Why it’s difficult to interview MPs – and how best to do it anyway

Philip Cowley of QMUL discusses the trials and tribulations of the political interview, offering sage advice on how to be successful in this area of research.

Few things in life can be more frustrating than trying to interview MPs. It can consume an enormous amount of time, often appearing to produce little of value in return. Each interview needs arranging, and often rearranging multiple times; there’s travel, always accompanied by a lot of waiting around, as the interviewee’s previous meetings run over; then the actual interview – “terribly sorry, very busy day today, afraid I’ve only got 20 minutes, remind me, what’s this about?” – after which there is more travel and the writing up of any notes. A single half hour interview can easily eat up half a day or more.

You will routinely come out of meetings thinking you’ve wasted your time entirely. They’ll ramble, obfuscate, get confused; they will get things wrong or just can’t remember; they’ll recount war stories, which have, like all well-told anecdotes, become so well polished over the years that they bear little resemblance to the original events; or they’ll pass on unsubstantiated gossip as if it was gospel; they often apply enormous amounts of retrospective judgment and try to place themselves at the centre of every key decision.

In much of this, they are normal human beings exhibiting normal behaviour. But, to misquote that famous line from Casablanca, politicians are like normal people, only more so. They pose especial problems for the interviewer. They are not easy to get to meet and once you’ve met them they are not easy to get stuff out of. This is because:

1. Politicians are busy people. Really busy. Busier than most people can imagine. Even the most junior has an almost infinite set of demands on their time. You are asking them to give up 30 minutes or so – sometimes more – of a packed diary. This is a non-trivial request. They will have plenty of better things they could be doing.

2. While some people might be flattered to be asked to take part in an academic study, politicians generally are not. They get bombarded with requests from school kids, university students, lecturers, pressure groups, and various randoms. If they said yes to everyone, they’d spend their entire day doing nothing else but filling in surveys or giving interviews.

3. You are asking them to do you a favour, in return for which they will likely get nothing. They don’t have to do this; you’re not a constituent. You’re not part of their core business, or even their peripheral business. You almost certainly can’t give them anything useful in return.

4. They can suffer from the bad habits of busy people: impatience, always needing to be elsewhere, with something else to do, constantly checking their phone, looking over your shoulder for someone more important. You are probably the least important thing they are doing that day; don’t assume they will give you much focus.

5. Some politicos are downright suspicious of academia and researchers. This can be an especial problem among parts of the right, who think – not entirely without justification, if we’re being honest – that academia is a hotbed of leftism, unlikely to give them a fair shake of the stick. But it can also be true on the left, especially the more traditional Trade Union-based left, wary of smarty pants academics. The Lib Dems, who often have a whiff of the Senior Common Room about them, used to be very accommodating towards academics but that’s not much help these days.

6. Even those who aren’t actively suspicious often think: what good will come of this? Why wash dirty linen in public? There’s no evidence that Bismarck ever uttered that much used quote about law and sausages – that no one should ever see either being made – but it is a view to which many politicians hold. Why risk it?

7. Politicians are used to evading difficult questions. It’s one of their core skills. If they don’t want to answer your question, they won’t. You’re in no position to probe aggressively – they can simply end the meeting if they don’t like the way things are going – and even if you could, it wouldn’t work. It is a never-ending source of amazement how many academics think they can rock up to an interview with a politician they’ve never met before and expect full disclosure. They may well not lie to you (although some will, without missing a beat) but they almost certainly won’t answer everything frankly. To expect anything else is naïve.

8. They are used to debating and challenging. Indeed, they love it. You can turn up with a list of ten carefully constructed questions, central to your research, only to find the MP doesn’t answer a single one of them in the way you expected. Worst case: they challenge the underlying assumptions of question one and go off on a long explanation of how you are essentially an idiot who doesn’t understand the subject. You never get to question two.

Based on my experience of doing around 1000 such interviews, over the last 30 or so years, this paper (available free of charge at SSRN) explains how best to overcome these problems, how best to get access to politicians, and then how to get the best out of the interviews you might do. The paper consists mostly of things I wish I’d been told at the beginning of my career – although whether I’d have listened is another matter entirely. 

Philip Cowley is Professor of Politics at Queen Mary University London. To learn more about his research click here