The Tory MP who nearly got it right on ADHD

The obvious first step here is to commend Joe Roberston for his openness and honesty, especially at a time when few others might have done the same. The MP has been in Parliament since 2024, and is on the Conservatives’ shadow frontbench as part of its DWP team. The 42-year-old also has ADHD – something he only found out about himself late last month.

Crucially, he decided to discuss his newfound diagnosis pretty much instantly, meeting up with a journalist from the Times two days later to talk about it, and what it meant for him. As often with people getting tested as adults, the politician said that he was “not surprised” by the result.

After all, “I’ve had three bank cards in the last year and I’ve had to have my keys cut twice,” he told the paper. Being informed he had a condition that usually involves head-spinning levels of forgetfulness wasn’t too much of a shock.

Similarly, he explained that “when things are coming at all angles, I don’t find it overwhelming, I just go into overdrive in terms of dealing with it and doing five things all at once,” something that fellow ADHD sufferers will easily recognise. It may seem counterintuitive but, really, it makes sense: if you have an attention deficit disorder, the best way to get work done is to wait for the adrenaline to kick into gear as you suddenly find yourself having to focus on multiple things at the same time.

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It is, as Robertson said himself, not a condition that solely has downsides. The hyperfocus that ADHD can bring, for example, can be extremely useful when deployed correctly. Overall, he said that he doesn’t “find life difficult for the vast majority of the time”.

I would be inclined to agree with him, and found the piece about his experiences to be a relatable one. I, too, have lost an absolutely remarkable number of possessions over the years, to the extent that the French embassy once believed me to be selling my passports on the black market.

I, like him, probably relied too much on the good graces of the people I lived with, and only truly realised something was up with me later in life. My epiphany came when I moved into my own flat in my late twenties; Robertson’s came when he was a decade older, and started working in Parliament.

Where we diverge, however, is on the question of what ought to happen next. Robertson didn’t merely speak to the Times in a passive, confessional style; instead, he let himself be interviewed so he could make the case that people with ADHD – our people – shouldn’t be getting financial help from the state. “It should be therapeutic support, support in the community, occupational health at work,” he said.

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Now, for the avoidance of doubt, these all sound like measures that would help neurodivergent people navigate both life and the workplace. But discussing them as things likely to happen anytime soon is like me writing about my upcoming nuptials to Rihanna. It may all happen eventually, but we probably need to act, in the meantime, like it won’t.

Assuming things stay broadly the same for the foreseeable future, then, requires asking Robertson a simple question, namely, does he really believe we’re the rule and not the exception? By “we” I mean he and I: the solicitor turned MP and the journalist and jack-of-some-trades.

Are we really representative of, say, the working population, with our extreme freedom in terms of what we choose to work on and when we choose to work on it? Don’t most other people have bosses, set hours, and workplaces full of other people, to pick only a few examples?

It is absolutely true that I enjoy my life as it is, but that’s because I’m able to create my own rhythm, and largely be left alone when I need to do things my own way. I know for a fact that his life isn’t dissimilar to mine, because I’ve worked in Westminster and have many friends working in law, a probable majority of whom are neurodivergent too. These areas of life are especially kind to the ADHD soul, which is probably why they attract so many of us, diagnosed or undiagnosed.

I truly mean it when I say that Robertson’s public diagnosis was a welcome move, but would caution him against believing that, as he told the Times, he now has more “authority” to speak on the subject, and legislate on what people with ADHD may or may not need.

He may not need personal independence payments and neither do I, but we shouldn’t be treated as representative of a condition we’ve mostly been able to work with, rather than against. We’re the lucky ones. He shouldn’t forget that.