I look eight years younger after quitting politics

I My heart jumped out of my throat and my soul jumped out of my ears as I was minding my own business in a small shop on Saturday: someone’s ringtone was the same music as my old “wake up” alarm.

When I worked in Downing Street, the same noise was heard every morning at 5.15am; lively, joyful and soul destroying. The moment I heard that terrible voice, I saw the ghost of the past government next to the candy bars and fridge magnets.

Many industries are stressful. Politics is aging terribly, and I say this from personal experience; There are photos of me at family gatherings where I look like a skull with tissue paper on top.

It’s like a never-ending Ironman triathlon, interspersed with the occasional Olympic 100-meter sprint while carrying an elephant on your shoulders and reciting prime numbers in time with Shakespeare. From start to finish, tennis ball machines throw human feces at you. An average morning in Westminster.

This isn’t meant to evoke pity, but perhaps it goes some way to explaining the photos of Barack Obama when he took office in 2008 compared to when he left in 2016. Two terms in office are much closer to the “dog years”; It takes you about eight years physically to go through these things.

I worked for Theresa May’s Downing Street from July 2017 to July 2019, and she had been Prime Minister for nearly a year before that. I’m not sure anyone would describe these three years as short. He looked exhausted as he made his resignation speech outside the famous black front door.

But he would cast his vote just three years later, in 2022. Boris Johnson’s leadership in a ball gown. These days he’s in the House of Lords, Chatham House and Yale, and we can only guess what moisturizer he uses. Whatever it is, it works for him.

This level of pressure does something to a person’s body and soul. There’s a serious lack of sleep, partly due to anxiety and workload, partly due to your phone’s inability to stay silent in the worst case scenario. There are occasional meal times and caffeine cravings. There are periods of gloom and lethargy when unsolvable, once-in-a-generation problems with dire ethical consequences loom before you.

And as I suspect the current prime minister realizes, there is a terrible fear that people are conspiring to bring you down, to throw your body into an excruciating and constant state of fight or flight. I had a period where every night I dreamed of Chris (now Lord) Grayling hunting me from the skies, a man I may have met twice in my life, The Hunger Games style. Like I said, it does things to you.

Thanks to our variable weather conditions this weekend, I managed to take advantage of both sun and windburn. Yet my healthy glow is on the weak end of the dimmer switch compared to a former Conservative MP holidaying in the same town as me. This is partly to do with the new seaside trend of sauna and cold water swimming, which the former minister did with my husband on Saturday evening. Storm Dave was fuming as he wondered how the politician’s obituary could be published, considering the potential risk of heart attack associated with extreme temperature change: his glittering ministerial career, his impressive CV before entering parliament, details of his wonderful wife and then the euphemistic but literal “found dead in a remote sauna with a young boyfriend”.

I can’t tell you how good this guy looks. And I never saw him as someone who was unhealthy or stressed while in government. He left parliament after the 2024 general election, so we’re approaching two years since he became a civilian again and he’s essentially Benjamin Button-ed. And he didn’t retire. Unlike many former Tory MPs who struggle to find work, he now has a very demanding job with a multinational company. That’s what serving in government does to you. A huge job in the private sector sounds relatively smooth.

Politicians are called many things, and most of them are unprintable. But former politicians are something else; They are best described as liver or lung; these are organs that can be abused for years by cigarettes or alcohol, but still have these amazing regenerative qualities – as long as great action is taken in time. Otherwise, they will fade and darken over time. Some MPs and ministers will now plan their next careers. Some will think this is a big surprise, as big a shock as stepping out of a relaxing sauna into the freezing cold. But how refreshing and restorative. Moreover, you receive incredible compliments from your young male friends.

Cleo Watson is Boris Johnson’s former deputy chief of staff and co-host of The Independent’s politics podcast.‘In the room’with former deputy cabinet secretary Helen MacNamara. New episodes come out every Friday Apple Podcasts, SpotifyAnd YouTube