The Political Animal by Jeremy Paxman

Author:Jeremy Paxman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141937502
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2007-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

According to a senior figure in the Conservative party, somewhere in central London is a safe containing a brown envelope. Inside the envelope is a photograph. It shows a well-known politician, a tireless campaigner for ‘family values’, in what used to be called a ‘compromising position’. He is naked. There are a number of women – also naked – in the photograph. It also includes a dog. Who took the picture is unknown: it was sent anonymously to the party with no covering letter or explanation of any kind. The photograph has been taken out of the safe only once, when the MP at the centre of the picture had threatened to rebel over a piece of legislation. He was invited to the whips’ office and offered a drink. Then he was tossed the envelope. He opened it, blanched, and spent the rest of his political career doing as he was told.

The whips – the term is derived from the ‘whippers-in’ who control packs of hounds – are the keepers of parliament’s dark secrets and custodians of the baubles of public life. For the average backbencher, the whip is the street-corner thug they need to get past on their way home from school. Treat him with respect, and life will be fine. If you cross him, watch out. Occasionally, whips can get literally physical: the Conservative Derek Conway (‘At my secondary modern, if someone hit you, you hit them back as hard as you could’) was once seen trying bodily to pick up a fellow MP to push him into the right division lobby. David Lightbown, another Conservative whip, was notorious for his ability to use his twenty-stone weight to pin reluctant MPs to the wall. Paul Marsden, a Labour MP unhappy with the party line on anti-terrorism legislation in 2001, found himself pushed and shoved, called an ‘arsehole’, and then pressed by a whip against the wall, with an arm across his throat.

But usually their methods are slightly more subtle. They have favours to dispense, places on fact-finding missions to Switzerland or Australia with accommodation in comfortable hotels, trips to places in the Indian Ocean to promote British ideas of democracy, or the chance for a backbench MP to become the Big I Am of nothing much, like being sent off to the North Atlantic Assembly, with more hotels and foreign travel on offer. Then there are honours to be splashed around. They used to follow a pattern: eleven years’ service for a knighthood, seventeen for a baronetcy, perhaps a viscountcy after a few years in cabinet. Modern MPs have to wait longer for their long-service medals, and even then the gong is at the mercy of the whips. Derek Conway recalled with obvious delight the way he had dealt with a colleague who rebelled against government policy on a matter of conscience. ‘He had been approved for a knighthood. It was a real pleasure putting a line through his name. And even more of a pleasure telling him.’

Where inducements or threats fail, there is an endless capacity for making life difficult.

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