Order, Order!

by Wright, Ben;

  In the 1970s and 80s Annie’s became, in the view of one Fleet Street veteran, an informal pillar of the constitution. During the dramas of Barbara Castle’s effort to curb the trade unions, the miners’ strikes and the three-day week, Annie’s became the main marketplace for transactions between journalists and politicians. According to the journalist Ian Aitken, its heyday was during the 1974–9 Labour government: ‘With no government majority, every Commons division became a cliffhanger which had to be monitored. The monitoring was most effectively done from Annie’s, just one flight of stairs from the members’ lobby. One could gauge the degree of crisis every night by how often the whips scuttled in and out in search of missing MPs.’37

  Ian Hernon became a lobby journalist in 1978 and now writes for Tribune, the left-wing magazine first published in 1937. He says both journalists and politicians welcomed an off-the-record drinking den far from the prying eyes of party bosses. ‘I realised it was a place where those on the way up briefly mixed shoulders with those on the way down, which made it all the more valuable as a source of contacts.’ He remembers:

  After 1979 people who had been Cabinet ministers and players on the world stage ten minutes earlier were drowning their sorrows, and sharing their wisdom, with members of the raw intake, and new junior ministers, who you just knew would eventually be given a place at the top table. However, no-hopers, some of whom deserved the tag and others who could fall back on pristine principle, remained the bulk of the MP customer base. I saw fights aplenty and was sucker-punched in the balls by a whip who wrongly assumed I was behind a drinking session which left half Labour’s defence front bench legless before a crucial division. But above all it was a place where you could judge the mood with parties and governments.38

  During Mrs Thatcher’s reign, the discarded Conservative ‘wets’ washed up in Annie’s to bemoan their plight to grateful journalists ready to loosen their tongues with drinks paid for on expenses. But it was not necessarily the best place to get a story. In Chris Moncrieff’s view, Annie’s obviousness and lack of privacy meant it was a hopeless place to get a scoop. ‘Everyone saw you there. Despite all the intrigue around it Annie’s just became a boozing bar full of north-east MPs. If you wanted to get a story privately that would be the last place you’d go.’39

  And eventually both MPs and journalists stopped going. Not even the Channel 4 drama could arrest the bar’s decline. In 1995 it moved again, to a sterile, windowless room below Central Lobby, and today all that remains is a nameless locked wooden door. During the Catering Committee’s inquiry in 2002, the chairman warned the press gallery and MPs that they should ‘use it or lose it’. By the end Annie’s Bar was costing two and a half times as much to run as it took in sales, so it finally closed for good. Ian Hernon is one of a dwindling number of journalists who remember the old Annie’s Bar and he despairs of the creeping modernisation that extinguished it. ‘We call it vandalism,’ he tells me, ‘part of the anti-drink culture which has infected the parliamentary estate over the last fifteen years.’40 Now only the bar’s reputation lives on.

  Moncrieff’s: The Press Bar

  Named after the legendary Westminster journalist Chris Moncrieff, a reformed alcoholic who had not had a drink for twenty-five years, and opened by the teetotal former Commons Speaker, Michael Martin, this is the bar where the press pack comes to drink. Or, more accurately, where they are supposed to. In fact this latest incarnation of Parliament’s press bar is now open to all pass holders and is snubbed by most journalists. It may be due to its soulless atmosphere or its 7 p.m. closing time, but this is one of the most forlorn, underused bars in Parliament. Reached by a gloomy staircase lined with ancient political cartoons, Moncrieff’s sits on top of the press gallery and the cramped warren of rooms that house Westminster’s political reporters. It livens up only once a month for the press gallery lunch, when a prominent politician comes to entertain the journalists and their guests with some on-the-record anecdotes and a chummy post-pudding Q&A. This is now one of the few occasions when politicians and press might risk a modest glass of House of Commons claret with their lunchtime lamb. Otherwise, Moncrieff’s is where the scribes downstairs nip up to grab a sandwich from the fridge.

