Over the past couple of years this column has featured many former politicians who have had to reinvent themselves after an enforced departure from the Commons.
Most ultimately managed the transition quite successfully. One who didn't, however, was the former Welsh Office minister Rod Richards.
Now 62, and living on a meagre pension in a suburb of Cardiff, his story is a reminder of how unforgiving a profession politics can be. He once described the Commons as "his niche" and said he had hoped to stay there for life. But personal problems, alcoholism and finally bankruptcy, put paid to what had been a promising career.
Until the mid-1990s, Richards' progress up the greasy pole had been relatively smooth. A former Royal Marine, he came into the Commons relatively late as MP for Clywd North West in 1992, but within three years had been appointed a minister under John Redwood at the Welsh Office.
However in 1996, with the media frenzy over ‘Tory sleaze' at its height, he was obliged to resign after Sunday newspaper revelations of an extra-marital affair. And the following year, he was just one of many victims of the Labour landslide, as the Conservative Party would see its parliamentary representation in Wales wiped out at a stroke.
Undaunted, Richards won election to the newly-created Welsh Assembly and was initially elected Conservative group leader in 1999. However this appointment also proved short-lived, after he was arrested and charged with assaulting a young woman. Although he was cleared at a crown court trial the following year, his rival Nick Bourne - who had been the party establishment's choice for the post all along - remained in the position of group leader.
He later revealed that he was by now suffering a drink problem. "Things started to fall apart in the Assembly and the drink started to move in again," he told a Times interviewer last year.
Richards eventually resigned from the Assembly in 2002, shortly before being declared bankrupt with debts estimated at more than £300,000.
And there was a further brush with the law in 2008, when he received a police caution after an altercation with a Tory party worker who was attempting to canvass his vote in the local elections.
Asked last year how he now felt about politics, he said ruefully: "I loved the House of Commons - I had found my niche in life. I was going to stay there till I died." As it turned out, however, his fate serves as a poignant reminder of Enoch Powell's famous dictum - that all political careers ultimately end in failure.










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