In mid-1985, PG, an anti-abortion campaigner from Glasgow, wrote to the then Ulster Unionist MP, Enoch Powell. While PG believed, correctly, that Powell was sympathetic to his views, the letter concerned letter-writing itself. Referring to what he termed the ‘controversy’ of standardized letters, PG asked, ‘if constituents have for whatever reasons, difficulty in trying to formulate personal letters to MPs on pro-life matters, is it better for constituents to sign a pre-printed letter rather than do nothing at all?’Footnote 1 Powell replied: ‘I have to say what you call “pre-printed letters” are virtually a dead loss. A Member is much more influenced by a letter written by a constituent himself or herself, however ill expressed.’Footnote 2
Powell’s letter reveals how correspondence was a tool of mutual scrutiny between voters and politicians. It may seem obvious that members of the public made judgements about MPs based on their replies, but Powell’s letter shows that MPs also made assessments of their correspondents. This was a form of triage where the handwritten but ‘ill expressed’ personal letter might be evaluated as an authentic expression of opinion while the lucid and well-informed letter might not. In How to Be an MP, Paul Flynn, longstanding Labour member for Newport West, explained:
The prized letters are handwritten with a Votingham postmark [i.e. from the MP’s own constituency]. These are from real human beings, often with serious problems. Generous time is devoted to them. Sadly these are not always what they seem. Cunning lobbyists persuade constituents to use this channel. After two or three identical letters, they are sussed.Footnote 3
As Powell and Flynn’s comments highlight, writers were often aware that their messages would be subject to bureaucratic management and sought to shape their communications in this light. This was a dialectic with a history and a context. MPs and their staffs were experienced analysts of correspondence whose judgements were shared with fellow political operators and, at times, contested.
For the last century and more, writing to politicians has been among the most common ways citizens have engaged with politics – simultaneously a minority pursuit and something millions did. In Britain, it was a feature of public life well before the advent of full adult suffrage (for those over twenty-one) in 1928. Writing letters to government officials in search of assistance was already endemic in early modern England.Footnote 4
The practice’s rise is connected to changing technology – the spread not only of radio, TV, and social media, but also typewriters, photocopiers, word-processors and computerized filing systems.Footnote 5 It is a practice that needs to be seen in the context of shifts in other ways that MPs interacted with the public. Note the long-term demise of the mass meeting and the rise of the constituency surgery as well as the decline in signing and sending petitions directly to Parliament.Footnote 6 Similarly, its history is connected to other forms of epistolary practice, such as writing letters to the editor.Footnote 7 Nor is writing to decision makers and political representatives a purely British phenomenon or a purely democratic one.Footnote 8
Scholars have long had an interest in the phenomenon. We are scarcely unique in taking Powell as our starting point. After his notorious 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, Diana Spearman undertook a pioneering if problematic analysis of some of the tens of thousands of letters Powell received.Footnote 9 These letters have been reanalysed ever since.Footnote 10 To date, the approach to examining letters to politicians has taken two principal forms. The first has been to use surveys and interviews to focus on the politicians who received correspondence.Footnote 11 Driven by an interest in the changing sociology, role, and expectations of MPs since the 1960s, political scientists have used an analysis of their postbags to trace how MPs have become local welfare officers as well as national legislators.
Historians, by contrast, have been drawn to the rich textual resource of letters themselves. Scholars have re-read letters to illuminate public opinion on specific topics and to reveal ‘the moral architecture of public and private life’ in modern Britain.Footnote 12 Recent studies have used letters to explore attitudes towards appeasement, Britishness, constitutional monarchy, immigration, and post-war socialism.Footnote 13 A focus of this work has been the question of changing approaches to emotional expression in what Amy Whipple has termed the ‘relatively private and anonymous space’ of the letter itself.Footnote 14 Frank Mort’s work has been especially influential. He used letters to Edward VIII during the abdication crisis to open a window into ‘competing forms of emotional expression’ during a ‘crisis of national self-confidence’.Footnote 15
Both approaches have revealed much about British politics. However, when read independently, they can sometimes present a misleading picture of how and why people wrote to politicians. Historians have focused on how individuals wrote about national and sensational topics rather than local and more mundane ones. Likewise, their examinations of an inevitably limited number of postbags have sometimes led, for example, to the suggestion that some practices, such as sending poetry, were more ‘remarkable’ than was really the case.Footnote 16 Equally, political scientists’ quest for representativeness has meant less attention to the minutiae of individual letters. These scholars concentrate on tangible outcomes (decisions overturned or more information provided) rather than intangible ones (feeling heard and establishing a psychological connection).Footnote 17
This is why we put these hitherto separate approaches in dialogue as well as stressing the relationship between the citizen-writer and representative-reader. Most importantly, we pay close attention to the mediators in this relationship: the spouses, secretaries, aides, and assistants whose job it was to open, analyse, and draft replies. This was a group of people of whom, crucially, letter-writers were often aware, and formed a critical set of third players in what was less of a private form of communication than might be assumed.