  But the press bar was not always so lifeless. In the days when Chris Moncrieff was the most influential political reporter in the land, it was a riotous drinking den. For many years it was run by a barman called Sam, who stored a cardboard cutout of Margaret Thatcher behind the bar and kept pace drink for drink with his patrons. Moncrieff remembers him getting so drunk he could not be bothered to work out the prices, so simply charged the same for everything, whether half a glass of lemonade or a double Scotch. Apparently the stocktake the next morning was completely accurate.

  Even after the shutter had come down, the thirsty hacks found a way to carry on. ‘Once we managed to get a straw through the grille and into an open bottle of whisky and drank the whole lot like that,’ recalls Moncrieff. The police used to join the journalists in the evening too; Moncrieff remembers witnessing a Welsh officer being so drunk one St David’s Day that he ate a bowl of daffodils.41

  Another Welshman was a regular in the press bar. ‘When Neil Kinnock was Leader of the Opposition he used to come up to the press bar and sing rugby songs and a huge amount of drink was taken,’ remembers Colin Brown. ‘There was one night that Kinnock was singing his head off, Welsh folk songs, when we got a message from the Speaker that we had to turn down the noise because we could be heard in the Chamber.’42 After that Kinnock’s people decided it was not prudent for someone who aspired to be Prime Minister to be seen singing beery renditions of ‘Land of My Fathers’ in the press bar and his trips upstairs ceased.

  But drinking at Westminster continued, and Moncrieff believes booze was responsible for one of his best scoops and one of the oddest moments of Neil Kinnock’s leadership. In June 1988, Labour’s Shadow Defence Secretary Denzil Davies suddenly and sensationally resigned. In the early hours of the morning he phoned the Press Association’s chief political reporter and launched a ferocious attack on his party leader. ‘I am fed up with being humiliated by Mr Kinnock,’ Davies said. ‘He never consults me on anything. He goes on television and he talks about defence but he never talks to his defence spokesman. So frankly I do not think I have a job to do any more. I have resigned as of now. Maybe I will write to Kinnock in the morning.’

  After Davies hung up, Chris Moncrieff filed the story to the Press Association and it was soon splashed on the front pages. Moncrieff was in no doubt Davies had been drinking, but the following day he was criticised for breaching an unwritten code of trust. ‘I got told off by Tory MPs the next day for doing the story. They said he was plainly drunk and I should have shown more compassion. That’s not my job. They thought it was like taking candy from kids.’43 By the end of the 1980s the booze-soaked bonding that brought journalists and politicians together was beginning to dissolve.

  The Sports and Social Club

  While the press bar no longer sways to harmonious renditions of ‘Cwm Rhondda’, drink-assisted parliamentary singing continues at the Thursday karaoke night at the Sports and Social Club – or ‘Sports and Socialist’, as some Tories call it. This is the most pub-like place in Parliament, a bar where researchers come to drink in the bowels of the Palace beside the bins. There are wooden boards etched with the names of parliamentary darts champions; cabinets of sporting silverware; a pool table and tables crammed with drinkers eyeing each other up. Andrew Marr describes the ‘burly squalor’ of the Sports and Social, a place frequented by policemen and the more desperate tabloid hacks.44 In 2011, Black Rod decided the place had become too raucous and limited the number of guests pass holders could bring in. But it is still the liveliest drinking destination in the Palace of Westminster, popular with the people who work for MPs, whether researching their speeches and carrying their bags or cleaning the corridors and cooking their food.

  After the 2015 general election the former First M
inister of Scotland, Alex Salmond, said his advice to the new intake of MPs from the Scottish Nationalist Party would be ‘make your voice heard, represent your constituents, and stay out of the Strangers’ Bar’.45 The 56-strong clan of SNP MPs, several still in their twenties and fresh from obliterating Labour in Scotland, heeded Salmond’s words and colonised the Sports and Social instead. On a wet Wednesday evening in the beery scrum, a SNP MP told me this was now the tartan bar. He said the English weather forced them to drink here instead of on the windswept terrace.

