Westminster? I barely knew 'er!

Behold! I have had a thought.

Hello!

Hi! Keeping the intro short this week, as I have mucho words to publish below, and I imagine you don’t have all day. I’ve also been collecting links of interesting things to read over the past week or so but I think I’m going to wait til the next edition, so I can do a big sexy round-up. That is all.

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A column

There's a move trapeze beginners often struggle with at the start, because they fundamentally misunderstand what it entails. You learn the front balance pretty early on, and it feels daunting at first but, once you get it, you realise that it's quite straightforward. It does look impressive: here you are, hip bones resting on the bar, looking like you're flying through the air.

Like many others, it took me a surprisingly long time to get it, because I assumed that the trick was to find the exact right spot in which to place yourself, so your body would, as the move's name suggests, balance itself. I'd try and try but could never quite stay in place, and it infuriated me. I complained to my instructor one day, and asked them to walk me through it, like I was a child.

They watched my attempt then said that, yes, obviously I couldn't do it, because I'd got it all wrong. The balance is partly about balance but, really, it's about movement. While doing a front balance, the trapezist must activate as many muscles as they can, and they must pay constant attention to the position of their torso and their limbs. The reason why they stay there, perched on the bar, is that they keep subtly, barely moving their left hand, their right foot, their shoulders, their neck, their thighs, and so on.

A front balance looks like a passive move, but it's anything but. It's something that looks immobile but requires constant, conscious tweaking. I took in their notes and, lo and behold, was immediately able to balance myself. I looked still as a statue, up there on the trapeze, but my entire body was tense, and I was unusually aware of the position of every extremity, every joint, every muscle. It was beautiful, but it was hard work.

It's also one of the reasons why I decided I could no longer work in Westminster. I started writing about politics in 2015, after years of being intrigued by whatever was going on in SW1. At first, I was a gossip diarist for the Evening Standard, and I think people didn't really know what to make of me. I couldn't really be trusted, though perhaps I could be, and I spent my days tweeting like an idiot but it was possible that, maybe, I broadly knew what I was talking about.

I worked at BuzzFeed for a while after that, but we don't talk about that year, because working at BuzzFeed made me feel mad and miserable, and by the time I escaped I felt so broken that I nearly gave up on writing altogether. Clearly, the message I'd been given by my editors there, time and time again, was that I was too thick, immature and undisciplined to ever make a career in journalism. For a little while, I wondered if they were right; luckily, I decided to give it one last shot. I'm very glad I did. I believe it's fair to say I've proved them wrong. It is a delight to me that BuzzFeed has now crashed and burned, but I haven't.

I went freelance in 2017 because I felt I had no other choice, and I kept doing what I knew best. I made myself unavoidable. Because I couldn't have a lobby pass, granting me access to Parliament, and to the MPs and staffers I needed to do my work, I instead became one of those stray cats who keeps running inside the house if you happen to have left the door open for a second too long. I attended every single event I was invited to; went to the pub in Westminster several times a week, every single week; cajoled friends into inviting me to parliamentary bars whenever I could.

I also spent my days tweeting, meaning that no place, physical or virtual, was safe from me. If you worked in politics, you just had to be aware of me. That's how I built my freelance career: I didn't have the fancy job title, or access to all areas, so instead I just tried to be up in everyone's faces, all the time. When it worked, it really worked: I was being commissioned by everyone and everyone wanted to have a chat with me at parties, and some people would leak me stories and others would introduce me to people who would. Few were the guestlists I wasn't on. I had a really good time.

Then the pandemic hit. Again, there's little point dwelling on those months: I'm planning to do it properly in a few weeks anyway. All I will say is that, now stuck within the confines of my little flat, I lost all sense of identity. As we now know, and then suspected, there were still people mingling and drinking in Westminster, but they were the ones living squarely inside the bubble. There were parties in No10 and, though that was never written about, I'm pretty certain that some solid drinking also took place in the Houses of Parliament, but I was resolutely stuck in Stockwell.

