The House of Commons without whips is like a city without sewers
Westminster's whips are shadowy figures but the Conservative Party seems to be losing its disciplinary deftness
There is an essay to be written on the role of the whips in Parliament (which I will write), explaining their duties and dispelling some of the more egregious myths about discipline in the House of Commons (and the very different approach taken in the House of Lords). But for the moment, as the prime minister lies at the mercy of her parliamentary party, I want to look at the current state of the Tory Whips’ Office and its apparent inability to function in a way which can prop up the leader.
The whips have long had very different vibes. Traditionally, the Conservative whips bore a strong imprint of public school, with stern discipline seeming like an outgrowth of the fagging system and cold showers, while Labour’s enforcers came from the beer-scented back rooms of trades unions steeped in hard-bitted negotiation and looking after the brothers.
For a long period, whipping was done by men and men alone. The first female whip was Harriet Slater, Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent North, who became a lord commissioner of the Treasury (a junior whip) in 1964; the Conservative team remained single-sex until July 1996, when Jacqui Lait, the Member for Hastings and Rye, was appointed a junior whip. This reflected a macho, almost brutal culture on both sides of the House: the institutions on which they modelled themselves, public schools and trades unions, were similarly male-dominated organisations. Even now, there are only seven women among the government whips in the House of Commons, though the Conservative Party does have its first female chief, Wendy Morton.
The modus operandi of parliamentary discipline was consequently unrelenting and confrontational. In 1951, a Conservative whip, Walter Bromley-Davenport (Grenadier Guards and British Army welterweight boxing champion) saw what he believed to be one of his flock making for the exit before the ten o’clock vote. He pursued the shirking fugitive and kicked him down the stairs, which would have made the point; but the man he had identified turned out in fact to be the Belgian ambassador. Bromley-Davenport was sacked and never held office again (though he was knighted 10 years later).
Matthew Parris, the veteran journalist who was Conservative MP for West Derbyshire, also felt the heavy touch of Tory whipping. As a young Member, he was meeting a visitor in Central Lobby when he was spotted by his whip, the 6’6” Spencer Le Marchant, a booming figure famous even in the Commons for his capacity for champagne. “Darling,” the Comptroller of HM Household (number three in the government whips’ office) roared across the crowded space, “why are you such a cunt?”
This kind of kinetic discipline would be intolerable and unacceptable today. Camera phones and social media have expanded the capacity of gossips and our age of wellbeing and mental health is inimical to such obvious brutality. That said, I remember an incident in the division lobby in the late 2000s, the New Labour era, when a regular Labour rebel (who will remain nameless) was complaining loudly that MPs were being kept late to vote on apparently routine matters.
“Why are we still here at this time of night?” he grumbled very audibly.
One of his whips responded swiftly and apparently mildly. “Because cunts like you usually vote against us otherwise.”
It was a fair point.
Since the Conservative Party returned to office in 2010, the party has had 10 chief whips, including the current incumbent. This is clearly too high a turnover and some occupants of the post have had tenures measured in months. Andrew Mitchell lasted only six weeks in 2012, before having to resign after a supposedly foul-mouthed altercation with a police officer at the gates of Downing Street. Mitchell, whose nickname as a prefect at Rugby School was allegedly “Thrasher”, let his frustration at the policeman’s delay boil over and expostulated “Best you learn your fucking place. You don't run this fucking government... You're fucking plebs.” He denied the phraseology but in 2014 a High Court judge found it was likely “on the balance of probabilities” that the story was accurate.
David Cameron tried to change the nature of the chief whip’s job by appointing his close friend and freewheeling intellectual Michael Gove to the position in July 2014. Gove was not keen on the move but was persuaded by the prime minister, who deployed him more than previous chief whips as a spokesman on the media. Gove’s tenure was not a success. He missed the first Commons vote on his watch after supposedly getting stuck in the lavatory, and when Cameron reshuffled his team after the May 2015 general election, he moved Gove to the Ministry of Justice as lord chancellor.
Gove’s replacement should have signalled a major change. Mark Harper, MP for the Forest of Dean, had been elected to the House in 2005, and from 2010 to 2012 had been a junior minister at the Cabinet Office, in charge of political and constitutional reform, which meant principally reform of the House of Lords and a referendum on switching to the Alternative Vote (AV) at general elections. Both were essentially Liberal Democrat policies which the Conservatives had accepted as part of the coalition agreement, and I doubt Harper was very keen on either. But he put on a brave face and was an eloquent and persuasive champion, especially in front of the joint committee on the draft House of Lords Reform Bill (of which I was one of many clerks).
Having a smooth, able and convincing politician as chief whip was an obvious boon for the government. In December 2015, he managed to deliver a vote in the Commons in favour of military action against ISIS in Syria. It had been a hard-fought 10-hour debate, with strong feelings on both sides, but 66 Labour MPs—swayed no doubt by a mesmerising speech by the shadow foreign secretary, Hilary Benn—voted with the government and the action was authorised by a majority of 174, a considerable triumph. But his tenure was cut short when Cameron resigned as prime minister the following summer; the new leader, Theresa May, found no place for him in her government and returned to the backbenches.
Gavin Williamson, who replaced Harper as May’s chief enforcer, enjoyed the legend of the whips’ office. He kept a tarantula called Cronus in a glass case in his office, and certainly was not unhappy at the reputation which grew that he “knew where the bodies were buried”. He had been parliamentary private secretary to Cameron and had managed May’s leadership campaign after identifying her as the most plausible anti-Boris Johnson contender; he also engineered the agreement with the Democratic Unionist Party after the 2017 general election which bolstered the Conservatives’ position in parliament.
