by Wright, Ben;
Surely a Whitehall of ministerial sobriety is a good development? Having been an adviser to the Labour governments of the 1970s, David Lipsey is not so sure: ‘Drink stopped the manic compulsion to do something every single day. A lot of what goes wrong now is due to ministers being too sober and too energetic and thinking up wheezes that they’d forget about if only they had a couple of large drinks.’22 I put it to Nick Clegg that many of the big, memorable political characters of the past – like Ernest Bevin or Roy Jenkins – were also serious drinkers. Is there something about the new abstemiousness that makes for duller politicians? Clegg does not think a reluctance to booze is the explanation, but does accept that modern politicians are a blander bunch: ‘There’s clearly a trend to more identikit, pasteurised politicians. Partly because if you’re not you get so mashed up by parts of the more censorious press we have.’23
Boris
But there are still politicians who seem to float in a different orbit, and who are spared the sort of judgmental scrutiny applied to their colleagues, perhaps because they refuse to conform to the sanitised sameness of so many others in political life. One has his office on the opposite side of Portcullis House to Nick Clegg’s; and when I visit him one evening there are bottles of House of Commons whisky and champagne laid out awaiting his signature, their destination possibly the raffle of a Home Counties Conservative Association. Also piled on the table are copies of the biography he has written of his political hero, Winston Churchill.
‘I have seen distinguished members of the present Cabinet very far gone,’ Boris Johnson says sheepishly, ‘but in a lucid sort of F.E. Smith way,’ he adds, referring to the rakish, witty and hard-drinking Conservative politician who blazed his way through British politics in the early years of the twentieth century. Lord Birkenhead, as he became, was one of Churchill’s closest friends and served as Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for India before dying of liver cirrhosis in 1930. Johnson, still at the time of writing the Mayor of London as well as Conservative MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip, has deep admiration for the formidable political drinkers of the past and values the fortifying power of alcohol himself. But drink, he tells me, is a ‘treacherous friend’ for a politician. It can encourage and embolden, while making the merry-go-round of dinners and rubber-chicken functions more bearable. There is usually a pint before dinner, then several glasses of red and white placed on the table: ‘Two glasses is OK. Three you’re starting to feel a bit prolix. And you notice the audience starting to look at each other.’
A politician has to be careful. ‘The crucial thing about using alcohol at political engagements is you have to know exactly how much to have. It starts well, there’s a terrific élan, but then after a while what happens with alcohol if you’re not careful, two things. Your words start to slur and then you find yourself speaking very fast for no particular reason and then you suddenly start slowing down for no particular reason. And then you become somehow disembodied and you’re spectating at this event. And then a blackness, a morbidity descends. And then you become sort of bitter,’ Johnson says, trailing off.
A former journalist, Johnson believes booze at lunchtime used to help enormously to make the words flow: ‘I certainly find that if I’ve drunk a bottle of wine at lunchtime I can write a piece unbelievably fast and it’ll be as good as anything else. I can do 1,000 words in forty-five minutes and it will be fine. But if I’ve done it at dinner, no good.’ Johnson is unabashed about his fondness for drink. ‘Sometimes I drink a prodigious amount but I also go days without drinking at all. I haven’t been drunk for a very long time.’
But what about coping with the stress of running London? Does that mean you drink more? ‘No, not really. Sometimes a cup of tea’s pretty good, you know. Sorry, I don’t want to ruin your thesis!’ he laughs.
But the sacramental aspect of shared drinking, its signal that a relationship has become closer and less formal, is alcohol’s real importance to politicians, believes Johnson. ‘Oh yes, alcohol’s crucial, absolutely crucial. You always slightly worry about people who don’t drink.’ So has it helped lubricate any particular decisions, I ask.
The Mayor pauses for a very long time. ‘I’d better be careful here,’ he groans, rubbing his mop of hair, agonising whether to spill some secrets. ‘I can’t tell you for security reasons, I’m sorry …’
Johnson grins. The silence is getting awkward, so I suggest some foreign examples might be easier. ‘Yes!’ he booms. ‘My God, in China, it’s absolutely true that we did a large number of deals there that resulted in huge investments in London – Battersea, Greenwich and elsewhere. In China they have this system when they have very serious toasts after every course. Loads of courses, nineteen of them. Huge tureens of Margaux wine. By the end we were pretty fluent.’