As well as drawing on existing literature we have examined letter collections belonging to, among others: Stanley Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain, Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, Hugh Gaitskill, Harold Macmillan, Harold Wilson, Neil Kinnock, David Owen, Margaret Thatcher, and Tam Dalyell. The preponderance of prime ministers and party leaders in this list makes it hard to compare directly how members of the public wrote to different types of politicians (backbenchers, leaders, their own MPs, etc.). This reflects the fact that much correspondence to backbench MPs remains either uncatalogued or closed on confidentiality grounds. Therefore, we have supplemented the direct evidence contained in letter collections with surveys, memoirs, diaries, newspaper and newsreel evidence, as well as material gathered by the sociological research organization Mass Observation (MO). Getting as close as we can to the present-day, we make use of a witness seminar we conducted that included testimony from former Labour leader Neil Kinnock and from individuals who managed correspondence for party leaders and backbenchers.Footnote 18
We explore how correspondence grew in popularity as a form of political engagement, even before the internet lowered the cost and effort of communicating.Footnote 19 We trace this to the expansion of the state after the First World War and the increasing demands electors placed on it. While the growth of this form of communication placed practical and psychological demands on politicians, it also offered MPs opportunities that could redound to their benefit, especially if they implemented effective correspondence management processes.
While we are aware our survey is far from complete, we hope it provides both a spur for further research and context for those interested in letter-writing either as a political activity itself or as a window onto popular opinion. Our central claims are as follows. On the one hand, politicians prized the ‘right’ kind of correspondence and developed techniques for panning for the gold. On the other, letter-writers were frequently aware of this and crafted their words accordingly. Thus, the contents of correspondence need to be read in the light of the attention-seeking strategies of writers, which often reflected rational, knowing, and politically informed efforts to secure the notice of elected representatives.
I
Well before the First World War, correspondence was regarded as an effective campaigning tool. In 1897, the feminist journal The Woman’s Signal advised readers that ‘a personal letter is far more effectual than signing a petition to Parliament’.Footnote 20 The growing volume of correspondence over the subsequent century is prima facie evidence that writing to politicians was regarded as useful or even inherently rewarding. People did not write exclusively to their own MPs. The classic example is that of early female parliamentarians, who were often treated as representatives of women in general, or specific groups of them, such as widows.Footnote 21
Though the general trend is evident, the data is patchy. The first public poll (in 1948) found 9 per cent of those questioned had written to their MP at some point.Footnote 22 Systematic surveys did not appear until the 1980s, with figures rising from 10 per cent in 1983 to 17 per cent by 1991, thereafter remaining relatively stable.Footnote 23 This increase predates email and is possibly linked to the spread of word processing. MPs’ own claims are difficult to verify, but broad trends are visible. Labour’s Douglas Jay, first elected for Battersea in 1946, recalled that at that stage he received twenty to twenty-five letters from constituents per week, and that this doubled by the 1970s.Footnote 24 Morrell’s investigation of Tony Benn’s correspondence shows he received an average of twenty-four letters a week from his constituency between 1972 and 1973 – lower than some earlier surveys suggested was usual.Footnote 25 In 1986 it was reported that MPs averaged thirty-three letters per day.Footnote 26
This rising volume of letters from the 1960s onwards likely reflected growing class and partisan dealignment and a concurrent sense among MPs that constituency work was a way to build local support and insulate them from national swings. Indeed, some candidates and MPs in the era undertook a deliberate ‘search for grievances’ to connect with their electorate at a time when community politics was much in vogue.Footnote 27 The decline of deference in the era also potentially contributed to the rising number of individuals willing to make demands of their representatives, even if it was just for personal attention.Footnote 28
There were further increases in correspondence to MPs in the digital era, with social media adding further complexity.Footnote 29 A survey of new MPs elected in 2010 reported that, on average, 49 per cent of constituency casework came via email – though the figure was lower for Labour MPs, who were more likely to be contacted by phone than Conservatives.Footnote 30 Rory Stewart, elected for Penrith and the Border in 2010, described how he ‘received 20,000 emails in the first year, one for every three voters in the constituency’.Footnote 31 More recently, Covid hastened the switch from ‘snail mail’ to email, with the volume of casework having ‘absolutely exploded’ over the last few years.Footnote 32 Prime ministers have long received high volumes of mail, with figures rising from 500 letters per week under Macmillan to 7,500 under Blair. By 2011, No. 10 was receiving about one million letters per year – though not, of course, all from the public.Footnote 33
Whereas individual collections of correspondence can be analysed relatively easily, it is hard to establish an overall picture of who was most likely to send letters. Each collection is sui generis; people wrote to specific MPs for ad hoc reasons. British Social Attitudes (BSA) figures for 2011 showed that 5 per cent of people in the eighteen to twenty-nine age group had contacted their MP as against 17 per cent of those in the thirty to fifty-nine age group and 20 per cent of those in the sixty-plus age group.Footnote 34 Although it seems plausible to imagine that older people have always been more likely to write, we should be cautious about extending this claim across the period. Many collections contain non-trivial numbers of letters from children, not included in the BSA survey. Similarly, there is evidence from the 1980s that members of the middle class were more likely to write to their MP about a grievance than those in the working class, who preferred to attend constituency surgeries.Footnote 35 Again, this cannot be conclusively extended across the period. Moreover, in both cases quantification is complicated by the fact that writers made their own decisions about what information they disclosed about their identities, choices which could reflect strategic methods of securing reader attention.
