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Mhairi Black’s maiden speech in the House of Commons 10 years ago remains a thing of beauty. We are only treated to a snippet of it in this excellent documentary about the former Scottish National party politician – the youngest MP elected to parliament since 1832 – but I recommend finding the whole thing on YouTube. Black, then just 20 years old, has the Commons in the palm of her hand, simultaneously charming her fellow MPs with her dry wit and laying bare the deprivation in her Paisley and Renfrewshire South constituency (among the horrors: a man who starved himself in order to afford his bus fare to the jobcentre, only to collapse on the way there). The documentary does, however, retain some of her best one-liners from that address. Among them, the fact that her MP status and changes to housing benefit meant that she was “the only 20-year-old in the whole of the UK” that would be getting any government help with their housing.
Black – if it wasn’t clear already – is a force of nature, and someone we surely need in politics. And yet, her exit from Westminster is what this one-off film is all about. We zip between archive clips from her younger years as an IndyRef campaigner; the last days of her career as an MP (Black announced her intention to stand down at the next election in 2023, following through on that promise in 2024); and her post-politics life. There’s also footage from last year’s Edinburgh fringe show, Politics Isn’t for Me, which saw her turn her tumultuous time in parliament into something approaching comedy, commanding the stage with what she calls her “Britney mic” jutting out in front of her mouth (the Guardian described it as “comedy therapy”). Being a young, gay woman in the Commons, we learn, took a profound toll on Black’s mental health. She tells us as much – describing it as having had “anxiety all the time” – but we can see it, too, the colour slowly draining from her face as her 20s march on. When we cut back to the present, she is calmer, happier; there is talk of regaining independence and control.
The message here is clear: Black may have been allowed to roam the corridors of power, but it was never somewhere she had any real chance of thriving. From the start, the tabloids were digging up old social media posts about her love of alcopops and why “maths is shite”. These were posted, unsurprisingly, when she was still at school. In any case, it was an “archaic” place where she didn’t fit in, and somewhere she felt isolated and even scared at points. She was left alone to deal with “visceral” hate – trolls calling her a “dyke”, a “dirty bitch”, and telling her that she was too ugly to get raped – and even death threats, including one which she says the police described as “imminent”. She drank too much, and lost weight from all the vomiting; her dad, Alan, says “her spark” was missing. Her wife, Katie, explains that people began to brand Black as lazy when she was signed off work for three months between 2017 and 2018. While the couple don’t go into too much detail about those critics here, it wasn’t just the media any more: Black has previously gone on the record to say that her fellow MPs also cast aspersions on her character.
Away from those tough times, we also see how determined, fierce and funny Black is, but not, ironically, during her onstage segments. It’s in her Commons performances that these qualities shine through. When she describes the government as having been largely “pished” during lockdown, then deputy speaker Dame Rosie Winterton asks her to mind her language. Without missing a beat, Black fires back a host of other options, complete with theatrical hand gestures: “Inebriated? Intoxicated? Paralytic?” There’s also a hilarious episode, where a tabloid claims that Black has called Rishi Sunak a “dickhead” during PMQs. Black lip-reads back her own mutterings before deciding that wasn’t what she said, but that it wouldn’t exactly have been wrong if she had done. On top of this, we also see how she is managing her mental health and neurodiversity (she was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in 2018, and is being tested for autism). Allowing yourself to be filmed reflecting on your enviable political career is one thing. That Black also let the cameras roll during moments of struggle and mental exhaustion is far more impressive.
I’m not entirely sure that her future lies in standup, but then neither is Black. Instead, she’s just really, really glad to be out of parliament, a new lightness radiating off her as the film ends. Her exit really is a loss to British politics. But my God, I’ve never seen someone look so happy to be walking the dog.