I end by asking Johnson about his hero Winston Churchill. He is in no doubt that Britain’s wartime Prime Minister benefited from his gargantuan consumption of alcohol. ‘God yes, absolutely. Churchill was very clever at making it work for him. His consumption was formidable but he could use it as fuel. He could keep producing and performing. It’s the high-density lipoproteins. That’s what you need to focus on. That’s what alcohol gives you,’ he says with the serious tone of a family GP. We swap stories about Churchill’s prodigious wartime drinking, recounting his arrival at Casablanca at six in the morning, having flown around the world, and asking for a tumbler of white wine. Could anyone do that today, I wonder?
‘The trouble is the 24-hour news cycle is so demanding. You’d have to be propped up and shoved out in front of the cameras the whole time as soon as something happened. I can’t see it somehow.’24 But it is clear which occupant of Number 10 would be a model for Boris Johnson if he does have a crack at replacing David Cameron.
CHAPTER 4
Prime Ministers: Tipplers at Number 10
The portraits that line Downing Street’s Grand Staircase can be seen as a story of prime ministerial imbibing through the ages. From the bewigged Sir Robert Walpole to the photograph of Tony Blair it is a gallery of whisky sippers, wine buffs and beer drinkers. For three centuries Prime Ministers have turned to the Downing Street drinks cabinet for consolation and inspiration; to fire them up and to calm them down.
Pitt the Younger’s heavy port drinking was done on doctor’s orders, but it destroyed his health. Asquith’s intake of wine earned him the sobriquet ‘Squiff’ and stained his reputation. Harold Wilson sought brandy to steady his nerves before he faced the Commons chamber; and a Bell’s whisky helped Margaret Thatcher wind down when she slipped off her heels at the end of the day. Churchill drank in quantities unmatched by any other Prime Minister, although his whisky was watered down more than legend suggests. Tony Blair had a stiff whisky, or gin and tonic, before dinner followed by wine with food. As he said himself: ‘By the standards of days gone by I was not even remotely a toper … But I was aware it had become a prop.’1
Harold Macmillan, the last Prime Minister to be a habitué of Pall Mall clubland, enjoyed a tipple himself and was relaxed about the habits of others. On 25 April 1962, Macmillan’s diary records that one of his junior ministers, Denzil Freeth, was arrested for being drunk in the Strand. ‘The Chief Whip agrees with the poor man that he should resign,’ he writes. ‘I am very much against this – assuming that this is the only charge. There are worse things that can happen. There is nothing unmanly about being drunk, and very good precedents among my great predecessors.’ Macmillan then adds, with a twinkle, ‘in the street is perhaps a pity.’2
Not every Prime Minister sought solace in a bottle and some avoided alcohol altogether. Although by no means teetotal David Lloyd George had an appetite for women rather than wine. The diffident and modest Clement Attlee led a serious government with suitable sobriety and did not reach for drink to ease the strains of office. Playing the piano rather than pulling out a cork was Edward Heath’s means of escape. James Callaghan resolved not to touch a drop once he got to Downing Street because he d
id not want alcohol to impair his judgment. But the focus here is obviously on those Prime Ministers who did turn to alcohol, some much more than others. And this invites an immediate question: what did drink do to their judgment?
There is no evidence of significant political decisions being taken by a Prime Minister who was obviously the worse for drink, but alcohol regularly sloshes around in the background. It perks Prime Ministers up, relaxes them, makes the grind and pressures of power more bearable and has effects on their behaviour. Their use of alcohol is a window into their characters; and into the political story of their times.