II
Though it is impossible to calculate definitive statistics of who wrote, it is easier to outline the major motivations for writing. The simplest reason is because people had problems. When MPs first developed reputations as problem-solvers is unclear, but this seems to have predated the First World War. In 1908, A.A. Milne quipped about writing to one’s MP to demand they do something about the weather.Footnote 36 The war appears to have accelerated the tendency to seek recourse from parliamentarians, as the accompanying expansion of the responsibilities of the state – already in train with the New Liberal welfare reforms – increased the number of problems politicians were expected to solve. Amongst these were issues surrounding war and widows’ pensions, though there were many other matters besides. Jennie Lee, elected as the Independent Labour Party (ILP) member for North Lanarkshire in 1929, recalled the heartrending cases with which she had to deal:
Ex-soldiers of 1914–18 too ill to work but somehow not entitled to pensions; men hurt in the pits, able at most for light work but no light work available and compensation being stopped. Women living in two-roomed cottages with one of the rooms so damp that the water made rivulets down the wall and the whole family had to huddle together, sleeping and waking, day and night, when they were sick and when they were well, all in the one apartment. Old people hungry because they could not spin out their ten-shilling pension even as supplemented by a shilling or two from the Public Assistance Board to cover food and fuelling to the end of the week. Unemployed men in areas where no work was available cut off benefit for ‘not genuinely seeking work’.
The list continued.Footnote 37 Labour’s Emanuel Shinwell recalled that during the Second World War he ‘gained an unenviable but genuine reputation as the MP who received a larger postbag than any other’. The five hundred letters he received each week came from men in the forces, factory workers, and professionals, often giving an ‘alarming picture of incompetence and buck-passing’.Footnote 38 A 1944 newsreel portrayed him as ‘a man who makes Parliament sit up’ and showed him working his way through ‘a mass of letters as big as a film star’s fan mail’.Footnote 39
According to Jay: ‘In Battersea for many years, until immigration became a pressing problem in the 1970s, some nineteen out of twenty of these [constituency] letters were consistently concerned with bad housing.’Footnote 40 In 1967, a new parliamentary ombudsman was established, to deal with maladministration. Cases could only be referred to the ombudsman by MPs and only a small proportion were likely to be accepted.Footnote 41 Members therefore now had a formal role in arbitrating the complaints of citizens.Footnote 42 It was not just the increase in the range of services government provided in the post-war period that generated increasing levels of correspondence, another reason was the complexity of bureaucratic structures. The development of New Public Management (NPM) from the 1980s, which increased managerial discretion and created new ‘delivery agencies’, arguably increased the need for constituents to have a competent and connected MP to help solve their problems.
Of the 1,266 letters received from Benn’s constituents in 1972–3, only 119 offered an opinion, a suggestion, an analysis, or registered a protest. All the rest were casework.Footnote 43 This is not to say broader political issues were unimportant; speeches, new legislation, or striking events might trigger a wave of post.Footnote 44 When the USSR launched the Sputnik 2 satellite, with a mongrel called Laika on board, letters and telegrams poured into Downing Street complaining about cruelty to the dog.Footnote 45 Indeed, the letter collections of the prime ministers we have examined are full of such explicitly ‘political’ correspondence with specific file series on, among others, the General Strike, the Abdication, Munich, VE Day, Suez, Vietnam, the 1984 Brighton bombing and many others. At the same time, there are examples of prime ministers receiving the kind of letters requesting assistance that were so common for constituency MPs. Harold Wilson’s letter collection – the least curated of those we have examined – contained letters inquiring about everything from access to housing grants to the unfair practices of a rival vacuum cleaner salesman.Footnote 46 However, in both of these cases it is notable that the letter-writer tied their grievances to wider policy – the ‘three-day week’ crisis and the abolition of the resale price-mechanism respectively. This suggests a reasonably sophisticated understanding of the different roles and responsibilities of constituency MPs and the prime minister. Nonetheless, whether the preponderance of congratulatory, admonitory, or policy letters in prime ministers’ letter collections is a reflection of what they received, or later archival decision, is an open, and intriguing, question.
