Why more than 50 MPs are standing down

Former work and pensions secretary Amber Rudd is among the MPs standing down in December

(Image credit: Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images)

last updated 31 October 2019

More than 55 MPs have decided they will not stand for election on 12 December.

Compared to the 31 who declined to stand again in the last national vote in 2017, the exodus has already been called a “changing of the guard”.

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Rudd decided that she would not stand as an independent in her Hastings and Rye constituency, a seat she already holds very marginally, having won by only 346 votes in 2017. Despite rumours she may try to stand as an independent in London, she said a break was due. “I’m not finished with politics, I’m just not standing at this election,” she told the London Evening Standard. She had simply hoped to leave after being welcomed back into the Tory fold, she said.

“Publicly parting company with Brexit blockers underlines that Boris Johnson is serious when he says that an intransigent Parliament has forced him into this election,” writes Douglas Carswell, who defected from the Tories to UKIP in 2014, in The Telegraph. “It also allows him to keep the mantle of being ‘Mr Brexit’, a title that one or two others might be keen to claim in the coming election contest.”

In a letter to his local newspaper, the Bucks Herald, Aylesbury MP David Lidlington wrote: “Politics imposes a heavy cost on family and private life. That is not a complaint: people who seek elected office do so voluntarily. But I have come to the conclusion that now is the right time for me to give a higher priority in terms of my time and energy, to Helen and my family who have given unstinting support to me during more than a quarter of a century in the House of Commons.”

Former Labour leadership contender Owen Smith spoke of “political and personal reasons” in his letter to party leader Jeremy Corbyn. “I write to inform you that, for political and personal reasons, I will not be standing at the forthcoming General Election. It has been an enormous privilege to serve as a Labour MP and I am truly proud to have represented my hometown of Pontypridd over the last decade.”