Order, Order!

by Wright, Ben;

  Although the Smoking Room has traditionally been a Conservative drinking haunt, it has occasionally welcomed in other Labour grandees including Hugh Gaitskell and Richard Crossman. Aneurin Bevan used to have a corner in there too. The fiery left-winger from Tredegar, who was to be the midwife of the National Health Service, loved the London dinner party scene and had started to hobnob with the rich and fashionable during the 1930s. At one dinner hosted by the millionaire proprietor of the Daily Express, Lord Beaverbrook, the Conservative politician Brendan Bracken roared his disapproval at what he perceived to be Bevan’s drinking hypocrisy: ‘You Bollinger Bolshevik, you ritzy Robespierre, you lounge-lizard Lenin. Look at you, swilling Max’s champagne and calling yourself a socialist!’17 But Nye Bevan saw no reason why the workers should not enjoy fine wines and champagne too, a crusade that took him into the citadel of Tory drinking.

  For Michael Brown, drinks in the Smoking Room were a daily pleasure for eighteen years. He shared an office with Ian Gow, Margaret Thatcher’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, whom he remembers buttering up Conservative backbenchers with drink: ‘He regarded it as his job to lubricate a problem with alcohol. Ian would come back at five o’clock from a day in Number 10 and say in fruity tones, “Michael, we are now going to the Smoking Room where we will partake of a White Lady” [a cocktail of gin and lemon juice served in a martini glass]. The Smoking Room used to be full from six o’clock onwards. We’d go and get a cocktail first, then into the members’ dining room, then into the House for the wind-ups at 9.30, then back into the Smoking Room until the early hours.’18

  The Conservative MP David Davis describes the Smoking Room as once a barometer of his party’s mood. He recalls the scene on the night of Nigel Lawson’s resignation as Chancellor. ‘It was a cross between a party and a pool of piranhas. Everyone was excited, gossiping, talking about their chances of promotion. I was dumbstruck. It was the Smoking Room mood, which used to be very important in the Tory party.’19

  A week into his Commons career, the Tory MP Julian Critchley was sitting in the Smoking Room reading a book. A fellow MP came up to him and said: ‘Young man, it does not do to appear clever: advancement in this man’s party is due entirely to alcoholic stupidity.’20

  Today it is rather different. The cigarettes and cigars have been extinguished in the Smoking Room and so has the bar’s reputation for Tory toping and party intrigue. When I peered in on a recent evening, the armchairs sat empty. The clock ticked on but the likes of Churchill and Bevan were long gone. A silver trolley of freshly made blancmange was parked forlornly at the door, failing to entice anybody in.

  The cost of staffing the bar is now greater than the takings. The place where Disraeli, Churchill and Thatcher used to fire up the troops is a room of ghosts. In 2011 the Administration Committee recommended that Smoking Room staff could be replaced by ‘alcohol vending machines’.21

  The Terrace

  There is another corner of the Palace where MPs can go and drink privately. The riverside terrace of the Houses of Parliament stretches along the southern side of the Palace, facing St Thomas’ Hospital on the opposite side of the Thames. From Westminster Bridge there is a view of the roof of a pair of green and red candy-striped canvas marquees that were conspicuously not part of Charles Barry’s original design. They provide a garish colour-coded contrast to the honeyed stone of the Palace. Red stripes for the Lords, green for the Commons. Inside, peers and MPs host receptions and lobbyists do their business, while bow-tied Commons catering staff proffer silver trays of wine glasses for the guests. The wine is free but ropey, and seems more so when there is rain running down the plastic windows.

  But when it is not cold and wet, and especially on a balmy early summer evening, the uncovered areas of the terrace are a splendid place to drink. As with the rest of the parliamentary estate, access rules are strictly enforced. The colour of your pass controls your movements. Visitors may not enter the terrace unless they are with an MP (and then only in very restricted numbers) and only certain pass holders can sit on the terrace unaccompanied.

  A drink on the terrace is what really impresses a visiting constituent. Parliament loves its hierarchies and its pleasures are carefully guarded. For MPs the terrace is a treasured place and the easterly end by Westminster Bridge is a spot reserved for them alone. A prominent sign warns the uninitiated that these wooden tables and chairs are ‘Members Only’. It is not a particularly private area, though, and the buses and tourists passing over the bridge can gawp freely upon their elected representatives. But that has not inhibited MPs from enjoying themselves when out there.

