Me too, even one who I always had a lot of time for has taken the Queen’s shilling and can’t be arsed to get anyone to vote for him anymore and gone to the House of Layabouts. Ken Clarke.
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Streeting is in favour of part privatisation of the NHS so he would not get my vote, we could probably agree on Dodds and I’d suggest Phillips, Rayner, Harman and Cooper along with Ed Milliband and probably Ed Davey but picking up skeletons in cupboards is something of a political habit so I doubt any of them is above all criticism.
But some of this is about profile isn’t it? I am sure there are plenty of hard working low profile MPs even on the Tory side - my own (Tory) MP mostly just got on with the job without fuss. Unsurprisingly he’s standing down for the next GE.
I rather suspect that if we - the members of SF - were all MPs then we would all have skeletons of various kinds that would make each other unelectable in our eyes.
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I know I would.
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Without a doubt. Some of my youthful behaviours would almost certainly be the end of a political career.
Likewise, but if you’re upfront about doubtful youthful (or not😉) shenanigans rather than issuing grovelling, embarrassing apologies when they’re later discovered you would likely have more respect.
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Maybe not if you were open about them, you might get some flack but it will go away when the folks see that you are who you are. Unfortunately not of the front benches on either side or up in the corner are worthy of voting for.
Those I can forgive (not least because I should be the last to cast the first stone 
), it’s what their doing now that concerns me.
Maybe your MPs standing down because he is a decent person with integrity @billybutcher
I had in mind more obvious ‘skeletons’. I would probably not vote for someone who wanted proportional representation or who wanted the house of lords to be elected, for example. Though much would depend on their other policies and attitudes too.
Becoming an MP places a person under a public microscope, with everyone able to sift through their histories in a way that’s not been easily possible until recently.
Why’s that. Isn’t FPTP rather brutal?
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Because FPTP and the current method of elevation to the upper house work so well?
I’ve talked about this before, and I’m not interested in discussing my reasons again. The point is that each of us probably have things that we consider right that others deeply and fundamentally oppose.
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Might have been better not to have mentioned it then @Ancient_Mariner , I read what you said twice and then again and thought it must have been a typo. How anybody could not want democracy is beyond my comprehension. Neither FPTP or the HoL are democratic.
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From personal experience… I can say with hand on heart… I have always done my best to do “the right thing”… but… I know that there are times when one’s best isn’t enough and things can go badly wrong… mea culpa !
I would love a time-machine to go back and do a few things better/differently… 
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What would your idea of democracy be, David . FPTP is like horse or dog racing, the one who gets the most votes is the winner. Unless the incumbent govt start gerrymandering like they did last year. Representational voting wouldnt really work to well either considering the size of the UK, in comparison to like the US.
HoL should be scrapped completly imho.
Were I to become a politician I have no doubt whatsoever that all sorts of drunken photos in full 80’s OTT tat (and eg pictures of my 21st fancy dress party, where a pal of mine came as Cleopatra rolled up in a carpet carried by a few more friends, whence he was unrolled wearing only a leopardskin jockstrap) would surface along with scurrilous things I wrote as secretary of a drinking club - and goodness knows what we got up to wasn’t that dreadful but it could certainly be presented that way.
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I have found the best way to get along with people one may/do not agree with is to keep quiet about ones personal views, though few others seem to respect that. The other alternative is to withdraw from society, which often looks quite an attractive option.
Consider then that I have put my head above the parapet in order to illustrate my point.
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Actually that’s not always the case in the UK. I think there’s been at least two GE’s in recent decades, where the party that won the most seats didn’t get the most votes.
Similarly in the US in 2016, Clinton got more votes than Trump
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I know this, the winner doesnt always get the prize through hidden skullduggery.