by Wright, Ben;
Harold Macmillan would not have approved of such uncouth behaviour, but his fondness for club life did revive the Carlton. As Prime Minister he enjoyed lunching there with colleagues and there is a delicious story told by John Boyd-Carpenter, the government’s Paymaster General, of Macmillan’s decision to skip Prime Minister’s Questions one day for another glass of port:
Macmillan used to lunch at what was the Parliamentary Table at the far end of the dining room about twice a week. A number of other senior Ministers took the cue from him and did the same. He would talk amusingly and sometimes very indiscreetly on the basis that the Parliamentary Table was occupied by discreet Parliamentarians. Sometimes he would drink port after lunch. On one occasion, after I had given the Prime Minister a glass of port, he gave me one and we were approaching a third glass when his Parliamentary Private Secretary, Sir Knox Cunningham MP, came bustling in clutching a folder containing the Prime Minister’s answers to Prime Minister’s questions. He drew the Prime Minister’s attention to the fact that he should go quickly to the House to answer them. Mr Macmillan was undeterred. Pausing for a moment in the course of an anecdote of a somewhat scandalous character which he was telling, he said ‘Please ask Mr Butler to answer for me.’ He then resumed his story.38
In 1977 Macmillan became chairman of the Carlton, a club he had joined in 1929. He was now eighty-three years old but had lost none of his twinkly élan. At the club in 1979 he unveiled a sculpture of Margaret Thatcher by the Croatian artist, Oscar Nemon. Thatcher was in the audience when Macmillan murmured in an elegant stage whisper, so everyone could hear, ‘Now I must remember that I am unveiling a bust of Margaret Thatcher, not Margaret Thatcher’s bust.’39
Macmillan helped revive the Carlton’s financial and social fortunes, staunching the falling membership and restoring some political glitz. But with the club still stopping women from gaining full membership, it was becoming the party’s embarrassing, sexist uncle. In 1963 women were allowed to visit the first-floor library but only if they used the lift or a small back staircase. The portrait-lined grand staircase was strictly off limits to heels. This was, apparently, to stop Tory gentlemen sitting in the corner of the hall from seeing too much of a lady’s leg, and that part of the lobby became known as Cads’ Corner.40 In the 1970s women were allowed to become associate members, which meant they could only use certain rooms and were prohibited from taking part in club elections.
There followed three decades of often anguished debate. A number of MPs resigned from the club and votes held in 1998, 2000 and 2007 failed to get the two-thirds majority needed to change the rules. Conservative Party leaders Iain Duncan Smith and David Cameron both shunned the club and turned down membership because of its antiquated entrance policy.
Duncan Smith did, however, retain his membership of the men-only Beefsteak Club, an institution where all the waiters are addressed as ‘Charles’ so as to spare members the bother of learning their names. Faced with a choice between political extinction and tradition, the Carlton Club eventually did vote to accept female members in May 2008, Ann Widdecombe becoming the club’s first full woman member.
Today the Carlton seems to be the sort of place that non-toff Tories are keen to join. The former Defence Secretary Liam Fox holds an annual New Year’s party there and MPs such as Brian Binley (secondary modern school followed by a career in business) are proud members. Support of the Conservative Party remains a qualification for membership, and a proposer and seconder are needed to get hopefuls through the door. Its current chairman, the effortlessly aristocratic Lord Strathclyde, tells me the club today is vibrant, having put the ‘terrible blight’ of its gender agonies behind it. The executive of the 1922 Committee no longer holds its meetings there and its political function is faint. But it does provide a place for like-minded Conservatives from all over the country to meet. ‘It serves good food, good drink and excellent wine at reasonable prices. That is part of the conviviality of politics which is very necessary,’ Strathclyde tells me. And he insists the leadership’s allergy to the Carlton has been cured. ‘I assure you Cameron does go to the Carlton. And not just for big events. He occasionally slips in.’41
But the Pall Mall clubs serving claret and custard, while doing far better than the working men’s clubs, are not where top politicians congregate now. Instead you’ll find them jockeying to get into the new breed of private members’ clubs that are thriving across London. Soho House, Shoreditch House, Home House and Mark’s Club (which includes David Cameron among its members): these are the clubs that are booming and today it’s where the media aristocracy, actors, celebrities and politicians fraternise in privacy.