  Writing in 1872, Sir John Sinclair considered the dining rooms of Parliament ‘very inferior to the Clubs’. He liked the terrace though: ‘Close to the library is the newspaper-room, inside it the tea room, and down below is the smoking-room, from which in the summer evenings you can walk out on the broad terrace which overhangs the Thames, and which is a cool, cheerful, and animated spot – enlivened by the steamers, boats, and barges, which are continuously passing.’22

  A century later the MP Gerry Fitt was one of those who particularly enjoyed the liquid delights of the terrace. Fitt was a founder and one-time leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party. One of Northern Ireland’s best-known politicians, he was a civil rights leader, a Catholic, a socialist and a nationalist. First elected to Westminster as the Republican Labour member for West Belfast in 1966, he ended his career in the House of Lords after moving his family to London following the burning down of his Belfast home by the IRA.

  Fitt was gregarious, garrulous and a drinker. In Belfast bars he always faced the door, lifting his glass with his left hand so he could grip the concealed pistol in his coat with his right. But in Westminster Fitt could relax a little more. He is remembered for sitting on the terrace during summer evenings waving great glasses of gin and tonic at the passing boats crying, ‘It’s free! It’s all free!’23 And the former Principal Doorkeeper of the House of Lords, Michael Skelton, a close friend of Fitt’s, remembers his generosity with the drink: ‘The river police used to come in and pull in onto the terrace at the House of Lords and I used to help him pass drinks down to the police,’ Skelton tells me. ‘That is perfectly true.’ Fitt’s first drink of the day was usually a G&T with no ice or lemon. When Skelton asked him why, Fitt replied that the ice cubes banging together made his hangover much worse.24

  Of course, not all Northern Ireland politicians followed Gerry Fitt’s example. The Reverend Ian Paisley was a ferocious teetotaller. Before doing an interview at Stormont with the Press Association’s political editor, Chris Moncrieff, Paisley once asked, ‘Have you taken drink, Mr Moncrieff?’ When the reporter admitted to having consumed two halves of Guinness, Paisley barked, ‘That’s two halves of draught Guinness too many for me,’ and walked off. With typical understatement Paisley denounced Ireland’s favourite drink as ‘the Devil’s buttermilk’.25

  But in general, MPs are prone to wax lyrical about the delights of the terrace. The veteran Labour MP Paul Flynn nicely reflects this: ‘There is a lovely ambience on the terrace on a summer evening, a bubbling contentment as the view of St Thomas’s gets more lovely looking with every drink.’26 It more than compensates for all those constituents with their incessant complaints and problems. There is a well-known tale of an MP in the early 1990s who went out onto the terrace one summer’s evening after a few too many pink gins. The unnamed MP was carrying a stack of constituency correspondence, and he lobbed the lot into the Thames with a cry of ‘Bollocks to the lot of you!’, a gesture that sparked cross-party cheers.

  Strangers’ Bar

  There was a time when Labour’s political opponents liked to smear the party by associating it with Soviet communism. The Strangers’ Bar looks nothing like the Kremlin, but for many years that was the nickname of Labour’s drinking domain. The party might have changed over the years, but this place has remained resolutely the same. It could even be described in Labour-speak as off
ering traditional values in a traditional setting, with 1970s décor, beer, dartboard, stumpy wooden tables, wood panelling and packets of pork scratchings.

  While Conservative MPs enjoyed the clubland atmosphere of the Smoking Room, Labour preferred to sink pints in the comparatively pub-like surroundings of the Strangers’ Bar, so called because that is how you will feel inside it if you are not an MP. ‘Strangers’ is the somewhat sniffy name Parliament gives to the visiting public, a reminder that the Palace is for MPs, not those who elected them. If you are being entertained by a Labour MP there is a good chance that this is where you will be taken. The added bonus is that the MP has to buy the drinks. It says so on a wooden board above the bar. The rules are strictly followed. MPs and their staff can bring in three guests, but the MP must pay, or at least hand over the money.

