Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

The silly season that never stops: the weird demands from constituents to their MPs

MPs are currently in hiding in their constituencies from the silly season. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t encountering some rather silly behaviour themselves as they hold surgeries. Constituency surgeries are normally quite doleful affairs, with local people in dire straits turning to their MP for help with an impossible housing situation, a tangled immigration case, or a row with social services. Depending on the sort of MP you are, you either love your constituency casework so much that it’s the main reason you’re in Parliament, or you secretly think it a bit of a bore and long to return from a lengthy discussion about the bad smell from the local sewer (a favourite topic of angry local tweets from MPs of all leanings) to the safety of Westminster. Commons researchers privately rank the offices around them depending on how much they really care about constituency work. But they also get the occasional silly case of their own to deal with.

Isabel Hardman
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Isabel Hardman
Isabel Hardman is assistant editor of The Spectator and author of Why We Get the Wrong Politicians. She also presents Radio 4’s Week in Westminster.

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