‘I get a daily abuse from people who want to see me dead’: Nicky Morgan explains her Commons exit

Tory cabinet minister has revealed in disturbing detail how febrile and dangerous British politics has become.

Britain's culture secretary Nicky Morgan has decided the job is just not worth it.

Nicky Morgan was standing on the platform at St Pancras station last month after the first Saturday sitting of parliament for 40 years when she decided that the time was coming to bring her career to a close.

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With Boris Johnson on the cusp of securing a majority for his deal with Brussels, MPs had instead backed an amendment that rendered the vote on his deal meaningless. What had been billed as Super Saturday descended into farce as Mr Johnson was forced to request a Brexit delay.

“It was exasperating, frustrating and depressing beyond belief,” she says. “I thought about staying in London on that Saturday night and I thought I just can’t be in Westminster, I need to go back to Leicestershire.”

As she was waiting for the train a guard advised her that she should sit at the front of the train for her safety as it was packed with protesters. Mrs Morgan, who is 47, found herself asking: “Is this really what I want?”

The culture secretary, who prides herself on being a “robust” politician, came to the conclusion that she had had enough. On Tuesday she visited Mr Johnson in his Downing Street office and told him that, despite supporting him and his deal, she was quitting to spend more time with her family. Mr Johnson was “almost rendered speechless”.

“There was a lot of hair ruffling,” she says. “He very sweetly said, ‘Is there anything I can do. Let’s have a think about it’.”

However, for Mrs Morgan the decision had been a long time in the making. Her nine-year career as an MP, particularly her role as a prominent backbench rebel after the EU referendum, has seen her become a target for hard line Brexiteers.

She is on the receiving end of a daily “stream” of abuse and threats which has become so frequent she has almost become inured to it. “You turn on your emails in the morning and you get a stream of people telling you they’d like to see you dead or how useless they think you,” she says.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, Dominic Raab and Nicky Morgan in the House of Commons. Picture: AP

“The trouble is that you become more and more used to it. You stop regarding it as being abusive and offensive and you only end up reporting the most serious messages – the death threats – to the police. Unfortunately words like betrayal and traitor have become so commonplace now in what we hear, and what we have yelled at us outside Westminster, that it’s become one of those things again that you just have to shrug off.”

The sheer relentlessness of the abuse, with the now daily ritual of having to delete emails and block abusive people on social media, has worn her down. “I think people struggle, even people close to you, to really understand what’s going on,” she says. “A lot of it is wearying. You can press the delete button, you can press the block button on Twitter, but it’s another thing you have to sort of emotionally process before you get through the day.”

Mrs Morgan also admits that she has been afraid. Two people have been jailed for sending her abuse and she has received warnings from police about particular constituents who pose a threat.

“I suppose what it does insidiously is change my behaviour and the way I interact with constituents,” she says. “Things like not saying publicly where I’m going to be, not being able to go and deliver leaflets on my own, concerns about standing in Loughborough market to campaign. I’m sure most of the time it would be absolutely fine. But as we know, after the awful incident with Jo Cox, it only takes someone once to be lucky. I’ve had about four people prosecuted, two of them have gone to prison.”

As a Tory MP on the receiving end of abuse and also as culture secretary, Mrs Morgan says that social media companies need to do more to stop the proliferation of fake and anonymous accounts. One of her biggest disappointments about standing down is that she will not be able to implement a new “duty of care” for social media companies.

“Unfortunately what the platforms have allowed to happen is often anonymous misogynistic abuse [allowing] people just to say things that I suspect many people never say in normal life face-to-face. The platforms need to know who they are and who they’ve got registering with them.”

Her biggest concern is that the abuse of so many female MPs could deter women from embarking on a career in politics. “There are efforts on all sides of the House to get women more involved and what you don’t want to see is those efforts undermined by the environment in which we’re asking MPs to operate,” she says.

For Mrs Morgan, the “enormous pressure” that her job has put on her family is no longer worth it. Her son was two and a half when she entered parliament and she has missed out on most of his primary education. Her husband, Jonathan, has taken the strain at home. “I don’t think that I have ever attended a parents’ evening,” she says. “If I don’t go now he will be 16 by the time of the next election. I will basically miss pretty much all of his secondary education. There comes a point I really need to be at home more for the sake of my family.”

She recalls a recent conversation in which a colleague told her that being an MP “is a pretty selfish job”.

Morgan leaves Downing Street. Picture: Getty Images

“It doesn’t matter whether you’re a male MP or female MP,” she says. “If you’ve got another half, and particularly if you’ve got children, your other half bears the brunt of it.”

On Brexit Mrs Morgan’s position has shifted dramatically. As the education secretary during the 2016 referendum she was a prominent Remainer, before being sacked when Theresa May became prime minister.

On the back benches Mrs Morgan went through what she described as her “rebel phase”. She repeatedly voted against the government to stop a no-deal Brexit and warned of its damaging economic impact.

In January this year she decided on a different course. She sat around a table with senior Eurosceptics including Jacob Rees-Mogg and Iain Duncan Smith and thrashed out what became known as the Malthouse Compromise on alternative arrangements for the Northern Ireland border.

Her reputation for compromise impressed Mr Johnson. When he became prime minister he surprised her by offering a return to cabinet as culture secretary. “When I was in my rebel phase I would have liked nothing more than to have received thousands of emails from people saying … 2016 was a mistake, I wish it hadn’t happened,” she says. “But I didn’t get those emails. What I got was people who want to leave. And actually with a typical British sense of righteousness and fair play, people like me – Remainers – said, ‘We’ve had a campaign, let’s get on with this’. ”

As recently as September, however, she said that she would vote Remain in the event of a second Brexit referendum. Mr Johnson’s success in securing a deal has changed her position. “I would vote to leave with this deal,” she says. “People who want to either revoke or remain talk about the damage on the economy,” she said. “I’m a former chair of the Treasury select committee, I don’t want to see our economy damaged. But actually think about the incalculable damage done to people’s belief in our democracy and the weight of their vote if we do not deliver on the 2016 referendum result.”

The threat of a no-deal Brexit is now firmly banished, she suggests. “If you vote Conservative at this election, you’re voting to leave with this deal, and no-deal has been effectively been taken off the table.”

Mrs Morgan says that she has been very impressed with Mr Johnson’s “transformation” into a politician with “gravitas” since he became prime minister. She will be going on the campaign trail with fellow One Nation colleagues to help Conservative candidates in liberal areas.

“I have absolutely no hesitation, and I say this as a One Nation Conservative, in asking people to vote for the prime minister,” she says.

Mrs Morgan is still working out her next steps amid rumours that she could be elevated to the Lords. “Who knows,” she says. “I want to stay involved in politics. I am a political animal. I think what I’ve learnt in this year of my journey is that I am absolutely to my core Conservative.”

The Times