Hart is far too guarded to be a good diarist

UNGOVERNABLE: The Political Diaries of a Chief Whip by Simon Hart

Simon Hart should never have published these diaries. So say traditionalists, who are affronted that he has revealed secrets entrusted to him as Chief Whip. Charles Moore explained their argument in The Spectator:

“The wrong is obvious – the whips cannot do their work unless their MPs trust them to keep their secrets safe. Their silence is the secular equivalent of the seal of the confessional. The most interesting thing about Hart’s book is that such a person – a straightforward, mainstream, rural Tory – should feel able and happy to publish as he has. It shows how much the regimental code which held parliamentary parties, particularly the Conservatives, together, has broken down, making them unmanageable.”

But the trouble with Hart’s diaries as far as readers are concerned is that he is far too discreet. The great diarists – Samuel Pepys, Chips Channon, Alan Clark – are wonderfully indiscreet. They pass on all the most amusing and embarrassing gossip, and give us many of their own transgressions too.

Hart has expurgated his diaries, either by not writing down the most embarrassing stuff, or else by removing it before publication, or at least by removing the name of the person concerned.

This is presumably how he reconciles publication with the reasonable expectation of Tory MPs that when they told him about their difficulties he would not put these in a book, especially one published less than nine months after his stint as Chief Whip ended.

The book has no index, which will reduce its value to any historian who wants to discover whether Hart sheds light on some politician in the years 2019-24.

Hart’s most enjoyable anecdote, printed in the serialisation in The Times, is about a Conservative MP who rings him at 2.45 in the morning to say:

“I’m stuck in a brothel in Bayswater and I’ve run out of money. I met a woman as I left the Carlton Club who offered me a drink, but now I think she’s a KGB agent. She wants £500 and has left me in a room with 12 naked women and a CCTV.”

The rest of the book is not up, or down, to this level. Hart has no ear for language, and no desire to record what his fellow insiders say when he goes for a drink or a meal with them.

But his account does offer, particularly in its second half, when Hart is Chief Whip for the whole of Rishi Sunak’s premiership. a way of gauging the morale of those who were striving, in adversity, to keep the show on the road.

In the first half, from victory in the general election of 2019 to the fall of Boris Johnson in the summer of 2022, Hart is Welsh Secretary, a position of little consequence, as most decisions are taken by Mark Drakeford in Cardiff.

Hart recalls, as he sets the scene, “once thinking it would be hard for me to remain in a party led by” Johnson,

“but then quickly finding myself happy to serve…under him and to go out on the airwaves defending him. He was a hypnotist like that, and I became the total opportunist. I loved our occasional chats, although we were never really friends as such.”

During the Owen Paterson debacle in November 2021 Hart records: “As fuck-ups go, this one goes straight into the charts at Number One.”

In January 2022 he writes of Johnson, “you can feel the love for him draining away”, in July that year he finds the Chris Pincher affair, which finishes Johnson off as PM, “unbearably awful”, and in March 2023, when Johnson is locked in battle with the Privileges Committee, Hart says “the certainty with which he expresses his innocence is really now at Trumpian levels”.

Liz Truss’s impending victory over Rishi Sunak in the race to replace Johnson is seen by Hart as “a total disaster”, and after she wins he writes that “I am out, unlikely to return”.

But Truss proves a transitory figure, albeit one from whom “in electoral terms we were never to recover”, and she is succeeded by Sunak, who makes Hart his Chief Whip, and receives in these pages the following testimonial:

“Rishi Sunak is a man whose ability to learn, absorb and analyse is in a league of its own. Throughout his premiership I would see him every day, often alone, as he wrestled with a reluctant Government machine, juggling the egos and expectations of MPs. He always took decisions for the right reasons and yet even that – eventually – wasn’t enough to unite our own colleagues, let alone the wider nation.”

Two other figures for whom Hart expresses unbounded admiration are Rory Stewart – “It seems mad that we lost him from our ranks” – and David Cameron, whose return in November 2023 as Foreign Secretary he greets as “an inspired move by the PM and his Chief of Staff, Liam Booth-Smith”.

Every so often, Hart comments gloomily on the weakness of the party’s system for selecting candidates, having seen some of the defective figures who got through. On 30 May 2024 he records that the party has to find candidates for 160 seats by 7 June, the close of nominations for the forthcoming general election.

Hart helps to check for “propriety”, at a rate of 30 a day, the short lists of three candidates from which each local association will make its choice:

“In one assessment, poor James Forsyth and Rupert Yorke were required to judge whether a candidate’s defence, that a photograph of his penis had been sent in error to a contact rather than his doctor as intended, was enough to allow him to apply for seats. It wasn’t.”

When viewed from behind the scenes, the workings of government often seem no more than a series of bodged improvisations, with a few skilled staff somehow holding things together. Here is Hart’s description of the Whips’ Office:

“It is the field hospital, into which damaged colleagues are delivered, patched up and returned to front-line duties. It is the funnel through which absolutely everything is channelled.”

Hart’s job, as Chief Whip, is to win votes by maintaining unity, so he generally fails to see the point of rebels, and is, indeed, extremely annoyed by them.

It is certainly true that without maintaining some sort of internal cohesion, the Conservative Party cannot make a convincing offer of its services to the British public.

One of the running difficulties posed for several decades by Nigel Farage is that he speaks for a lost Tory tribe, without which the party is weakened. On 3 June 2024 Hart records that Farage is to stand in Clacton:

“Colleagues suggest we do a deal, but what does he want that we haven’t already delivered? Farage is the sort of pub bore who stands at the bar shouting about foreigners and picks up the support of around 25 per cent of the angriest voters and the opposition of everyone else.”

How does one reach this 25 per cent of angriest voters? Cameron and Sunak were for the most part too reasonable to do so, though Cameron finessed the problem for a time by promising the referendum.

Johnson with his disruptive anti-Establishment instincts reached angry voters both in the 2016 referendum campaign and at the 2019 general election. Sir Keir Starmer has no appeal to such voters. One of the unanswered questions of British politics is where a majority of the angry will go next time.

Hart gets furious in these pages with Bill Cash, John Redwood, Suella Braverman, Nadine Dorries, Natalie Elphicke and Andrew Bridgen, all of whom are, in their different ways, more than capable of being infuriating.

But if freedom is to endure, government must be precarious, and rebels are needed. At great moments in parliamentary history, the party in power becomes unmanageable, having failed to rise to the level of events, and leadership passes into other hands.

Hart himself used to be a not very noisy rebel, a leader of the Countryside Alliance, but of that we read nothing here.