Order, Order!

by Wright, Ben;

  I ask Lord Strathclyde if politics and the public are better served by this new seriousness. ‘That is something for historians to decide. Certainly politics has a little less colour, less character.’47

  Away from the public bars, discreet and exclusive soirees, hosted by party donors, newspaper publishers and lobbyists, are still held at all party conferences. And despite the champagne ban, top Tories still found a way to drink the best. During the 2010 conference the outgoing party treasurer Michael Spencer held a party at Simpsons, a swish Birmingham restaurant. Honouring a promise he had made to the leadership if the Tories won the election, the billionaire Mr Spencer dipped into his cellar and pulled out crates of 2001 Petrus. At around £1,000 a bottle, there was plenty of the magnificent Bordeaux red for guests to quaff. Next time there’s talk of a party conference champagne ban, my advice would be not to believe a word of it.

  Supping with the Leader

  Apart from the well-courted political editors of newspapers and broadcast media, most political journalists are not on first name terms with the Prime Minister and his most senior Cabinet colleagues. Of course there are friendships, usually formed when the politician was on their way up the ladder and looking for flattering press coverage. But once they make it to the top, the gap grows. Old mobile numbers are used very sparingly. Conversation and questioning is mostly conducted through special advisers, the young political spinners and loyal lieutenants who work for Cabinet ministers. Many of these, as we have seen, can be found doing business in the back of Whitehall pubs.

  It is sad to report that run-of-the-mill political correspondents do not spend their evenings sipping brandy and swapping gossip behind the doors of Numbers 10 and 11 Downing Street. So it is a rare treat when this happens. Twice a year, in summer and winter, the hacks are let in, after a stiff envelope has arrived in the post containing an invitation for drinks with the Prime Minister.

  Even the most jaded journalists run their hands up the polished wooden banister of Number 10 and wonder what it must be like to live there, up past the portraits of Pitt, Disraeli, Attlee and Thatcher. Mobile phones have to be handed in at the front door, where they’re held in a mahogany sideboard. Political journalists are a self-important tribe but this surrender reminds them where power really lies. If it’s winter, it is up to one of the large reception rooms where a large table is laid out with drink. In summer, trays of glasses and nibbles are passed around in the garden. Everybody already knows everybody else. Except the person hosting the party.

  We know him, of course, or think we do. And he knows most of our names and who we work for from press conferences and encounters on foreign trips. But it’s an odd situation. Someone whom the journalists spend so long talking and writing about with casual familiarity doesn’t really know them at all. And they have the same frisson when the Prime Minister comes into the room as any other visitor to Downing Street would. It must be peculiar for the Prime Minister too, hosting a jolly reception for a Westminster press corps composed of people who inevitably spend much of their time making life difficult for him and his government.

  For Gordon Brown the whole thing seemed to be agony. He would try and make conversation with the hacks which invariably began with ‘Did you see the game?’ followed by an update on the fortunes of his own football team, Raith Rovers. For most of his time in Number 10 Brown was torn to pieces in the papers. But his torturers still showed up for the free drinks twice a year and the chance to share stilted observations about football. These occasions are not the moment to ask about his mutinous Cabinet, the date of the general election or rumours about his phone-throwing. To do so would jeopardise the return of your own phone.

  David Cameron is far more insouciant at these receptions. The drink’s improved too. At a recent Christmas do there was red and white wine from Berry Bros. & Rudd in St James’s, as well as bottles of craft beer, served below the chandeliers and portraits. The format’s the same though. Journalists go straight to the drinks table to get a glass and then mill around talking to each other while keeping an eye out for the Prime Minister, who is being steered around the room by his official spokesman. Not everyone gets a word, so you need to catch his minder’s eye. Small groups of journalists then stand in a doughnut around the PM and try to think of something to say while the spokesman discreetly reminds his boss who they are.

