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amenity · Joined: 22 Nov 2006 Posts: 775 Location: Dovercourt

164 The Political Animal

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3. European Act and yet continued to pour acid on dreams of a greater single Europe, were all comprehensible matters of policy. They might, she believed, be set right. But she had failed to reckon with the something intangible that had gripped her parliamentary party. When the Conservatives lost Eastbourne - Eastbourne of all places - to the Liberal Democrats in a by-election, panic set in. Thatcher had planned to fight the next General Election, and thought she might then stand down a couple of years later. Now, grand party figures such as Lord Carrington began to mumble questions about whether she might think of leaving earlier, so she could go with dignity, and at a time of her own choosing. Sensing how the tide had gone out on his leader, her remarkably undramatic lieutenant, Geoffrey Howe, resigned from her government and then used the House of Commons to denounce her dramatically.
4. Belatedly, realizing that her time was up, Thatcher began to appear in the Commons Tea Room, canvassing support from rank-and-file MPs. But her rival Michael Heseltine had been there before her. Repeatedly. Finally, she called in the cabinet, one by one, and received the same message from almost all: personally, the minister would vote for her, but did not believe that she could win a vote of the whole parliamentary party. The game was up. 'Democracy is no respecter of persons,'10 Margaret Thatcher wearily commented later. 'I was sick at heart,' she wrote bitterly; '. . . what grieved me was the desertion of those I had always considered friends and allies and the weasel words whereby they had transmuted their betrayal into frank advice and concern for my fate.'11 Thus she discovered that, however much a British Prime Minister may dine with queens or dance with presidents, their destiny is in the hands of their own colleagues. It is a powerful warning against the inclination which seizes any Prime Minister with a comfortable majority to spend their days at international conferences and to regard the House of Commons as just an inconvenience and to stop listening to their own MPs.
5. But it is a very rare event. For the most part, the party system is one in which the commands come from the top and are obeyed at the bottom. In his book The Charm of Politics, Richard Crossman remarked that the modern system of centralized government, 'buttressed by a party system which limits the elector to choosing between

6. the Cabinet and the Shadow Cabinet ... has steadily degraded the status of the individual MP, and, most serious of all, is rapidly transferring both debate and decision from the publicity of the floor of the Commons to the secrecy of the party caucus in the committee rooms upstairs or the party headquarters outside'.12 It has not got better since he wrote that in 1958.
7. According to a senior figure in the Conservative party, somewhere in central London is a safe containing a brown envelope. Inside the envelope is a photograph. It shows a well-known politician, a tireless campaigner for 'family values', in what used to be called a 'compromising position'. He is naked. There are a number of women - also naked - in the photograph. It also includes a dog. Who took the picture is unknown: it was sent anonymously to the party with no covering letter or explanation of any kind. The photograph has been taken out of the safe only once, when the MP at the centre of the picture had threatened to rebel over a piece of legislation. He was invited to the whips' office and offered a drink. Then he was tossed the envelope. He opened it, blanched, and spent the rest of his political career doing as he was told.
8. The whips - the term is derived from the 'whippers-in' who control packs of hounds - are the keepers of parliament's dark secrets and custodians of the baubles of public life. For the average backbencher, the whip is the street-corner thug they need to get past on their way home from school. Treat him with respect, and life will be fine. If you cross him, watch out. Occasionally, whips can get literally physical: the Conservative Derek Conway ('At my secondary modern, if someone hit you, you hit them back as hard as you could') was once seen trying bodily to pick up a fellow MP to push him into the right division lobby. David Lightbown, another Conservative whip, was notorious for his ability to use his twenty-stone weight to pin reluctant MPs to the wall. Paul Marsden, a Labour MP unhappy with the party line on anti-terrorism legislation in 2001, found himself pushed and shoved, called an 'arsehole', and then pressed by a whip against the wall, with an arm across his throat.
9. But usually their methods are slightly more subtle. They have favours to dispense, places on fact-finding missions to Switzerland or

