by Wright, Ben;
Harriet Harman doesn’t regret this one bit. ‘When journalists took you out to lunch, if you didn’t drink you were considered too guarded. For me, I’d been up four times a night with babies so going on the lash at lunchtime wasn’t possible. I’d sip a quarter glass of wine to be polite but it was ridiculous,’ she says, railing at the misty mateyness of it all.23 It would now be unusual to drink anything with a Cabinet minister at lunchtime.
Some politicians and journalists are defiant. Like his anecdote-swapping colleagues in the Gay Hussar, Peter Oborne doesn’t think drier politics is better politics. ‘Political discourse in the last century was more humorous, kinder, more generous. Less earnestness, less dogmatism, more humanity at a personal level. I don’t think it’s entirely a gain that we’ve moved from a culture that was based on drinking alcohol together to a culture based on drinking coffee together.’24
Members Only
Drink is still an important glue for binding the party faithful. Alcohol fosters political camaraderie, from the Pimm’s poured at local Conservative Association summer BBQs to the pints pulled in working men’s clubs. Today Tony Blair drinks champagne with plutocrats in Davos. But not so long ago he would sup pints in the bar of Trimdon Labour Club in his former County Durham constituency. It was where Blair announced he would stand for the Labour leadership in 1994, where he first celebrated victory in 1997 and where he announced he was bowing out as Prime Minister in 2007. There’s a story – alas too good to be true – that, after answering the phone one evening, the barman shouted out, ‘Where’s Tony? Bloke called Clinton says he wants a word with you!’ The club gave Blair a useful dusting of working-class cache and grassroots credibility at a time when New Labour was doing everything it could to distance itself from the party’s past. The bar was formerly Trimdon Working Men’s Club, one of the thousands that thrived throughout industrial Britain for a century.
Set up in 1862, the Working Men’s Club and Institute Movement (CIU) was spearheaded by a temperance movement minister, the Reverend Henry Solly, and many clubs signed up to this national federation. Originally conceived as an alternative to the pub, they soon became social clubs renowned for heavy drinking, dominoes, concerts and comedy nights. They were the social centres of industrial communities and an antidote to the rigours of factory and pit life. In the early years particularly, the clubs had an educational role too; by 1903, of the 900 clubs almost half had lending libraries and many put on plays.25 Seventy years later there were 4,000 CIU-associated clubs; smoke-filled, beer-sinking dens of camaraderie and pleasure. The working men’s clubs hosted music acts and sports competitions. They were also home to sub-clubs of dog-racers, pigeon-flyers, card-players and leek-growers.
The Labour MP Ian Lavery is unlike most recent arrivals at Westminster. His accent is broad Geordie and his unshakable cough is a legacy of coal. Lavery took over the presidency of the National Union of Mineworkers from Arthur Scargill in 2002 and became MP for Wansbeck in 2010. We meet for a cup of tea in the Strangers’ Bar of the Commons, a place once full of Labour MPs from trade union backgrounds and the country’s vanished shipyards and pits.
Lavery tells me the bigger clubs used to have three or four thousand members and the drink and politics went together. ‘There was a heavy drinking culture. There was a pecking order of drinkers. People had reputations as fast drinkers, good drinkers, big drinkers. You’d know who had fifteen pints yesterday morning, went home for his dinner and came back for another fifteen pints. People enjoyed the drink, they enjoyed the craic. Fantastic atmosphere. In these clubs you’d have people sitting together discussing trade unionism, politics, football. These people didn’t have degrees and PhDs but they were bright and articulate.’26
The drinking was fierce. The Labour MP Kevan Jones used to be a trade union official on Tyneside, and he describes the clubs and drinking habits of the Newcastle shipyard workers. ‘If you went to Swan Hunters in the early 1980s and visited the bars and clubs at lunchtime when the whistle went, they used to have all the pints on the bar ready for people to come in. These were people who’d go back to work in the afternoon to work with heavy machinery. It was simply part of the culture.’27 Drink and shipbuilding go back a long way. A spectacular example comes from the Republic of Venice whose powerful fleet was built at the Arsenal, a massive shipyard that employed thousands of men. Wine was provided to workers for hydration and sustenance. It was stored in huge 2,000-litre casks and diluted to 4 or 5 per cent before being taken around the workers in buckets. By the late 1630s workers at the Venice Arsenal were drinking around five litres a day and a vast bronze wine fountain spewed out a continuous stream of wine.28
But the CIU clubs in 1980s Britain were not places for wine, or women. Wives and girlfriends might be taken along on a Saturday night, but these were clubs for blokes and beer. And to break the monopoly of the big brewers north-east clubs created their own beer, Federation, which was owned by the working men’s clubs and provided beer and ales to the northern clubs as well as to the Strangers’ Bar in the Commons. A CIU club membership card meant access to thousands of working men’s clubs throughout the country. The beer was cheaper than in pubs but drunken misbehaviour could get a member barred.
