Member News
By Sam Macrory - 21st February 2011
David Cameron wanted to bring specialist knowledge to his benches, and West Country GP Sarah Wollaston answered the call – but she has found that bringing expertise to bear is not easy within the confines of Westminster.
Just over a week ago, Sarah Wollaston was best known for being a former GP who was selected as a candidate through an open primary process.
Then everything changed. After questioning the supine requirements of parliamentary private secretaries, labelling the process of whipping through bills as ‘profoundly toxicating’, and wondering out loud if David Cameron’s pre-election promise of a “new politics” was sincere, Wollaston has barely been out of the headlines.
“I’m not trying to be awkward,” she insists more than once during our interview, but Wollaston is certainly raising some difficult questions for her party leader. He should have been prepared.
“I am exactly what he said he wanted,” she argues, alluding to her party leader’s May 2009 call. “If he was serious about wanting better scrutiny of legislation and getting people with specialist interests to come into politics, then I’m afraid that this is what you get.” She delivers the line softly, slowly, and with a smile. Rather like a doctor, in fact.
Her background is not political, and she had never attended a political meeting before agreeing to stand for Parliament. As a ‘forces baby’, Wollaston’s childhood was spent on the move, with a four-year stint in Malta the lengthiest stop-off. “You can move from Hong Kong to Wiltshire and still have the same style of curtains. It was a happy and varied childhood.” And her upbringing, she adds, gave her a useful outlook: “It gives you that ability to move on, so that you are not pining for the past.”
For Wollaston, the past is a career in medicine. “I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to be a doctor,” she recalls. Politics wasn’t on the radar: “When I was a junior doctor, I was working 110 hour weeks. There’s no time for anything else.”
But after qualifying as a GP, Wollaston soon felt the downside of endless diktats from Westminster: “You have the sense that much of what happens in politics is strangely uninformed by the experiences of those on the front line.”
So when David Cameron announced that he wanted to open up his party to “the talent that is available”, Wollaston, who says she is “naturally a Conservative”, decided to see if he meant it. “When the call went out for people with real-life experience, it sounded genuine. I don’t come in with any political track record; I’m as green as can be. If not me, then who?”
She believes her background allows her to “ask some of the questions which some colleagues might find difficult, because people assume they know the answer”.
That sounds like a diplomatic way of saying that she is simply brave enough to ask. “If you have come in from outside, you can take a cold hard look and say ‘that’s not how the rest of the world operates’,” she explains.
Becoming an MP, she says, was “like falling off a cliff”. She has recently suggested the idea of continuous professional training for parliamentarians. “You don’t expect a doctor to arrive and then never undertake any professional training,” Wollaston argues, adding that she wants more opportunities to develop her role. “How do I
function best as an MP? I genuinely don’t know the answer. I feel like I am operating in the dark.”
Other new Members, she adds, feel the same way. “There’s no pastoral support for MPs, and no sense that their talents and experiences are used or recognised. People are working very long hours under a great deal of stress, and they feel they are not having the opportunity to do what they would have expected.”
Wollaston first spoke out after Tory whips rejected her request to join the committee charged with looking at the Health and Social Care Bill. “We all want the NHS to operate in an open and honest way, and if you say someone can only be on a bill committee if they are prepared to vote with the government, then that is fundamentally in conflict. Parliament sets down rules about how all other organisations work; as an outsider, I say we should hold a mirror up here.”
She used a Westminster Hall debate as her platform. “If a doctor thinks that something is happening that affects either their own performance or the performance of someone else, then they have to act without delay and with integrity. I take issue with the scrutiny of bills. Why not elect bill committees in the same way as select committees, taking them out of the gift of the whips? People should leave their party politics at the door.”
Wollaston’s outspoken approach continued when she rejected the chance to become a PPS. “If part of that role means you cannot speak on the one subject that people elected you to speak out on, then that is wrong,” she says, a complaint initially lodged with the Tories’ 1922 committee.
“PPSs work incredibly hard and they are a link, so I hope they don’t feel I am denigrating them. But it belittles their role if they always have to vote for the government. I get the idea of collective cabinet responsibility, but a PPS is not in the cabinet. People outside Westminster don’t want to see block voting from their MPs.”
No PPS has told her that they disagree with her, but she admits that she “doesn’t know what they say when I am not there”. What Wollaston says about them is characteristically open. “People are often hung up on the idea of being a minister, and some MPs clearly seem to come into this process with that as their end goal. I think it’s best to come into this with that not as your end goal – and it is absolutely not mine.”
Instead, to hold the Executive to account, Wollaston believes she needs to be a “critical friend”. What would the whips say to that? “They may think that with friends like me, who needs enemies?” Wollaston laughs. “But do you serve a team best by agreeing with everything your captain says, or by saying how you could do it better? There tends to be an assumption here that the way to operate is to always publicly agree. From my background, that’s something I find quite challenging.”
However, she insists that she doesn’t regret her dramatic career move. “People are always asking me if I wish I’d never done it, but I don’t think that,” she argues. “It’s a fantastic opportunity.” Her teenage children “are interested by my job and old enough to be involved”, but while they benefit from her absences in the week – “I can’t nag them about leaving their shoes in the hall” – the new arrangement is tough on her husband. “I met him at medical school; we are very close. This is a huge change.”
When asked if she will stand again, her answer is non-committal. “I hope so, but you shouldn’t come into politics obsessed with the idea of re-election. You should do the best you possibly can, and if people think you have done a good job, then they are more likely to vote you back in.”
Meanwhile, she waits for the prime minister to respond to the issues she has raised. Does David Cameron really believe in a “new politics”? “You’d have to talk to him about that,” she replies, adding: “I genuinely believed that it was his intention. It’s now for him to clarify what he meant.”
Wollaston is dividing opinion. Her predecessor, the colourful Anthony Steen, once warned her that no friends are made in politics. Wollaston smiles. “I really like my colleagues, and it really is a privilege to be here.”
Parliament should feel privileged to have her too. After all, she is exactly what David Cameron called for.
Wollaston on… being a GP, then an MP
“They are both vocations. You have to throw your heart and soul into it, and that’s what I am trying to do. Compared to being a junior doctor, the hours are quite familiar. I miss it, and I still feel like a doctor – the difference is nobody takes their clothes off. Perhaps I should have gone into Italian politics!”
Wollaston on…open primaries
"When I applied it wasn’t a primary, but at each stage the goalposts moved. I didn’t mind the process, though if I had known at the start it might have put me off, as I wouldn’t have thought I could do it. Open primaries give women a great chance of being selected and give my constituents greater ownership of their MP."
Wollaston on… party loyalty
"I’m not some sort of maverick who votes how they like. If I wanted to do that I’d have stood as an independent. I stood on a Conservative ticket and make no bones about it. Look at my voting record. I’m not all over the shop. However, it’s not necessarily a bad thing for MPs to vote against their party. People should be less worried about that.”
Wollaston on… describing the NHS reforms as a “grenade”
"I might use less flowery language in future. Perhaps ‘a fireship sailing into the primary care trusts’. We’ve moved from support for the bill to a lot of hostility. The right thing is to listen and look at what needs to change so that we can take people with us. This should be much more collaborative."
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