Carla Denyer, co-leader of the Green Party, has announced she needs several weeks off to recover from burnout. The diagnosis is correct. The cause, however, is not what anyone thinks it is.
It is not the late nights. It is not the constituent emails or the committee meetings that run past midnight or the standing ovations for legislation that will never pass. Those are the easy parts. The hard part—the part that actually breaks people—is the constant, unrelenting performance of caring about things that everyone in Parliament knows nobody cares about.
Take environmental policy. Denyer has spent years explaining to cameras why we need to reduce carbon emissions. The cameras nod. The public nods. Then everyone goes home and books another flight. She has to sit there, day after day, pretending this is a genuine surprise. Pretending the contradiction between what she says and what happens does not exist. Pretending that if she just explains it one more time, with slightly better graphics, something will change.
It will not.
The real exhaustion is not from the work itself. It is from the theatre. A backbench MP can coast on three talking points and a decent smile. But a party leader must care—or appear to care—about everything simultaneously. The cost of living crisis. NHS waiting lists. Housing shortages. Child poverty. The state of our rivers. The future of democracy. All of it. All the time. With equal passion. While knowing that your party will never have the power to fix any of it, and that even if they did, the public would immediately elect someone else.
Why does anyone bother? Because the job requires a specific psychological endurance: the ability to maintain moral urgency about problems you cannot solve, in front of audiences who do not want solutions, for a salary that is objectively good but feels insulting given the performance requirements.
Denyer’s burnout is not a mental health crisis. It is a competence crisis. She is too good at her job. She actually believes some of what she says. That is the fatal flaw. The MPs who last longest are the ones who understand that Parliament is a production, that policy is a prop, that caring is a costume. They perform brilliantly. They retire rich. They write memoirs about how they tried.
The ones who crack are the ones who occasionally forget they are performing. Who slip into actual conviction. Who look at a climate report and think, for just a moment, that it matters. That moment of genuine concern—that is what kills you. Because the moment you believe it, you have to reconcile it with the fact that you are standing in a room full of people who do not, and nobody is going to do anything about it anyway.
So Denyer takes several weeks off. She will rest. She will remember why she got into politics. She will return refreshed, recommit to the performance, and the cycle will continue. The Green Party will release a statement about how important rest is. Nobody will acknowledge the actual problem: that political life requires the constant, exhausting maintenance of a fiction, and eventually, that fiction eats through your nervous system like acid.
The system works. It just requires people willing to burn out maintaining it.