Correspondence was not always intended to apply direct pressure – it was sometimes simply a way of finding out what government policy or MPs’ views were.Footnote 47 Moreover, many letters blended the political and the personal. Abusive messages fell into this category, but there were plenty of positive and well-wishing ones too. A sensational election triumph might cause an influx of congratulations.Footnote 48 Radio and TV appearances, newspaper articles, and book publications often led members of the public to put pen to paper. Letters could be stimulated by illnesses, bereavements, birthdays, marriages, Christmas, or by the bestowal of honours. A high-profile resignation would likely trigger a wave of messages.Footnote 49 Or there might be a flood of sympathy when a politician had been targeted by the press and their treatment was perceived as ‘unfair’.Footnote 50
Such communications, sometimes the product of impulses that the authors could not explain, might seem trivial.Footnote 51 Nevertheless, well-wishers often expressed policy views. For example, some of those who wrote to Thatcher with expressions of support after she survived the 1984 Brighton bomb, also called for the return of the death penalty.Footnote 52 Moreover, such letters reflected many people’s tendency to identify with particular politicians (and to dislike or detest others).
In retirement, Harold Wilson stated explicitly that many of those who wrote to him in Downing Street identified with him as a Labour prime minister: ‘a lot of them were giving you genuine advice[,] they had been talking to their shop stewards or something, and they wanted to help in some way’.Footnote 53 Messages that were not directly instrumental – in terms of asking for help or applying pressure for a specific action – were nonetheless important. Their authors tried to wreak moral and psychological effects on the recipients. The intended impacts were by no means always negative. Whereas abusive missives were intended to shock and discourage, positive ones sought to sustain, uplift or console. Crucially, they were intended to elicit attention, however fleeting.
III
What were the authorial, literary, and other strategies that correspondents used to get themselves heard? First, there was the issue of manners – how to address an MP. This could be a challenge to the uninstructed and sometimes led to what might be called ‘salutation anxiety’. This could involve playing safe by awarding politicians titles they did not have, for example by writing to ‘Sir Edward Heath’ decades before he was knighted.Footnote 54 Sometimes correspondents alluded to their uncertainty about forms of address. For example: ‘Dear Mr. Powell (If I may so address you)’.Footnote 55 Though such awkward formulations have their comic aspect, this type of forelock-tugging was understandable in a class-stratified society. Though things relaxed as the twentieth century progressed, some figures remained sensitive about forms of address.Footnote 56 Writing a letter was to tiptoe into a social minefield and to risk committing solecisms such as addressing the prime minister as ‘Dear Lady’.Footnote 57 Yet, paradoxically, these trivial faux pas may have been signs of the ‘ill expressed’ authentic letters politicians so valued.
Second, though many correspondents were straightforwardly admonitory, launching straight into the matter at hand, others felt obliged to justify their decision to write. They stressed their hesitation in doing so; they expressed anxiety about imposing upon the recipient; they worried about seeming presumptuous; they explained they felt compelled to set pen to paper.Footnote 58 Such strategies often emphasized the authors’ modesty, reticence, and consideration. Yet, in so doing they drew attention to the bursting importance, or heartfelt nature, of the letters sent. Openings could also be arresting, self-aware and replete with humour. Take one woman’s letter to Clare Short MP in support of her 1980s campaign against photographs of semi-naked tabloid ‘Page 3 girls’: ‘I have three small children, three cats, innumerable stick insects and am in the throes of moving house, but I cannot let another day go by without thanking you and congratulating you on tackling an issue that is crucially important to every person in the country.’Footnote 59
Third, writers laid out their credentials. Personal or organizational headed paper might express some of these. One qualification for writing might be professional – a doctor writing about medical services, for example. Yet one’s job could serve as a token of status or a more generalized form of authority. A striking number of those who wrote to mid-twentieth century prime ministers identified themselves as ex-military officers or members of the clergy. A qualification might also be personal, such as someone who had had trouble conceiving children writing about IVF. Or a longstanding member of a political party might feel especially qualified to reprimand its leader.
Fourth, the politics of place and national identity were important.Footnote 60 An address, if included, told a story in its own right, not least whether the author was a constituent. But even those who lacked that important connection could still leverage geography. Our group of prime ministers received a considerable number of letters from expatriates, many of whom made pointed references to being ‘Britishers’ and to where they grew up in the UK. The reason for including these details, it seems, was to legitimate writing and to reflect the authors’ continued connection to the ‘mother country’.
Fifth, the authors of letters themselves often made their own claims to represent. This might simply be in the form of an assertion: ‘Believe me, Sir, I write on behalf of scores of friends and acquaintances, and solely because I have the cause of Socialism and world unity at heart.’Footnote 61 Personal histories could serve as evidence that one was speaking for others: ‘I have experienced war, both as soldier & civilian […] I have made up my mind never to take part in a war against them [the Soviets]’.Footnote 62 Or a writer might pass on a formal decision by a body of which they were a member: ‘Dear Sir and Comrade, At our last branch meeting, which was specially convened, I was instructed to forward the following resolution […]’.Footnote 63 Such claims to represent were arguably of particular importance when writing to prime ministers and party leaders where the constituency connection was lacking.
