Order, Order!

by Wright, Ben;

  Eric Joyce had become MP for Falkirk in December 2000 after winning a by-election. His 21-year career in the armed forces and his authorship of an article branding the army ‘snobbish and rife with sexism and racism’ made him a prominent and intriguing new MP, a favourite of BBC guest bookers. He stayed largely on message and was rewarded with a job as parliamentary aide to the then Defence Secretary, Bob Ainsworth. It was a job he quit in September 2009 after criticising the purpose of Britain’s military campaign in Afghanistan.

  Joyce’s career, like that of many MPs, was static. He was not poised for promotion to Ed Miliband’s front bench team. But nor had his prospects been fatally destroyed by scandal. And at least he was known to Westminster’s journalists, unlike the many MPs who toil away in backbench obscurity and will never be ministers or invited to opine on Newsnight. There is no job description for MPs and each one has to work out for themselves what they are in Westminster for. Is it to be a diligent constituency MP and vote loyally for their party? Is their driving ambition to get a front bench job and the chance of becoming a minister? Some find their job satisfaction in scrutinising the work of government in a select committee. In practice many MPs follow a number of different paths during their Westminster careers.

  Eric Joyce was clear about what he wanted. ‘What’s the point of being in politics if you’re not a minister?’ he said, as I fished around for reasons why he had cracked. ‘I had no background in politics and just assumed, because I was so fantastic, that progression through the ministerial ranks would be fairly straightforward. But by 2005 there was a new government and I still wasn’t in it.’ After his brief stint as a Parliamentary Private Secretary, Joyce began to drink. Considering his political career to be a futile failure, he found consolation at the bottom of a glass. He said he hardly drank before arriving in the Commons. ‘Was it a response to political failure? Absolutely, unquestionably. Most nights I’d have several glasses of wine, routinely, without thinking about it. It anaesthetised the experience of being here.’ But the alcohol, mixed with a volatile temperament, made him prone to a fight. ‘I’d been in lots of brawls,’ Joyce chuckled.14

  Four months after we met, Eric Joyce was again being pinned to the ground by police. On the evening of 14 March 2013, the Falkirk MP was arrested outside the Sports and Social Club bar, which was hosting a karaoke evening. Reports varied about the cause of the rumpus, but it may have had something to do with Joyce wanting to take a glass outside. At around 11 p.m., after a wrestle with police officers that was captured on the camera phones of other drinkers, he was once again hauled off to Belgravia police station and held there for twenty hours.

  The parliamentary authorities called time on Joyce’s drinking and banned him from buying alcohol anywhere within the Palace of Westminster. But the Crown Prosecution Service spared him another trip to court, deciding there was not enough evidence to bring charges. There were, prosecutors said, ‘multiple inconsistencies’ in the statements taken from witnesses at the Sports and Social. Two days after the fracas, Joyce posted a lengthy blog, denying he had been drunk or that he had ever been an alcoholic. ‘I do not go into bars, nor drink in my office,’ he wrote. The press again pilloried Parliament’s drinking culture.

  The impact of the Strangers’ Bar brawl was felt far beyond Phil Wilson’s chin. It is not fanciful to suggest that, if Eric Joyce had not seen red after too much drink on that February evening, then Jeremy Corbyn may not have become Labour’s leader three and a half years later. How so? The chain of events goes like this. After Joyce was convicted of assault, he resigned from the Labour Party and said he would not stand for re-election in 2015. That opened up a vacancy in his Falkirk constituency. The Unite trade union wanted to ensure their chosen candidate was selected and was accused of signing up members to the local Labour Party branch without their knowledge with the aim of rigging the contest. Unite strongly denied doing anything wrong and the police found no evidence. But Falkirk became synonymous with a Labour variety of Tammany Hall politics.

  The furore over trade union influence within the party prompted then leader Ed Miliband to radically change the rules for selecting Labour leaders. His aim was to broaden the membership base of the party, and appear to diminish trade union influence. The old electoral college system that gave MPs a third of the overall vote was ditched in favour of giving every Labour Party member one equal vote. And a new category of membership allowed people to become party ‘affiliates’ for just £3. So the influence of MPs was diluted while opening up the contest to non-party members.