Walpole’s Wine
Britain’s first Prime Minister, Robert Walpole, clocked up twenty years in the job. It remains an unmatched record. The aristocratic Whig dominated politics in the first decades of the eighteenth century, an era that required Walpole to juggle the demands of the King and Parliament using a combination of political cunning and corruption. Entering the House of Commons in 1701, Walpole soon saw that lavish entertaining was an essential ingredient of a successful political career. So he used his first government job to help stock up his cellar.
Walpole was made a member of the Admiralty Board, which advised Prince George on naval issues. It was not a particularly demanding role and Walpole spotted a chance to get his hands on forbidden French wine and champagne. Imports were banned because of Britain’s war with France, but Walpole and the Secretary of the Admiralty, Josiah Burchett, came up with a ruse to smuggle booze in with the help of the navy. Ships (presumably with the compliance of their crews) picked up wine from Holland, hid it among the rigging and then floated it up the Thames on an Admiralty barge to the waiting Walpole. Other customs-dodging smugglers would have faced punishment and prison. Walpole, however, began to build up one of the finest wine collections in politics.
After Britain made peace with France in 1713, the wine started to flow in lawfully. Remarkably, some of Walpole’s wine receipts have survived the centuries and provide a snapshot of the tastes and consumption of this discerning drinker. In 1733 he spent £1,118 with the wine merchant James Bennett – a huge sum for the time, equivalent to around £200,000 in 2014 prices.
As the historian J.H. Plumb reveals, Walpole’s consumption was prodigious. He had a love of white Lisbon and in the first six months of 1733 bought 111 half-dozen bottles, far more than any other wine. It was more expensive than port and cost Walpole twenty-four shillings a dozen, ready-bottled. He also bought huge quantities of champagne and Rhenish from the Rhine. As for reds, it is clear he preferred claret to port and bought it by the cask. In 1732 and 1733 (the years for which complete bills exist) he bought four hogsheads of Chateau Margaux (£45 each) and a hogshead of Lafite every three months. The claret was usually bottled at Walpole’s cellar by his merchant.
Twice a year, the Prime Minister entertained close friends at the Walpole family home at Houghton in Norfolk. They were lavish affairs. In July 1731, the political writer Lord Hervey wrote this description to Frederick, Prince of Wales:
Our company at Houghton swelled at last into so numerous a body that we used to sit down to dinner a little snug party of thirty odd, up to the chin in beef, venison, geese, turkeys, etc; and generally over the chin in claret, strong beer and punch. We had lords spiritual and temporal, besides commoners, parsons and freeholders innumerable.3
In the intimate, aristocratic political world of the time, Walpole dominated the scene like nobody before and his wine bills give an insight into early eighteenth-century drinking habits. As much business as possible was done around the dinner table. As Plumb puts it, ‘it was not an abstemious age’.4
Pitt’s Port
Bookending the eighteenth century was Britain’s second longest serving Prime Minister and one of the heaviest drinkers to occupy Number 10. William Pitt the Younger was just forty-six when he died, probably from gastric ulceration brought about by years of overwork, pressure, recurrent illness and excessive drinking. By the end of his life there is little doubt that Pitt was an alcoholic, dependent on the port he had been reared on in his youth.
The precociously brilliant Pitt, the son of the Earl of Chatham, inherited his father’s political skills but also his fragile constitution. He was often unwell as a child and developed gout when he started his studies at Cambridge at the age of fourteen. Unlikely remedies were prescribed. The Chatham family doctor, Anthony Addington, recommended that Pitt should follow a special diet, take regular horse rides and knock back a daily dose of port wine. As Pitt’s biographer William Hague says, that dose has been variously recollected down the generations as a ‘bottle a day’ or ‘liberal potations’.5 At the time, alcohol was thought to be a good way of dispelling toxins from the body and Pitt’s health did begin to improve. So, given the green light to guzzle large amounts of port by his doctor, Pitt drank heavily and regularly for the rest of his life.
