Matt Warman

By Matt Warman Boston & Skegness MP

Having watched Love Actually, I had hoped that at my daughter’s first nativity she might get to be an octopus. No such luck – in preparation for a momentous visit to a church hall in Boston for the wonder that is Teddy’s Tunes Christmas Show, grandma wrestled a sewing machine into submission to construct a sheep outfit like no other. It really was quite a sight to behold, and admittedly more fitting in most nativities.

So it was that I found myself, with the 17-month-old toddler, helping to narrate a show that mixed the traditional with plenty of modern music, via an iPod.

Some adults played key parts – boo to King Herod – but it was mostly, of course, about the children.

Seeing a doll, my daughter went straight for it, and little matter it was the baby Jesus. Quite how a temper tantrum was avoided only her mother knows.

That disaster averted, a fantastic time was had by all, and not least thanks to the pots of jelly provided afterwards. It was gloriously informal.

What, though, does this Saturday afternoon out have to do with politics? On one level, not a lot. Like shopping in the market at the weekend or going out for dinner in a local pub, it wasn’t something I was doing ‘officially’. Nobody is elected to go to a nativity.

Being a Member of Parliament in a government with a wafer-thin majority, however, is one of those jobs that inevitably does risk getting in the way of attending these crucial milestones in a child’s life.

Plenty of the hours we’ve spent discussing the EU Withdrawal Bill have been when others are out at their Christmas parties – but MPs are better at their jobs if they can get out into the real world.

The constant cry that we’re all out of touch is usually disproved by listening to what is said in Parliament, where it turns out there’s far more common sense than the internet would have you believe – but that staying in touch comes from genuinely having our feet on the ground in our constituencies.

At the nativity, were people clustered around tables talking about Brexit, foreign policy or Donald Trump? No. But did they care passionately about their children’s schools and the world in which they will come to grow up? Of course.

So even in these ‘off-duty’ moments, it’s a politician’s job sometimes to discern those issues, to gauge the mood and occasionally to set the record straight too.

But above all of that, it’s not to be some sort of visitor from another species – constituents surely deserve to be represented by someone who is, to some degree, like them.

And that’s maintained by living the same sort of life – using the same NHS, driving the same roads and going to the same nativities.

And also by coaxing the same almost tantruming sort of toddler into understanding that, no, she can’t take the baby Jesus home with her.

Matt Warman is the Conservative MP for the Boston and Skegness constituency.

By Matt Warman Boston & Skegness MP

Every rural county claims to be ‘forgotten’, and within that each town claims its larger neighbour gets a greater, disproportionate share of government funding – Bostonians regularly tell me Lincoln gets too much of the financial cake; Skegnessians sometimes says Boston gets an unfair slice, and a constituent from Algarkirk recently told me they thought they had to make do with tiny crumbs. Many, of course, wonder why so much money is being spent on HS2 or foreign aid.

And up to a point, every one of those people is right: Lincoln has more bypasses than I care to count, while Boston has been waiting for decades for its.

Boston has just won a grant from the Controlling Migration Fund to spend £1.4 million additionally on integrating migrant communities, tackling rogue landlords and anti-social behaviour as well as seeking to bridge the language barrier.

Skegness has spent a significant, but smaller, sum on new bus lanes. Each can claim the larger neighbour gets more money.

Boston’s Controlling Migration Fund award, nonetheless, was the largest in the country. It represents recognition that Boston has faced unique pressures, but is also based on the fact that having large numbers of new people in the area has helped keep local shops open where in other equivalent towns they have closed.

So that tackling of rogue landlords and houses of multiple occupation will now come from additional, central funding; the money for Skegness bus lanes represents the huge advantage it would be to the town as a whole if more people took public transport.

In the years since I’ve been elected I have, in that sense, made it a personal mission both to be able to say that Lincolnshire is not forgotten – witness repeated questions, too, on Boston’s bypass – but I’ve also sought to do two other things: that’s first to explain why other areas attract more money, and second to make the case centrally for distributing that money more fairly.

Many areas get grants because they ask and, historically, many community groups in Lincolnshire haven’t gone to the lottery to ask, for instance. Today they increasingly are, and I’ve found myself opening more refurbished school playgrounds as a result.

But it’s also often the case that government asks how best to distribute its money and says that it should go where it will have the greatest economic impact.

That means giving it to existing centres of population, so Lincoln can make the numbers stack up more than Boston or Skegness can.

That, ultimately, can be short-sighted: the greatest potential difference might come from lifting people from below a lower line.

And so it is to that person in Algarkirk: their church, today, is at the heart of a vital heritage project, attracting more than a million pounds in Heritage Lottery Fund money.

It proves that if you make the right case, government support can go where it is right for it to go, rather than simply to our biggest cities.

And it proves not only that Lincolnshire’s no forgotten county, but that even our smallest villages are well remembered too.

Matt Warman is the Conservative MP for the Boston and Skegness constituency.