The working men’s clubs are threads in a once huge national tapestry of clubs and associations, most represented under the CIU umbrella. As well as the hundreds of Conservative and Labour associations, there are British Legion, RAF and naval social clubs. In 1977 the Queen popped into the Coventry Working Men’s Club, one of the oldest in the country. But this was their heyday and the visit was never repeated. The Coventry club was declared bankrupt in 2008 and closed its doors. Industrial decline, a dwindling membership and unaffordable debts finished it off. Sons no longer followed their fathers to these havens of cabaret, crooners and a cheap pint. When Kevan Jones first became an MP for the Durham coalfields in 2001 there were four or five working men’s clubs in his constituency; they have since closed down. His Labour club shut its doors in 2002. There was also a CIU group of MPs that has disappeared too. As Jones says, the closure of thousands of working men’s clubs over the last twenty years was inevitable. ‘The decline of those industries broke the connection. If you worked at Saxon colliery you were also part of Saxon working men’s club. When the pit went that link broke.’
There are now just 1,500 clubs in the Working Men’s Club and Institute Movement and the number continues to shrink. The attractions of a night drinking pints of brown ale in front of a club circuit comic have faded too. People would rather watch Peter Kay affectionately parody the rusting northern clubs in Phoenix Nights on television than go to such a club themselves, while the smoking ban and even cheaper supermarket booze has accelerated the decline. When Trimdon Labour Club closed down in 2010, its last secretary, Paul Trippett, said their beer prices couldn’t match the cost of drinking at home. ‘In the club £10 will unfortunately only get you four pints of lager, but if you go to one of the big supermarkets, £10 will get you forty-eight cans. Really, you can’t compete with that.’29 The price of alcohol was once the big draw at these clubs. Now it is draining them of life.
But the jobs, traditions and habits of a working class that congregated in clubs are all vanishing. As the former Labour MP Roy Hattersley has said, the few remaining clubs are relics of another age: ‘They are part of a lost civilisation in which working men never went out for the evening without being properly dressed in collar and tie, raised their cloth caps when coffin-bearing hearses passed them in the street, and knew nothing of “happy hours”, giant television screens or karaoke machines.’30
So what has been the effect on politics of this decline? For a hundred years working men’s clubs and trade unions were intertwined. Ian Lavery says the working men’s clubs were where the ranks of trade unions and the Labour Party were replenished: ‘Anybody who seemed fairly bright and articulate would be picked up by the local officials and given opportunities. Would you want to be a member of the Labour Party? A co
uncillor? It was the political educational ladder that these clubs provided. It was a conveyor belt year after year. Nothing has replaced those structures.’31 Lavery is adamant that the Labour Party is poorer for the disappearance of clubs that produced generations of councillors, canvassers and MPs who knew what it was like to work on the factory floor or hundreds of feet underground. But the unified political activism that he describes has faded away. Trade union membership has been falling for many years and the political allegiance of people in manual work has fractured. Even the term ‘working class’ is rarely used by political journalists now, nervously unsure what it means any more.
Ian Lavery is right to feel rather alone in Parliament. In his study of class voting between 1964 and 2010, the academic Oliver Heath has found that the number of MPs with a background in manual work has fallen sharply. Although always smaller than the proportion of the working class in the population, in 1964 20 per cent of MPs had a working-class occupational background. By 2010, only 5 per cent had the same. The change is almost entirely due to the changing make-up of the Labour Party in Parliament. In 1964, 37 per cent of its MPs were from manual occupational backgrounds compared with just under 10 per cent in 2010.32 Heath concludes that this shrinking working-class representation within the Labour Party is having a significant impact on how people vote, with working-class voters turning to the SNP and UKIP instead. The north of England and Scotland is still solid Labour territory, while the south of England is overwhelmingly Conservative. That geographical divide has hardened since Thatcher and Blair built huge majorities by winning non-traditional seats. But as Ian Lavery says, ‘A good parliament should reflect the country a whole. And it doesn’t.’ To reverse this trend will take more than a few pint-drinking photo opportunities for politicians in the working men’s clubs that soldier on.
Clubland
The price of a pint is of no great concern to the denizens of Pall Mall drawing rooms. Inside the hushed temples of Georgian splendour that still dominate the streets around St James’s, modern London stops at the door. While the brash, raucous, Tinder-browsing city rushes by outside, the clocks in the billiards room and library tick on with insouciant, timeless indifference. The quirks and rules of the gentlemen’s clubs are a mystery to non-members and some of the most venerable institutions (White’s and Brooks’s for instance) still ban women from joining.
That discrimination is the main reason prominent politicians are no longer seen snoozing at their club following a lunch of cold meats, claret and custard. It’s a toxic association for a modern politician. David Cameron’s late father Ian was once a chairman of White’s, the oldest and most aristocratic gentlemen’s club in London. His son was a member until 2008, when the Conservative Party leader quietly handed in his resignation. The raffish, wealthy exclusivity of White’s did not sit easily with the image of Cameron’s rebranded party. The Carlton Club still lurks in the background of the Conservative Party’s social life, but others have been drained of political importance.
