William Wragg is not the trailblazing reformer of parliament that he thinks he is. A similar challenge to the authority and practices of the party whips was made by Paul Marsden in 2001. Had the MP for Shrewsbury and Atcham pursued a less eccentric career path (he was elected as a Labour MP in 1997, defected to the Liberal Democrats in 2001 and defected back to Labour shortly before standing down from parliament in 2005), his legacy might have been more substantial than it was.
Marsden, a seemingly loyal foot soldier in the parliamentary party for the first four years of Tony Blair’s government, opposed Nato’s military reaction to the 9/11 atrocities and demanded a parliamentary vote on sending British troops to join the invasion of Afghanistan. When he was invited in for a dressing down by the then chief whip, Hilary Armstrong, he broke a cardinal rule of the House by surreptitiously recording the conversation.
The controversy bubbled away for a while – threatening to expose the manipulations of the whips’ office in a way that had never been done before. But after Marsden’s defection, his complaints lost some of their force and life at Westminster returned to normal.
Perhaps Wragg, who is vice-chair of the 1922 committee of Conservative backbenchers, will have a deeper, longer term impact with his expose of the alleged nefarious strong-arm tactics being pursued by Johnson’s whips in their attempts to shore up the embattled Prime Minister’s leadership.
The problem is that his accusations of threats to recalcitrant MPs – at least to anyone who’s served in the Commons – is business as usual and not exactly something that should raise an eyebrow.
Perhaps such complacency is misplaced and damaging, not least to the individual wellbeing of men and women who, after all, have volunteered to take on a tough job precisely because they believe in their party’s cause.
That being the case, it is absurd for Wragg to risk his own credibility to go one step further and suggest that the behaviour of the whips has anything at all to do with the police. Somewhere in New Scotland Yard, there is undoubtedly a highly-paid official whose sole job is to respond to the various attempts by politicians to recruit them to their political cause, all for the sake of attracting extra publicity and some helpful headlines.
The whips of both main parties have a duty to get their government’s programme through. If any MP is seen to be wavering in their support, pressure must be brought to bear in order to persuade him to go through the right lobby. How severe should such pressure be? Threats about local funding are usually hot air: governments fund local authorities, not individual constituencies, and there are usually many parliamentary constituencies within each local authority area, so the ability to deny funding to a specific seat is limited.
But a line needs to be drawn when it comes to exposure of personal foibles to the press. Do the whips actually keep a “little black book” recording the various indiscretions that MPs have made in the past, to be retrieved from a safe in the chief whip’s office whenever an MP threatens to rebel? No one really knows but it’s extremely doubtful. Not any more, anyway.
Such desperate measures have been employed, even after the event of a rebellion, to punish rather than deter. When the late David Cairns regretfully resigned his job as a minister in protest at Gordon Brown’s premiership in 2008, he handled himself with absolute dignity. His criticisms of Gordon were measured and respectful and he refused to do more than one pooled interview about the reasons for his resignation before assuming a dignified omerta thereafter.
But he had nonetheless defied the thugs who ran Brown’s office at Number 10 and within a few days, David received a call from a Sunday tabloid reporter asking if he had used air miles accumulated through his MP’s travel in order to pay for flights to the US for him and his partner. Also, wasn’t his partner another man?
A year later I was targeted by the same people for exactly the same reason: calling publicly for Brown to resign. Within days, my own trade union, Unite, had I believe been persuaded to table a vote of no confidence in me with my local party in an attempt to remove me as the Labour candidate at the next election. Egregious stuff and unworthy of a party of government (which we were soon not, in fulfilment of both mine and David’s warnings).
If Wragg’s slightly hysterical rhetoric about whipping tactics result in a more enlightened approach to human resources in Parliament, his efforts will have been worth it. But this is not a police matter and it diminishes the power of his complaints even to raise an investigation by Scotland Yard as a possibility, when to outsiders it is a transparent attempt simply to garner publicity.
But the truth is that such tactics – strong arming, blackmail, call it what you will – have been pursued by both main parties when in power. In the Labour whips’ office, it was often boasted that their favourite film was “The Godfather” and that their hero was Lyndon Baines Johnson, the man who stole his senate seat through cheating but who then used his office to radically improve voting and civil rights for black Americans. The message: the end justifies the means. Much of the time, though, it doesn’t.