Letter-writing itself could be a collective activity. Spearman noted that many of the 1968 letters to Powell were signed by more than one person.Footnote 64 There was thus often a blurring of the lines between correspondence and petitioning, a letter’s writer taking it around their neighbourhood or workplace for signatures. But whereas multiple signatures might suggest a weight of opinion, they might also suggest organized lobbying and risk alienating politicians. Collective expressions of opinion could be portrayed as inauthentic or even sinister and might thus be more easily ignored. This led to efforts to make messages seem ‘personal’. Some parliamentarians encouraged this. As Josiah C. Wedgwood MP, urged fellow opponents of the Mental Deficiency Bill in 1912: ‘I want you to write to your MPs in your own way; not a stereotyped form but a letter of your own.’Footnote 65
This may help explain why many writers stressed the personal, even when writing about matters of general interest. They often noted previous contacts or shared background, having heard the MP speak, shaken hands with them, attended the same university, etc. This may have been a rational strategy for winning attention by exploiting existing social bonds. Yet it may sometimes also have indicated a desire to establish a relationship with a politician, if only for a moment and at a distance. If so, this was often less about extracting concrete benefits than about offering emotional support or political sustenance.
This can be seen from anonymous letters. These are often treated as coterminous with the ‘poison pen’, but they were by no means always intended to be threatening or intimidatory.Footnote 66 When Anthony Eden resigned in 1957, ostensibly for health reasons, the letters he received included anonymous signoffs from an ‘ordinary member of the public’ and from ‘a sincere praying well-wisher’.Footnote 67 Anonymous letters with positive sentiments demonstrate that frequently correspondents wrote to politicians without seeking any kind of acknowledgement. During the General Strike, one ‘lover of King and Country’ wrote to Stanley Baldwin without including his name and address, ‘so that you do not feel constrained to answer’.Footnote 68 Such an act could be used to make the author’s sentiments or devotion appear more sincere.
Sending objects was a further way to attract attention. This might be a kind of political stunt, as in 1909, when two suffragettes mailed themselves to 10 Downing Street.Footnote 69 It could also be dangerous or menacing. Politicians were sent, inter alia, packets of DDT, letter bombs, and sinister white powder seemingly meant to look like anthrax.Footnote 70 Yet, were there were also tokens of esteem. Kevin Luginbill notes that Joseph Chamberlain’s correspondents ‘provided newspaper clippings, pamphlets, books, songs and poems, and even gifts of complimentary cigars and castings of Canadian fish’.Footnote 71 At the time of Munich, Chamberlain’s son Neville received gifts ‘in embarrassing profusion’, including German wine, fishing equipment, lucky horseshoes, and umbrellas.Footnote 72 Churchill was sent hats and, inevitably, innumerable cigars, cigar cutters, and ashtrays.Footnote 73 Following the Profumo affair in 1963, Macmillan received a missive from the mother of one of his Great War comrades, who included the silk handkerchief Macmillan had given her son before his death.Footnote 74 Wilson received books of poems, essays, and novels that the senders had written themselves.Footnote 75 It was quite common to send artwork. An aide to Theresa May when she was at the Home Office and Number 10 recalled: ‘people liked sending in portraits of her that they’d done themselves. Of varying qualities.’Footnote 76
Such actions may seem comical, but they speak to people’s sense of connection with politicians. Even if they are taken as a sign of sentimental naivety, it should be remembered that correspondents often had tactical awareness, literary nous, and detailed understanding of the political system. The files of Mass Observation illustrate this point because they include evidence of letter-writers’ intentions of a kind that the letters themselves do not usually reveal. This shows that sometimes correspondents engaged in conscious self-censorship, as in this 1942 example:
I wrote to my MP today, just to let him know that I didn’t share his confidence in the Government, & a few of the reasons why. I had half a mind to tell him that the other day when Churchill was reported to have said ‘We must fling in everything we have’ someone remarked ‘What about a few cigars?’ – but he’s a Tory & would probably suspect that I was a mere communist.Footnote 77
After the revival of the MO project in the 1980s, one respondent revealed how she alternated between epistolary self-restraint and succumbing to the impulse to communicate:
On legislation and government action that I do feel strongly about I write to my MP but, as dreadful things are happening weekly, I don’t write about everything[.] I’d be afraid my MP wouldn’t even bother to read my letters. I only write about things on which he has a free vote so might be influenced or I’m so very incensed I can’t forbear to write.Footnote 78
As this suggests, some voters, however strong their feelings, were scrupulous in their drafting. In 1991, another Mass Observer noted:
I occasionally write to my MP. Those letters are short, on specific topics, and very carefully written to make a point precisely, clearly and concisely so as to elicit careful attention. I think about them in a very concentrated way, making my ‘draft’ in my head and writing unhesitatingly, shortly afterwards.Footnote 79
In the autumn of 2002, with war with Iraq looming, a different Observer wrote to his MP, Labour’s Barbara Follett. Rather than dash off a letter in high dudgeon, he timed his missive strategically to obtain the effect – and accountability – that he wanted.
