Why William Wragg’s whipping complaints matter

To an old Westminster lag like me, there is something slightly grating about MPs complaining about nasty whips and political intimidation. I’m thinking about William Wragg, who says the government is ‘blackmailing’ MPs to support Boris Johnson and suggested the police should get involved.

Wragg says that MPs are facing threats over constituency funding and even their personal lives unless they fall into line.

Some people are surprised and outraged to learn that governments threaten to do horrible things to their own MPs. Those people have not spent much time in Westminster, where such things are quite mundane.

Indeed, the sort of things Wragg describes strike me as being at the milder end of the spectrum of whipping – he makes no mention of either the threat or the reality of physical violence, for instance. Such violence would not have raised many eyebrows in earlier decades around Westminster, when every good whips’ office included at least one hefty chap who could leave backbenchers at least wondering if they’d get a snack in the face for rebelling.

I became a Lobby correspondent in 2001 in what now feels like a different age, a time before Twitter and WhatsApp, when far more Commons business was transacted in bars and corridors. And a bit of collegiate intimidation was considered part of normal parliamentary life, practised by both the big parties. Likewise suggestions that personal misdemeanours could be made public as a form of punishment, or pet constituency projects smothered. Most MPs were familiar enough with such warnings to dismiss them, understanding that it’s one thing to threaten to deny funding to a seat and a very different one to actually do so.

Anyone of a similar vintage to me who claims to be shocked by Wragg’s revelations isn’t being honest, I’d suggest. Because this stuff has gone on for decades, even if some of it was done behind closed doors to allow the boss-class to profess ignorance. (I don’t need to name him, but one PM in particular was all too inclined to piously deny all knowledge of any black arts by his team, even though those same arts were fundamental to the operation that got him to No. 10.) In short, the sort of behaviour William Wragg laments is and has been normal and accepted at Westminster.

But something can be accepted without being acceptable. Reflecting on Wragg’s story and reactions to it today, I’m reminded of the MPs’ expenses scandal of 2009. My part in that story was to report from the Lobby for the Telegraph on how MPs were acting and reacting as my colleagues at HQ revealed more and more of their expenses claims.

Other than swearing, the most common thing I heard from MPs during those chaotic, fearful weeks was: ‘But this is what we’ve always done – it’s in the rules – this is how things work around here.’

Those reactions weren’t entirely incorrect. Over the years, MPs’ expenses had been allowed to grow to make up for the pay-rises members hadn’t had but believed they deserved. Excessive claims and generous allowances had become accepted and normal.

The problem, of course, was that no one asked the voters if they accepted it. And they didn’t. The political consequences of their anger are still with us today; my bet is that historians will conclude that without MPs’ expenses, Britain would still be in the EU.

Will public unease over politicians twisting arms and demanding their colleagues’ obedience have consequences of similar magnitude? I doubt it: voters don’t care enough about MPs’ welfare to bother much if they get duffed up in the toilets, though they naturally won’t like the idea that their patch misses out on public goods because of petty politics.

Nor do I think that whipping and party discipline will disappear from our politics: parliamentary government would be very difficult without some mechanisms by which party leaderships coordinate Commons voting.

But I still think it’s possible that Wragg’s claims will be a big moment in politics, where the norms of the Westminster village are revealed to the wider country, are rejected and then shift. If nothing else, the fact that an MP has gone public on this will change things: others with similar grievances are likely to be more inclined to do so too in future. And the arm-twisters and bruisers will have to think twice before leaning too hard on their colleagues. That will probably accelerate a trend towards MPs behaving like tribunes or delegates of their constituents instead of Burkean legislators.

Burke told the voters of Bristol that an MP owes voters his judgment and nothing else; he betrays the electors if he puts their short-term whims ahead of that judgement. Burke also lost his next election, and his notion of detached Olympian lawmakers has always been more imagined than real.

But there has still, I think, been a tangible movement further away from that notion in the time that I’ve been working around Westminster. I did my first job as an MP’s researcher in 1994, which included the fairly small constituency mailbag. At that time, it was easier for an MP to remain a bit detached from day-to-day public opinion. There were no email campaigns, no hashtags – just letters, the local paper and surgeries.

In that climate, whipping was easier too: few MPs expected to be scrutinised by thousands for every vote they cast, so fewer of them hesitated before toeing the party line on controversial divisions. Successive generations of MPs have learned to do the job under ever greater scrutiny from their voters. It’s no surprise that Boris Johnson has the greatest problems with his newest MPs; nor that more seasoned colleagues lament the 2019 intake’s propensity to listen to their voters rather than the whips.

William Wragg might or might not break the whole old system of whipping and parliamentary discipline, but in a sense that doesn’t matter. The long-term trends are against that system. Whipping and the nature of being an MP are changing, come what may.