Elected in the 1997 landslide, Westminster’s answer to Hugh Grant was one of the first openly gay MPs – and a firebrand on TV. After 27 years, he reveals why he’s leaving politics behind
After Ben Bradshaw was selected as the Labour candidate for Exeter in 1997, Peter Mandelson apparently said: “Bloody hell, where did you come from?” Bradshaw had been a journalist, BBC Radio’s man on the ground at the fall of the Berlin Wall. He won the seat, at the age of 36, surfing the wave of enthusiasm for Tony Blair. Perhaps more importantly, as an openly gay candidate – only the second in British parliamentary history – he proved that the country had had enough not just of the Tories in general but of raging homophobes. Adrian Rogers, whose majority he overturned, notoriously described homosexuality as a “sterile, disease-ridden and God-forsaken occupation”.
I meet Bradshaw in Portcullis House, his office filled not with grumpy staffers but two youngsters learning the ropes, which gives it a slightly festive, end of term mood. It’s a bit like seeing Hugh Grant in real life: remembering him so well as a constant screen presence in the Blair and Brown years – armoured by power, softened by charm, with the faintly suspicious air of a guy who finds everything a bit too easy – now a bit more bashed about and much more real. Bradshaw won’t be standing again at the next election and his openness about it is disarming. “One reason I have absolutely no misgivings about stepping down,” he says, “is that I’m still traumatised by Brexit. It was such a disaster for the country.”