There had been a world with insiders and outsiders and I'd managed to spend years with a foot in both camps, because the line between the two had been porous, but it solidified in 2020 and I was left on the other side of the window, enviously looking at the large dinner and warm fireplace like a Dickensian orphan. When the world temporarily reopened in the summer, I rushed out, and practically ran to the Red Lion. Many other people did, and it was joyous - like seeing all your school mates again after the summer holidays.

The aftermath of the winter lockdown was different, though. Too much time had passed. The weather wasn't as good. People were more broken. The world reopened but Westminster took a long time to get going again. I, meanwhile, had already moved on a bit. I was working on a book that had nothing to do with politics; I'd lost touch with a lot of my SW1 acquaintances, and the people I'd kept in touch with throughout the pandemic had become more than mere work contact, and so I didn't feel the need to hang out near Parliament to see them. We could just go for drinks in Soho, like normal people.

Slowly, Westminster started looking like itself again, but by that point I'd essentially become irrelevant. Perhaps more importantly, it'd become clear to me just how much work I'd been putting in before the pandemic, just to ensure that I could still have half a seat at the table. All I wanted was to be there and be taken seriously but in order to have that, I had to be out all the time and constantly remind people of my existence and relentlessly promote myself, in a way I'd been fine with while I didn't see it as such, but which became unseemly the moment I became truly aware of it.

It probably feels like a goofily absurd comparison, but it's often reminded me of that famous quote, "it's terrible, the things I have to do to be me", which Philippa Snow used as a title for her book on femininity and fame. I may not be Kim Kardashian, doing intense breathing exercises in order to fit into a corset as tight as a torture implement, but I can see where she's coming from. My life and career, before the pandemic, had become like a constant front balance; it probably looked effortless, but I could never relax, not even for one second, lest I fall down onto the mat.

If I'm honest, I also hated this "insider/outsider" stuff. I know people meant well but I did really try very hard to fit in. I don't think people realised that, because even if I'm trying really hard I often still stick out like an odd thumb, but the effort had been there. How would you like it if you'd spent years trying to blend in and build a life and a career somewhere, only for people to endlessly compliment you on being such a quirky outsider? Their hearts were in the right place, but I still struggled to see it as a positive thing. It stuck in my craw.

Then again, maybe I didn't really want to be a true insider. Maybe that was the problem. I was in Westminster as MeToo broke out and it gave me hope, fleetingly, because I knew that things were bad in Parliament and I thought that maybe other people cared about it as much as I did. Obviously, they didn't. They pretended to care for a few months and they merrily brought down the men they didn't like anyway, but so many creeps kept thriving, because they were charming, important or both. They didn't care. They didn't care!

I still remember being at some summer party a few years ago, chatting to people I knew and respected, at least at the time. One minister arrived and we all knew that the guy was a rapist - there was no way these guys didn't know, everyone knew by then - and he started walking towards us and I realised with horror that everyone in our little group was smiling and welcoming him in. I briskly walked away and watched from afar as he took turns hugging everyone. I'm still friends with one of the people in that group but I don't think I'll ever respect her again.

This is one brief, random example but I could give you a hundred; the bland, simple truth is that the majority of people in Westminster don't care about rape or sexual assault. Some of them don't care about it at all; others only care when it's not inconvenient to them. A lot of them probably think that they care but, really, they don't care all that much. There are other things they care about more. It's a concern but not a major one. How do you stay in a world like that for years and decades?

As I saw it, you only had two choices: you could either become cynical beyond belief, and keep going while losing all hope in your fellow man, or you could become cynical beyond belief, and choose to join your fellow man in not really caring about anyone but yourself. Neither of those particularly appealed to me. It was an odd epiphany to have though, and made me realise that I'd hit the bottom of a particular bell curve.

It's not one I've ever bothered naming, but the theory goes like this: if you're someone who's never spent any meaningful time in Westminster, you probably assume that a lot of people in politics are crooked and selfish; mad and malevolent. That's the left-hand side of the curve. If you've spent a few years in Westminster, you probably feel quite strongly that, actually, Parliament doesn't quite deserve its terrible image. There are plenty of people there who are in it for the good reasons, and who are decent, hard-working, and enjoyable to know and trust. That's the peak, in the middle.