I will insert a mild caveat. I know Gavin a little bit, having worked with him when he was a young backbencher on the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly. He is only a year older than me, and as the successor to the rather heavy-going Sir Patrick (now Lord) Cormack as MP for South Staffordshire, he received a measure of goodwill in the House. Coming from a practical but modest career in manufacturing, he had few airs and graces and was pleasant, approachable and friendly. At that point he must have concealed the ambition he later displayed very carefully.
Once he took office as chief whip, I fear Williamson started to believe his own hype. He almost deliberately posed as an odd Bond villain, concealing the threat of metaphorical violence behind a façade of charm, but he descended slowly into self-parody, culminating at the Ministry of Defence (where he was not universally respected) in his response to the Salisbury poisonings that “frankly, Russia should go away, and it should shut up.”
Whipping is a combination of persuasion and menace. MPs are, after all, grown-ups, most of whom have a greater amount than the average person of self-importance and self-belief. They are not easily intimated, and it is often more effective to appeal to their reason and natural loyalty to deliver their votes than it is to show them the potential instruments of their torture. Williamson simply lacked the depth, the nuance and the shades of grey to be a truly effective enforcer.
The government chief whips have not been an inspiring group since Williamson left. Julian Smith, a perfectly pleasant man who was an able and effective Northern Ireland secretary for all too brief a period in 2019-20, seemed to have no real grip on the parliamentary party, though his tenure, from 2017 to 2019, coincided with an almost-total dissolution of internal party discipline as Conservative MPs wrestled with the practical business of forging and implementing a Brexit deal. It was the Commons at its most fissiparous, and any chief whip would have faced a Sisyphean task. Smith is not a natural charmer, lacking the easy grace to grip elbows and put arms around shoulders, and he could not sway his flock very much, given their devoutly held theological positions on leaving the European Union.
Smith was succeeded by Mark Spencer, a Nottinghamshire farmer who went from assistant whip to chief in three years. He had no proper ministerial experience, and was occasionally accident-prone, telling a Labour shadow minister with excruciating lack of tact that those seeking jobs needed to learn the discipline of time-keeping. It all seemed to reflect a perhaps-fatal lack of political judgement, which one would usually regard as a drawback in a whip. When faced with major decisions, he tended to get them not just wrong but catastrophically wrong. He had ignored warnings about the behaviour of a Conservative MP who ended up being arrested for sexual assault in August 2020, and declined to withdraw the whip from the Member even after his arrest. It made him look complacent, unsympathetic and uncaring; worse, he seemed simply not to grasp the seriousness of the issue, or of the reputational damage his inaction was doing.
When the former cabinet minister Owen Paterson was found by the parliamentary commissioner for standards to have breached the House’s rules on paid advocacy in October 2021, Spencer’s judgement deserted him again. The prime minister, Boris Johnson, initially tried to rally the parliamentary party behind Paterson and portray the disciplinary process as unfair, which led to public outcry and growing unease among Conservative MPs. The chief whip should have been sufficiently attuned to the mood of his flock to advise Johnson of the potential catastrophe with which he was flirting, but the government ploughed on for a while, trying to suspend Paterson’s punishment and overhaul the whole process. It was saved from its own unforgiveable folly by Paterson’s eventual decision to resign.
In February 2022, Johnson moved Spencer from the whips’ office, appointing him instead leader of the House of Commons, and brought in Chris Heaton-Harris, the Europe minister, to head the organisation. It might have been a positive move. Although Heaton-Harris’s judgement could be erratic, he is a likeable man, fond of puns, and some felt that his training as a football referee might even be an advantage in his new post. He had been a junior whip, so he knew how the office worked. But his time was destined be short: Johnson’s leadership began to disintegrate in the summer, a process he seemed powerless to stop, and when Liz Truss became prime minister last month, Heaton-Harris found himself despatched to the Northern Ireland Office.
Truss chose the Conservatives’ first female chief, Wendy Morton. It was a surprising choice. Morton has only seven years in the Commons under her belt, though she spent 18 months as a junior whip early in her career. She is not a well-known figure, though that is not necessarily a critical factor in being an effective chief whip. But she has inherited a legacy as toxic as any of her predecessors. Some have criticised her for acting too hastily in dismissing Conor Burns as a trade minister and suspending the whip from him earlier this month after allegations of misconduct as the party conference. Others have argued that decisive action was vital. But it has raised questions.
The post of chief whip (officially parliamentary secretary to the Treasury) is a central one to the functioning of a government. The past 12 years have seen Conservative incumbents have very short tenures, some have been unsuitable candidates, and some have made far-reaching mistakes. Events have overcome some who might have been effective, and three changes of leadership in Downing Street have contributed to the instability. But the unvarnished truth remains that the government has not had an effective chief whip for any length of time since the veteran Patrick McLoughlin (who had been a Tory whip since 1995) was “promoted” to the Department of Transport in 2012.
The parliamentary party is therefore steeped in uncertain and inconsistent discipline. Many of the substantial 2019 intake are said to regard Boris Johnson as their king over the water. But now, as the prime minister faces a genuinely existential challenge within the Commons as well as in the country at large, the disciplinary chickens are coming home to roost. Truss lacks an experienced and effective enforcer at the centre of her leadership, and it is no small contributing factor to her current woes. Whether she survives or falls, it will be possible to trace a direct line from the beginning of a decade of incompetent whipping to the current crisis of October 2022.