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14. Australia with accommodation in comfortable hotels, trips to places in the Indian Ocean to promote British ideas of democracy, or the chance for a backbench MP to become the Big I Am of nothing much, like being sent off to the North Atlantic Assembly, with more hotels and foreign travel on offer. Then there are honours to be splashed around. They used to follow a pattern: eleven years' service for a knighthood, seventeen for a baronetcy, perhaps a viscountcy after a few years in cabinet. Modern MPs have to wait longer for their long-service medals, and even then the gong is at the mercy of the whips. Derek Conway recalled with obvious delight the way he had dealt with a colleague who rebelled against government policy on a matter of conscience. 'He had been approved for a knighthood. It was a real pleasure putting a line through his name. And even more of a pleasure telling him.'
15. Where inducements or threats fail, there is an endless capacity for making life difficult. The whips determine who can leave the Westminster area and when. One woman who served in the first Blair administration was called back to vote in the House of Commons just as she was at the end of a 120-mile drive home. She obeyed the summons, drove back to Westminster and found the vote had been cancelled. Those who do as the whips desire find life is easier. Those who persist in defiance can find them utterly Machiavellian. What else the whips get up to is a mystery. By tradition, they do not give interviews, and their victims are usually afraid to speak out, not least because it makes them look weak. But in his October 2001 rebellion the Labour MP Paul Marsden took the unprecedented step of recording the dressing-down he had had from the government Chief Whip, Hilary Armstrong. Armstrong had been born and bred in the Labour party, stuffing election envelopes at the age of eight, and, as an adult, she had inherited her father's rock-solid Labour seat in Durham. Paul Marsden, the son of a Labour councillor, had won Shrewsbury from the Conservative whip Derek Conway, against all the odds, in the 1997 Labour landslide. Four years later he found himself increasingly uneasy at the way the Blair government was aligning itself with George W. Bush's military campaign in Afghanistan. In the course of trying to explain why Marsden was wrong, Armstrong said or shouted, according to Marsden, 'those that aren't with us are against us', 'war

16. is not a matter of conscience', 'it was people like you who appeased Hitler in 1938' and 'the trouble with people like you is that you are so clever with words that us up north can't argue back'.13 The verbal assault was followed by a whispering campaign suggesting that the cause of Marsden's anxiety about the war was simply that he was insane. A few weeks later, he defected to the Liberal Democrats.
17. Other victims of the whips have simply left parliament. Jenny Jones, a one-time social worker and local councillor, returned as an apparently archetypal new Labour MP for Wolverhampton in 1997, found herself shouted at and called a 'smile cow' by one of the whips. (His management skills were rewarded in the next government reshuffle when he was appointed a Home Office minister.) Tess Kingham, another 1997 entrant, was called in by the whips after complaining that she was being instructed to vote for things she didn't believe in, and which had not even been in the party manifesto. She was told that, if she failed to do as she was told, she could expect to find her private life all over the tabloid newspapers, and that her constituency party would find resources cut off by headquarters. She quit parliament at the next election, saying the whips' behaviour was 'an affront to democracy'.14
18. The whips prefer to point to another, more benevolent side of their work. They like to claim that they are as much a counselling service for MPs as they are enforcers. MPs with money troubles who approach the whips often find a sympathetic ear, before being put in touch with a wealthy party member who will offer an interest-free loan. But the price of accepting the money is that, when told to jump, they ask only, 'How high?' The 'black book' or 'dirt book' which lists all the scuttlebutt about a party's MPs (known in the Major government as the 'Unstable List') contains details of all those in the parliamentary party with a drink problem, those who are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, and those who are running second families in London. The parties retain sympathetic doctors -specialists in alcoholism and depression in particular - to whom members can be referred. But the slimmer the government majority, the nastier the whips become: then the list is a weapon of virtual blackmail.
19. Every party contains its share of obsessives, some of whom have a

