Recess? WHAT RECESS!

Everyone assumes the politicians have clocked off for July and August. To be fair, some do. Most do not. I did ten such summers, some more productive than others, some spent hiding in a hole in the ground, and you can probably guess which year was which. On a serious note, here is what is actually going on while the chambers sit empty, and why it should matter to you.

I did ten recesses. Ten summers of being told, usually by someone at a barbecue holding a paper plate, that it must be lovely to get the whole of August off. I grimaced and nodded with that polite, and slightly passive annoyed look i perfected over the years.

It is a lovely idea. The big long summer off. It is also not remotely what happens.

What actually happens in recess is that the chamber goes quiet and everything else simply gets louder. The surgery tours. The rural shows and gala days, where over the years I judged dog shows, Victoria sponges and, on one unforgettable afternoon, a competitive vegetable. Not an aubergine in sight, I might add.

The casework that has been patiently waiting for you to have five minutes. And yes, somewhere in there, if you are quick and lucky, a fortnight of trying and failing not to look at your phone whilst ordering a cocktail in the Canaries.

From the outside it looks as though politics has switched off for the summer. It hasn't. It has gone into the workshop.

The September I remember

Here is the bit nobody sees.

You come back in September, faintly sunburnt (my party leader once told me, on the first day back, that I looked like a quiz show presenter) and lying endlessly about how thoroughly rested you feel, to an inbox that has been quietly breeding for six weeks. You have been put on a committee whose work programme is laden with legislation you didn’t know might ever exist, but does. You are holding a portfolio brief the size of a phone book. And the diary you left empty is now mysteriously full of meetings that other people decided you wanted to have. Thanks, guys.

That was every September for me. It is every September for all of them, right now, sharpening up for the autumn.

Why this one is worse than most

And this year it is properly brutal for the poor new sods who have just been elected to serve.

Scotland and Wales both voted in May. Holyrood is a new session, committees still forming, a good number of members quietly working out where the toilets are. The Senedd has gone from 60 members to 96 more or less overnight, under a brand new voting system, with a new balance of power and a government still finding the light switches. Westminster has a new Prime Minister and the whole programme that drags along behind him. Even Stormont, which did not have an election, gets the same September avalanche. Four parliaments, and barely a settled desk between them.

So most of the people coming back are not picking up where they left off. They are starting from scratch: perhaps a new portfolio, a new committee, no settled idea yet of what the next few years are meant to be about.

Which, if you have something to say to politicians, is the best news you will get all year.

A member in September, in that first term of office, is as close to a blank page as you will ever find them. By November that page is full, and someone else has done the writing. By year two they are on another level entirely: jaded, completely knackered, and completely out of breath from all the Commonwealth Games worthy shinning up and sliding back down greasy political poles. I have been there. Trust me.

What I noticed the clever people doing

The desk is piled with manifestae (not a actual word, but I quite like it). Enough corporate annual reports to light a late summer barbecue. Someone once sent me an entire book they had written that summer on how ferry franchising ought to work. Hundreds of pages.

Here is what didn't work: emailing me a campaign. I did not read campaigns. Nobody reads campaigns in September. They go in the same mental folder as the barbecue small talk.

The ones who got through to me did something quieter. They worked out that I was now on a big committee I knew little about, and sent me the single thing that made it less terrifying: a short, honest, genuinely useful note I was grateful to receive, rather than one more thing to survive.

They watched for committee calls for views, several of which are open as I type this, because a good written submission early is the cheapest influence in politics and the first ones in tend to set the terms. And they worked out, often before I had, how to make my job easier instead of heavier.

That is the whole trick, and it is not a well kept secret. In the September scramble, a member's time goes to whoever makes their life simpler, never to whoever shouts the loudest. You do not build that in the panic of October. You build it now, in the quiet, while the building is empty and there is actually time to get it right.

Use your summer wisely! Plan ahead. Think about how you are going to engage with government and politics. Think about how to make their lives easy this coming term. And for goodness sake, leave those newly elected folk alone for a short week or two while they make it up in advance to their mums, partners, kids and dogs, who will see precious little of them for the next four months, nay four years actually.

The politicians are away. The advantage very much is not.

Jamie Greene spent ten years, and ten recesses, in the Scottish Parliament before founding Kempock. He knows exactly what that September inbox looks like, because he is the one who used to open it, sigh, and get on with it.

If you want some advice on HOW TO ENGAGE, drop him a line