  After Miliband resigned, the contest to replace him saw more than 100,000 people sign up, 88,000 of whom voted for the veteran left-wing outsider Jeremy Corbyn. The majority of full members voted for him too, but the rule change undoubtedly made it easier for Corbyn to transform the contest, hoovering up support from enthusiastic new recruits. Labour MPs, the vast majority of whom emphatically did not want Corbyn to become leader, had no power to stop him. So the remarkable rise of Jeremy Corbyn had its roots in the events in the Strangers’ Bar. His capture of the Labour Party and the surge in membership that took him there began with a drunken headbutt.

  Eric Joyce was not the first MP to realise that life in the Commons was not what they had dreamed of. Elected because of their party badge, and rarely because of their personalities, new MPs confront a world in which their lives are governed by whips, they have very little power of their own, and there is none of the pastoral care or career development common in other walks of life. A long way from home, in a London flat, with time on their hands, MPs are prey to a multitude of temptations. The policemen on the doors might nod in deference, but the truth of a new MP’s existence can be very different.

  The journalist and former Conservative MP Matthew Parris describes the feeling of being a fraud:

  It breeds an internal cynicism and an imperceptibly opening up gap between your public life and your private, internal life … The gap between these worlds becomes, for some, almost unbridgeable … it is not surprising that MPs learn to despise, if not themselves, then the thing they are pretending to be. It is not surprising that they sometimes try to escape this, sometimes in a manner which to the rest of us looks desperate. Being an MP feeds your vanity and starves your self-respect.15

  Some try to fill the gap with assorted diversions, which often get them into trouble. And as Eric Joyce and others have discovered, a readily available river of anaesthetising drink runs through Parliament from which to sip.

  In 2014 drunken antics in the Strangers’ Bar made headlines again, with the trial and subsequent acquittal of the Conservative MP Nigel Evans, who was also a deputy Speaker. He was cleared of a number of sex abuse charges against men. But the court heard how alcohol featured in every allegation against him, and Evans’ defence barrister said the MP’s ‘drunken overfamiliarity’ with young male researchers was not disputed.

  One Labour MP elected in 2010 told me about his vow not to drink at Westminster, wary of putting even a first foot on that particular ladder. Chatting to me over tea in the Strangers’ Bar one afternoon, he described the pressures on politicians and how he had to wrestle with himself when it came to drink: ‘Here I want to be seen as someone who’s respected. I’m an ambassador of the people I represent. Once I have one or two pints I want more. It would be easy for me to slip into a drinking culture that wasn’t in my own best interests. To me it’s important I keep in the right place when I’m down here. I’ve thought about it greatly. I’ll have soft drinks in here but at home I’ll have a proper drink. It’s something which, in a public position like an MP, you’ve got to give thought to. And I love drinking. I love a drink. I had to make a decision personally and stick by it. You’ve no idea how difficult it is when you come in here and fellow MPs are having one or two beers. And I say no. It’s really difficult for me. There’s a lot of pressure on people. It’s easy to be lonely here. It’s sink or swim. Survival of the fittest. If you’ve got problems and you’re stru
ggling there are not many people here to help you. And I’ve seen one or two people turn to heavy drinking. And that’s in the main because it’s lonely. Long hours, away from your family. People start off with a few drinks then have a few more and have a few more.’16 In 2015 this MP returned to his small London flat to find a fellow member splayed out on the communal hallway floor, too drunk to move.

  It is a culture the Conservative MP Sarah Wollaston was shocked to see when she arrived at Westminster in 2010. A former GP with no background in party politics, she created a stir when she said, at a fringe meeting of the Conservative Party conference in October 2011: ‘Who would go to see a surgeon who had just drunk a bottle of wine at lunchtime? But we fully accept that MPs are perfectly capable of performing as MPs, despite some of them drinking really quite heavily.’17

  Remembering what it used to be like, older MPs and journalists tend to roll their eyes in disbelief at such remarks. To them, the Palace of Westminster feels like a temperance bar in comparison with days gone by. If you spend a few hours watching MPs go about their business in the fig tree filled atrium of Portcullis House, the scene will be one of snatched cappuccinos and bottles of mineral water being glugged by MPs while they meet a ceaseless stream of visitors, mostly constituents or lobbyists. There will also be journalists trying to grab a word. Like the MPs, they generally no longer drink on the job either. The journalistic days of Lunchtime O’Booze are gone. Both MPs and journalists are now too busy writing, meeting, tweeting and blogging. The pace at which politics is now conducted is too unforgiving to permit an afternoon clouded by drink.