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24. fragile grasp on reality. I once asked a whip how many of his MPs were 'slightly loopy'. He replied, 'Slightly? Slightly? There's no slightly about it. There are plenty who are stark staring mad. I think it's a form of autism: they can stand up in the House of Commons and make what sounds a perfectly rational speech on investment in the railways, but the moment they sit down they are completely insane again. There is a man in the House of Commons who believes — really, truly believes - that 10 Downing Street is manipulated by a witches' coven in Gloucestershire.' Another whip told me that during the Major years there was even one MP who had become so unhinged by the business of being a politician that he had retreated to a monastery: the whips' office sent a car down to collect him whenever there was a crucial vote.
25. Privately, the whips will try to justify their existence by saying that they offer members of the party the chance to communicate their feelings to the leadership: if enough MPs are troubled about a stance on a particular issue, the party will change course. Clearly, since governments are formed by parties, and no party - and therefore no government - can survive without a sense of collective responsibility, there needs to be some way of enforcing discipline. But the assumptions of the party leaders about the role of the individual member of parliament have changed radically. Leo Abse remembered a furious Conservative MP in the 1960s boiling over as he spoke of' the bloody impertinence of the whips: they want me to become a junior minister'. Yet after the 1997 election, Tony Blair gathered together the unprecedented number of Labour MPs and told them, 'You are ambassadors for the party.' Anyone who took this injunction literally risked turning themselves from a constituency representative into a travelling salesman. It was only later that some of them realized that collective responsibility had no counterpart in collective decision-making.
26. In opposition, for example, the party had claimed that a Freedom of Information law was 'absolutely fundamental' to the reforms Labour would bring to the government of Britain. Most of the shadow cabinet had taken in a belief in open government with the first pint of beer at the student union bar. But that is exactly the sort of commitment which seems much more attractive when in opposition than it does when in government. So cynics were not surprised when there was a

27. distinct lack of urgency about introducing legislation after the 1997 election. When, finally, a bill was laid before parliament, the 'absolutely fundamental' principles turned out to be distinctly conditional. So many exemptions had been introduced that the rights the bill offered the citizen turned out to be fewer than those enjoyed in the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the Irish Republic. Dozens of backbench MPs remained true to their beliefs, though, and fought behind the scenes and then on the floor of the House of Commons to persuade the Home Secretary to modify the bill so that it reflected more accurately the noble promises they had made while in opposition. But, when the time came to vote, the whips marched on the government's stage army and crushed dissent. All the close and reasoned argument about how the bill might be given some teeth ended with the whips shepherding Labour MPs into the division lobbies with the words, 'Government this way. Intellectual wankers that way.'
28. The whips are the people who make the party system work and, although they come in for their share of deserved abuse, in reality they are just a symptom of a sickness. The official handbooks tell us that Britain is a liberal democracy. The popular version of history has it that a long tussle between the monarch and the people ended in defeat for despotism and victory for representative democracy. Ever since the Glorious Revolution of 1689 and the Bill of Rights, the British people have governed themselves. But in reality, of course, what happened was that power shifted not from king to people, but from king to parliament. In practice, most of the time, power lies not with parliament but with party. Those ambitious for power will whip themselves. As Thomas Jefferson warned two centuries ago, 'whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct'.15
29. The opportunity for an individual MP to become a historical footnote, with his or her own pet piece of legislation on the statute book is, literally, a lottery. MPs choose a number, and then the Speaker pulls numbers out of a barrel. Eric Pickles had been entering the ballot for ten years, in much the same spirit as most people play the National Lottery - as a habit, a dream, and with no real expectation of ever

amenity · Joined: 22 Nov 2006 Posts: 775 Location: Dovercourt

Well, whta do you think about our political representatives?

Just for starters guess who was one of the MP's allegedly assaulting Paul Marsden under para 8.

amenity · Joined: 22 Nov 2006 Posts: 775 Location: Dovercourt

So they, our illsutrious brothers have voted to keep their expenses, it's only human after all. Surprised

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