Bleak House

It takes seven years to know your way around Parliament. That’s what I was told when I arrived in the Commons press gallery seven years ago, but I am still none the wiser about how to get from the Snake Pit to the North Curtain Corridor, and have only recently discovered the location of the Yellow Submarine. As a building, the Palace of Westminster is a confusing, contradictory rabbit warren of underground corridors, secret briefing rooms at the top of towers and rooms with strange names. The very fabric of the building is dysfunctional, with pieces of masonry falling onto cars, and mice creeping through kitchens.

Winston Churchill famously said that ‘we shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us’ — which perhaps explains why the inhabitants of one of the best-known buildings in the world lead such dysfunctional lives. Marriages disintegrate within years of an MP entering the House of Commons; addictions are easy to develop and just as easy to hide; mental illness is so prevalent that Parliament has had to set up a special treatment service.

Research I carried out for my new book found that of the 666 MPs elected between 2010 and 2015 (some in by-elections), 12 per cent got divorced while serving in Parliament. Of the 307 Conservatives, 32 saw their marriages end, as did 9 per cent of Labour MPs. For the Lib Dems, it was 12 per cent, and of the six SNP MPs elected in 2010, four split up with their spouses while serving. The SNP’s marital troubles were particularly complicated by the fact that two of its MPs — Angus MacNeil and Stewart Hosie — had been having affairs with the same female journalist, though not at the same time.

This isn’t particularly out of step with the general population, but what is significant is how many people cite parliamentary life as the cause of their split — and how quickly after getting elected their marriages tend to collapse.