The tragedy of Mark Field

“Many MPs, political journalists and the general public would … regard politics and celebrity culture as two sides of the same coin,” laments Mark Field in his political memoir The End of an Era: The Decline and Fall of the Tory Party, “At the risk of sounding sanctimonious … I have never seen politics in this light.”

It is ironic, then, that Mr Field’s book has been featured in the Mail with the headline: “The truth about my 18-month affair with Liz Truss”. “No European country has a tabloid press to match the tawdry content of our UK equivalents,” Field claims in The End of an Era. What could be tawdrier than a kiss and tell?

I’m sure it was the publisher’s idea. The sad fact is that having an affair with Liz Truss is the most eye-catching event in Mr Field’s life. “Former Minister of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office TELLS ALL about the COP24 UN Climate Change Conference in Katowice” wouldn’t sell many books. But that makes you wonder why Mr Field has written his memoirs.

Of course, good prose can make any life interesting. I’m not sure The End of an Era could be sold on these grounds. At some point, Truss gave Field a copy of Atlas Shrugged. After forcing himself to read it, Field “resolved for each of my (now) three published books to employ an editor”. Perhaps he should consider employing a new one. “I am convinced that he genuinely believes this from the bottom of his heart” is a sentence from a random page. Is it possible to believe something from the bottom of one’s heart without being genuine? “It is said that the trouble with all your dreams coming true is that you quickly discover this is not altogether a good thing” is a sentence from another random page. It has to have been said more elegantly than that.

Field has had a busy life. A lawyer and businessman, he became Conservative MP for Cities of London and Westminster in 2001 and sat in parliament for the best part of two decades. Still, he’s not entirely sure what he was doing there. “Despite allowing it to dominate my twenty-something hopes and dreams,” he reflects, “I am not so sure now that politics was ever the right fit for me.”

Okay, well, perhaps this is to Mr Field’s credit. After all, it’s hard to imagine what sort of sociopath would actually like politics. Field has a sort of brooding scepticism that can make him rather sensible for a veteran Conservative. He drew solid conclusions about military interventionism from the War on Terror. He opposed lockdowns in 2020. He is rightly critical of the NHS and British universities. 

Some politicians, like Tony Blair and Michael Gove, commit themselves with furious ambition to the pursuit of evil. It sounds like Field was stumbling about and trying to do the right thing. Good for him. Yet his politics are too diffuse and superficial to seem especially significant. As the founder of “Conservatives for Managed Migration”, he opposed Tory attempts to lower migration levels. The economy needed workers, he argued, and low-skilled EU migrants were coming in at the expense of high-skilled non-EU migrants. Well, that was at least a defensible perspective. But what does he have to say about crime, and benefits and political dysfunction in post-Boriswave Britain? Nothing much. His thoughts on immigration trail off into a fairly sound but largely irrelevant digression on history and reparative politics. It is hard to disagree — but it is also hard to know what the point is.

There is, it seems, no animating force that drives and deepens Field’s politics. He stands athwart history, mumbling, “Hm, steady on.” I shouldn’t be too harsh. As a dilettantish right-leaning opinion commentator, I could face the same accusation — and, unlike the average MP, I haven’t even had any potholes filled. But it is not hard to understand why cold-blooded careerists like Gove and George Osborne took over the Conservatives. 

Field can have a tough time seeming likeable. Here he is, describing one “rural Tory” who annoyed him:

Although he fancied himself as an intriguer and intellectual of sorts, I was staggered to discover he had actually attended university, having assumed that he must be a non-graduate. Evidently his shtick went down well in his super-safe constituency, but it was no surprise to learn it had some of the lowest educational attainment in the country. I guess he was living proof that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

To write off a bunch of Conservative Britons as drooling morons seems harsh. Still, this sort of blithe unfiltered spirit makes Field seem rather charming after all. Unlike a lot of his colleagues, he is not a devious enough politician to be manipulative. As much as he was elected to parliament in 2001, he seems like a politician from a different time — a pre-Blair time when politics made more intuitive sense and a veteran MP’s political memoirs would be a good stocking-filler.

Mr Field signed up to Twitter this month. “Dreadful news coming out of Syria about sectarian massacres,” he posted recently, “More on Syria and geopolitics in my book.” I suppose he needed a selling point that wasn’t his liaisons with Liz Truss.