‘After all these years, I finally have a front page in the Daily Mirror worth keeping,” George Osborne tweeted following the tabloid’s revelations that weeks after losing the EU referendum and exiting the cabinet, the former chancellor had been spotted firing a machine gun in Vietnam.
“He really let rip,” said a tourist who saw Osborne shooting £1-a-pop bullets with “the largest machine gun available” at the range on a former Viet Cong base near Ho Chi Minh City. “We were all having a bit of a laugh about it – that he was aiming at a picture of Boris Johnson or Theresa May.”
Regardless of whether or not having a blast with an M60 machine gun on what was once a battlefield can be considered good taste, it seems a long way for the man who was once Britain’s second most powerful politician to go in order to take out his frustrations. It is also a long way from how some other politicians have behaved after an unexpected defeat.
The morning after his electoral annihilation by Tony Blair, for example, John Major went to the Oval cricket ground, where he has been a regular visitor since his Brixton boyhood, to watch Surrey play British Universities.
The journalist and former professional cricketer Ed Smith, who was playing in that 1997 match, recalls that despite his humiliation Major “visited both dressing rooms, chatting courteously with all of us. He looked shattered but also relieved, even oddly assured.”
So, is the manner in which a politician responds to crushing defeat a measure of the man (or woman, obviously)?
Failure can certainly be a bitter pill to swallow. As Michael Portillo, the bumptious Conservative defence minister whose political career was gloriously terminated in the Blair landslide, put it: “My name is now synonymous with eating a bucketload of shit in public.”
A 2015 study by the Open University revealed the extent of the emotional carnage unforeseen defeat can wreak. Interviews with 30 politicians, including MPs who lost their seats in the 2010 election, revealed “shock, hurt, devastation, guilt, betrayal, a sense of failure … and shame” lasting sometimes many months, the study’s author, Jane Roberts, concluded.
The upset and pain of losing (“Inside I was smashed to pieces … It took every ounce of emotional strength, but you’ve got to hold it together,” one former MP told the researcher) is equalled only by the difficulty of adjusting to a new reality.
Defeated politicians “suddenly lose a demanding, busy but valued role”, Roberts said. “Suddenly they are no longer relevant to any political debate. Their deeply cherished values and beliefs seem to have no place … The experience is dislocating at best, but personally crushing, even in the longer term for some.”
Perhaps not surprising, then, that a few feel an urgent need to loose off a few machine-gun rounds in the jungles of Vietnam. But if you have an eye on the future, travelling to exotic locations to let off steam Rambo-style is not necessarily the way to go.
What a defeated politician is ideally looking for – as Major demonstrated – is something that says to the public: “Yes, it hurts. But I am now going to return to a very normal life – which I know, as do you, is actually far tougher than the life lived by the loathed Westminster elite.”
David Cameron half got there, making the requisite “visibly emotional” resignation speech, cracking a few jokes in parliament that “the diary for the rest of my day is remarkably light”, and letting it be known he was taking his daughter riding.
Sadly, he then went to Corsica on a holiday that – despite flying easyJet – the Telegraph reckoned will have cost £15,000, and got himself photographed in “£225 shorts from a designer Notting Hill shop”.
Former justice secretary Michael Gove, also summarily sacked, might have smoothed his path to eventual re-entry, departing with a modest little wave and then cunningly setting himself up as the butt of a thousand jokes by being spotted in a scruffy little beard that spoke of many dark nights of the soul.
Because defeat is not always the end: Major (unlike Blair) is an admired elder statesman; Portillo has transformed himself into an affable TV railway buff. Ed Balls, who in a few minutes in May 2015 went from being a pugnacious, much-derided would-be chancellor to an unemployed ex-MP, is on the way.
Helped by a gracious acceptance of defeat and some coy confessions about how hard it was for him to learn the piano, Balls has now progressed to the pinnacle of public reacceptance that is an appearance on Strictly Come Dancing. Osborne is rumoured to have ambassadorial ambitions; he may not have got off to an auspicious start.