  For the journalists, the alcohol is a useful lubricant at this point, while Prime Ministers have mastered the art of polite but perfunctory conversation and the quick getaway. Once the circuit of the room is done, he’s out of there, leaving the journalists to carry on consuming as much free drink as they can before being gently shown the door by Downing Street staff. And whether it’s winter or summer the jaded, seen-it-all-before cynics of the Westminster press corps will then snap selfies and pose for photographs on the steps of Number 10 before trundling down the street for further drinks at the Red Lion on Whitehall.

  And the point of all this? It’s a chance for the journalists to glean a bit of gossip from the Prime Minister, of course. But this biannual brush with the PM over drinks at his place flatters the lobby correspondents too. It’s a perk of belonging to Westminster’s small club of political hacks and makes them feel important. Prime Ministers are not naïve enough to believe some free drink and a chat will change what’s written or said about them. But it’s a bridge between the two trenches and a reminder that both the press and politicians are in the same game.

  Downing Street isn’t the only corner of political London handing out alcohol to grateful journalists. Before the Christmas and summer recesses thirsty hacks can fill their diaries with evening drinks at Number 11 and the Leader of the Opposition’s knees-up in his parliamentary office. Lobbyists and think tanks also lay on seasonal parties where journalists and politicians can be found swigging the free booze. Invitations pour in from all sides, from Welsh Labour to the Institute of Economic Affairs. The Mayor of London hosts a bash at City Hall. The venues are different but the crowd and conversation are the same. In the throng will be some teetotallers and others having a night off from the grog. But these gatherings float along on a sea of warm wine. They pull in the politicos and grease the gossip. Who’s up, who’s down, who’s going to win, who’s doomed?

  A Height for Drinks

  The most memorable political drinks – from a journalist’s perspective – are usually those served at 36,000 feet during a long flight back from a Prime Minister’s foreign trip. The last report has been filed, mobile phones won’t work for hours and the aircraft’s galley is groaning with free booze. Often these trips are on scheduled flights, but the best are those on specially chartered planes, where the Prime Minster and his Number 10 team, a contingent of political journalists and a few rows of business leaders mingle, drink and gossip. The news organisations and the business people pay to be on these trips. Thus it was that I covered David Cameron’s four-day dash around South-East Asia in 2015, spending almost as much time in the air as we did on the ground. Every take-off was further lifted with a glass of champagne and the atmosphere soon resembled a bizarre political package tour. The Prime Minister would occasionally amble down to the back of the plane for a chat with the hacks, for whom these trips can be a valuable source of stories. It’s also a rare chance to hobnob up close, dressed down, with the person we spend a great deal of time talking and writing about but rarely meet outside a press conference or drinks reception. As the trip wears on, the jet lag kicks in, the drinks keep coming, and the formality on board dissolves. By the time we begin our final leg from Kuala Lumpur to London the plane is up for a party.

  The alcohol is provided by the airline – not the taxpayer – and everyone tucks in with gusto. It’s champagne to start and David Cameron comes to chat holding a plastic cup of fizz. The forbearing cabin crew then attempt to steer a drinks trolley up the aisle through the crush of politicians, advisers, CEOs and journalists, all stretching out for a top-up. The flow of booze is ceaseless and the trolley bare
ly makes it to the wing before it is wheeled back for a refill. This is hardly Led Zeppelin on tour, but it’s the closest we will ever get.

  Previous trips have seen quizzes, charades and karaoke without machines. On this one, speakers were wired up to an iPad and somewhere over the Arabian Sea a disco kicked off at the back of the plane. The Prime Minister had long since retreated to his seclusion at the front and several hours later Number 10 told us to pull the plug because he was trying to sleep. We woke up on the descent to Heathrow, empty miniature wine bottles wedged into seats and cracked plastic cups at our feet. Drink had briefly brought the two halves of the aeroplane together.

  But on the ground, David Cameron was straight down the steps and into a convoy of cars waiting to take him to a meeting of the government’s emergency committee, a reminder of just how gruellingly relentless modern prime ministerial life can be. There is a world of difference between journalistic access to political power and the exercise of it. For us, the bubble had burst. We just had a slow trudge home with our hangovers.

