Dan Jarvis is a work in progress. He has not yet been an MP for a year. As a politician he has much to learn. But his two decades serving in the army make him a rarity in the current Parliament. He has dealt with far more dangerous and fraught situations than standing up in the House of Commons. He has been awarded an MBE for that work. Those experiences mark him out as an unusual politician. In 2012 we will find out if Dan Jarvis will make for an unusually talented one.

Since arriving in Parliament after a by-election in March 2011, the Barnsley MP has refused to be branded as simply ‘army’. He hasn’t avoided his previous career – taking part in Commons debates on defence and serving as a patron for Labour Friends of the Forces – but he has set himself broader horizons. “I consistently said from the outset that I wanted to do other things in politics,” he says. Did he tell his party leader that he wouldn’t accept a defence role for Labour? “I made it clear that I was keen to plough other furrows,” he answers.

Former servicemen and women can offer much to society in Jarvis’s view. He believes his own political career can act as an example of the skill set gained in the forces. Jarvis says: “The ability to think, plan, solve problems under pressure, to lead, to manage, are qualities that the military develops in people very effectively. I’m always talking to businesses about the value of employing people who’ve served because they’ve got a can-do attitude. They understand how to get things done at short notice without fuss. They are producers, they are doers and they are effective members of society in the main.

“I thought that if I played the easy option and went straight into my comfort zone, in some respects it would have been a disservice to all those in the military who go on and do other things based on their life experience. So I partly thought that I owe it to those people to show that military people can turn their hand to anything.”

Identifying yourself as an example like this is obviously a risky statement if his current shadow culture brief doesn’t work out. The job does seem an odd fit for someone who confesses: “I was in the army for 15 years. I’ll be the first to admit I didn’t spend a huge amount of time going to the ballet or the opera.”

It would be wrong, however, to cast Jarvis as an uncultured man. Reading allowed for precious escape during his six-month tour in Afghanistan. “If you’re doing a very difficult, pressurised job, to move yourself away into a corner and open up Charles Dickens takes you to a different place. The quote I’ve often attached to being in Afghanistan is a classic Dickens quote: ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.’ I used to read Great Expectations particularly. I made time occasionally to sit in my room privately for 25 minutes and open that book. It would take me to another place and just refresh my mind.”

Jarvis claims he finds people in the arts are like soldiers – “they sniff, bluster and waffle from a mile away”. He believes in his abilities but avoids sounding arrogant. The only thing he “finds terrifying” is appearing on local radio. Speaking to him the day before he received his MBE, Jarvis said he wouldn’t be nervous for himself but wanted to make sure his son would get through the ceremony okay sat in the audience.  

There are good reasons that Jarvis’ arrival has got him noticed. He answers every question seriously, apologises for talking at length and comes across as utterly sincere. He is also often self-deprecating. Considering the tragic death of his wife, the mother of his two children, from cancer at the horribly young age of 43 in 2010 and his years of frontline army experience, you suspect that Jarvis has an immensely strong mental character.
He is certainly not a smoothly-crafted politician. There are the rough edges of a political novice. He can sometimes sound naïve. “I’m not convinced that we’re necessarily going to come up with a definitive solution to this” is his response to describing a report he is working on to quantify the value of the arts to the UK. Sitting down with him for an hour reveals he is full of questions and big visions, and less prone to come up with answers or too many details. But then, he has been in Parliament for under a year.

Jarvis believes his relative callowness doesn’t mean he shouldn’t think big. The ambition matches his rapid trajectory into Parliament. In February Labour will host a summit for the creative arts in London with Jarvis and his boss Harriet Harman appearing with shadow chancellor Ed Balls and shadow business secretary Chuka Umunna.

‘The Index’ – his name for the Labour report into the arts he is working on – has two elements. The first is working out the “hard-edged economic benefit”. The other is the “less tangible value” of providing school children with the opportunities to get involved with the creative arts. “The discipline associated with learning a musical instrument is a really useful life skill,” says Jarvis. “So is the confidence that can come from being in a play.”

There is also a deep-seated belief in the personal benefits of the arts. The “healing quality” of the arts and “the way I had to cope and deal with my wife’s death” means Jarvis has “a much broader understanding of the role the arts could have in helping people to express themselves”.

Jarvis also says it was the values of public service that allowed him to stay strong during his wife’s illness. He says: “I am a public servant at heart. It was public service that took me into the army and kept me there through some pretty dark days. I had some incredibly difficult moments in Afghanistan, where I had a wife who was ill with cancer and I had to make very difficult judgements about whether it was appropriate for me to be doing that or not. I was heavily influenced by my belief in making a contribution to our country and to our society. It was that kind of same belief that led me into politics.”

A member of the Labour Party since university, Jarvis says the values of equality and fairness were the reasons he joined and later chose to become an MP. He calls these “genuinely political times”.

“People say, ‘You’re all the same. You’re all scrapping over the centre ground.’ I don’t think that. Of course, there are interesting debates about the importance of the centre ground, but there is a real difference between a Conservative government that is making incredibly deep and unfair cuts based on an ideology and the way Ed Miliband is offering an alternative.”  

Jarvis admits that his first year in Parliament has passed by in a bit of a blur. “A year ago, I wasn’t in politics, was still in the army and didn’t know much about Barnsley.” After not having elected an outsider in living memory, the South Yorkshire town accepted Jarvis with an increased majority despite his predecessor, Eric Illsley, being jailed for expenses fraud. He puts this down to fighting the by-election as if Barnsley was a marginal seat. Before being promoted to the culture brief, Jarvis served as chairman of Labour’s backbench business committee. It was a breathless 2011. Now, Jarvis wants to learn how to step back… and think.

A serious thinker sounds like an unexceptional quality in a politician. But there is something relentlessly inquisitive about Jarvis. He can sit still but his mind whirrs. From his manner of answering questions to his decision to swap the straight-forward values of the army for the world of politics, and then deciding to accept the culture brief, he appears to force himself continually to progress. “I’m naturally restless and impatient,” he says.
“My new year’s resolution, which may or may not survive contact with the parliamentary diary, is to spend more time thinking about the big issues that impact on this country because this generation that sits here now… some difficult decisions are going to have to be made and part of how we restore the faith and the trust, which has undoubtedly been lost, is by thinking about the big issues that affect our country in a serious and strategic way.”

“I’m going to think about Britain’s role in the world,” he concludes. The fact Jarvis makes such a statement having been an MP for such a short time means either he has yet to be bogged down in a heavy brief, or he plans to become a politician of real substance.

The test for Jarvis is to think of some answers. Then Parliament will take notice of an MP who hasn’t even celebrated his first anniversary yet.

Tags: Afghanistan, Barnsley, Dan jarvis, Labour Party