The port Pitt drank differed from that consumed today. It could be white, red or rosé; and port was the name given to the region it was produced in, the Douro Valley, rather than a single variety of wine. All were sweet and fortified with brandy but, at around 14 per cent, eighteenth-century port was weaker than its modern namesake. The bottles that contained it were also smaller and thicker than modern wine bottles. Pitt was known as a ‘three-bottle man’, but it is unlikely he regularly drank that much at a single sitting. As William Hague concludes, ‘Three bottles of port in Pitt’s day would be roughly equivalent to one and two thirds of a bottle of strong wine today. This is still a large amount of alcohol to consume, but not an unimaginable one.’6
Indeed, it is perhaps more imaginable than Hague’s own much-mocked claim, made as Conservative Party leader, that he could polish off fourteen pints of beer a day as a teenager while working for Hague’s Soft Drinks, his father’s Yorkshire delivery firm. And while beer drinking has become a way for modern politicians to signal their similarity to ordinary voters, port drinking in the eighteenth century was a way for the political elite to share the habits of the developing middle class. At the start of the century, Walpole had filled his cellar with claret. But by the end of the century, Pitt’s chosen beverage was judged more masculine and patriotic than the weaker, pricier wines from France. Port drinking was a mark of middle-ranking Englishmen. Indeed, as Charles Ludington says: ‘By the 1780s, port was the preferred wine of the most politically and socially elite men in England.’7
Pitt took his seat in the House of Commons in 1781 and his political ascent was astonishing. A year later, at the age of twenty-three, he was Chancellor of the Exchequer. By twenty-four he was Prime Minister, still the youngest ever to this day. His first ministry lasted for seventeen years and oversaw union with Ireland, brought in Britain’s first ever income tax and gradually increased Westminster’s grip over Britain’s fledgling empire. Politics was everything to Pitt, and after the outbreak of war with Napoleon the pressures on the Prime Minister increased. So did his drinking.
Pitt had always been a heavy drinker and it had not gone unnoticed. In 1788 the Declaratory Act – which aimed to establish a permanent military force in India, paid for by the East India Company – went through the Commons. In the debate, Pitt was too ill to respond to a speech by his great rival, Charles James Fox. Pitt had been drinking heavily the night before and various accounts suggest he was suffering from a severe hangover. On another occasion Pitt was called away from dinner to answer an unexpected political attack by opponents in the Commons. It was clear he was under the influence of wine and it alarmed his friends. In fact, one of the clerks of the House was made sick by the sight of it and developed a violent headache. ‘An excellent arrangement,’ remarked Pitt; ‘I have the wine and he has the headache.’8 Shortly after the outbreak of war in February 1793, Pitt and his loyal friend and political fixer, Henry Dundas, entered the Commons clearly the worse for wear, leading to the memorable lines in an opposition newspaper:
I cannot see the Speaker, Hal, can you?
What! Cannot see the Speak
er, I see two!9
As other Prime Ministers have done, Pitt used drink to cope with the demands of the job. Although he first developed the habit of heavy drinking on the advice of his doctor, he also seems to have drunk more when under strain. Pitt was a workaholic who wanted to be involved in all areas of government and by the late 1790s the pressure was taking its toll. According to one historian, ‘His consumption of alcohol increased; his optimism drained away when problems defied rapid solution.’10 After a bout of illness in 1802, one of Pitt’s friends, Earl Camden, wrote: ‘He has recovered his appetite, and his strength is returning, but I observe no difference in his diet and he drank at least two bottles of port after dinner and supper last night.’11
The war with France dragged on longer than Pitt had expected. When he returned to Downing Street for his short second (and last) ministry, drink had become a crutch for the dutiful but exhausted and prematurely aged Prime Minister. In 1804 the army general William Napier noted that Pitt had become dependent on drinking alcohol in private: ‘Mr Pitt used to come home to dinner rather exhausted, and seemed to require wine, port, of which he generally drank a bottle, or nearly so, in a rapid succession of glasses; but when he recovered his strength from this stimulant he ceased to drink.’12
Pitt was dead less than two years later. Decades of excessive port drinking had poisoned his body and William Hague is in no doubt that by the end of his days he was an alcoholic.13 But Pitt’s niece Lady Hester Stanhope thought the life Pitt led would have broken even the strongest character: