Ousted Labour MP Nick Palmer signs on for dole

The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Saturday 12 June 2010 Nick Palmer was correctly described as the past Labour MP for Broxtowe, but also as holding a "west Nottingham seat". Rather, his seat was west of Nottingham; he was a Nottinghamshire MP He speaks six languages, has a PhD in maths, and spent 13 years in parliament. But despite his glittering CV, Nick Palmer, former Labour MP for Broxtowe, has revealed that he applied last month for unemployment benefits. Palmer, 60, who lost his west Nottingham seat by only 389 votes to Tory Anna Soubry in May, said he signed on at a central Nottingham jobcentre to "explore what it's like for myself", and to keep his "NI contributions continuous". He is thought to be the first former MP to apply for unemployment benefits. The former parliamentary private secretary to Margaret Beckett told his former constituents in an email that he wanted to see whether he would "be nodded through without questions or browbeaten into applying for jobs on a building site that I wouldn't be able to do". Palmer told the Guardian that he also wanted to show claiming benefits was "not something to be embarrassed about". Jobseekers can claim up to £65 per week. But Palmer, who has managed to secure some freelance work as a translator, told the Guardian that he "won't be claiming much more than £5 most weeks" as he is able to earn "around £60 through translation jobs". Palmer said many politicians had "wildly different ideas" about unemployment services but nevertheless had a duty to understand such services "directly". David Allen, 21, who lives in Palmer's former constituency, thought that it was "a good idea in principle" but argued that Palmer was "not likely to experience 'real life' on the dole having just spent a decade earning £60,000 a year". But Palmer said that while he was "in a luckier situation than most", he "wanted nevertheless to see how the unemployment system worked". Overall, he was very satisfied with his experience. "My interviewer was extremely keen to be helpful," Palmer said, and by the end of his first trip to the jobcentre, "I felt almost like giving him a hug". He signed on at a time when the number of claimants actually fell by 27,100. This was despite figures released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) which suggested that though the unemployment rate has plateaued at 8%, the number of unemployed people in the UK rose by 53,000 to reach 2.51 million in the first quarter of 2010. The British Chambers of Commerce has predicted that this figure will reach 2.65 million in the first quarter of 2011.