not least, I suspect, because I was so pleased. I told her all I knew about the Whips’ Office. ‘It sounds wonderful,’ was her comment. ‘But what exactly do whips do?’
The Whips’ Office is unique, and joining it has a special cachet, as the appointment to it is not made by the prime minister but by the popular acclaim of fellow whips. One blackball excludes: the rationale for this is that the Office works so closely together that compatibility between the members is essential (whips watch one another’s backs, while other politicians often go for each other’s throats). The chief whip may, and often does, propose a shortlist of potential new whips, but the Office makes the final choice. In doing so it tries to balance political opinion across the party as well as ensuring that all parts of the country are represented.
The Whips’ Office is singular in other respects as well. It exists to deliver the government’s business, and will do so even if the collective view of the Office is that the legislation is unwise. But that collective view will be delivered forcibly to the prime minister by the chief whip, and to relevant ministers, who ignore it at their peril. The Whips’ Office view is private and, to my certain knowledge, the most leak-free office in government. Ministers, even prime ministers, might be shocked by the robust opinions expressed in private about their policies, performance or personalities by the whips. The Office is nobody’s patsy, as politicians with an arrogant streak have often learned. This is invaluable, because the whips know the collective view of the parliamentary party better by far than any minister, and are able to make that view known as policy is brought forward. The Office too, and the chief whip particularly, are crucial in advising the prime minister about the performance of ministers and backbenchers, which is vital in determining whether Members climb the parliamentary ladder to senior positions, slip from high office, or remain for ever on the backbenches waiting in hope.
I knew little of this when I joined Michael Jopling’s team. Michael was crisp, rather soldierly, blunt and straightforward, and believed the Office owed the Prime Minister the unvarnished truth and a majority in the Lobby. He delivered both. In many ways he was a traditional chief whip, understanding of occasional principled rebellion but wholly intolerant of rent-a-quote, persistent rebels. In private he was jovial and fun and (most unexpectedly) a motorcycle enthusiast, to be seen hurtling around the country in full black leathers with his red-haired wife, Gail, on the pillion. When he was displeased with the Office he did not hold back. ‘I’m absolutely disgusted,’ he’d say. In the background, my alert ear would catch Tristan Garel-Jones’s comment on any disaster: ‘Thank God it’s only a game.’
Michael had old-fashioned virtues. A tale current among his colleagues was that when Matthew Parris made a speech at the Oxford Union which barely hid the fact that he was gay, Michael called him in. He wasn’t sure how to deal with the problem of this contrary backbencher.
‘Look, Matthew,’ he began, ‘there are some things one just doesn’t say. I don’t believe in God. But I’ve never felt a need to tell anyone about it. Even my wife doesn’t know.’
A puzzled Matthew left, to have Michael’s true meaning spelled out to him later.
The Whips’ Office was a talented team. Michael Jopling’s deputy was Tony Berry, who would be tragically murdered by the IRA’s Brighton bomb in October 1984. The backbone of the Office was two old soldiers, Carol Mather and Bob Boscawen, both holders of the Military Cross with very distinguished war records. Both had been wounded in the war. Bob had been terribly burned facially and had been one of the ‘guinea pigs’ treated by the pioneering plastic surgeon Archibald McIndoe. With great courage he had entered public life and, with Carol, now held sway in the Whips’ Office.
The Office included the occasional exotic. Spencer le Marchant conducted life and politics only over the finest champagne. His goal in life was to spread bubbling bonhomie to whomsoever he met: this pushed up the collective mess bill for the whips to alarming proportions. ‘I’m entertaining for England,’ an unabashed Spencer would say in answer to the occasional complaint about the bills. ‘Your health. Can I pour you one?’ The hospitality began at 10 a.m., the champagne being offered in splendid silver half-pint tankards. We signed the cheques as he sipped on, and ignored the overdraft.
Sometimes Spencer’s high spirits took him too far. Once he devised a plan to stage a ‘horse race’ round the Members’ Smoking Room, for which the ‘horses’ would be the younger Tory MPs (Spencer adopted Matthew Parris, and intended to dress him in the yellow-and-green le Marchant racing colours). The ‘course’ would be once around the perimeter of the Smoking Room on the tables, chairs and sofas, without touching the floor. The race had to be called off when the Evening Standard got wind of it – this was a time when unemployment was high and climbing, and swathes of British manufacturing industry were facing ruin.
It was a team with exacting standards. One day Tristan Garel-Jones, then a junior whip, walked in wearing a Loden overcoat. He was already, in embryo, the irreverent Tristan who, to some members, was later to become the Machiavelli of the Office, rumoured to be in touch with every cabal. The Loden was a garment so favoured by Foreign Office mandarins that it had been christened ‘the Single European Overcoat’: Tristan’s was a far from fetching olive green, the standard colour, and its appearance was not enhanced by his having neglected to put on any socks that morning. Carol looked him up and down in horror, gazed at Bob, then back at Tristan. He then announced: ‘The last time I saw someone wearing a coat like that – I shot him.’
Tristan, outgunned by the old soldier, fled.
I had joined the Whips’ Office in the run-up to the general election which Margaret Thatcher called for 9 June 1983. The result never seemed in doubt. Margaret’s success in regaining the Falklands made her as unbeatable as the Labour Party were unelectable, with their preposterously left-wing manifesto. Gerald Kaufman, the cynical spirit of Labour’s front bench, called it the longest suicide note in history, but it was worse than that. Moreover, the defection of a number of senior Labour figures to the Social Democratic Party produced an organic split in the left of politics that almost guaranteed an overwhelming Conservative victory. In the event the election was a walkover and Margaret increased her parliamentary majority from forty-four to 144. In Huntingdon (as the constituency was now called) I had no difficulty and was comfortably re-elected by 20,348 votes – over 62 per cent of those cast.
After the election my vague hopes that I might be appointed a parliamentary under-secretary (a junior, junior minister) came to naught. I remained an assistant whip in a Whips’ Office changed by the appointment of John Wakeham as Chief Whip and John Cope as his deputy. The Office took on a different style. John Wakeham was subtle, reflective, a persuader, a fixer, fascinated by why something happened rather than simply what had happened. He was laid back, adept at delegation, and he played Mrs Thatcher like a master fisherman landing a prized salmon. He began, as a matter of policy, to bring some of the brightest young talents of the parliamentary party into the Office. He was ideal for the role.
The next two years as a whip taught me so much about how Parliament really worked, as I saw its dramas from the inside track. I learned about our colleagues and our opponents: their strengths, their weaknesses, their interests and sometimes their secrets. I came to know the team players and the loners; the able and the dotty.
The whips met daily in the House of Commons at 2.30 p.m., except on Wednesdays, when we gathered at 12 Downing Street, the Chief Whip’s domain, for a longer meeting that usually began at 10.30 a.m. and ended at lunchtime. We planned parliamentary business, bullied and cajoled where necessary, and shared every piece of intelligence that came our way. We discussed the opportunities and pitfalls of the week ahead and made our dispositions. John Wakeham received all the Cabinet papers and made them available to any whip who wished to read them: I devoured everything of interest.
An awful incident occurred in the House one snowy night when I was sitting on the bench beside Michael Roberts,
