttons installed in their offices and even their homes.

Six MPs – Airey Neave, Robert Bradford, Sir Anthony Berry, Ian Gow, Jo Cox and David Amess – have been murdered in my lifetime and, in 2000, the Lib Dem Nigel Jones was fortunate not to join them as a mentally disturbed individual with a samurai sword killed his assistant Andrew Pennington. 

That’s before we even consider online abuse. The threats of rape, assault and worse; snaps of your kids snatched at the school gates; taunts beyond any measure of wit, perspective or charity.

In the last troubled weeks of his life, the late Charles Kennedy in 2015 fought for re-election as MP for Ross, Skye and Lochaber amidst almost fantastic levels of vitriol.

Hateful notes were left on his car or slipped through his letterbox and a member of his campaign team had to be deployed full-time deleting venom from his social media.

One SNP activist was reluctantly suspended. The politician who tipped Kennedy out of Parliament, Ian Blackford, never apologised – and, when Kennedy died a month later, the grieving family told Blackford not to attend the funeral.

An old but honourable Kennedy opponent, Brian Wilson, reflected starkly in 2021: ‘Charlie was grieving the death of his parents, the loss of his best friend, and trying to hold a family together. 

Nobody could have been well equipped to deal with that. It was beyond belief the things that were being said and done.

‘What Charles was subjected to had nothing to do with his politics, had no respect for what he’d done in politics or in public life, and had no respect for his personal circumstances.’

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