I wrote […] prior to the debate in the House. I left my letter until a day or two before, so that when replying she would have to account for any contribution to the occasion, including the vote which critics of the government planned to force, rather than responding with vague and inconclusive generalities, as is her wont.Footnote 80
Thus, many letters were carefully crafted with specific effects in mind. At the same time others were the product of emotional incontinence and rage. Aside from the evidence in correspondence itself, it can be hard to discern why some people wrote abusively. Explanations tend to be delivered to the police or in court, and are usually unilluminating, though both drunkenness and admitted racism and misogyny have been repeat factors. The 2021 case of David Knott, who sent hundreds of threatening messages to Keir Starmer and Emily Thornberry, is fascinating because he was simultaneously unrepentant and loquacious. Knott explained he had been attempting to complain about noise from ongoing London Underground works which left him and his late partner ‘sleepless for six months’. He had a clear sense of what was owed to him by the system:
I sent those emails to avoid it happening to other people – I would have liked to have used Oxford Dictionary words but my language and education let me down. I spent four years trying to get a response from these people – my MP’s treatment of me is absolutely disgusting. I’m working class and I used the words as an expression of the torture I have suffered.Footnote 81
It was, of course, disingenuous of Knott to suggest that there was a natural relationship between being working class, uneducated, and abusive. Yet his testimony reveals that he, like so many other correspondents, adopted a conscious strategy for seeking MPs’ attention.
IV
When it comes to responding to correspondence the evidence suggests that, despite the growing number of communications, MPs grew better at answering rather than worse. Michael Barnes (Labour MP for Brentford and Chiswick, 1966–74) recalled:
As an MP for a very marginal constituency you obviously had to give a high priority to your constituency work. … I was slightly horrified that there were printed cards in the House of Commons for MPs, presumably with large majorities to use, which said, ‘Thank you very much for your letter dated so and so I have taken up the point you raised with the Minister and I will be in touch in due course.’ So MPs literally just signed these things. When I wrote to a Minister I didn’t just act as a postbox; I really tried to act as an advocate for somebody’s problem. There is no doubt that that paid off in the 1970 election when I was re-elected against the swing.Footnote 82
This suggests two things. First, by the mid-1960s there was already a somewhat efficient if impersonal bureaucratic mechanism for dealing with letters. Second, canny members spotted advantages in making that system more tailored and responsive. Barnes was by no means the only MP who believed that personalized attention to constituents’ interests could help mitigate national electoral swings.Footnote 83 As Philip Norton has argued, from the early 1960s onwards, the shift away from the ‘Amateur MP’, to whom the role was an addendum to their existing profession, towards the ‘Professional MP’, for whom politics was their defining career, also saw a growing professionalization in the way parliamentarians handled their constituents as they sought to earn reputations as good constituency MPs.Footnote 84
The development of a system of parliamentary expenses from the 1970s made the task easier.Footnote 85 Prior to this, the help that an MP received depended on their personal means. Wealthier MPs sometimes chose to employ their own secretaries to handle correspondence or delegated the task to an election agent.Footnote 86 Field experiments in 2015 and 2019 showed that British MPs, in international comparison, were highly responsive to constituent emails and gave helpful replies – though there was also evidence of inequality based on the occupation and the ethnicity of the (fictitious) correspondent, with a name that suggested Asian or African heritage tending to lead to less favourable treatment.Footnote 87
Of course, prime ministers and party leaders generally had the best-oiled machines. Gladstone ran a tightly disciplined Number 10 office, delegating the selection of items that could receive standard replies to subordinates, but making spot checks himself.Footnote 88 Not all of his successors were so efficient. MacDonald initially insisted on opening all letters personally, and even when he relented, failed to make best use of the help available.Footnote 89 Baldwin confessed to putting letters that he wanted to answer personally in his pocket and then failing to reply for weeks.Footnote 90 After the war, Conservative premiers did seem to have an advantage in managing correspondence compared to their Labour peers, with Number 10 linked closely to the then vaunted bureaucratic machine of Conservative Central Office.
It was partly for this reason that Wilson’s longstanding political secretary Marcia Williams (later Lady Falkender) sought to overhaul the Downing Street operation. She later claimed to have overseen a step-change in the handling of letters. She tried to make the system more efficient and more politically sensitive and also attempted to ‘humanize the officialese wording which so often bemused the ordinary citizen who had written in’. She recalled:
The question was: how seriously should you take the mail? There can be no real half-way house there. You either treat it all carefully, or you do the opposite and offload it, or send a brief acknowledgement. It seemed wrong for a Socialist Prime Minister to do the latter.Footnote 91
In the process of managing correspondence, figures such as Falkender also managed the emotions of politicians. A mass of supportive letters might bolster a leader during a crisis or even lead them to get carried away.Footnote 92 Aides, who were obliged to be selective, sought to provide their bosses with the right balance of material.Footnote 93 David Beckingham, who worked in the Number 10 political office, noted:
for a time under Theresa May we had a system of giving her letters once a week, sort of 10 or so from just ordinary members of the public who probably wouldn’t otherwise have had a response from her directly. That got us into difficult discussions. You don’t want to make them all positive, telling her how great she is, but you don’t want them to all be abusive either. So, you end up slightly artificially managing it and it’s very difficult to give a true picture of what’s coming in.Footnote 94
Secretaries thus functioned as mediators or analysts of the raw intelligence that correspondence provided and tried to represent an accurate picture of which issues concerned the public, taking account of the psychological impact of that information on their chiefs.
