expenses. He was then ordered to stand down as an MP by his party leader at the next general election. There is no more to be said. Duck off.
39. Robert Carteret
(1721–76) Yarmouth, Isle of Wight, 1744–7
Before the Parliamentary Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867 abolished corrupt electoral practices, many seats in the House of Commons were controlled by aristocrats simply for the benefit of their sons. Sometimes a peer’s son was made an MP to give him something to do, with the Commons seen as a political nursery before assuming the responsibilities of a seat in the House of Lords. In the case of Robert Carteret, however, the Commons was his nursery in the fullest possible sense of the word, for he was completely mad.
His insanity was well known even before he was elected MP at the age of just twenty-three. Once, while a guest at Woburn Abbey, he suddenly woke his hosts, the Duke and Duchess of Bedford, at five in the morning, covered in blood. He held up his coat, and presented them with a great mass of horses’ ears. A guest wrote: ‘He had been in the [Duke’s] stable and cropped all the horses.’ According to another contemporary, Carteret was ‘deficient in his intellects, fond of low company, profuse, fickle and debauched’. He spent most his time wandering aimlessly in St James’s Park, dressed in the garment of a groom or a coachman.
Nevertheless, his father, Earl Granville, was determined that he should represent the family in the Commons, and he was elected for Yarmouth in 1744. There is no record of Carteret ever speaking in debates, and he seems to have figured out how to vote only once, in 1746. He stood down at the 1747 general election. He did manage to marry one Molly Paddock, ‘a woman of vile extraction, bold, loose, and vulgar’, but evidently did not succeed in working out the rest, for he died without issue in 1776, the last of his line.
38. Lord Randolph Churchill
(1849–95) Conservative, Woodstock 1874–85,
South Paddington 1885–95
Churchill’s career was one of those that promised much but delivered little. Despite being the architect of a new, populist form of Conservatism, which he called ‘Tory Democracy’, his main contribution to political history was his dramatic resignation.
From the outset of his political career in 1874 – the year when his son Winston was born – Churchill was seen as a rising star. But he had a knack of antagonizing the very people whose influence and support he needed. In 1875, he helped to save his brother from being named as co-respondent in Lord Aylesford’s divorce case by threatening to publicize incriminating letters sent by one of Aylesford’s friends to Lady Aylesford. Since that friend was the Prince of Wales, this was not, perhaps, the shrewdest move, and social ostracism beckoned for several years. He survived this, however, and began to build up his own power base within the Conservative Party.
His success in appealing to the grass roots made him a force to be reckoned with, although he never endeared himself to Sir Stafford Northcote, the leader of his party in the Commons. He openly undermined Northcote in opposition after 1880, with the creation of a party-within-a-party, the so-called ‘Fourth Party’. However, this did not matter unduly, as Northcote was rapidly being eclipsed by the party leader in the Lords, the Marquis of Salisbury. Salisbury recognized Churchill’s significance and made him Secretary of State for India and then Chancellor of the Exchequer (which he combined with the job of Leader of the Commons). But in 1886, Churchill threw away all his political advantage by attempting to bluff Salisbury. He threatened to resign in order to achieve cuts in defence. Salisbury called the bluff and let him go.
After his resignation, it seemed as if he might return, but no opportunity ever arose. Salisbury refused to offer him the Paris Embassy that he sought. Meanwhile, his health deteriorated. It was (and still is) widely suspected that he was suffering from secondary, and then tertiary, syphilis. Despite his son’s subsequent denial of this diagnosis, Lord Randolph’s behaviour became ever more erratic, and he died in 1895. We suspect that history might not have paid him much attention at all, had it not been for the achievements of his more successful son.
37. Tom Driberg, 1st Baron Bradwell
(1905–76) Independent & Labour, Maldon 1942–55, Barking 1959–74
Thomas Edward Neil Driberg had many attributes, but a devotion to Parliamentary duty was not among them. He spent most of his time working as a journalist and on his other main interest: blow jobs.
Elected first as an Independent, before taking the Labour whip, Driberg was an assiduous MP in his early Parliamentary career. However, from the 1950s onwards, he increasingly spent his time on writing and oral sex.
There can be few MPs whose skills in fellatio helped gain them a place in the Dictionary of National Biography, but, as the book states, ‘Driberg had a consuming passion for fellating handsome, lean, intelligent working-class toughs.’ Policemen, fellow politicians, miners and sailors were all among his conquests.
Driberg was also an effective, popular writer for newspapers and magazines, and preferred that to spending time on his work as an MP. When Clement Attlee’s government was in its final days, calling in MPs from their sickbeds to help maintain their slim majority, Driberg was off for months at a time covering the Korean War. And we can be reasonably certain that his interest in military activity was not confined to the war effort. Men in uniform had often caught his attention. During the Second World War, he was once caught by a policeman when he was just about to service a sailor’s ‘long, uncircumcised, and tapering, but rock-hard erection’.
While that particular coitus ended in interruptus, most of his encounters were carried off successfully. Apart from one unsuccessful prosecution, Driberg was lucky. It was widely suspected that he had avoided exposure because he had so much incriminating material on pillars of the establishment. It is claimed that he performed fellatio on Nye Bevan, and that he even made a pass at Jim Callaghan. Despite his extracurricular activities, Driberg got married, to a Mrs Ena Mary Binfield. Upon the surprising event, one wag commented that ‘she won’t know which way to turn’.
Intelligent, cultured and able, Driberg might have made a good MP, but we think he deserves his place here for his constant distraction from Parliament. Unsurprisingly, although he was tolerated as an MP, he never achieved ministerial office – that, at least, his party might have found a little too hard to swallow.
36. George Galloway
(b.1954) Labour, Glasgow Hillhead 1987–97, Glasgow Kelvin 1997–2005, Respect, Bethnal Green & Bow, 2005–
George Galloway is very litigious. But we still think he is a crap MP.
35. James Alexander
(1769–1848) Old Sarum 1812–32
There may have been MPs in the unreformed days of Parliament who were more useless than James Alexander, but the accolade he receives here is not just for
