Order, Order!

by Wright, Ben;

  It would be nice, but inaccurate, to be able to say that there are no comparable instances today.

  At this period, speaking in the House of Commons and taking part in debates was a minority interest for MPs. The majority did not say a recorded word throughout their parliamentary careers. But between 1820 and 1828, there was a 20 per cent increase in the number of MPs who got a mention in Hansard.54 After the 1832 Reform Act, that trend accelerated. Press coverage of proceedings increased massively and Victorian politicians began to find fame among a growing electorate. But one constant was the conviviality to be found by MPs in Parliament’s bars. The Victorian MP and writer Justin McCarthy recalled that in the Commons chamber in the early 1850s,

  there hardly ever took place a night’s debate then and for many Sessions after during which some members did not make it evident by the manner of their speeches that they had been stimulating their nerves and screwing up their courage a good deal too much at the expense of the bottle or the decanter … In the former days it might be said without exaggeration that hardly a night passed without giving the public some exhibition of a drunken member amusing his audience by trying to take part in a debate.55

  Similar behaviour was evident a century later, when the Commons assembled for one of its most critical moments: a two-day debate on the failure of British forces to stop Germany’s invasion of Norway in April 1940. In his biography of Winston Churchill, Roy Jenkins describes a boozy Commons chamber during the ‘inquest on Norway’ debate that followed on 7 and 8 May 1940. As Churchill was wrapping up his crucial swashbuckling speech just after 10 p.m. on 8 May, Jenkins writes, ‘There developed one of those scenes of faintly hysterical disorder with which the House of Commons has long been inclined to accompany its most serious decisions. It began with a few allegedly intoxicated Scottish Labour members but was quickly reinforced by at least equally inebriated responses from the other side.’56 At what would turn out to be a decisive juncture in British history, alcohol fumes filled the Commons air. By this time, the Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was clinging on to office. A confidence vote followed and the Conservative government’s majority was cut to eighty-one, shattering Chamberlain’s authority. Two days later Hitler invaded France and the Low Countries; and the military architect of the Norway debacle, Winston Churchill, was asked to lead a new government.

  A vivid glimpse of the drinking culture in Parliament at this time is provided by Fenner Brockway, a radical Labour MP and prominent anti-colonial campaigner who was a boy when Gladstone ran the country, and who died during Thatcher’s third term at Number 10. Writing in 1942, during a twenty-year break from the Commons, Brockway said the typical parliamentary existence could easily destroy unwitting, under-occupied MPs:

  More and more of such members settled down to an existence of inertia. They descended after a question time to one of the lounges and smoked, gossiped, drank, according to their tastes, or slept until the division bell rang … Automatic machines would have filled the part just as efficiently. The inevitable deterioration of their existence was hastened by the ease with which drink could be obtained.57

  Brockway remembered one Cabinet minister winding up a late debate who could stand ‘only with difficulty’. The shocked, disapproving MP left the chamber, saying to a colleague, ‘a workman would be sacked if he were found drunk at his bench.’

  Despairing about the drudgery of parliamentary life, Brockway was rare in breaking the omerta around drink:

  I know it is the habit of Members of Parliament, and even of ex-Members of Parliament, to be silent on this matter. I am writing of it, not because I am unconscious of human frailty in myself, but because the drunkenness which occurs at the House of Commons is only a reflection of the futile, wasted existence which large numbers of MPs are encouraged to live by the procedure of Parliament.58

  Late-night sittings continued to be the norm as the century progressed, with alcohol always a heavy presence at that hour. The political journalist and essayist Henry Fairlie describes the atmosphere of the 1960s, when MPs would return to the Commons from dinner ‘a little flushed with food and certainly noisier than at any other time of the day’ to hear the closing front bench speeches. ‘The House of Commons at this hour is a superb political animal,’ he writes.59 But the Speaker at the time, Dr Horace King, struggled with alcohol and was once too drunk to ascend the few steps to his chair. Sir Robin Maxwell-Hyslop remembered the incident:

  Horace came in at 9.25, and he had two goes at getting up into his chair … and the second time he fell to the right across the Clerks’ Table with his wig 45 degrees to the left and Bob Mellish (the government chief whip) called out ‘You’re a disgrace, Horace, and I’ll have you out of that chair within three months.’ Horace turned round so abruptly that his wig was then 45 degrees out the other way, and he gave a brilliant riposte: ‘How can you get me out of the chair, Bob, when I can’t get myself in to it?’60

  Horace King was the 151st Speaker but the stress of the job was too much for him and the drink ensured he was shuffled out of the Speaker’s chair in 1970.

  On the evening of 28 March 1979, the Callaghan government lost its Devolution Bill and faced a vote of no confidence, which it then lost. But the Commons catering staff had gone on strike. As the journalist Frank Johnson remembered, this might have been the first time ever that a government had lost a vote of confidence with everyone sober. Watching from the press gallery were gasping reporters:

  All evening we waited for the answer to the question: Would we get a drink? … There were hopes that on humanitarian grounds the unions would allow essential supplies of alcohol to reach the press gallery. As the night wore on, passers-by were confronted with that most frightening spectacle: a sober mob of journalists.61

  As a minister for health in the mid-1970s, David Owen testifies that it was possible to talk complete rubbish in the wind-up debates after dinner. ‘At least a third of the House of Commons were pissed. There’s no question about it. It was quite respectable to be the worse for wear by 10 o’clock.’62 A qualified doctor, Owen told me about the time he was called to help an MP who had collapsed in the Chamber:

  ‘We got the person out and into a small room off the lobby. We put him down and I examined him and I told the policeman we should just leave him there for a while. I checked him every half an hour. The truth was that the person was blind drunk. That was the diagnosis. No heart attack. Completely and utterly plastered in the Chamber. That is a classic example and it wasn’t the only case of someone being seriously ill from drink.’63

  Into the 1980s, and Michael Brown describes a typical evening in the Chamber: ‘The benches on both sides were full and you could smell the fumes, that’s why it was so boisterous.’64 Brown remembers the Labour MP for Dearne Valley, Edwin Wainwright, a former miner, getting sloshed in the Strangers’ Bar one night before the 1983 election. The Labour whips decided it was best to pack him off home in a taxi. Thinking he had gone, they then turned in horror to see Wainwright’s name on the monitor that showed who was speaking in the Commons chamber. According to Brown, the MP babbled away incoherently for some time, leaving the Hansard writers unable to record anything more detailed than ‘Mr Wainwright made a number of observations.’65 In those days television cameras were not present to record the inebriated ramblings of Members of Parliament. Their arrival probably did much to dissuade half-cut politicians from taking their unsteady place on the green benches, or at least from trying to speak.

  But not all Commons debates are now duller. For example, the video record contains a particularly entertaining performance by the well-lunched Conservative giant Nicholas Soames, grandson of Winston Churchill and close chum of Prince Charles. One afternoon in April 1998 he pitched up at a debate on the Money Resolution in the Regional Development Agencies Bill, not the most exciting of legislative moments. During a lengthy, florid and wandering intervention, Soames was repeatedly steered back to the subject by the Speaker, Betty Boothroyd. Onlookers suspe
cted Soames had been drinking, an accusation he denied. ‘My lunches consist of bananas, still water, preserved apricots and bats’ droppings,’ he said, soberly.66 But the aristocratic Soames also understands the relationship between class and drink. In the Commons Chamber and restaurants he used to hail John Prescott, Labour’s former Deputy Prime Minister and one-time ship’s steward, with the cry: ‘A whisky and soda for me, Giovanni, and a gin and tonic for my friend!’ The first time it happened Prescott shouted back: ‘At least I’m here because of my brains, not my father’s balls.’67

