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It was late on a school night, at a time when most teenagers would have been relaxing at home.
But Rosie Duffield’s teenage son was up, sitting on a bench in the Palace of Westminster’s central lobby, surrounded by journalists as he watched The Thick of it on his phone, while she voted.
The member for Canterbury gave her sons a firsthand introduction to politics. As one of the few MPs trying to combine the demands of a career in Westminster with the duties of a single parent she had little choice.
“It’s kind of bring your child to work with you in a way,” the Labour MP tells i.
When she was first elected in 2017 her sons were 14 and 18. Her youngest would stay with her in London during the week, often with a friend in tow, and then head back to school in Kent everyday on the train “at stupid o’clock in the morning”.
Late night votes meant the evenings were often also far from conventional. Deliveroo “became a friend” for Ms Duffield’s son while she was tied to divisions on Brexit or media appearances: “They would be ordering all kinds of horrible food and fizzy drinks – and they loved it – because I felt so bad,” she says.
Food wasn’t her only worry. “Once he even came into a debate I did on postpartum issues for mums. I had to talk to him beforehand and say: ‘Oh my god, I’m going to be talking about birth trauma. Just maybe put your earphones in!’ He was absolutely fine with it.”
But she adds: “I could not imagine being able to do this job with younger children.”
Fellow Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi had to do just that. Her son Jack was 12 when she was selected as Labour’s candidate for Gower and turned 13 the day before the 2017 general election that saw his mum become an MP.
On combining the job with being a single parent she says there is “no one way to do it”. But for Antoniazzi, it was her mother who made it possible and “totally scooped up my son” from the day she was selected.
“I couldn’t have done it without her,” she says. “She just said, ‘Jack get your stuff, get your X-box, get your clothes’, and you know he never really came home after that!”
The MP starts to cry. “The horrible thing for me is that just as my son has gone to university, I’m now caring for my mother because she’s got cancer.
“Isn’t it ironic that this poor woman, who supported me and put up with me and empowered me to be able to do this job is now unwell at the point when she can finally stop. I owe so much to her.”
There have been some perks of the dual role. The hours have allowed Antoniazzi to drop her son at school on a Monday and do pick-up on a Thursday for example and school holidays often align with recess.
The pandemic when she, Jack and her mother were all living under the same roof, as she worked from home also provided a boost, allowing her a “lovely” opportunity to reconnect with her son.
The first time he came to Parliament he was “miserable”, Antoniazzi says, and just wanted to tour around London’s football stadiums. Now, aged 19 he is happier on Westminster visits and is able to have his mother’s Parliamentary spousal pass so that he can come and go as he pleases without requiring a chaperone.
“I’m very lucky we have got to this stage,” she says. “It is really, really helpful. It just saves me and makes things so much easier.”
One of the best ways Antoniazzi found to cope with the time apart was by simply trying to switch that part of her brain off: “When I’m in Westminster I try not to think about home at all – the only time I get to call my son or my mum on my way into or back from Parliament and that is it. Same thing goes when I’m home, I don’t think about here and that is the split we have.”
For Mims Davies, Department for Work and Pensions minister and Conservative MP for Mid Sussex, becoming a single mother nearly ended her political career altogether.
“I was going to leave politics when I ended up on my own [after her divorce in 2017], and I fully expected to,” she tells i.
She had been elected MP for Eastleigh in 2015 when her daughters were just five and ten. But when she became a single parent she found that juggling between work and home life was just too much.
“The gilded cage of obligations between Westminster and home”, she calls it – where you are “always feeling torn”. So she opted to step down in advance of the general election in 2019.
But then the decision of her Conservative colleague Sir Nicholas Soames to stand down from his Mid Sussex seat – Ms Davies’s home constituency – offered her a Parliamentary lifeline. And in a break from normal party conventions, for someone who has just stood down, she was allowed to be interviewed as a prospective candidate for 2019 and was selected.
“I was incredibly lucky,” she says. “That’s a rarity. I count myself extremely lucky to still be in frontline politics, that wasn’t a given at all.
“My previous constituents and my association, my chairman, my friends, they totally got it. It worked out brilliantly because with Covid, the juggle would have been just too much to try to settle their lives and mine… so thank you to whoever helped that come about.”
But Davies also sees the whole situation as an indication of the difficulties facing single parents who want to work in politics.
“It was crazy, that an experienced mum and minister and an MP, potentially wasn’t able to apply,” she says. “No other job would have been that way.”
But becoming an MP was a “challenging” adjustment for her children, she acknowledges, going from her being “very much there” to suddenly being “in London, on a whip, three or four days a week”.
Her ex-husband helps with childcare, and taking her daughters, now 13 and 18, to their sports clubs. Grandparents and friends also pitch in and there is occasional paid help.
Now, eight years on from becoming an MP, “we are sort of into the groove” of making it work but it is still “really difficult” and requires “amazing support”.
Even as she meets i, Davies is juggling work with how to get her eldest daughter, now 18, picked up from the airport following her post A-levels trip.
She says: “When you hear the phrase, it takes a village, it literally takes a village and most of the constituents.”
But she adds: “My kids understand that when you’re in London, four days a week, it is really full on. But then there’s parts of the year where you are local and that is great.
“What I do notice compared to when I came in eight years ago, is the increased level of work”.
Davies says a balance has to be found between being increasingly “reachable and visible”, as she believes MPs should be, and making time for yourself and your family.
Occasionally she is forced to cut a conversation short and just say to someone: “I’ve got to go because I’ve got to do some parenting. They need to see me and sometimes I do have to cook for them.
“It is why you need supportive friends and understanding children; they are the most wonderful people in this.”
But one of the trickiest things, Davies adds, is getting to the end of a difficult day and not having someone to talk to about it.
“I’d really like someone just to go: ‘Right. It’s all okay’. [But] going dating or getting out and having a life is not really going to happen.”