Secretaries were also repositories of important institutional knowledge. Sometimes handwriting could give secretaries a clue as to the authorship of anonymous letters. One such, sent to Macmillan about the performance of his then Foreign Secretary, Lord Home, was determined to have been written by an ambassador.Footnote 95 Secretaries also offered assessments of repeat correspondents. The longstanding Number 10 employee Edith Watson complained of one man who over the course of eighteen years had ‘written to every Prime Minister as if he is a personal friend’ despite having known none of them.Footnote 96
The triage process was often conducted under pressure, especially because of the tendency of correspondence to come in waves. Claire Short recalled of the letters that were sent in response to her Page 3 campaign: ‘They were enormously welcome but created real problems for me just in opening and reading them and sorting them from the letters from constituents that urgently needed my help with immediate problems.’Footnote 97 In his guide for would-be MPs, Flynn explained that ‘obvious junk’ was identifiable by a logo on the envelope or a transparent wrapper.Footnote 98
Postmarks were not only used to spot whether a correspondent was a constituent. They could also be used to make judgements about a writer’s social class. At the Board of Trade in the 1960s, Jay noticed that a high proportion of opponents of the proposed new airport at Stansted were writing from W1 and SW3. He was bolstered in his support for the plan by his conclusion that this showed that ‘the determined opposition came from the wealthy minority’.Footnote 99 The quality of the notepaper could similarly give a clue about social status, even if the letter was anonymous; shaky handwriting might suggest that the writer was of advanced age.Footnote 100 Lord (Stephen) Parkinson, who worked for Theresa May, recalled: ‘Letters would be everything from printed on the very best Basildon Bond paper and somebody’s nicest handwriting to paper ripped out of a notepad and scrawled on in pencil. And you could generally get a sort of flavour of the letter before reading it – what sort of tone it was going to be in and who might have sent it.’Footnote 101
The techniques for the differentiation of correspondence were key to assessing the opinions it contained. The ‘weighting’ of different types of view was reminiscent of discussions in the pre-1914 period, when ‘intensity of belief’ and ‘scope of collective action’ were factors assessed when deciding whether something should count as ‘public opinion’.Footnote 102 One aspect of this was measuring ‘party feeling’, which was highly mediated via constituency associations, branch resolutions, and so forth. Letters from self-described party supporters to Number 10 would land in the in-trays of political offices, as opposed to being dealt with by civil servants, and helped guide politicians as to what activists were thinking. Although politicians knew that correspondence was imperfectly representative, they often used it to gauge the wider public mood. This was why they and their assistants prided themselves on being able to detect ‘professional letter-writers’ and on ‘sussing’ organized campaigns.Footnote 103
V
Many correspondents were aware that a bureaucracy would process their letters. Neil Kinnock recalled:
the assumption in many people’s minds is that you as the politician will never see the letter. So, they are addressed in terms like, ‘If someone in your office could take this up’. The assumption … is that I and every other politician has a substantial office with specialised staff, and they will take care of it. I’m just an address on the envelope. That used to be extremely rare. It is now very usual.Footnote 104
Though this type of sentiment may have increased over time, it was not as rare as Kinnock suggested. In 1965, having received a stock reply from Heath on Rhodesia, one man replied to one of the then Leader of the Opposition’s private secretaries: ‘Of course I realise it would be impossible for him to answer all letters himself. But I am interested and pleased that he finds such letters as mine helpful.’Footnote 105
In other words, writers could take in their stride the fact that the addressee might not see their letter. After all, many of them had experience of state bureaucracy, which could seem impersonal or downright uncaring.Footnote 106 Nevertheless, they might still hope to overcome the obstacles. In 1986, Enoch Powell received a large number of letters after he stated in a radio interview that he wished he had been killed in the war. ‘You must have an enormous mailbag’, wrote DL, a woman from Surrey. ‘I would love to think my letter may get through the network and realise that nothing is achieved without faith.’Footnote 107 DL did receive a reply, albeit, unlike some other correspondents, not a personalized one.
