the times | Tuesday April 5 2022 5times2
risks, his preening selfies after his
eight-stone weight loss and habit of
wearing a leather bomber jacket in
the Commons suggest a man giddy
with a sudden sense of power.
If politics is showbusiness for ugly
people, perhaps he was enamoured
with its relative glamour? (He is said
to have asked the woman with whom
he allegedly took coke if she felt
“proud” an MP had slept in her home.
She felt violated.)
Hancock, who has spoken of being
bullied as a child, displayed a similarself-regard in his now infamous Diary
of a CEO interview. With his Kendall
Roy makeover he exuded a similar
exhilaration at acquiring a glamorous
new partner.
In Anatomy of a Scandal, my
fictional MP James Whitehouse takes
risks — having sex in his office, and
in a BBC studio off the press gallery,
a spot I remembered as a political
correspondent — but he’s no politics
nerd who has embarked on a midlife
makeover. It was crucial, for the
nuance of the rape trial, that he was
deemed the Commons’ “mostThe things I’ve seen
A Westminster insider reveals all
years ago — and how political parties
are still too slow to act when reports of
impropriety are aired.
This sort of behaviour has gone on
for so long that people have forgotten
it is illegal. Let’s remember that for
most MPs, this does not apply. They
are just as horrified as the rest of us,
and they realise it gives their
profession a bad name. If asked, many
of them could give you the same
handful of names as the ones you
have to watch. Yet nothing is done.
Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Speaker of
the House of Commons, is trying to
turn things around and takes a
no-nonsense approach to drunken
behaviour. The alcohol culture doesn’t
help, of course, but even if they
cracked down on drinking in the
parliamentary estate, it would
happen in the pubs and bars locally,
and the result would be the same.
Parliamentary authorities are more
likely to turf out anyone who appears
drunk, but why should they have to?
It’s not the Queen Vic, for God’s sake.
These people are meant to be running
the country.
The political parties need to do
more and so do their whips. Nobody
wants to take responsibility but they
must — just as they must help when
MPs are in personal difficulty, they
need to step in and take complaints
seriously. The selection process needs
an overhaul too. How do these
scheming, lying toerags get through
the process to become a candidate in
the first place?
Of course, parliament is a stressful
environment and many MPs have
become employers of a team with no
prior experience or training. Maybe
it is time to run it differently with
pooled staff and an HR department to
support them. That would go some
way to removing the power MPs
have over those they employ. The
best MPs often have older, more
experienced staff who raise an
eyebrow and flick the one-finger
salute to anyone who comes
within an inch of them.
For some MPs, their homes and
families are hundreds of miles
away, and nobody is there to tell
them that a 3am finish two
nights on the trot has earned
them a few nights on the sofa
for their behaviour. The
system of living in two places
at once almost sets them up
to fail. Many are lonely and go
out drinking for company.
Parliament is still far from providing
safety in the workplace. It is still
extremely difficult to speak up. In this
latest case, the person in charge of
HR was the MP’s wife. The mind
boggles as to how hard that scenario
must have been for staff. More MPs
should be named and shamed. At the
end of the day, like all abusers, they do
it because they can get away with it.
It’s time for zero tolerance in the
corridors of power.fanciable male politician”, and entirely
fitting that he is played by the
exquisitely cheekboned Rupert Friend.
But James embodies a characteristic
shared by many of these MPs:
entitlement — the belief in the right to
something. The innate self-confidence
that your opinion and world view is
the right one, so why on earth would
you comply with any other rules?
It was a mentality epitomised by
Boris Johnson when I interviewed
him, in November 2004, about his
affair with Petronella Wyatt. He had
just had to resign from the Tory front
bench, six days after describing reports
of an affair as “an inverted pyramid
of piffle”, and yet he didn’t seem to
exhibit any embarrassment, let alone
contrition, for having lied at all.
It was clear that he thought it
acceptable to have lied, because it was
nobody’s business. As Theresa May
would say of him, 17 years later, when
referencing the Downing Street
parties. “Either [he] didn’t read the
rules, or he didn’t understand them, or
he didn’t think they applied to him.”
But, while the prime minister may
be the most obvious offender, he isn’t
alone in his entrenched entitlement.
Winchester and Oxford-educated
Rishi Sunak’s £180 coffee cup smacks
of it — or his lack of understanding
that being photographed with it was
profoundly tone-deaf — as does his
defence of his wife’s family business
when it was still operating in Moscow,
despite other British businesses being
advised against investing in Russia.
Hancock, yes him again, oozed it
when he justified breaching the social
distancing guidelines he’d set down
because he’d fallen in love (a fact
“completely outside of my control”).
Eton and Oxford-educated Jacob
Rees-Mogg displays it consistently,
lounging along the government front
bench during a Brexit debate.
When I started researching Anatomy
of a Scandal, a female MP told me
the very act of being elected could
inculcate it. “You have this mandate.
All these people have voted for you.
And you can start to believe your
opinion is always right.” Anyone
who has worked in the House of
Commons will recognise the
strut of an entitled man, and the
self-importance and innate
confidence that powers someone
to stand and filibuster in a debate.
I wrote Scandal in 2016, with
David Cameron, one Old Etonian
and Bullingdon Club member, as
PM; a man who assumed he
would win the referendum while
underestimating the strength of
feeling among Leave voters.
At times, I’ve wondered if it would
feel dated by the time the Netflix
series aired. But with the boy who
would be world king as our PM,
colleagues who either shore him up
or share his view — more than 100
police questionnaires have been sent
to people suspected of being at the
Downing Street parties — and with
MPs such as Warburton sitting on the
green benches, it seems MPs will
continue to behave in a way that fails
to meet expectations of them for quite
some time.
Reputation by Sarah Vaughan
(Simon & Schuster UK) is out nowThe 2009
expenses furore
seems almost
tame these days
Matt
Hancock
and Gina
ColadangeloS
ome of the stories I heard
during my years working in
Westminster would make your
eyes pop. Frequently these
are tales of bullying and
intimidation. One MP gets drunk
regularly and rings his staff late at
night or in the early hours of the
morning to tell them how useless they
are or how much he hates them, the
one-way conversation full of swearing
and threats. Another MP used to text
his former researcher so often late at
night that she had to block him. And
another has on several occasions
locked his staff in the parliamentary
office like caged animals in a zoo, and
promised he will return in a few hours.
But let’s not dance around the issue:
alongside poor working practices,
there is still a sleazy culture in the
corridors of power. I would even go
so far as to say that for some young
women and men, fresh out of
university, it is borderline unsafe.
One MP uses this line to get tens of
young impressionable women into
bed, “You would make a great MP’s
wife.” And why not, when they follow
their leadership? One cabinet member
is well known for working their way
around their department, only to
start on fresh talent once promoted.
Now here we are with yet another
scandalous story of sexual abuse at
the heart of Westminster. This latest
shocker exposes how HR systems
haven’t really improved since other
poor practices were identified a few