Party Time
It’s 6.30 in the morning at the Midland Hotel in central Manchester. The Conservative Party conference is trudging into its third day. The lobby smells of baked beans, bacon and booze, the morning after slowly eclipsing the night before. While keener party members begin to appear for their breakfast, the huge lounge bar is still scattered with politicos looking glassy-eyed at their dregs. There are about thirty people still drinking and the bar is ready to serve more. The shutters will only come down once the last customers have staggered off to bed. A trio of tight-suited delegates from Conservative Future (the party’s youth wing and successor to the Young Conservatives) are slumped on sofas, their feet planted on a table covered with half-empty wine glasses and shrivelled lemons in puddles of gin.
I’m on my way to the conference hall to do an interview for BBC Breakfast on David Cameron’s speech to conference later that day. Key lines and themes were briefed to journalists the night before, so there’s something for the newspapers and people like me to say before a word of the speech is uttered. With a few minutes to spare I go and sample the mood in the bar. ‘We’re Liberal Democrats,’ one of the occupants slurs. He’s probably about twenty years old and he and his friends have been drinking since late afternoon yesterday. They may be hammered but this group is still savvy, flipping over their passes to hide their names from the nosey hack. Not that there is anything outlandish in having a skinful at conference. Indeed, it is why many people want to come. It’s a chance to drink colossal quantities of alcohol with fellow believers. Party conferences are, wrote Jeremy Paxman, ‘part revivalist gospel meeting, part boozy party, part ineffably tedious evening class’.42 Evening classes with free drink thrown in. Because almost every fringe event, from a think tank’s worthy panel discussion on the future of social housing or the third sector to a newspaper-sponsored public conversation with a Cabinet minister, will lay on a long table of free food and drink to entice an audience. With conference hotel bar prices high, it’s a very useful place for the politicos to pre-load on white wine before the evening’s serious drinking.
Party conferences have shrunk in size, importance and character over the last three decades. They’ve moved from the huge Victorian ballrooms of English seaside towns to city centre conference venues, where the dwindling number of delegates can be disguised by rearranging the chairs into ever smaller auditoriums. The public are kept away by Green Zone levels of security. The politicos and press appreciate the superior hotel rooms and the quality of the cappuccino. And it’s for them that party conferences still exist. Deterred by the cost, the security and the stale theatre of the conference schedule, fewer ordinary party members turn up each year. Instead it’s a gathering for professional party workers, lobbyists, journalists and charities who pay the parties much-needed cash to exhibit their stands on the conference fringe. If there was a time when party conferences really mattered, few can now remember it. The Tory Prime Minister Arthur Balfour said he would sooner take advice from his valet than the Conservative Party conference; and its role has always been to rally the faithful rather than set party policy. Votes are still taken at Labour’s annual gathering, but for years politically awkward results were simply ignored by the leadership. However, Jeremy Corbyn has promised to breathe new life into Labour conferences and revive the policy-making power
of party members, freeing them from the grip of spin doctors terrified by any squeak of dissent. In that respect they could become more like Liberal Democrat conferences where debate is held and policy set. But at all three it’s the leader’s speech – and its reception on the teatime TV news – that matters most.
Writing about party conferences in the early 1980s, the Conservative MP Julian Critchley observed the various tribes:
The Social Democrats seem to attract the examination-taking classes, Guardian readers with yellow Volvos and two children, one of whom suffers from dyslexia; the Liberals are a blend of the old middle classes and the bearded practitioners of ‘community politics’, whereby broken paving stones acquire a curious doctrinal significance; the Labour Party is not a band of brothers; and the Conservative Party has, under Margaret Thatcher’s populist leadership, become, to all intents and purposes, a working class festival.43
The differences haven’t completely vanished; you’ll find more hemp bags sported at the Liberal Democrat conference and more Guards ties at the Tories. Labour still rounds off its conference with a time-warp rendition of ‘The Red Flag’. But the distinctions are fading. As are the parties themselves, which have been losing members since the 1950s. Then the Conservative Party had almost three million members; today it has fewer than 200,000. Just one per cent of the population is a member of a political party, compared with nearly four per cent a generation ago. More people pay money to belong to the Caravan Club or the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds than all of Britain’s political parties put together.44 Political activism is now very much a minority pursuit, although Jeremy Corbyn’s success at rallying disillusioned older Labour members and young activists in 2015 may yet harbinger a new era of political participation that other parties will try and copy.