  CHAPTER 6

  Cocktails and Congress: Political Drinking in the United States

  This story of political drinking now takes a detour, to the United States, to fill out the picture from over there. Like its Cold War rival Russia, the land of Alcoholics Anonymous and Betty Ford Centers is one of the very few countries to have experimented with banning alcohol altogether. Prohibition was a policy debacle that few politicians bothered obeying. Yet its legacy lasts in a nation where a third of people don’t drink at all and per capita consumption is far less than in other comparably prosperous countries. But America wasn’t always so temperate.

  The colonists were champion drinkers, firm believers that alcohol could cure the sick, improve digestion and prolong life, making it more enjoyable along the way. Their various distilled liquors – gin, brandy, whisky and rum – were also safer to drink than the water. Before and after the Revolution, America was one of the hardest-drinking countries in the world. The annual amount consumed by each colonist is believed to be in the range of five to six gallons of pure alcohol. By 1830 Americans were knocking back a colossal seven gallons a year. In comparison, per capita consumption in the United States in 2007 was 2.3 gallons.1 As the historian W.J. Rorabaugh says, in the early nineteenth century, ‘Americans drank from the crack of dawn to the crack of dawn.’2 They drank at breakfast, before meals, with meals and after meals, bingeing their way through the first decades of the new Republic.

  So it’s no surprise that alcohol sloshed through the politics of the era too. As in Britain, taverns were places for political argument and organisation. They were rallying points for the militia and recruiting stations for the Continental Army.

  John Adams, a Founding Father and the United States’ second President, described public houses as the ‘nurseries of our legislators’, places where British rule was condemned and independence plotted.3 Drink oiled elections in colonial America too, with voters demanding and receiving spirits in return for their ballots. Candidates needed to be generous with their liquor. Electoral success, said one Kentucky politico, hinged on understanding that ‘the way to men’s hearts is down their throats’.4 When the young George Washington failed to win a seat in the Virginia House of Burgesses at the age of twenty-four, he blamed the defeat on the failure to lavish alcohol on voters. Two years later he made sure they were plied with 144 gallons of rum, punch and cider.5

  It was important for a politician to imbibe with his voters too, proof that he was like them. As Rorabaugh writes, ‘a candidate’s good nature and congeniality in his cups demonstrated his respect for his peers, the voters, and thereby confirmed his egalitarianism’.6 Many a politician in colonial America became inebriated to prove he was independent, an equal and a true republican.

  The Founding Fathers knocked it back with gusto. John Adams drank a tankard of strong cider every morning while wondering whether it was ‘not mortifying … that we, Americans, should succeed all other people in the world in this degrading, beastly vice of intemperance?’7

  No such angst afflicted Thomas Jefferson, who as well as writing the Declaration of Independence, became sommelier to the other Founding Fathers. In his early life Jefferson carried on the colonial tradition of drinking fortified wines like madeira and port, but he became passionate about wine while in Paris as Minister to France from 1784 to 1789. His travels through the vineyards of Burgundy and Bordeaux in 1787 prompted an interest in lighter red and white wines which he later had shipped across the Atlantic to fill his Monticello cellar. At Jefferson’s Virginian villa, wine was winched up to the dinner table by a dumb waiter, and guests would receive tutorials on Old World wines from the New World’s most knowledgeable connoisseur. Not all diners were dazzled. ‘There was, as usual, a dissertation upon wines,’ John Quincy Adams noted in his diary after dining with Jefferson in November 1807; ‘Not very edifying.’8

  So Jefferson may also have been America’s first wine bore. The household at Monticello emptied 400 bottles a year and fresh supplies were ordered annually from Europe. He ordered around 600 bottles a year when he lived at the President’s House. An oenophile but not a drunk, Jefferson savoured the pleasure of three or four glasses at dinner and didn’t imbibe at any other time of day. But for the same reason that he soaked his feet in a bowl of cold water every morning, Jefferson believed wine drinking improved his constitution. ‘Wine from long habit has become indispensable for my health,’ he wrote to the wine merchant John F. Oliveira Fernandes in December 1815.9