The right-hand side, where the curve goes down again, occurs when you've spent a good long while in Westminster. I would sum it up as "ah shit, the place really is full of cunts". Not everyone there is a cunt, of course, but there is enough cunt-like behaviour that the water feels sufficiently sullied. I reached that point a few years ago, and it was the beginning of my slow moonwalk out of SW1. I'd made a lot of friends by then, people whose company I enjoyed even outside of the Red Lion, and it made me feel like I was in a heist movie. I'd come in, got what I wanted, and I could leave again.

With hope, this also meant that I could become a slightly better version of myself again. That was the odd thing with Westminster; I could tell that a lot of it was getting to me, and I was becoming pettier and more ruthless with each passing year but, like Cady Heron in Mean Girls, I just couldn't stop. It's something that really hit me not long before the pandemic, actually. The whole story is so pathetic that I can't really bear to put it into words, but it may be useful, if only to chronicle the extent of the rot.

It was the last day of the last conference of the season and I'd had a pleasant enough evening, going from reception to reception, but hit a snag towards the end as there were two big parties happening from 10pm, and I wasn't invited to either of them. Undeterred, a pal and I had decided to simply wait it out in the main bar, and keep drinking until our better-connected friends were done downing champagne behind closed doors. An hour passed, then another; at around midnight, perhaps 1am, we decided to call it a night and return to our respective hotels.

Once in bed, taking off my make-up, I saw videos on Twitter of people - most of whom I knew - singing and braying in the bar of the conference hotel. As it turned out, we'd ended up leaving around ten minutes too early, and had just missed the stampede back to the bar. Two things simultaneously happened to me at that exact moment: I thought "christ, how pathetic to care about this, you see these people all the time in London anyway" and I started crying. My brain split itself into two parts, over the course of about five minutes, and during that time I was both acting pathetically and coldly telling myself that I was being pathetic.

Granted, it is entirely possible that I wept mostly out of drunkenness and sheer exhaustion, but the facts remain. I, an adult woman, cried because my friends were hanging out without me, and I'd already taken my make-up off so I couldn't get dressed again and quickly join them back at the bar. Isn't that insane? Isn't that the most embarrassing thing you've ever heard? It still makes me cringe. I still find it unbearable to think about.

I think the worst of it is that I can tell exactly why it happened, and it happened because I was a very unpopular child at school and on a few occasions I thought I'd made friends with other kids, then realised that they'd just been humouring me for a little while, and didn't care about me at all. The same thing had happened again, and I'd reacted in the same way I would have had at seven years old. Still, I'm glad it happened, even if I didn't quite see it as a turning point at the time.

There are a lot of people in Westminster who clearly, blatantly were strikingly uncool at school. They tried to make their peace with it for a while but then joined a world where being geeky and weird-looking wasn't a barrier to social success and man, that felt good. I get it, obviously: it felt good to me too. It's even endearing to watch sometimes: you'll see some flustered guy in his early forties clumsily flirting with a leggy blonde staffer, and it will be entirely obvious to anyone watching that it is the first time in their entire life that a leggy blonde has ever showed them even a modicum of interest. It's pretty sweet. Well, often it isn't, but sometimes it's benign and amusing.

I do wonder if they realise what's happening though. Maybe some of them do. I don't think I realised what was happening to me for a while, but that night it became clear. I'd failed at winning the popularity game at school and so I'd found myself, consciously or unconsciously, in a grown-up world where popularity games were still alive and kicking. Like a movie about an adult waking up in the body of their loser teenage self, I was given a shot at trying again, this time as a person with adequate social skills. I enjoyed it a lot, until I didn't: as it turns out, gravity is stronger in Westminster than in most other places.

Stop being perceived as relevant for even a few minutes and your inbox will suddenly be empty. It's something I hated and resented for years, this constant need to remain at the forefront of everyone's minds, but I kept doing it because I felt I had no choice. Writing good and interesting stories can only happen if you have good and interesting chats with good and interesting people, and those people often tend to be in all those rooms guarded by ferocious young women holding clipboards. It partly was an ego thing, sure, but also a cold, professional calculation. If you're not in the tent, then how will you know what goes on inside it? Political journalism is an access game, and without access you may as well shout at the clouds.

