‘We were a Zoom parliament’: 2019 MP intake on returning to the Commons

As Daisy Cooper walked into her election count in the early hours of 13 December 2019, she checked her email to see six unread messages. Five hours later, now the newly elected Liberal Democrat MP for St Albans, her tally was 200. Two days later when she headed to Westminster, it was 3,000.

“These were people saying ‘I’m going to be made homeless in two weeks’ time’, ‘the ceiling has collapsed from damp’ or ‘my visa is running out and I’ve been trying to contact the Home Office for three months’,” says Cooper. “That’s literally on day one, and you’ve got no staff.”

Becoming an MP is almost always a shock. But for the 140 parliamentary newcomers of 2019, it was a start like no other: things were about to become a lot more complicated.

“When I arrived, we had the first six weeks of getting the Brexit deal through,” recalls Alexander Stafford, who became the first-ever Conservative MP for the South Yorkshire seat of Rother Valley, one of 107 new Tories.

“We had February, and then lockdown happened. The last 12 months have seen all these internal battles. So in the three years since I was elected, I’d say we’ve had one month, February 2020, when things seemed just about normal.”

When Covid struck, the newly arrived MPs had barely got to know colleagues, let alone recruit staff. They were now forced not just to communicate virtually but to replicate the Commons from their homes.

Sarah Owen, who arrived in December 2019 as the Labour MP for Luton North, and nearly eight months pregnant, recalls being told by officials that her early virtual contributions to the Commons had substandard lighting. “They would say: ‘Can you move to a different room?’ And I’d say: ‘I haven’t got a different room.’

“At the start I had the laptop balanced on my baby’s changing mat, because it was the right height. And I kept thinking: this had better be done soon because she’ll need changing, and this is going to be messy.”

Such adaptations were, of course, taking place all over the UK. But MPs had to do it in a workplace not exactly used to innovation.

Amy Callaghan, who took her East Dunbartonshire seat for the SNP by just 149 votes, says that even as someone who had previously worked in the Scottish parliament, the goings-on in Westminster seemed grossly archaic.

“One of the very first things that struck me when I arrived was that I was given a hook for my sword,” Callaghan says. “It’s still very much stuck in the 18th century.”

At 27 when she was elected, Callaghan also became rapidly used to officials assuming she was not an MP. “Even now, on a fortnightly if not weekly basis, I’ll be somewhere like the members’ library and get tapped on the shoulder and asked what I’m doing there.”

Callaghan’s battle against old-fashioned attitudes became even more acute when, in June 2020, she had a serious brain haemorrhage, necessitating four months in hospital and a period of recovery that means she still walks using a crutch.

“I had to tweet and have phone calls with the speaker of the House of Commons to try and negotiate a proxy vote,” she says. “I shouldn’t have been doing that from a hospital bed.”

The sheer political intensity of the last three years, plus the isolation from colleagues, has meant the emotional toll has been even greater than usual – perhaps one reason why a series of often younger MPs are standing down.

Cooper recalls taking a phone call during lockdown from a near-hysterical young man who had been told his father would be taken off a ventilator in three hours and wanted to say goodbye.

Another time, she directly phoned Matt Hancock, the then health secretary, after learning that a maintenance problem meant the oxygen supply at her local hospital was about to fail. “As soon as I got the call that the engineers had arrived, I just burst into tears,” Cooper says. “I was in my kitchen, absolutely sobbing, first thing on a Monday.”

Even returning to the physical workplace has brought its challenges, given the fact it is a crumbling, patched-up fire risk that also happens to be a UN world heritage site.

During the recent cold snap in London, Owen took part in a committee meeting in a notoriously draughty room wearing her winter jacket. The committee chair had a hot-water bottle on her lap.

Around the same time, Stafford’s office had a week with no power and no heating. He sent his staff home and worked from the Commons library on a laptop.

Despite the pitfalls and frustrations, all four agree that being physically back in parliament brings benefits, including the ability to chat informally with other MPs.

“For a long time we were a Zoom parliament, which means you don’t bump into people in the corridors, or in the tea room or in the voting lobbies. But that is starting to develop now,” Cooper says.

Stafford theorises that the unusual start to the 2019 parliament could help explain the chaos his party has gone through since, with Conservative MPs atomising into self-echoing factions.

“Covid split us into WhatsApp groups – there wasn’t the broader collegiality,” he says. “The [MPs’] tea room is the best place to be, and that’s where frankly a lot of the work gets started now. You’ll find yourself sitting next to a secretary of state, and you can just talk informally.”

Being physically in parliament also allows MPs from different parties to liaise more easily – and to form opinions of each other. Owen recalls being pleasantly surprised to find that the DUP’s Jim Shannon, with whom he has minimal political common ground, was not just a near-omnipresent parliamentarian (“I suspect there are three Jim Shannons”) but also “the loveliest” of MPs.

For Callaghan, it was Theresa May, who was, she recalls, “so pleasant to me when I first got elected”, while she says Boris Johnson wrote to her when she was in hospital.

Callaghan says: “People can be really kind, and I think it’s important to emphasise that we’re all human beings, and nothing gets done in the House of Commons unless you work with other parties.”