With British politics at a turning point, former Tory MP Mark Field reflects on his career in and out of Westminster in his new memoir, The End of an Era. In this conversation, we explore why now was the right time to tell his story and the lessons it holds for the future.
What made this the right moment to tell your story?
It had always been at the back of my mind that at some point I would write a memoir for my children, reflecting the life and times I have lived through in and out of public life. Having had five years outside the Westminster bubble and in the aftermath of the Tory Party’s most cataclysmic defeat in its history, I felt now was the time!
You’ve spoken about your generation benefiting from opportunities that seem out of reach for younger generations. What do you see as the biggest systemic barrier facing young people today? How would you address it?
The general sense of confidence and the array of career possibilities that seemed open to those of us leaving university in the mid- and late 1980s is not there for many of today’s twenty-somethings. Partly, this is to do with the fact that, across the world, there is an imbalance between the supply of and demand for graduates in today’s economy. This means my generation of middle-aged Britons worries that our children are going to be less well off than we were – and key to this (in the UK at least) is a sense that it is far more difficult to get on the housing ladder.
During your time at Oxford, you crossed paths with future political heavyweights like Nick Robinson, Michael Gove and Keir Starmer. Have your first impressions of them stood the test of time?
More than you might imagine! Both Nick and Michael were highly articulate and charismatic even as undergraduates, so their rapid rise in the media was pre-ordained to some extent. I suspect Nick’s career at the BBC made the prospect of a move into politics more difficult than being a star columnist in a national newspaper did, which is why only Michael entered Parliament. Keir Starmer and I were reading the same subject at the same college; he was in Oxford for a year on the highly prestigious postgraduate Bachelor of Civil Law course, so a top-flight legal career was the more obvious trajectory for him. This is, of course, what he did up until the age of fifty-two (which is the oldest any Prime Minister in the history of the office has been when first entering Parliament).
When you became Foreign Office Minister, was there a moment when you felt you had truly arrived in the position?
It was about six weeks after I had been appointed that I first travelled to Asia on a nine-day official visit to China, Hong Kong, South Korea and Singapore. The first set-piece meetings were with senior ministerial counterparts in Beijing and I must admit that I was a little nervous beforehand, keen not to let down my private office and our team of diplomats on the ground. Protocol is vitally important to the Chinese and the fact that the key meetings were all allowed to run a little longer than planned was the clearest sign that I had ‘performed’.
If you could pick someone to play you in the biopic film of The End of an Era, who would it be and why?
I am not holding my breath that such a film will ever see the light of day, but if Michael Douglas could be persuaded to come out of retirement…
The End of an Era: The Decline and Fall of the Tory Party by Mark Field is out on 27 March.
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