“I DO find it curious,” says MP Sir Roger Gale, “when people write to me asking ‘can’t you get the retirement age lowered to 60?’ I don’t understand why they think I would want to.”
He has a point. At 81, Sir Roger is the oldest Member of the House of Commons and, with 41 years’ service, its joint longest-serving MP. He’s also one of the relatively few Conservative MPs who managed to retain his seat in the recent Labour landslide – suggesting his constituents believe he’s still doing a pretty good job.
“I think the majority of people I represent have no idea how old I am, and nor do they care,” he says. “In my office we turn round around 500 emails a day dealing with local constituent issues around housing, education, health, special education needs. The people who voted for me seem to understand that an ability to do the job has nothing to do with age, it’s what you do that counts and how much of a contribution you can make to helping people.”
Having said that, the experience he’s built over the years is clearly valued – not least by younger MPs, of all parties. “Of course you learn as you go – you learn how to do the job and the wrinkles that make it easier, and I’m always delighted to pass this on. Two of our previous Conservative intake used to ask me for advice and call me Uncle Rog, and in the past couple of weeks I’ve had a really sweet handwritten note from a new young Labour MP, who said ‘I’m a newbie, I know you’ve been round the block and would love to meet you over a cup of tea’. So we did, and it was lovely.
“It’s how it should be. I had my own experience of that when I entered the House in 1983 as a young Tory MP and found myself in a lift with (left-wing Labour firebrand) Dennis Skinner, the ‘Beast of Bolsover’. I had an issue I wasn’t quite sure about, so I asked him and he said, ‘If it were me, I’d do this, but you’re a Tory so you’d better do it this way’, without any edge or side or nastiness. I asked the question, I got a helpful mature answer and I’ve never forgotten that. He was super, a very nice bloke, just happy to pass on his experience. That’s what I want to do.”
Sir Roger believes his age was irrelevant in him holding his Kent seat (Herne Bay and Sandwich, replacing his previous constituency of North Thanet) because people knew him and understood he would do a good job. But he does sadly wonder if ageism cost him another recent election, for the role of House of Commons deputy speaker. “It’s ironic that I think I experienced a degree of ageism in the Commons itself,” he says. “I was stand-in deputy speaker for the previous 18 months and many people were kind enough to say ‘you did a bloody good job’. But when it came to the vote in the new parliament, the new intake is appreciably younger than me and half of them had not seen me in the chair. I do think some members of a certain age thought ‘who the hell’s this old fart?’ and decided to vote instead for someone younger, even though they’d never done the job before.”
But he’s always had a connection with young people. Many of his constituents and fellow MPs are unaware of his past lives as a DJ on Radio Caroline, a producer at Radio 1, director of BBC Children’s Television and senior producer of children’s programming at Thames TV. He’s now a grandfather of five, a role he loves: “I think kids recognise more maturely than some people that with age comes a degree of knowledge, but certain prejudices around age haven’t yet set in”.
He also embraces the perspectives of people of all ages, but, he says, particularly young people. “Experience is valuable, but I’m still learning, all the time. For many years we’ve taken teenagers on work experience, who shadowed me in my day to day work around the constituency. It was great, because they have enquiring minds and challenge your thinking. They ask “Why are you doing that?” which makes you ask yourself “yes, good question, why am I doing it?” The thing people my age get from young people is enthusiasm. Yes, sometimes some have harebrained, scatty ideas and your knee-jerk reaction is to say ‘yes, been there, seen that, got the t-shirt, it won’t work’ but they are always right to think what they think and, actually, many of these ideas do work. Young people are often fearless, they’re not afraid to get it wrong and fail. We become risk-averse as we get older, which is why you need perspectives from every stage of life, every age group, and they’re all as valuable as each other. No one has a monopoly on wisdom.”
All of which underlines that Sir Roger is not going stop what he’s doing any time soon – and even when he does, he’s adamant it won’t be because of his age. “Being an MP is a tiring job, you don’t get remission,” he says. “But I always said I would pack it in when I got compassion fatigue and I still don’t appear to have hit that yet. If I started to get cynical, I would stop. But I still empathise and feel very deeply for people’s individual problems.
“I did get maybe half a dozen crass emails during the election campaign from people saying ‘why don’t you go away and die and let somebody younger have the job’. But while I believe I can do the job and thousands of constituents think so too, there’s no reason to step aside. Anyway, I’m not going to die, I haven’t got time.”