  For a now disappearing generation of Labour MPs, Strangers’ was a haven, a place to drink in familiar surroundings. Bruce Grocott arrived in the Commons in 1976, and ended up as Prime Minister Blair’s Parliamentary Private Secretary. Now a Labour peer, he explained to me over a pint in Strangers’ that for MPs who had tipped up in Westminster from coalmines and factories, the bar was the nearest thing to reality in a very strange environment. ‘People had come from very settled occupations, shift work in the mines or on car assembly works. It was a huge shock to the system turning up here.’27 But in the Strangers’ Bar they could sup the same Federation ales available in northern clubs and replicate the serious drinking habits of home. Bill Stone was one who tried to take away the pain in his lungs after years down the pits with a steady stream of pints. Once he overheard a couple of MPs sitting at the bar complaining with disdain that the Commons was ‘full of cunts’. A couple of feet further along the bar a normally taciturn Labour MP from the north-east looked up from his beer and said firmly, ‘There’s plenty of cunts in t’country,’ putting down his pint, ‘and they deserve some representation.’28

  According to Geoffrey Goodman, those Labour MPs who had grown up with the drinking cultures of their unions and working men’s clubs continued to booze in the same way at Westminster.29 It could get boisterous in there. Veteran Press Association reporter Chris Moncrieff remembers Strangers’ as a sweaty spit-and-sawdust place, sticky with stale beer. Pints of Federation ale would slosh around and there would be occasional brawls between MPs. At one time there was even a little arrow nailed to the wall two inches from the floor with an accompanying inscription that said ‘Way Out’. A policeman told Moncrieff it was to guide MPs crawling out on their hands and knees.30

  Today the arrow has gone and Strangers’ is more sedate. Dropping in late one afternoon I found three solitary Labour MPs nursing pints on their own. They were members of the old guard, overlooked and unknown outside their constituencies. It was livelier on a Thursday evening, with drinkers spanning the political spectrum from Labour’s Tom Watson to the former Tory defence secretary Liam Fox. Milling around were several newspaper journalists mopping up the gossip. But the Strangers’ Bar of the 1970s and 1980s has gone, as have the Labour MPs who worked down pits and toiled in factories before becoming politicians.

  The demise of heavy industry has been matched by the rise of the professional politician. Today it is common for MPs of all stripes to be incubated in think tanks or serve political apprenticeships as ministerial special advisers before entering the Commons. To many new MPs the Houses of Parliament are a familiar place. The number of MPs with backgrounds as researchers or special advisers grew rapidly in the 1990s; by 2005 over 14 per cent described their background as ‘politician/political organiser’.31 While Labour MPs of the past propped each other up in Strangers’, recreating the working men’s clubs of their home towns in fraternal solidarity, that world has gone.

  David Lipsey for one is not nostalgic for what has been lost. As a special adviser himself in the 1970s and later a journalist, he was not impressed by the calibre of the Strangers’ regulars: ‘They’d come down from the north for the week not always sure what their function in life was so they’d just inhabit the bars and drink Newcastle Brown Ale. They didn’t have the constituency workload then and they weren’t manoeuvring for their own interests because there was no way they could be a minister for anything ever.’ Lipsey adds that in one sense the House of Commons has improved: ‘You meet hardly any completely unemployable duds any more.’32 Perhaps that is so, but there are also fewer MPs rooted in the lives of the working-class communities they represent. The changing character of the Strangers’ Bar reflects that story.

