In front of Downing St, after delivering the worst Tory defeat in modern history, Rishi Sunak paid tribute to the hundreds of Tory MPs who lost their seats . “It pains me to think how many good colleagues who contributed so much to their communities and our country will now no longer sit in the House of Commons,” the former Prime Minister said. “I thank them for their hard work and their service.
” Among these colleagues are Liz Truss , Jacob Rees-Mogg, Penny Mordaunt and Grant Shapps, who may now be scrambling to secure new jobs. It’s a feeling Ash Hussain, 52, knows all too well. Hussain was working as a senior picture editor on a national newspaper, a position he had held for more than a decade, when one afternoon, in the autumn of 2011, he learnt he had been made redundant and was out of a job due to company cutbacks.
“It was completely out of the blue and a total shock,” he says. “It is probably one of the most horrific things I’ve ever experienced in my life. I had a young family and all I could think was, ‘How will I pay the bills and mortgage? Am I going to lose the house?’ The redundancy package helped but I was still incredibly anxious and became quite depressed.
I kept thinking, ‘What did I do wrong?’”.