Members of Parliament have tried to kill themselves due to the “almost unsustainable” nature of the job, a former Conservative minister has said.
“I don’t want to talk about the specifics because this is deeply personal to people but, yes, colleagues tried to kill themselves,” he told GB News. He went on: “I think it is because the gap between the way that MPs are encouraged to present themselves to the public and who they really are is almost unsustainable.
Asked how he felt when he was an MP, he said: “I ended up despising myself. I would find myself sort of creepily trying to sit next to David Cameron at lunch, and I’d send these texts saying, you know, ‘Congratulations on your latest policy’ that I didn’t really believe in.“I’d been the acting governor of an Iraqi province responsible for three million people, and a Harvard professor, and I’d run a charity in Afghanistan.