Of course, the higher the level of the politician, the less likely it was that the intended recipient would see any given letter. But even those at the top of politics involved themselves in drafting answers. Matthew Parris, who helped Thatcher with her correspondence when she was Leader of the Opposition, has described how ‘she would grab handfuls from my desk, and start reading them and suggesting replies’. In an attempt to discourage this Parris started preparing summary reports, which ‘came back with heavy underlinings beneath any opinion cited which was close to her own’.Footnote 108 Therefore, the idea that one’s missive might somehow ‘get through the network’ was not inherently improbable or unrealistic.
Indeed, politicians had strong incentives to familiarize themselves with letter-writers’ opinions. With centralized messaging increasing from the 1920s, politicians laboured under constraints in respect of what they could say in reply, often facing pressure from their parties to stick to a line.Footnote 109 Shortage of time and money could lead to bland, duplicate answers that might stoke disappointment. But a sympathetic reply, a problem solved or clarified, could deepen a personal connection and might translate into future support or even a message of gratitude that could be printed on election literature.Footnote 110
The sifting process was useful because it helped MPs find real voter opinions they could cite in public – often in support of views that they already held. Long before Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘people’s question time’, where he used letters from the public to more subtly attack the then prime minister (David Cameron) than his own words might have allowed, the practice of reading out letters in the chamber of the Commons was so widespread that in 1944 one member complained about it, arguing that it should be possible to have them inserted in the official record ‘without burdening the House’.Footnote 111 In his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, Powell controversially deployed a letter from a constituent in which she claimed to have been maltreated by black immigrants. He thus created a feedback loop which prompted a further inundation of messages.Footnote 112 Kinnock recalled how, at one PMQs, he made use of a letter from an elderly constituent who was unable to pay her poll tax. ‘Because it was authentic it put the cat among the pigeons.’Footnote 113 In this sense, a voter who sent an MP a powerful, usable, ‘authentic’ letter was potentially doing the recipient a substantial political favour – though the politician would only benefit if the triage was effective and allowed the message through.
VI
Reflecting on his nine years as a Tory MP, Rory Stewart noted that those who emailed him seemed to regard him as someone with immense, quasi-judicial power, ‘a colonial district officer’. Nevertheless, ‘the same people seemed also to sense that I had no budget, that planning decisions rested with the local council, and that my powers were limited for voting to laws in Parliament’. And yet, Stewart found that ‘in about half the cases I seemed to be able to help constituents win their complaints with the government’.Footnote 114 In 2009, journalist Janice Turner wrote an article about women opposed to the proliferation of strip clubs: ‘Several activists told me how suddenly optimistic they feel about the political process, were amazed to find that if you write to your MP, then ring to suggest he vote for a Second Reading, he might do just that.’Footnote 115 Writing to an MP was quite a rational strategy for pursuing an objective, even if many correspondents were ignorant or confused about how the political system actually functioned.
This is the simple explanation for why people wrote to politicians in increasing numbers over the decades – in addition to the fact that electronic methods made it easier, it very often worked. Letters had, as the Dundee Evening Telegraph suggested in 1945, ‘a power out of all proportion to their numbers’.Footnote 116 Yet as we have seen, what counted as success depended on what any given correspondent was trying to achieve: solve a personal issue, alter policy, gain information, express support/hostility, or some combination of the above. Not all correspondents wanted help or policy action – though they may have wanted a simple acknowledgement of their views, to proffer advice, or to build an emotional or social bond. Letters, telegrams, and emails were not just complaints or types of legislative advocacy. They were vehicles for expressing pride, solidarity, hopes for the future, and beliefs about national identity, as well as sadness, sorrow, dismay, shame, and grief.
Whatever letter writers’ goals, their epistolary styles and techniques were multifaceted, often eccentric, sometimes deranged, but also frequently passionate, considered, knowledgeable, and carefully honed to attract attention. Moreover, although the relationship is hard to disentangle, MPs, perhaps without fully realizing it, could be influenced by the language and phraseology of their constituents.Footnote 117 As the scholarship of the last few decades rightly stresses, the public were not mere passive recipients of politicians’ messages but co-creators, with their words refracted back to them through interviews, focus groups or, as in our case, correspondence.Footnote 118
Nevertheless, to create an impact through correspondence voters had to ‘get through the network’. This often required them to prove their genuineness – that is, their apartness from orchestrated activity – a task sometimes helped rather than hindered by lack of literary sophistication. Whereas we are accustomed to considering electoral politics as a process through which voters seek out authentic politicians, we can switch the lens and instead think of correspondence as a tool which voters used to demonstrate their own authenticity to politicians.
Acknowledgements
This article is one of the outcomes of the authors’ AHRC funded project ‘Telegrams to Twitter: Writing to Politicians in the UK, 1890–Present’. The authors would like to thank the members of the project’s advisory board: Paul Readman, Edward Wood, Camilla Schofield, Jon Davis, Andrew Blick, Clare Brant, Heidi Eggington, and Michael Kandiah, as well as the Sheffield Digital Humanities Institute. The research was conducted when Dr Kowol was a Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London. It greatly benefitted from being presented at the University of Queensland, in 2025, where Dr Kowol is now an Honorary Fellow in History.
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