  The Pugin Room

  On a gloomy rain-lashed October evening I meet the veteran Conservative MP and historian Keith Simpson for a drink in the cosy gothic grandeur of the Pugin Room. This is where MPs bring guests to impress. It is all that the Strangers’ Bar is not. The stone windows frame the view of boats passing by, and bow-tied waiters serve the drinks and bring nibbles in silver bowls. Over a glass of white wine and a gin and tonic (combined price £7.10) Simpson rattles off a list of post-war Commons drinking casualties. There was Horace King, Speaker of the House in the late 1960s and the first to come from the Labour benches. A clubbable chap with a soft spot for the limelight (he once agreed to turn on the Blackpool illuminations), King was a familiar figure in the bars. There was the former Conservative MP for High Peak, Spencer Le Marchant. Tall, grand, boisterous and loud, and a serious drinker, Le Marchant was the first MP the political journalist Simon Hoggart met, having been instructed by an editor to take him to Annie’s Bar for a drink. The young Hoggart asked for a pint: ‘It came in a pewter tankard, and when I took the first swig I almost choked — being Spencer he’d had it filled with claret.’33 Even Margaret Thatcher mentioned Le Marchant’s imbibing in her memoir, describing the whip as ‘famous for his intake of champagne’.34 After ten o’clock in the morning that was the only drink served in his office, poured into half-pint silver cups.

  On one occasion Le Marchant almost pulled off a dazzling display of parliamentary pantomime. His idea, as recounted by Matthew Parris, was to organise an MPs’ horse race, in which Members of Parliament would play the part of horses. Le Marchant had decided that Parris would be his horse, dressed up in the livery colours of his actual racehorse. Senior MPs also selected the services of more junior, sprightly colleagues to be their runners. The racecourse was to be the perimeter of the Smoking Room, around which coffee tables, chairs and sofas were to be lined up. The MPs would then leap from one piece of furniture to the next around ten circuits of the course. Everything was set and the Chairman of the Commons Catering Committee had even given his assent. Sadly, the London Evening Standard diary got wind of the plan and the government whips thought it wise to cancel the race.

  Drink eventually killed Le Marchant. Matthew Parris remembers the now yellow-tinged MP trying to stay sober in his final days, drinking only water for dinner in the Members’ Dining Room but ordering melon with port for dessert. ‘Into the shallow depression left in the half-melon by the removal of the pips, they pour a couple of teaspoons of port. Spencer was desperately scrabbling in this depression with his pudding spoon, trying to recover the last drop.’35

  As Keith Simpson mines his formidable memory for more names, the Pugin Room fills up with pre-dinner drinkers. The room is also the front line of a long-running territorial dispute between the Commons and Lords. Although technically in the Lords, it has been captured by the Commons. Its carpet, like everything else in the Lords, is red, but its occupants are those from the green end of Parliament. The room was given over by the Lords to the Commons in 1906 in return for the use of a committee room. But peers have long felt deprived of places to drink and want it back. According to the Conservative peer Lord Norton, it is a running sore between the two Houses and the Chairman of Committees has previously tried to persuade the Commons to return it, so far without success.36

  Annie’s Bar

  There is another drinking den, now defunct, that journalists and MPs of a riper age remember with affection. In pop
ular folklore, Annie’s Bar was the epicentre of political scheming and intrigue at Westminster. It was a place for politicians to drip poisonous gossip into the ears of story-hungry hacks and to hatch plots with parliamentary colleagues. This reputation was fortified when Annie’s Bar had a starring role in a risible 1996 Channel 4 mini-series of the same name.

  Like many Westminster bars, Annie’s was moved around over the years. The original, named after a long-dead barmaid, was opened before the Second World War in a small room adjacent to the Members’ Lobby. Annie sold drinks from a jug of ale and two bottles of whisky, one blended and one malt, to MPs as nerve-stiffeners before they stepped into the Chamber. But that bar was flattened when the Commons took a direct hit from the Luftwaffe. The rebuilt Chamber had no bar attached; Clement Attlee’s teetotal chief whip, William Whiteley, did not want to encourage drunken fraternising between MPs and journalists. But the bar was reborn in 1968 by decree of the Commons Catering Committee chairman Robert Maxwell. Annie’s was moved to a ground floor room beneath the tea room that had once been the office of the Victorian Irish nationalist Charles Stewart Parnell; it was opened by the then leader of the opposition, Ted Heath.

  It then survived for thirty years at the heart of Westminster’s political trade. The crucial difference between Annie’s and other parliamentary bars was that journalists could buy the drinks. It put them on equal terms with the politicians. They could lubricate their sources without the power imbalance of other bars. With journalists buying the booze, the exchange of gossip could be more direct – and because the terms of discussion were the same as in the parliamentary lobby itself, nothing said or done could be reported, either in the press or to the party whips, without permission.