We know Jamie MacDonald wasn't actually a whip in The Thick of It but he was very funnyTory Prime Ministers like talking about Europe as much as 14 year olds like talking about their parents' sex lives. Which is why David Cameron has been weeping into his monogrammed hanky behind closed doors this week, because it now looks like Europe is set to become the chief trouble of the mid-years of his term in office. “The Tory party is no longer split between Euro-philes and Euro-phobes,” as one commentator had it yesterday. “But between more and less patient Euro-phobes.”
John Major spent most of his seven years in office battling against the ones he famously called the ‘bastards’ – the large rump of Tory MPs who were happy to drive their own party into a landslide defeat if it meant that they might get to tell Europe to piss off and take their curiously-spiced sausages with them.
No one wants to be John Major, so while many had argued for a free vote on Monday’s parliamentary motion for a referendum on EU membership, to beat down his own rebels, Cameron decided that if he was going to be a bastard at all he needed to go full-bastard and impose the whip on his MPs.
Eighty still voted against him, a historically high number: more impressive given that this was also the dreaded ‘three line whip’, which is basically when the party leadership threatens you with everything short of stuffing your hand in a Moulinex and setting it to ‘breadcrumbs’ (though this threat is often implied). Three MPs have already had to resign from government jobs because of their disobedience. Many more will have their dreams of promotion thwarted for years.
Traditionally, the ‘whipping’ of MPs to vote is done by a small team within the whips office. These are the political equivalent of the Stasi: internal investigators, custodians of politics’ blackest arts. They have ways and means of making you vote. Generally hated by their peers, but good bets for promotion to higher office, it is their job to find any dirt they can on you and drag it up at the crucial moment. They can bully. They can hector. They can even charm, if the mood takes them, though it seldom does. They will often offer vague promises of minor jobs in government departments. All the best insider gossip they collect – drink-problems, troublesome affairs, dodgy dealings, is stored together in the infamous ‘black book’, whose existence has always been officialy denied. The black book provides early warning of problems, and plenty of fertile room for leverage. “It is no accident,” one insider noted, “That many of the great whips have been connected with one or other of the intelligence services.”Despite their thunking majorities, the Blair years were the most notorious for whipping – from the pagers that would bleep during interviews to make sure Members kept to the party line in interviews, to the attempts to gerrymander the party machinery to deselect troublesome MPs. Paul Marsden defected to the Lib Dems after Labour Chief Whip Hilary Armstrong, told him that "it was people like you who appeased Hitler in 1938”, in response to his refusal to vote for yet more anti-terror legislation. One of her henchmen then allegedly held his arm across Marsden's throat to help gently ease his way of thinking round to theirs – all this in full view of a gaggle of other MPs.
A few years later, when he was a whip, Labour’s Bob Ainsworth was alleged to have pushed a woman MP and sworn at her when she refused to support cuts in disabled benefits. Another female MP was threatened with the chop for being absent from Commons votes – despite the fact that she’d just given birth to twins who were still in intensive care.
Of course, if they’ve got nothing on you, then the whips can be curiously powerless: Labour’s notorious rebel Bob Marshall-Andrews argued that they were impotent to do anything to stop him spending his parliamentary career mouthing off about what a shitbag Tony Blair was, because he had no ambition for promotion, no skeletons in his closet and he wasn’t easily intimidated. Besides, he argued, the power of the whips was padaxocially waning in proportion to the growing pre-vetting of MPs: weeding out the potential scandal-magnets until everyone is pure brushed-aluminium cyber-prick in the vein of David Miliband.
But when the chips are down, Prime Ministers need whips they can rely on more than anyone else in their cabinet or government, and their need tends to lead to very close friendships forming. In the 1920s, Stanley Baldwin sent an emotional letter to his own Chief Whip, Magresson, telling him that "there is no relationship between men so close as that of a Prime Minister and his Chief Whip". He clearly hadn’t heard of buggery, but it remains a fair point.Previously: Quango - Should The Guy Who Runs The Ministry Of Sound Be Running The Country Instead