I didn't enjoy the game I was made to play but I still played it, because it was mandatory. I finally cracked last year, though. I'm not sure why. The last straw was this party at conference, which I'd reliably been invited to every year. Conference was approaching and I didn't get an invitation, and so I messaged the relevant person asking, nicely and politely, if I could be snuck onto the list, but I didn't get a reply. I spoke to a mutual friend of the organiser about it, wondering if there'd been a mistake, and they said: "oh yeah, she does that sometimes, she loves the power, so she'll randomly start inviting some people and stop inviting others, that's how she has fun".

I should have got angry at that point but, instead, I just felt a lot of pity for her. Here was a woman in, I would imagine, her forties, with an illustrious career behind her, acting like the bitchy popular girl at school. It made me feel really sad and uncomfortable. I did once cry because of a party-related palaver at conference but I'd been in my twenties and drinking solidly for around seven hours. What was her excuse? I didn't want to become like her. The thought of being like her in ten, fifteen years made me physically cringe. I knew, in that moment, that I wanted out.

I also knew it was my only choice, in the way that it perhaps wouldn't have been for someone else. There are plenty of people in Westminster who keep at it without acting like needy teenagers, but unfortunately I have all these buttons in my brain and politics presses them all, in all the worst ways. I can both know, intellectually, that what is happening behind this set of closed doors is boring and not worth my time, yet yearn to go yap at whoever's in charge of the list because I want in. That's who I am. I think I'd always suspected it, on some level, but I now know that for certain.

Another thing I've had confirmed is that I belong in a city, not a village. People go a bit insane when they spend too much time around Parliament, in the same way that people go a bit insane when they don't really have enough neighbours. If everyone knows everyone and everyone feels entitled to know what everyone else is doing, madness usually ensues. It can sometimes feel nice and comforting, especially if London isn't your hometown. You can turn up at an event or to the pub and be pretty certain that you'll bump into people you know, and if you're young and not entirely certain about where you fit in the world, that's a good feeling.

What you may miss at first, however, is that there will be nowhere for you to hide. If you go on a date with someone and it goes well or badly, everyone will know about it. If you do end up dating someone and it ends for whatever reason, you'll still have to pleasantly make conversation with them at least once every other week. If you decided, rightly or wrongly, to screw someone over in order to get a story over the line, you can be sure that you'll bump into that person more often than anyone you've ever met. Anything of interest that happens to you will do the rounds of the parliamentary estate at the speed of light. Sometimes, things that haven't even happened to you will also become common knowledge.

I know of several false rumours people circulated about me over the years; I'm sure there must have been many more, which never got back to me. I've broadly made my peace with it now, but you can imagine how it felt at the start. In my defence, I just didn't know what it was like to live in a village: I'm a lifelong city-dweller, anonymity is my default setting. Still, I guess that moving from Nantes to London was quite the step up, and it did feel overwhelming at times. My university years had been tumultuous, to say the least, and graduating had been quietly terrifying.

I could, in theory, do anything I wanted, and wasn't that horrific? Luckily I found journalism quickly in 2013, and it didn't take long for the magnet of Westminster to draw me in. Here was a world where interactions were mostly codified, and there was a pecking order which, while often shifting, was usually well-defined. There were rules and I could either choose to follow them, or sometimes decide to ignore them while remaining aware of their existence. It was, in retrospect, exactly what I needed at the time. I had no idea who I wanted to become back then, and becoming a Westminster person felt straightforward enough.

I did, for the avoidance of doubt, had a really great time cosplaying as a Westminster person for all these years. I wouldn't trade them for the world. It's just that, you know - we all need to leave Neverland eventually. I know I certainly did. It's why I decided to slowly but surely stop writing about politics last year, and start writing about other things instead. It wasn't an easy decision; I sometimes fear I may live to regret it. Hell, I don't even know what I want to be doing now. I turned up in Parliament one fine evening, when I was 23 years old, and now I'm 33 and I've just come back out again, and it's taking a while to adjust to daylight again.

I've no idea what I'm going to be doing next, but that's a separate issue. The point is that I do now get to decide what sort of person I want to be, without having all these charming, noxious people breathing down my neck. I can be whoever I want, and that's daunting but exhilarating as well. Out of the village, and into the world.