  America’s third President was also one of its wine-growing pioneers. Or at least he wanted to be. Jefferson tried many times to make a Monticello-grown wine, but none of his attempts to cultivate imported vines worked. He persevered into his retirement, by which time he was importing less expensive wines from southern Italy and France instead of the earlier bottles of Chateau Margaux and Chateau Latour. And during these years, wine made from the scuppernong grape of north California began to appear on the shelves of Monticello’s cellar. Jefferson couldn’t grow his own grapes; but the author of the Declaration of Independence, third US President, multilingual polymath, philosopher, founder of the University of Virginia, amateur architect and inventor makes contemporary politicians look as nugatory as a nickel, on which his head is now stamped.

  Two centuries later, rich men would squabble over the provenance of wine believed to have belonged to Jefferson when he lived in France. In 1985 the publisher Christopher Forbes paid $156,450 for a bottle of 1787 Chateau Lafite – a record auction sum for a single bottle of wine. Etched into the dark green glass were the initials ‘Th.J’. Four other bottles from the cache reputedly found behind a bricked-up wall in Paris were bought by the US billionaire Edward Koch in 1987 and 1988. When he wanted to display them at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 2005, Koch had to prove their authenticity. But the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello, on being asked to give the bottles their stamp of approval, found no evidence of the Paris haul in Jefferson’s own records.

  As it began to look like the bottles were fake, Koch launched a succession of legal actions in the US for alleged fraud against both the German wine dealer who put the bottles on the market and Christie’s auction house. But in October 2012 a New York judge ruled that Koch had waited too long to file the suit against Christie’s. Already, in 2009, the former director of Christie’s wine department, Michael Broadbent, had won an apology and damages from Random House after it published a book on the saga called The Billionaire’s Vinegar.

  Thomas Jefferson could not have imagined any of this as he sat on the edge of his bed, refreshing his feet, watching the sun rise over Monticello’s plantation. Would he have been amused or appalled by the antics of America’s wealthiest wine collectors and the prices they are prepared to pay? After all, it was Jefferson who had begun weaning America’s political aristocracy off madeira and onto the pleasures of wine two hundred years earlier. The Jefferson wine frenzy reached its ludicrous climax
at New York’s Four Seasons hotel in April 1989. One of Manhattan’s most publicity-hungry wine merchants, William Sokolin, possessed a 1787 Margaux, believed to be one of Jefferson’s lost bottles. He had been trying to sell it for $519,750 but nobody had bitten. So Sokolin took it along to a banquet for New York’s wine buffs, held to greet the arrival of the latest Bordeaux vintage. But as he twirled his treasure around the room he collided with a metal-topped tray table and punctured the back of the bottle. Guests watched aghast as red wine, possibly 202 years old, possibly once belonging to Thomas Jefferson, soaked into the Four Seasons carpet.

  Back to America’s founders. Evidence offered to prove they heartily filled their cups is a session that supposedly took place in a Philadelphia tavern in 1797, two days before the delegates to the Constitutional Convention signed off the Constitution. The bill from the evening is said to detail what must be one of the biggest political drinking binges in history. The fifty-five delegates drained fifty-four bottles of madeira, sixty bottles of claret, eight of whisky, twenty-two of port, eight of hard cider, twelve of beer and seven bowls of alcoholic punch. Clearly an impossible amount to drink. And not all of them were heavy boozers.

  Benjamin Franklin – another extraordinary polymath and leader of the American Enlightenment – thought drunks tiresome and urged people to drink moderately. But he enjoyed the conviviality of taverns and it was there he mopped up more than 200 synonyms for ‘drunk’, publishing them in a piece for the Pennsylvania Gazette in January 1737. The alphabetical list includes the following, many of which time has rendered nonsensical: