There was an appalling account this week of the desolate death of the former Labour MP Fiona Jones. After a brief political career of almost no merit whatsoever, marked out by an obscure court case over electoral expenses, in which enemies from her own local party joyfully participated, Jones began drinking alone in London, lost her seat in 2001, failed like so many former MPs to find another job, drank more and more and died last week surrounded by empty bottles. Her two sons, now 14 and 17, have spent their childhoods watching their mother disintegrate; her husband recounted how on the day of her death, the eldest had to go into her room and lifted her back into bed after she drunkenly fell out of it.

It takes quite a lot in politics to shock me, but this did. Combined against Fiona Jones were all the pressures that a modern political career can fling at an MP. First, she was hated by an old Labour faction in her local party and suffered the vicious bullying that middle-class, middle-aged women can expect from old Labour, having defeated a local politician for the Newark seat.

Secondly, she was female and stuck, like all those Labour women who entered Parliament in 1997, with the appallingly patronising “Blair babe” tag. She hated it and it followed her to the grave, the label repeated in almost every article and obituary about her death, including two in The Times. Then she fell victim to female bullying at Westminster; bitchiness about whether she had elbowed her way next to Mr Blair in the group photo and, I bet, fury at her Roman Catholic views against abortion. The mainstream cadre of new Labour women do not forgive those who oppose abortion.

As a study by the Hansard Society last year showed (A Year in the Life: from member of public to Member of Parliament), the first year in the Commons is a tough time for new MPs who have to find their feet, find an office, make friends and allies, perhaps hundreds of miles away from their families back home in the constituency and feeling guilty about how little time they are able to spend with them. In all the criticism of politicians, it is easy to forget how damn tough the job of being an MP is: an average 70-hour week, sometimes up to 100 hours, with more demands from constituents than ever before. This is due both to e-mail, with hundreds of requests a day, and a culture in which people expect more from their members of Parliament than in the past.

I know MPs from all parties who feel they cannot live in their constituencies because of the pressure it would place on them and their families. Go on, sneer, but I have sympathy for them. There is no escape from the demands of a constituency. An alarming yet entertaining guide to being an MP’s partner, by the barrister Alicia Collinson, contains advice on issues from keeping leaflets in waterproof satchels to not turning up two years running for the same event because they will assume you are an annual fixture. Do not judge competitions; there is only one winner and all the losers will resent you. It is an acute lesson in quite how childish the demands of a constituency can be.

Jones did not expect to be elected to this strange world; she was one of the MPs surprised to be swept into Parliament in the Labour landslide. Her family — two young sons and a husband — was up in Lincolnshire. And within a month of election, she was caught up in a local police inquiry into bizarrely technical rules about her election expenses, after a complaint from her defeated Liberal Democrat rival. The resulting court case, at which her local Labour opponent also gave evidence against her, overshadowed her first year at Westminster and must have made settling in impossible. She was convicted of electoral fraud in March 1999 and stripped of her seat, before being acquitted on appeal and reinstated. The party hierarchy wasn’t too interested. New Labour was a successful election-winning machine, remember; it had no time for embarrassments or failures.

Jones may not have been a particularly talented MP — I have no idea — but she never stood a chance. She was mocked for not making her maiden speech (by all accounts a terrifying experience) for eight months, during which she was embroiled in the police investigation. When she came back to Westminster after her conviction and acquittal she felt her career overshadowed by the case. She hadn’t formed a close circle in London and began drinking more heavily.

Lots of MPs drink quite a lot, but Westminster isn’t the boozy culture it used to be and not all disappointed politicians become alcoholics. The Commons can, however, be a viciously bitchy and soul-destroyingly lonely place, particularly for female MPs, who almost invariably feel the demands of family and the guilt of absence from their children more strongly than their male colleagues. As one old toughie, Gwyneth Dunwoody, told the Hansard researchers: “You give up a lot. You give up a lot of family time. In some cases you give up money. Some people come here and really don’t like it and go away because they can’t deal with it . . . It is very make or break. People don’t realise that it can be a very destructive system.”

I don’t believe the destruction of Fiona Jones can be blamed simply upon a Westminster drinking culture. That is far too convenient an excuse for SW1. This MP was a victim of a careless political culture, sad fallout from the new Labour years. That image of a teenage son heaving a mother in an alcoholic stupor back into bed for her to die, alone, is a dismal reminder that behind the machinery of politics, beyond the criticism and the cynicism we fling, lie real people struggling in a failing system. And it’s not all their fault.

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