For the diminished number of party members who still attend the annual get-together, along with the legions of political journalists who dutifully cover it and the scores of advisers, bag carriers, press officers, lobbyists and policy wonks who also pack their suitcases for conference, the promise of bacchanalia and drink remains a draw. Television cameras never choose to capture and broadcast the sweaty, boozy, fetid scrum to be found at the bar of the main party conference hotels each year. The political parties hire the hotel and try to control what’s filmed. The hacks are usually in the thick of it too. And it’s been like this for as long as anyone can remember. Bernard Donoughue shudders at the memory of Labour Party conferences of the 1960s and 1970s: ‘They were Romanesque grotesque occasions with people often drinking all day, people going from party to party. For a number of people it was clearly the most exciting occasion of the year. For me it was an appalling experience and I hated every minute of it.’45
Party conferences are boozy school trips for the politics industry and the bars always do business until dawn. Fabulous snapshots of status anxiety can be glimpsed outside the main bashes. MPs can be found trying to charm their way into the Spectator magazine’s party, horrified they’ve been left off the list. Inside, Cabinet ministers, journalists, lobbyists and party bosses mingle and schmooze their way through crates of Pol Roger champagne.
Conference drinking is a useful measure of political hypocrisy too. In September 2009 the Labour Party assembled in Brighton for its final pre-election conference – tired, deflated, depressed. In his leader’s speech, Prime Minister Gordon Brown took a populist swipe at ‘binge drinkers’ – the scourge of Britain’s town centres, whose antics were fodder for the tabloids at the time. Labour had introduced 24-hour licensing but Brown said local authorities should now have the right to scrap it. And he promised new rights for people to make clubs and pubs pay for cleaning up the broken glass and vomit in areas where there was persistent trouble from young drinkers.
It was all enthusiastically applauded. But hours later the Sun newspaper ditched its support for Labour and the binge drinking began in earnest in Brighton. ‘Labour’s Lost It’ would be the next day’s front page, ending Rupert Murdoch’s decade-long love affair with New Labour.
Party bosses showed their fury and disgust by boycotting the free drinks being laid on at the News International party in one of the Grand Hotel’s conference rooms. Instead Labour members, politicians and staff crammed into the Grand’s main bar to drink, some in defiance, others despair. As the night went on the sweaty, beery crush spilled onto the terrace. Inside, the then Culture Secretary, Ben Bradshaw, led his comrades in a hearty singalong of ‘Hey Jude’ around the bar’s grand piano.
Labour’s conference the year before in Manchester had witnessed another night of drink-fuelled confusion around Ruth Kelly’s resignation from the Cabinet. At a chaotic press briefing in the bar of the Midland Hotel at 3.15 in the morning Damian McBride, beer in hand, confirmed rumours the Transport Secretary wanted to go. According to McBride, a party conference resembles a stag do. There’s the odd speech or fringe event a delegate might want to attend, but the rest is about boozing. In the Blair/Brown years their respective warring teams of advisers would race to colonise a hotel bar for themselves in the style of an Italian gangster film. ‘At the 2008 conference there was a vitriolic atmosphere,’ McBride tells me: ‘All these plots and coups going on. The atmosphere in the bars was absolutely poison and that was fuelled by drink.’ When Gordon Brown was still Chancellor, McBride was woken up one morning by his ringing mobile phone. It was Sue Nye, Brown’s gatekeeper, reminding him that the editor of the Sunday Times was due to meet the Chancellor in five minutes’ time. ‘I said I’d be up in a minute. But I looked at the lift and realised it wasn’t my hotel. I went outside and saw I was at a Travelodge on the motorway twenty miles outside Manchester. No idea how I’d got there. No idea what I was doing there or who I’d come with. They were the kind of things that happened at party conference.’46
One of the most surreal scenes to be found at a party conference is the final night at the Liberal Democrat conference. In a packed hotel suite, familiar faces can be seen belting out songs with chorus lines like ‘Tony Blair can fuck off and die’ to the tune of ‘American Pie’. This is the Glee Club, the bizarrely savage side of the hemp-and-beards brigade. This singalong has been a conference highlight longer than the Lib Dems have existed and is organised by the grassroots group known as The Liberator. Satirical lyrics are paired to well-known tunes ranging from old hymns to Amy Winehouse.
