Yahoo News County Durham MP Dehenna Davison motivated by dad's death on night out to get into politics
A County Durham MP has spoken about how her dad being killed at the pub when she was a teenager drove her into politics.
In the first episode of the Mirror ’s new show Party Games, Dehenna Davison reveals what it was like to get elected at just 26-years-old. The Bishop Auckland MP said she was worried about the “old guard in Parliament” when she first arrived in Westminster in 2019.
She admitted she didn’t grow up around politics and thought Winston Churchill was a Labour Prime Minister when she was younger, telling Party Games how her dad’s death influenced her to become an MP. “When I was 13, he was 35, back in 2007, he went out to the pub on a Friday night with his mates as normal and he never came home,” she said.
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“He never came home because he'd been punched once and was basically dead before he hit the ground, which is the sort of thing that you see in movies. You see it in soap operas, but it doesn't happen to real people does it?”
She added: “So at that point, everything completely changed in my mind about what I wanted to do with my life. I mean, ultimately the big driver was I wanted to make sure that dad, wherever he was, would be proud of whatever I did, but also I wanted to do something to stop other families having to go through what my family had to go through.
"And then when I discovered politics, which was a kind of complete accident, I thought: ‘Oh actually this is it. This is a way that I can get involved because you can actually go and change things right now.‘ I'm working with both the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice to try and improve the kind of victim’s experience, aka the families of victims and their experiences.”
Party Games is a new show launched by the Mirror where an MP sits down to discuss their childhoods, why they became a politician and what the day-to-day of being an MP is like. In a relaxed tell-all chat over a familiar board game, we hear about how they manage their work-life-balance, how they deal with social media trolls and some of their worst and best times in Westminster.