  The Lords Bar

  The teetotal Prime Minister Clement Attlee once compared the House of Lords to a glass of champagne that had stood for five days. The former Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe was even more brutal, describing the Lords as ‘proof of life after death’.46 Their Lordships have always had a bar of their own in which to contemplate the wonders of democracy, and today it is a shiny little nook beside the Lords cafeteria, which excels in traditional school puddings like spotted dick and custard. Hereditary peers have been largely phased out, although (for reasons that nobody can quite remember) when one dies their numbers are replenished by election among those remaining. According to Michael Skelton, former Principal Doorkeeper in the Lords, the hereditary peers used to be the big drinkers: ‘If you’re a hereditary you’re there because it’s a club. You arrive, check your email and go straight to the bar.’47 But the bar is sparsely attended these days. With its high pine tables it feels like a compact All Bar One, which is perhaps why it is rarely busy. In the view of experienced Commons researcher Sadie Smith, young parliamentary assistants now avoid the place because the bright lights make everyone look unattractive. She also remembers a false door by the bar that people used to lean on before falling straight through into the adjourning Churchill Dining Room. Like the Chamber it serves, the Lords Bar is of uncertain purpose.48

  However, alcohol has certainly kept aged peers well oiled in the past. The Conservative leader of the House of Lords during the coalition government, Lord Strathclyde, is a believer in what he calls the ‘corruption of good catering’, although he is too self-deprecating to claim the phrase as his own. It may have been minted by a Rothschild, he muses. But the idea behind it is that, if you look after someone well, entertain them with fine food and drink, then the appreciative recipient will feel obliged to return the favour. We meet for morning coffee in the sun-dappled tea room of the House of Lords in early spring. Thomas Galloway Dunlop du Roy de Blicquy Galbraith, 2nd Baron Strathclyde (Tom to his chums) joined the House of Lords in 1986 and was immediately made a Conservative whip by Margaret Thatcher. He remained on the front bench for the next twenty-five years, serving six Tory leaders including three Prime Ministers. The jovial millionaire peer is one of the most affable yet shrewd people in Parliament. From 1994 until 1997 he was the Conservative chief whip and readily dispensed a generous tumbler in his office to move business along.

  ‘Already there was a good bar, largely whisky,’ he tells me. ‘The great thing about whisky is it doesn’t need mixers. G&T is such a bore. Lemon, tonic water and god knows what else. But whisky is very good and the Famous Grouse was a wonderful oil. People were offered a glass of whisky to help them relax and make them be a little more helpful than they might have been. It helped create a camaraderie. I did find if you offered people a drink they felt more willing to help than perhaps if you hadn’t,’ he says with a grin, adding: ‘There was certainly a time in the 1990s where alcohol proved a good lubricant to help manage the backbenchers of the Conservative Party in the House of Lords, and that made a difference. People liked it and they appreciated it.’49

  But those were the wilderness years for the Conservative Party. Once back in power, Lord Strathclyde insists, tea and biscuits trumped whisky and brandy when he had the job of corralling Tory peers through the government voting lobby.

  Their lordships, or at least some of them, are perhaps more likely to have studied the ancient civilisations of Greece and Rome than are their elected colleagues down the corridor. Certainly peers are expected to bring historical perspective and mature wisdom to Parliament. It is not impossible, therefore, as they enjoy a glass of Bordeaux with their grouse in the Peers’ Dining Room, that the Greek symposium might come to mind. The word means ‘drinking together’ and describes a male, upper-class evening of gossip, poetry reading, political discussion and rumination. It was also the setting for young teenage males to be initiated into the social and political life of Athens, often with the guide of an older male lover. That aspect of the symposium may not have a modern echo, but the drinking certainly does. Then, as now, wine was used to stimulate a lively conviviality conducive to political reflection.

