by Wright, Ben;
When in that House MPs divide
If they’ve a brain and cerebellum too,
They have to leave that brain outside,
And vote as their leaders tell ’em to.4
There are many satisfactions in being a Member of Parliament, but there are also many frustrations and disappointments. Roy Jenkins took a dim view of life on the backbenches, without a real job to do:
Being a full-time back-bench MP is not in my view a satisfactory occupation. The time can obviously be filled in, but not with work of sufficient intellectual stimulus … Excessive attendance at the House of Commons, with the too many hours spent hanging around in tearoom or smoking room which this implies, either atrophies the brain or obsesses it with the minutiae of political gossip and intrigue.5
Both the growth of constituency work and the development of select committees have altered the picture somewhat since Jenkins wrote that, but there is still much about the life of a Member of Parliament that sends them in search of diversions and distractions. And drink has remained a crutch for many.
Kennedy’s Curse
In July 2002 the then Liberal Democrat leader, Charles Kennedy, was interviewed by Jeremy Paxman on the BBC’s Newsnight programme. It was an echo of Robin Day’s interrogation of George Brown thirty-five years earlier but Paxman was blunter, telling Kennedy that every politician he had spoken to in preparing for the interview had said the same: ‘You’re interviewing Charles Kennedy? I hope he’s sober.’ The Lib Dem leader brushed off this suggestion of heavy drinking as Westminster tittle-tattle, a slur that should not be taken seriously. Paxman then asked Kennedy directly how much he drank and got a twinkly, knowing reply: ‘Moderately and socially, as you well know,’ he said with a grin.
But if Kennedy had hoped this conspiratorial reminder of shared past pleasures was going to shake Paxman off, he was wrong. There followed a question about whether Kennedy drank privately and alone, ‘a bottle of whisky late at night?’ Instantly, Kennedy’s face burned with anger and indignation. He snapped back: ‘No, I do not, no.’ It was the first time the Westminster whispers and rumours about the Liberal Democrat leader’s drink problem had been put to him publicly and directly. Three and a half years later – after more denials, cancelled press conferences, missed appearances in Parliament and a sweaty speech at the party conference – Kennedy admitted he struggled with alcohol, but only after ITN had discovered that he was receiving treatment. In a statement at the party’s headquarters on Thursday 5 January 2006 he said: ‘Over the past eighteen months I’ve been coming to terms with and seeking to cope with a drink problem, and I’ve come to learn through that process that a drink problem is a serious problem indeed. It’s serious for yourself and it’s serious for those around you. I’ve sought professional help and I believe today that this issue is essentially resolved.’
In an appeal to party members, Kennedy announced a leadership contest in which he would stand, but senior Liberal Democrats told him he could not continue. They refused to be dependent on his dependency any longer. His public candour and promise to change was too late and on Saturday 7 January Kennedy resigned the leadership of the Liberal Democrats. He may have been given a final chance if the Lib Dems had been doing better in the polls at the time. Despite their popular opposition to the Iraq war and a tally of sixty-two seats in the 2005 election, many in the party were frustrated by a sense of inertia and drift. And senior figures had heard pledges of sobriety from their leader several times before.
Charles Kennedy plunged into politics in 1983 at the age of twenty-three, at which time he was the youngest MP in the Commons. He thought he had little chance of winning Ross, Cromarty and Skye for the SDP when his fledgling academic career was swapped for Westminster. Becoming president of the Liberal Democrats in 1990, his affable informality made him a popular figure, regularly appearing on television shows, and in 1999 he became party leader at the age of thirty-nine.
