Revolving Doors

Politics used to be sold to us as public service. That was the theory, at least. A slightly noble calling in which a person gave up the comforts of ordinary life, endured public criticism, and devoted themselves to the improvement of the nation. There may even have been a brass band involved somewhere.

These days, for a highlighted few, it looks more like a conversion process. You go in with one sort of career, spend a few years acquiring contacts, status, access, ministerial language and a working knowledge of how the machine operates, then emerge on the other side as someone with a market value you did not previously possess.

Take my former MP, Luke Hall. Before politics, he worked in retail. He worked for Lidl from the age of 18, became manager of the Yate store, and later became an area manager for Farmfoods. That is a perfectly respectable career. No sneering required. Britain runs on people who can get staff rotas done, keep shelves stocked, and stop the frozen peas becoming a small inland glacier.

Then came Parliament. He became Conservative MP for Thornbury and Yate in 2015, served in ministerial roles, and left the Commons when Parliament was dissolved in 2024. Again, none of that is improper. It is how representative democracy works, or how it is supposed to work when it is not being used as a holding pen for think-tank alumni and people who say “delivery” every six minutes.

But after leaving Parliament, Hall took a role with National Grid as Head of External Affairs and Stakeholder Engagement. The official appointments advice noted that National Grid has a significant contractual relationship with government and is regulated by Ofgem, although it also said there was no direct overlap with his Department for Education ministerial brief.

And there, really, is the smell of the thing.

I am not accusing him of corruption. That would be unfair, unevidenced and legally unwise, which is a poor combination. The point is not that a rule was necessarily broken. The point is that the public can see the shape of the transaction. A man goes into politics with one kind of career and comes out with another: external affairs, stakeholder engagement, public policy, government-facing communication. Not wires and pylons. Not the engineering of the National Grid. The navigation of influence.

To be fair, quite a few Conservative MPs did not exactly discover business after politics. Many came from it in the first place: finance, law, property, consultancy, corporate management - the old familiar Westminster grazing pasture. For them, the move after office can look less like a dramatic career change and more like returning to the mothership with a better pass, a fuller contacts book and a working knowledge of which ministerial door needs knocking on.

Labour has its own risks, of course. Nobody should get too misty-eyed and imagine Labour MPs are all still emerging from pit villages with a union card in one hand and a flask of tea in the other. But Labour MPs have historically been more likely to come from public services, teaching, unions, local government, charities and political organising, while Conservative MPs have more often had business and legal backgrounds. That does not make one side morally pure and the other wicked. It simply changes the shape of the temptation.

With some Conservatives, politics can amplify an existing business network. With some Labour MPs, especially after time in government, politics can create one. Either way, the danger is the same. Public office becomes a private asset.

And yes, in recent years this has looked more Conservative than Labour. But that is partly because the Conservatives were in power for fourteen years, which gave them a much larger herd of former ministers, advisers and connected Westminster wildlife heading for the private sector. A long spell in government creates a long departure lounge. The more people you have standing near the levers of power, the more people later discover that lever-proximity has a very pleasant day rate.

But Labour should not get smug. The revolving door is not painted blue. It simply opens most easily for whoever has recently been nearest the machine. If Labour spends years in office, some of its own people will discover the same mysterious gravitational pull towards consultancies, advisory roles, public affairs firms and “stakeholder engagement”, which is often what lobbying calls itself after a shower and a LinkedIn makeover.

So this is not a party-political purity test. It is a power test. The Conservatives have supplied more of the recent examples because they supplied most of the recent government. But the temptation belongs to office itself. Power creates access. Access creates value. Value then seeks a salary, preferably one large enough to require the word “package”.

That is why Hall is such a neat local example. He did not arrive in Parliament as an energy specialist, infrastructure expert or public affairs grandee. He came from retail management. Respectable enough, but not obviously a route into the upper reaches of National Grid stakeholder engagement. Parliament supplied the missing ingredient: status, access, fluency in government, and the faint scent of usefulness to people who need to understand how Whitehall and Westminster work.

Local gossip about what people thought of him before politics may be satisfying, but it is not the foundation of the argument. People are disparaged by former colleagues for all sorts of reasons: competence, ambition, politics, personality, jealousy, or because they once reorganised a stockroom with the quiet messianic energy of a district manager on a leadership course. Anecdote is colour, not proof.

The documented career arc is stronger. Retail. Parliament. Ministerial office. Then a public affairs role with a major regulated company. Perfectly legal, by all appearances. But legality is a low bar. It is the political equivalent of saying the MOT tester did not actually fall through the floorpan.

What matters is what this does to public trust. Voters look at these moves and begin to think the whole system is built this way. They stop believing politicians are primarily there to serve. They start believing they are there to accumulate future value. And once that belief takes hold, every speech sounds like networking, every committee sounds like auditioning, and every ministerial announcement comes with an invisible LinkedIn update hovering somewhere in the background.

That is bad for democracy. Not because every politician is bent. They are not. Many are diligent, serious and probably underpaid for the abuse they take. But a system does not need universal corruption to lose legitimacy. It only needs enough examples of respectable self-advancement to convince the public that the game is rigged politely.

The modern scandal is not the brown envelope. It is the business card.

Not a bloke in a trilby leaving cash under a park bench. A former minister taking a stakeholder role, a consultancy, a directorship, an advisory post, all signed off by the correct process, all technically within the rules, all accompanied by grave assurances that no lobbying will occur.

And perhaps no lobbying will occur. Perhaps every rule will be followed to the letter. Perhaps everyone involved will behave impeccably, and the whole thing will be as pure as a freshly wiped whiteboard in a corporate awayday breakout room.

But the public still sees what has happened. Public office has created private value. That may not be corruption. But if democracy depends on trust, it is still a very expensive way of losing it.