  The Commons Chamber

  With so many bars for Members of Parliament to imbibe in, and with so much time to kill between votes, it is no surprise that history records many instances of drunkenness seeping into the Chamber itself. Popping into the reporters’ gallery on 19 December 1666, the diarist Samuel Pepys witnessed the antics of a couple of well-refreshed MPs. Pepys was not amused:

  Sir Allen Brodericke and Sir Allen Apsley did come drunk the other day into the House, and did both speak for half an hour together, and could not be either laughed, or pulled, or bid to sit down and hold their peace, to the great contempt of the King’s servants and cause; which I am grieved at with all my heart.50

  Two centuries later, the novelist Anthony Trollope (who also stood for Parliament) described the drunken demise of the villainous financier and Member of Parliament Augustus Melmotte. His inebriated performance in the House of Commons preceded the swindler’s suicide:

  Melmotte was persistent, and determined not to be put down. At last no one else would speak, and the House was about to negative the motion without division – when Melmotte was again on his legs, still persisting. The Speaker scowled at him and leaned back in his chair. Melmotte standing erect, turning his head round from one side of the House to another, as though determined that all should see his audacity, propping himself with his knees against the seat before him, remained for half a minute perfectly silent. He was drunk, – but better able than most drunken men to steady himself, and showing in his face none of those outward signs of intoxication by which drunkenness is generally made apparent. But he had forgotten in his audacity that words are needed for the making of a speech, and now he had not a word at his command. He stumbled forward, recovered himself, then looked once more round the House with a glance of anger, and after that toppled headlong over the shoulders of Mr. Beauchamp Beauclerk, who was sitting in front of him.51

  And the drunken antics of nineteenth-century MPs were not confined to fiction. In the early years of the century, the Tory gent and ally of Pitt the Younger, George Rose, caused outrage in the Commons when he turned up in the Chamber drunk and asked the Speaker to perform a comic song. According to an excitable account from 1902, it was the ‘greatest astonishment ever created in the House of Commons’ and MPs were ‘paralysed with astonishment’.52 Ordered to stand at the Bar of the Commons and apologise, the MP refused and was carted off to the room known as the lock-up to sleep off the booze. The next day, sober, he begged the Speaker’s pardon and was discharged from custody on the condition that he paid a hefty fine.

  George Rose was a gregarious chap and a founding member of the Ministers’ Fish Dinner, an annual knees-up which took place shortly before the parliamentary summer recess. Fried whitebait from the Thames was very popular at the time and the dinners took place at a tavern in Greenwich, with invitations to Cabinet ministers dispatched in their ministerial boxes.

  The parliamentary sketch writers peering down on proceedings pray for such a performance, but now usually have to quarry their reports from more arid and predictable material. Most MPs are not dazzling orators and some are so dire they can rapidly empty the Chamber. But there are notable exceptions. One of the most captivating speakers in nineteenth-century politics was the Irish playwright, barrister and politician Richard Laylor Sheil. H
e made a name for himself by writing witty sketches of contemporaries in London legal life and politics for the New Monthly Magazine. One sketch from 1829 describes the ordeal of watching another Irish politician, John Leslie Foster, make a speech in the Commons. For the MPs there, drink was the only way to endure it.

  Sheil was in the gallery of the Commons watching a debate on the Catholic question. The Chamber was full when John Leslie Foster stood up to speak. ‘In an instance the House was cleared,’ writes Sheil. ‘The rush to the door leading to the tavern upstairs, where the Members find a refuge from the soporific powers of their brother legislators, was tremendous.’ Whatever their views on Ireland, all MPs agreed that Foster was agony to listen to. Sheil followed the hundreds of MPs out to Bellamy’s where they tucked into dinner and wine:

  Half an hour passed away, toothpicks and claret were now beginning to appear, and the business of mastication being concluded, that of digestion had commenced … At the end of a long corridor, which opened from the room where diners were assembled, there stood a waiter whose office it was to inform an interrogator what gentleman was speaking below stairs. Nearly opposite the door sat two English county Members. They had just disposed of a bottle each and just as the last glass was emptied, one of them called out to the annunciator at the end of the passage for the intelligence; ‘Mr. Foster on his legs’ was the formidable answer. ‘Waiter, bring another bottle’, was the immediate effect of this information, which was followed by a similar injunction from every table in the room. For two hours this went on and more bottles were ordered, until ‘Mr Plunket on his legs’ was heard from the end of the passage and ‘the whole convocation of compotators rose together and returned to the House’.53