  A big change has been in the relationship of MPs with their constituencies. When Roy Jenkins became an MP in 1950, he would visit his Birmingham constituency once a month and ‘hardly ever raised constituency issues in the House of Commons’. For many years MPs did not even have to pen their own letters to constituents. The Liberal Democrat MP Sir Menzies Campbell remembers when the House of Commons Stationery Department used to provide a handy printed letter for MPs. ‘It said, “I have taken up the matter you raise with me with the authorities and I enclose a copy of their letter.” And that’s what people used to sign. The idea of being a good constituency MP is a modern idea,’ he tells me.18

  An MP’s constituency role has been transformed in recent years, with MPs doing much more and voters in turn expecting much more. By seven o’clock most evenings, the parliamentary restaurants and bars are quiet. Many MPs are tucked away in their offices desperately trying to catch up with their constituency correspondence. This has certainly contributed to the decline of political drinking, along with the changed hours, although seasoned Guardian journalist Michael White thinks several other factors have been at work: ‘A desire to live longer, a desire to become a junior minister, a desire to be loyal to the party when the press persecuted dissent, all these things contributed. Family friendly hours was only part of it.’19 The antics of MPs such as Mark Reckless and Eric Joyce are notable precisely because they are now rare, an echo from another age.

  Labour’s former Deputy Leader, Harriet Harman, has no nostalgia for the days when alcohol dominated the culture of Parliament and the bars groaned with MPs waiting around to vote in the early hours of the morning. I met Harman in her office with its wraparound view of Parliament Square, just days after Jeremy Corbyn had become Labour’s new leader. She recalled how the male-dominated bars were a very uncomfortable place for women to be, particularly in the early years of her career: ‘To be a young woman, to be on your own, in the middle of a whole load of men with drink flowing, it was a bit ambiguous. When you’ve got a meeting at least there’s a sense of formality. But when you have a drinking culture it’s an uncomfortable crossover between the social and the political.’

  Harman is certain that her reluctance to be part of the drinking scene held her back at the beginning of her parliamentary career and defined how Westminster viewed her: ‘Because I had young children and had a constituency close to the Commons I would go home. And if you weren’t part of that drinking culture you were regarded as un-clubbable. That’s what they used to say about me and it was reported by political journalists as fact. I was un-clubbable. What it meant was I wasn’t hanging around in the bars drinking. Even if I hadn’t had children I wouldn’t have been comfortable doing it. There was no right way to behave. Either drinking tonic water or leaning on the bar, both would receive disapproval. If you weren’t part of it you were snooty, unfriendly and not teamly.’

  I asked if she thought this shaped the way the press presented her for the rest of her career. ‘All the way through. I’ve never been unfriendly. I’m a total social animal. But the construct was a male drinking construct and there was no place for a woman in it. For decades I was apprehensive about going into Strangers’ Bar. Which is why the arrival of a hundred women in 1997 was such an important change. Suddenly there was a critical mass.’20

  Being absent from the bars meant political networks and relationships were being formed without you. When I asked Harman if this harmed her progress up the greasy pole, her reply was emphatic: ‘Yes, definitely. You were seen as setting yourself apart and looking snooty. The one woman who did join in was Mo Mowlam. She became one of the boys in a way I never was.’

  Of course, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown did not build their careers propping up Westminster bars; and the near-teetotal Jeremy Corbyn certainly did not. Nor did David Cameron and George Osborne. But perhaps they dipped in enough not to seem aloof. As senior Conservatives begin to prepare their pitch for a run at succeeding David Cameron as Tory Party leader, drinks with Conservative MPs will undoubtedly play an important part in their campaigns, as they woo and cajole their colleagues over a glass of wine. George Osborne has been doing just that for years; and Boris Johnson can be counted on to roll out the hospitality.

  It has even been suggested to me that this is one reason that Theresa May might struggle if she decides to run for leader. There is the same sense of being slightly apart from the club that Harriet Harman talked about. ‘The drinking culture is utterly gendered,’ Harman insists. ‘I know everyone’s against the professionalisation of politics but it’s a workplace not a club.’ Then why not just close down all the bars and sweep the whole culture away? Suddenly Harman becomes more guarded. ‘It was what it was. We’re in a different time now and it’s not a defining part of the culture in the way it was. I’ll leave it to other people whether they want to ban it or not,’ she says wearily.21

  Nick Clegg Splits a Bottle

  Few modern politicians in Britain can have experienced the exhilarating high of political success followed by its cruel puncture as sharply as Nick Clegg. Taking over the leadership of the Liberal Democrats after Charles Kennedy’s resignation, Clegg dazzled during the television debates of the 2010 general election and a fleeting phenomenon dubbed ‘Cleggmania’ was hatched by the press. In the end, the Liberal Democrats won five fewer seats than they had in 2005, but in the first hung parliament since 1974 the party suddenly held the keys to power. To the surprise of most Westminster pundits, Clegg welded his party to the Conservatives to form a coalition government in which he became Deputy Prime Minister. Suddenly, the Liberal Democrat leader was sauntering up Downing Street, had armed police drivers to ferry him around and occupied a huge Whitehall office. Along with David Cameron, George Osborne and the Liberal Democrat Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Danny Alexander, the four men formed the so-called ‘quad’ of key ministers that steered the government’s decisions from Budgets to foreign policy.

  It was the coalition’s early decision to raise the level of university tuition fees that burst the bubble for Nick Clegg, breaking a pledge the party had made before the election to abolish student fees. The compromises required when in a coalition government with the Conservatives dismayed many who had voted Liberal Democrat and the party’s support collapsed during its five years in power. At the 2015 general election Liberal Democrat MPs were scythed down, leaving just eight in the Hou
se of Commons, including Clegg.

  I meet Clegg, now a backbench MP, in his parliamentary office on a gloomy November afternoon. He is typically ebullient and breezy, and as always seems to me one of the most likable and unaffected politicians in Westminster. As I probe his drinking habits, Clegg is apologetic that he does not have any stories of whisky-swilling desperation to share. Even in his most miserably pressured moments alcohol has never provided a crutch: ‘My abiding sin was to have a few fags in the evening when I got back home, which I’ve now stopped. But it wasn’t drink, no, and I certainly never got that impression for David, George or Danny either.’ Such men mark a generational shift in government, ministers who would not dream of having a tumbler of whisky at five in the afternoon. Nor did Nick Clegg spend his early years in Parliament greasing political contacts in the House of Commons bars. ‘I don’t even know where these bars are!’ he laughs.

  However, alcohol did play a role in keeping coalition relations smooth. A few times a year, the quad would meet for dinner. Sometimes these were convivial affairs; at other times the backdrop to tough negotiation. They were often held in David Cameron’s Downing Street flat and civil servants and special advisers were not invited. It was just the four people at the heart of the coalition, thrashing out policy issues and priorities over food and wine. Clegg is emphatic that no decisions were ever made while they were drunk, but the bottle of wine on the table was a useful lubricant. ‘We would have eaten our feta cheese and fettuccini anyway but of course the alcohol helped, definitely, of course it did,’ he tells me. ‘It was very, very middle class. Classic wine drinking and we shared a bottle.’ Just as the ancient Greek symposium was loosened up with a little libation, so the relationships underpinning the coalition were oiled with the help of a glass or two. However, this was tame stuff compared with the serious ministerial drinking of the past. Even though the economic problems faced by the coalition government were no less daunting than those faced by Wilson, Heath and Callaghan, the role played by alcohol in responding to them was much diminished. Instead, ministers jog, the Prime Minister setting an example by running around St James’s Park with a personal trainer (and often with a photographer in tow).