The 2015 Glee Club was held in the Dorchester Suite of Bournemouth’s Marriott Hotel and the song sheet was dedicated to their late leader Charles Kennedy, whose name cropped up in a number of ditties including one about the drinking habits of politicians. There was a song about Trident sung to the tune of the Beatles’ ‘Yellow Submarine’, an old favourite called ‘Iraqi Cokey’ and another number, ‘Coalition’, matched to the melody of ‘Twelve Days of Christmas’. Here’s a flavour:
On the first day of coalition
The Tories gave to me,
A referendum on A.V.
On the second day of coalition
The Tories gave to me,
Absolutely zilch,
And a referendum on A.V.
(which we lost!)
And so on for ten more increasingly irate verses. Other songs skewer past and present Liberal Democrat figures with varying degrees of affection, and the whole raucous cabaret manages to be self-mocking, pugnacious and despairing all at the same time. It’s a bizarre window into what the party really thinks about itself. And of course most of those singing along have had a few sherbets beforehand. At least you hope they have.
It always seems there are more gin and tonics and wine bottles being drained at Conservative Party conferences than at Labour’s, which remain a brotherhood of beer-drinkers. And it was the Tories who felt the need to have a ‘champagne ban’ at its conferences in 2009 and 2010. Party workers and MPs were told not to be snapped holding anything that looked like a glass of bubbly, for fear the press would condemn such indulgence in a time of austerity. While working-class Nye Bevan could get away wi
th being a ‘Bollinger Bolshevik’, the wealthy duo of David Cameron and George Osborne were determined to try and stop their party looking posh, and that meant no champagne. Even Lord Strathclyde, the Conservative Leader in the House of Lords, cancelled his lavish annual drinks party, held in his suite at the conference hotel.
‘I stopped doing them in around 2006,’ he tells me in the House of Lords tea room. ‘There had been a rich tradition in the 1980s, Alistair McAlpine and Jeffrey Archer threw shepherd’s pie and Krug parties. Being in opposition was very miserable. It was appalling for us and conferences became rather miserable places. And one or two of us decided to hold a party. The magic was not to invite anybody apart from the Shadow Cabinet but to let people know there might be a party somewhere on the eighth floor of the Blackpool hotel. All of these things used to be at the seaside. Following on from the example set by Lord Hesketh we produced a plate of oysters, a plate of smoked salmon sandwiches and champagne that we kept in bottles in the bath. I once met a Labour peer who asked if I poured it all in! It was bottles on ice in the bath.
‘It all sounds so incredibly dated now. Anyone with any nous like lobby correspondents would find their way and it was great fun. A great mixture of senior journalists, Shadow Cabinet ministers, and one or two very junior people who found their way there and it was fun. It was good for party morale and people wrote about it. There was no dress code. No guest list. To begin with the only invites under doors were to Shadow Cabinet ministers, although it gradually became more sophisticated and we eventually succumbed to printed invitations.’
Lord Strathclyde takes a sheepish pride in his party-throwing past. Everyone wanted to join the convivial crush in his Blackpool hotel room at two in the morning and drink from the champagne-filled bathtub. But then party conferences and the Tory Party began to change. ‘As part of the modernisation we moved to modern hotels in nice city centres which started to exclude normal members. The rooms became boring. More importantly there was a feeling that conferences should be more than about whether or not someone threw a good party. So the fun party died. It was a good decision to sober up, look more professional,’ he says rather unconvincingly.