It was very different in the nineteenth century, when the clubs of St James’s and Pall Mall incubated the new era of party politics. The clubs where Charles James Fox and William Pitt met to gamble, gossip and drink in the previous century became overtly political. In the late 1700s White’s cemented its status as the club for Tory gentlemen, while a few doors down Brooks’s was the spiritual home of their political opponents. As Philip Ziegler writes, ‘if the Church of England was later said to be the Tory party at prayer, Brooks’s was the Whig party at dinner’.33
The arguments around parliamentary reform sharpened the party divide and spawned new clubs. A group of Tories including the Duke of Wellington formed the Carlton Club in 1832 after failing to halt the Reform Act of the same year. It effectively became the Tories’ headquarters and a base for rebuilding their shattered party after electoral defeat. Four years later Whigs established the Reform Club to defend the wider franchise and counter the activities of the Carlton Club next door. This was when Pall Mall began to look as it does today. The Travellers’ Club had been founded in 1819 and the Athenaeum in 1824. Not all clubs had a political stamp, but they did have characteristics in common, being exclusively male, elite, discreet retreats where men could network, gossip, dine and drink from the finest wine cellars in London. Then, as now, the profits of the clubs were in large part dependent on how much alcohol their members put away.
New political clubs followed, such as the Conservative-supporting St Stephen’s (still used by the Tory Party today for press conferences and receptions) in 1870 and the National Liberal Club in 1882. Prospective members out of step with their party leaderships would find themselves blackballed and the clubs were vital to political advancement. As the historian Amy Milne-Smith writes, the clubs of Victorian London were far less raucous than the hard-drinking gambling dens of the Regency period but their political importance was clear: ‘The conversations within club walls helped define politics not only in London, but also in Britain, the Empire, Europe and the world.’34
Nineteenth-century Liberal Prime Ministers continued to frequent Brooks’s but the club was eclipsed in importance by the Reform, which first staged the long struggle between Whigs and Radicals and later the Liberal Party split over Irish Home Rule. This marked the beginning of the Reform Club’s fade from formal Liberal politics. In the twentieth century it evolved into a purely social club with a liberal outlook, becoming the first traditional gentlemen’s club to admit women members in 1981. But unlike their rivals in the Conservative Party, Liberal politicians largely turned their backs on the rarefied world of London clubland. One significant exception was Roy Jenkins, who adored the silver-tray charms of Brooks’s and noted with a touch of regret that the club had last produced a Prime Minister in the Edwardian era. That was Asquith, who used to slip out of Downing Street and stroll across St James’s Park to the Athenaeum for a couple of hours to read the newspapers in the library.35 In contrast, Tory politicians continued to tinkle the drinks bell at the Carlton despite the embarrassment its membership policy caused recent party leaders.
For over three decades Margaret Thatcher was the only woman signed up as a full member of the Carlton Club. When she became Tory Party leader in 1975, Thatcher was made an honorary member, getting around the awkward bar on women being able to join by right. The party’s first female leader was unfazed by this eye-crossing hypocrisy and embraced the Carlton enthusiastically when Prime Minister. At the beginning of each parliamentary session she took most of the Cabinet to the club for a grand party, a tradition continued by her successor, John Major. It was a time that re-established the Carlton Club at the heart of the Tory Party’s social life after years in the doldrums.
The Carlton Club had been the home of the party until Conservative Central Office was created in 1870. Benjamin Disraeli and Robert Peel built their careers in the club’s Pall Mall home, which was destroyed in a 1940 air raid. The Carlton’s most famous moment was a meeting held on Thursday 19 October 1922. The Tory Party was in coalition with the Liberals and the Conservative leader Austen Chamberlain shared Lloyd George’s view that the coming election should be fought on a joint ticket. But many Tory MPs wanted their party to go it alone and a showdown meeting was held at the Carlton. At 11 a.m., large glasses of brandy and soda were passed around and the argument got under way.36 Chamberlain failed to persuade the troops and when a vote was taken he lost by 187 to 87. This revolt by Tory MPs brought down the government, triggering a general election which the Conservatives won under the new leadership of Andrew Bonar Law, whose tenure as Prime Minister was the shortest of the twentieth century. Conservative MPs first elected in 1922 then established a new parliamentary committee the following year. The 1922 Committee – the ’22, as it is familiarly known – was soon opened to all Tory MPs not serving in government and its weekly meetings are still the place for backbenchers to vent their views about policy, the state of the party and the leader. The committee’s chairman and executive officers hav
e significant clout in the party and the mood of the ’22 cannot be ignored.
Despite this legacy, the Carlton Club’s political importance then waned. Meetings of the 1922 Committee shifted to the House of Commons. After the war the Carlton was rehoused at 69 St James’s Street and Tory MPs continued to drift in for dinner and drinks. A history of the club suggests it was far from a den of drunkenness and only one incident was brought to the organising committee’s attention. On 11 January 1968 a complaint was received about a member who had left the club the previous evening ‘so tight that he could not walk steadily through the hall. On getting to the doorway, he fell down the steps and groped around for all to see on his hands and knees. The hall porter’s comment was: ‘He is always like that’’.’37