According to one biographer, he was suffering from a drink problem even before that. His close personal assistant for many years, the late Anna Werrin, told the Times journalist Greg Hurst that symptoms of his alcoholism were ‘seen by party members’ before the leadership contest. The source was not whisky, as Paxman presumed, but gin and wine. Anna Werrin told Hurst: ‘He drank in private, by and large, and drank more than he ought.’6 The first time Sir Menzies Campbell became aware of the problem was in October 2001, when Campbell and Kennedy met with Yasser Arafat in London. On the way to Arafat’s hotel, Kennedy’s hands shook as he tried to drink from a can of Lilt. At the hotel, Kennedy asked the Palestinian leader one question before sitting through the rest of the meeting in silence. ‘Was Charles the worse for drink? Was he sick? I had no way of knowing since I had never seen Charles behave like that before but I presumed it was drink,’ said Campbell, who complained to the party’s chief whip.7 But it was only when Campbell became the Liberal Democrats’ Deputy Leader in February 2003 that he was taken into the confidence of those closest to Kennedy and the seriousness of the drink problem was spelt out. In June that year, Kennedy was too incapacitated to sit in the House of Commons chamber and hear Gordon Brown’s announcement on whether Britain would join the euro. His failure to appear was not explained.
That summer, shortly before the parliamentary recess, Kennedy decided that he would hold a press conference explaining that he was temporarily stepping down as leader to have treatment. But while Campbell was travelling down to London by train, Kennedy changed his mind and cancelled the confessional. This prompted Campbell and others to talk to their leader candidly for the first time and tell him the problem had to be tackled. They received an assurance from Kennedy that it would be. But Budget Day in 2004 brought the biggest crisis yet. Just before Prime Minister’s Questions, Anna Werrin told Campbell that the party leader was unable to appear because of a stomach upset. Campbell went up to Kennedy’s office and asked to see him, but Werrin said he couldn’t: ‘He’s very sick. He’s in a bad way. It’s better if you don’t.’8 Vince Cable had to give the Lib Dem Budget response and Westminster buzzed with gossip about whether booze was to blame for Kennedy’s absence.
A week later Kennedy sweated his way through the leader’s speech at the party’s spring conference and again senior figures confronted him about the drinking. This time they were blunter, telling him that if he continued to drink he could not remain as party leader. Again, there was a promise to seek treatment. But the bouts of drinking did not stop and the effects of a heavy night might have been the cause of a confused press conference performance during the 2005 election. A new baby and sleepless nights were blamed for Kennedy’s mangled explanation of the party’s flagship tax plan. Through the autumn of 2005, his support both among new MPs and the party grandees flaked away and by the new year he was faced with mass revolt. What had been a private issue for Kennedy, his family and a small circle of confidants in the party was finally in public view.
Did reporters in Westminster collude in covering up Charles Kennedy’s drink problem? The rumours were fiercely denied, and the issue was effectively hidden by Kennedy’s discreet inner circle, but journalists knew the truth. Kennedy was very adept at concealing his drinking bouts, and for five years affection for him personally and loyalty to his leadership kept a lid on the problem. But by 2006 his colleagues had lost patience with the pattern of remorse and remission and the cover-up collapsed.
Why did Kennedy sometimes drink so much that he could not do the job? Three and a half years before Kennedy’s death, Sir Menzies Campbell, the abstemious ex-Olympian who became Lib Dem leader after Kennedy, told me Commons life contributed to it: ‘In Charles’s case, in the first instance it was loneliness – dispatched into Westminster as a 23-year-old. It can be a very lonely place. Then stress and strain – having to assume greater responsibilities perhaps than he expected at an earlier stage. And maybe he just liked it, who knows.’9 Only Charles Kennedy really knew, and he never returned to the chat shows to talk about it. He
did not need to top himself up with alcohol during the day like Churchill, nor did his drinking flick a switch that made him volatile and embarrassing like George Brown. But his evenings of heavy private drinking could make the following day a write-off.
In the years before his death Kennedy’s drinking was treated as a bit of a public joke, just as George Brown’s had been forty years before. In December 2008, for instance, Kennedy appeared – as he often did – on the BBC’s Have I Got News For You show. Jeremy Clarkson introduced his guest with a gag about his alcoholism: ‘On Paul Merton’s team tonight is a man who, after confessing to a drink problem, reported that four party officials cornered him in his private office – although later it transpired that there were only two of them: Charles Kennedy!’ Merton’s team-mate gamely fixed a half smile while the studio audience whooped and clapped.
Kennedy died at his home in Fort William on 1 June 2015. Several days later his family released a statement saying he had died of a major haemorrhage that was a consequence of his battle with alcoholism. ‘Ultimately this was an illness Charles could not conquer despite all the efforts he and others made,’ they said. A close friend of Kennedy’s, Celia Munro, and her late husband John Farquhar Munro were among those who had tried to help. ‘Alcoholism is a fearful, fearful thing. One can only assume that in the end he still couldn’t reach the help he needed. I spoke to him very explicitly about it on many occasions. It was hard, like having your own child in front of you, and trying to reason with them. We sat many times with him. He had so many tragedies thrown at him,’ Munro said, referring to the recent deaths of Kennedy’s mother and father and the paralysis of his brother following a fall.10
Friends of Kennedy insisted it was not the loss of his seat in the SNP clean sweep of Scotland that precipitated his decline. He was looking forward to the future, as his close friend Alastair Campbell wrote in a tribute hours after Kennedy’s death: ‘Despite the occasional blip when the drink interfered, he was a terrific communicator and a fine orator. He spoke fluent human, because he had humanity in every vein and every cell.’ A former alcoholic himself, Campbell said he and Kennedy frequently swapped coded text messages of support. If Kennedy wrote ‘health remains fine’ it meant a day off the bottle.
Of course Kennedy knew he had a serious drink problem. Other people close to him complained about coy references to ‘demons’ in the tributes and obituaries that followed his death. Alcoholism, they insisted, was an illness and should be described as such.
Would Charles Kennedy have been a better leader sober? He might have had a sharper interest in policy detail and been less lackadaisical, a common complaint among critics in the party. But in electoral terms he was the Liberal Democrats’ most successful leader, taking the party to its highest number of seats in 2005. What Kennedy did so well was to connect quite naturally with the electorate. With his merry face and sense of mischief, he was the party leader most voters said they would choose to have a pint with. His fatal flaw was that he could not control his own drinking and so became the most recent senior politician to be undone by alcohol.
Reckless Drinking
Of course alcohol can produce very different effects on people. While some struggle on the edge of alcoholism, others can happily confine their consumption to a glass or two of wine at night. In some it produces behaviour that is embarrassing and aggressive, while in others it nourishes a gentle bonhomie. Most varieties of drinker were out in force on the House of Commons terrace in July 2010, on the night of the newly formed coalition government’s first Budget vote, when the Second Reading of the Finance Bill was approved with a three-line whip. While they waited for the session to wind up, MPs did what they have always done to kill the time and headed to the bars for a drink. It was a balmy summer evening and the terrace overlooking the Thames was soon heaving.
For the newly elected, this late-night sitting was a novelty. Veterans could observe the collective slide into intoxication and took it steady. In the Commons chamber, the few MPs not guzzling the booze were giving their views on a Finance Bill that would bring in the biggest spending cuts and tax rises for a generation. It was a Budget that defined the government’s decision to try and repair Britain’s finances with a programme of austerity. But spending restraint was not in evidence the night MPs gathered for the vote. It was claimed that the Commons bar took some £5,000 during the evening as MPs splashed out on Pimm’s, wine, beer and champagne.
Despite knocking back the drinks in the soft evening air, most managed to follow their whips’ instructions and duly walked through the correct voting lobby at 2.07 a.m. All, that is, except the new Conservative member for Rochester and Strood, Mark Reckless. An MP for just two months, Reckless was legless; staggering around the terrace before reportedly falling to the floor. The former banker was bundled into a taxi and sent home, missing the vote. A remorseful Reckless told one newspaper he felt very embarrassed. ‘It was a mistake I will not be repeating. I don’t know what came over me. It was a long day and I’d had a very early breakfast meeting. I don’t know what happened. I don’t remember falling over.’11 In an interview with BBC Radio Kent, Reckless said he remembered someone asking him to vote but not thinking it was appropriate to do so given his inebriation. ‘I don’t plan to drink at Westminster again,’ promised the contrite MP, who later went teetotal and defected to UKIP before losing his seat in 2015.12
Mark Reckless was caught out. He had drunk too much to function and chose not to walk through the voting lobbies. But it is certain that many of the MPs voting either for or against the Finance Bill that warm July night would also have been over the legal limit to drive a car. If they were pilots, they would not have been allowed to fly. If they were surgeons attempting to operate, they would have been struck off. Yet MPs consider it quite normal to vote on legislation after a session in the bar. The Labour MP Paul Flynn has recommended that MPs be breathalysed before entering the Commons chamber. In his view being drunk in charge of a legislature is as dangerous as being drunk in charge of a lathe.13
But of course, even if every MP voted while sober, the results would be pretty much the same. For backbench MPs hoping for advancement (and that is most of them) it is a lesson quickly learnt that they are in Parliament to support the position taken by their own party’s front bench. Every MP receives a weekly whip telling them how to vote, with each vote underlined. A one-line whip means they can turn up if they would like to; a three-line whip means compulsory attendance on pain of penalty. It is therefore an illusion to believe that MPs cast their votes after carefully weighing up the arguments in the House of Commons. Most debates in Parliament are not debates in the normal sense of the term. They are usually a thinly attended chance for MPs with an interest in the subject to recite their familiar views, or to catch the eye of their party, their constituency and the media.
Of course there are exceptions, and some MPs (often dubbed ‘mavericks’) make a point of being unbiddable. In recent years rebelliousness and independence have increased; and the debates and subsequent votes on the invasion of Iraq, raising tuition fees and House of Lords reform have sparked fierce argument and significant backbench rebellions. However, the free thinkers remain a small minority in their parties. Most MPs are content to be herded through the division lobbies by their whips, voting on legislation they are unlikely to have read. It does not matter to the party whips whether their MPs are drunk or sober so long as they can clock up the numbers. Hence, in July 2010 the government was going to get its Finance Bill through the Commons whether MPs had spent the evening carousing on the terrace or reading in the library.
Punches and Politics
One alcohol-fuelled incident stood out during the 2010–15 parliament and was destined to have far-reaching repercussions. On 22 February 2012, in the Strangers’ Bar of the Commons, the Labour MP Eric Joyce headbutted the Conservative MP Stuart Andrew, punched a Labour colleague, Phil Wilson, and assaulted a couple of visiting Tory councillors. This ensured that the former
army major made the headlines when he was arrested and charged with assault. Witnesses described scenes from a Wild West saloon as Joyce erupted and tables were upturned. He punched and headbutted his way through four people before eventually being restrained by police while shouting ‘You can’t touch me, I’m an MP!’
A few weeks later I sat in the press seats of Westminster Magistrates’ Court as the crumpled-looking 51-year-old was given a £3,000 fine and banned from bars for three months after admitting to the assaults. He was lucky to escape a prison sentence. As he faced the cameras outside the court, Joyce apologised to everyone involved and said the incident had caused him ‘considerable personal shame’. Expelled from the Labour Party, he announced that he would not be seeking re-election in 2015.
We met eight months later under the fig trees of Portcullis House, the modern building across from the Commons where many MPs have their offices. ‘It was the final headbutt that did for me,’ said Joyce, a burly, genial man with swept-back straw-coloured hair. He resembled a retired middleweight boxer. On the night of the fight he had been drinking House of Commons sauvignon blanc. The Falkirk MP said he was ‘sufficiently loosened up’ by the time a group of Conservatives began to rile him. ‘One of them was being lippy and I do remember a Tory MP put his arm around me from behind like a bear hug and picked me up. And from that point it was game on really and I just whacked everybody.’ He was eventually restrained by police, handcuffed and taken to Belgravia police station to calm down and sober up, before being charged with three counts of common assault.