If James Cracknell can handle 50 days alone at sea with Ben Fogle, Westminster will be a breeze

Life is pleasingly fluid now, writes Tom Peck. For a while, it was thought that the pivot from politics to reality TV wazzock only went one way, but no – the double Olympic gold medallist proves you can pivot right the way back again...

Olympic medallist James Cracknell will be the Tory candidate in Colchester (PA)

Double Olympic gold medallist and, as of now, Conservative Party parliamentary candidate James Cracknell is a man who seems happiest when pushing back the boundaries of his own ambition.

I imagine it is this ruthless competitive streak that caused him to return to university and win the boat race for Cambridge at the age of 46.

It may also have been behind his having to acknowledge his “anger management” issues while denying that he had a “tantrum” backstage after being scored a “two” by Craig Revel Horwood on his way to becoming the first contestant to be eliminated from Strictly Come Dancing in 2019.

Cracknell has been selected to contest the Essex seat of Colchester, evidently unperturbed by the realisation that its incumbent MP, Will Quince, is one of the youngest, brightest, most likeable and most able in the parliamentary party – so there’s sadly no point carrying on.

Does Cracknell have what it takes to make it big in politics? Who of us can say? One thing new MPs are known to find extremely hard is the long days and nights away from family, so there is perhaps some clue to be found in the words of his now ex-wife, GB News’s resident Russell Brand enthusiast Beverley Turner.

“When James spent 50 days rowing across the Atlantic with Ben Fogle,” she wrote in The Times, “he failed to discuss his plans with me in any detail despite us having a two-year-old son.”

From what I’ve seen so far, Cracknell’s own precise political sensibilities are not entirely clear. From what I can gather, he has a voracious appetite for spiritual growth by putting himself through immense personal pain. Having spent 50 days alone at sea with Ben Fogle, it may very well be he – and he alone in all the land – that is capable of understanding quite how bad life will be for a backbench Tory MP after the 2024 election.

As it happens, I interviewed Cracknell just after he got back from that, 15 years ago. I can remember almost nothing about it, other than as he talked about spending more than a month at sea with only Ben Fogle for company, all I could think about was the novel Life of Pi and how, if given the choice of companion – Ben Fogle or Richard Parker – you’d probably go with the Bengal tiger.

Can he win? Well, yes, maybe. The majority’s about 6,000, which isn’t going to be enough in most places, but Colchester went Lib Dem as recently as 2010, so he could sneak through the gap made by some kind of Liberal-Labour split.

But to me, the timing seems unfortunate for so many reasons. If he was in the House of Commons now, the hundreds of soon-to-be defenestrated Tory MPs would have their own in-house career guidance counsellor. Cracknell is a rare thing in that he could well arrive in the commons pre-humiliated. Matt Hancock had to go through the pain of being an actual MP for 13 full years before he was deemed famous enough to eat a camel’s penis for money on ITV. Footage of his being punched in the face by former Liverpool forward Jermaine Pennant on Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins will air in the coming days and weeks.

Cracknell, meanwhile, has already done the lot. He’s already dared, though not quite won. He’s already denied to Lorraine Kelly that he got annoyed on Strictly, denials that – as far as I can tell – were strictly not believed by anybody.

Indeed, if he were in the commons now, he could be valuably assigned to “stop the boats” duty. It was not all that long ago – 2020 – that former home secretary Priti Patel really did appoint a “clandestine Channel threat commander” – a former marine who zipped about the channel looking for migrant dinghies, mainly for the benefit of his own social media feed. Imagine Crackers, sculling about under the White Cliffs, perhaps enlisting one of those highly egregious boat race coxes to get on the microphone and scream at them to “f**k off back to France.”

At least it shows that life is much more pleasingly fluid now than it ever used to be. For a while it was thought that the pivot from politics to reality TV wazzock only went one way, but no. Now you can pivot right the way back again.

The only other notable Tory prospective candidate is George Osborne’s former advisor, turned investment management colleague, Rupert Harrison. Those two show that it really doesn’t matter any more which one you do first, make your fortune or go into politics, either’s just fine.

In fact, you can just do whatever you like these days. Why should having a two-year-old son stop you from breaking utterly meaningless Atlantic rowing records? Why should a known and very public anger management problem stop you from being an MP? Westminster needs a lot more of that, after all.