  There is, though, one occasion when an MP is allowed to drink alcohol in the Commons chamber, a ritual that started in the Victorian era. On Budget Day the Chancellor of the Exchequer can tinker with alcohol duty while sipping from a glass of their favourite tipple. In 1853 William Gladstone gave the longest Budget speech in history (four hours and forty-five minutes) and fortified himself throughout with a hideous concoction of sherry and beaten egg. His great rival, Benjamin Disraeli, delivered the shortest Budget address (a mere forty-five minutes) while drinking brandy and water. Into the 1980s, Chancellors kept up the habit. Geoffrey Howe opted for a gin and tonic. His successor Nigel Lawson took a whisky and soda into the Chamber for his first Budget in 1984; and Kenneth Clarke confidently quaffed a glass of whisky. But then the showmanship abruptly stopped. Gordon Brown ploughed through his many Budgets with only a mineral water at hand. Alistair Darling and George Osborne followed this example. As dry Budgets become the norm, it will be a brave Chancellor who revives the ritual.

  In fact all government ministers now sit through Commons debates with nothing more than water for sustenance. Some, I am told, add a splash of elderflower cordial to perk it up. But of course we can’t be sure it is just water. John Biffen was a sharp, well-liked Conservative Cabinet minister and thinker who served in Margaret Thatcher’s first two governments. As Chief Secretary to the Treasury from 1979 to 1981, Biffen found plain water ‘inappropriate as a companion’ through speeches and debates. He later revealed that his Parliamentary Private Secretary used to nip out of the Commons chamber while he was chained to the front bench and fill a carafe with weak vodka and tonic. It looked like sparkling water, so nobody knew.68

  Biffen’s career hit the rocks in 1986 when he dared suggest in a television interview that Mrs Thatcher might not be Prime Minister for the whole of the following parliament. The Downing Street press secretary, Bernard Ingham, briefed journalists that Biffen was ‘semi-detached’. The soon to be ex-minister stoically excused Ingham for being ‘the sewer, not the sewage’. Speaking in 2004, Biffen said a career in the Cabinet was comparable to being a football manager, both being short-lived experiences. ‘You can’t complain about being scratched if you work in a menagerie,’ he mused.69 This is a good description of the parliamentary zoo, where exotic high-flyers rub along with the grey and overlooked, the two species occasionally meeting while they queue for drinks at the bar.

  CHAPTER 3

  Drying Out

  The story so far has been one in which a drinking culture played a central role in political life. As the street lights sparked up along Whitehall, ministers would fling open the drinks cabinet while Members of Parliament poured into the bars. In the latter part of the twentieth century, this began to change. It is not that politicians stopped drinking, or that there were no longer any celebrated political drunks, but there was a marked change in the culture and conduct of politics that had its impact on political drinking. Politics started drying out. This chapter explores how it happened, even while alcohol continued to exact its political casualties.

  After Labour’s landslide election win in 1997, the new government ministers were shown to their offices. Harriet Harman remembers her arrival at what was then the Department of Social Security: ‘I couldn’t believe it. You got a red box, a driver, a private office and a drinks cabinet! Wine, spirits, everything.’ Perhaps typifying the newness of New Labour, Harman did not see the need to get the drinks out. ‘The fog of drink never helped me understand what people were trying to tell me or explain to them what I was trying to do,’ she tells me.1

  While there certainly were members of that government who liked a drink, Robin Cook and the former Lord Chancellor Derry Irvine notable among them, with Mo Mowlam always ready to kick her shoes off and sink a few with the boys, the Labour governments of Blair and Brown generally marked a shift in the character of ministerial drinking, away from whisky and wine to still and sparkling water. Peter Mandelson’s cocktail party preference for a canarino (hot water with a twist of lemon peel) symbolised the new sobriety.

  Why the change? Perhaps a growing awareness of the damage drink can do is part of the answer. Governments that now spend so much time fretting about the number of units of alcohol that people are drinking are expected to set an example. There is also the relentless pace of modern government. Twenty-four-hour news means that political storms flare up and die down much faster than they did even twenty years ago and ministers are now expected to be ever-ready with a response. The television cameras would easily spot the glassy-eyed flush and slurred speech of a minister who had enjoyed an excessively liquid lunch.

  The mood in Parliament itself has been changing too. Previous generations of backbench MPs routinely passed the time in the bars, waiting for late-night votes that often dragged into the early hours. But in 2002, MPs approved government plans to change the working hours of Parliament. The House of Commons now rarely sits beyond 7 p.m. and that has had a major impact on the Commons, including its late-night drinking culture. The place has undoubtedly sobered up. The arrival of many more women has been another significant factor. Labour’s introduction of some women-only shortlists doubled the number of women MPs after the 1997 general election. There is a story, which may or may not be true, of a Tory MP from the shires surveying the Labour benches after that election and exclaiming: ‘Who are all these people? They look like a lot of bloody constituents!’ Before 1987 women had never made up more than 5 per cent of MPs, but after the 2010 election the figure rose to 22 per cent. It seems likely that the arrival of so many more women played a significant role in diluting the male drinking culture of Westminster.

  However, the drinking habits of backbench Members of Parliament still continued to hit the headlines. There were brawls, missed votes and deaths that shocked the world beyond Westminster. Over the years there have been several MPs who drank too much and died too young because of alcohol. In fact one of the first such casualties of the New Labour years was a woman. Fiona Jones died from liver failure in January 2007 at the age of forty-nine. Ten years earlier she had been swept into Parliament as the new Labour MP for Newark in the party’s landslide election win. She did not drink much before heading to Westminster. But once there, the bars were a place to nullify the pain of being away from the family home, and of the tedium and bullying she encountered. According to her husband Chris, Jones found the travelling tough and she was subjected to sexual harassment by an unnamed Cabinet minister.

  Adding to her woes were questions surrounding the use of election expenses in her constituency. In February 1999 Jones and her agent were tried for expenses fraud and found guilty. When she overturned the ruling and went back to the Commons, many fellow MPs wanted nothing to do with her and she started drinking heavily. She eventually lost her seat in 2001 and failed to find another job. ‘At home she drank vodka to hide the smell from the children but down there she drank whisky because nobody cared if she drank,’ said Chris Jones a few weeks after his wife’s death.2 In his view, his wife’s spiral into alcoholism ‘can be traced directly back to her experiences at Westminster’. She did not go to Alcoholics Anonymous because she feared being recognised and by the end there was nothing her family could do to stop the disintegration. It is her husband’s judgment that the fact nobody cared is most damning of all. As long as she turned up to vote when ordered, party managers did not care about her slide into alcohol addiction.

  Party whips notice
when their MPs don’t turn up to vote. It is what sent the Conservative whip Derek Conway knocking on Iain Mills’ door at the Dolphin Square apartment block in Pimlico (where many MPs keep a London flat) in January 1997. For eighteen years Mills had been a quiet, unassuming backbencher for a Midlands seat. He was found dead on his bed surrounded by gin bottles, his body undiscovered for two days. The inquest into his death concluded that Mills was five times over the legal driving limit when he died. After the inquest, Conway said the whips’ office had known he was drinking, although they had no idea how much: ‘We were encouraging Iain to try and get a grip on the things that were of concern to him.’ But Mills died as he had existed in the Commons. Alone, only noticed when he failed to show up for a vote. In this same period another MP destroyed by drink was Jamie Cann, the Labour MP for Ipswich, who was found guilty of drink driving in 1998 and died of liver disease in 2001.

  In his study of the political species, Jeremy Paxman noticed what a solitary existence is revealed in the pages of many political diaries. ‘Whether they be snobs on the make or hair-shirted evangelists, the striking impression in many cases is how utterly lonely they seem,’ he wrote.3 Some Prime Ministers have displayed a rather weary disdain for the backbench drones who file through their respective voting lobbies day after day. Harold Macmillan once said that the only quality needed to be an MP was the ability to write a good letter. Winston Churchill was pitying: ‘The earnest party man becomes a silent drudge, tramping at intervals through the lobbies to record his vote and wondering why he comes to Westminster at all.’ In 1882, Gilbert and Sullivan famously captured the experience and set it to song in their comic opera Iolanthe: