Bringing a Whip to a Gunfight

Will Wragg is speedrunning the whole ‘Tory dinosaur’ thing like it’s Mario Kart. A select committee chair and prolific rebel, described almost universally as a ‘senior Tory backbencher’, he’s only 34 and has been an MP for just seven years. By the age of 40 he can expect a knighthood, and the occasional subtle hint from the frontbenches that he should consider retiring so someone younger and more talented and/or loyal can have his seat.

Wragg has also fired another red shell straight into the back of Boris Johnson, a man whose last three months have been the political equivalent of slipping on a series of banana skins, being hit with every colour of shell, and finally being barged off the track altogether by a Bullet Bill. Using his committee chairmanship as a platform, Wragg publicly accused the whips of pressuring and intimidating MPs, threatening to withdraw funding from their constituencies, and blackmailing them with embarrassing press stories, all in aid of preventing a vote of no confidence in the Prime Minister.

Cue outrage, tempered by a hint of derision from some Old Westminster Hands. Virtually all of what Wragg describes has been assumed for decades to be part of the whips’ playbook. The amount of dirt parties keep on their (and their opponents’) MPs for a rainy day was played for laughs in The Thick of It. But the fact that this behaviour is now as likely to turbocharge MPs’ rebelliousness as it is to get results is just another example of the long-term decline of the whips’ office.

MPs have grown increasingly rebellious over recent decades, and this trend has accelerated since 2010. The 2010–15 Parliament smashed the then record for rebelliousness, which had been set by, er, the 2005–10 Parliament. The 2017–19 ‘Brexit’ Parliament was infamous for its near-constant stream of major rebellions and regular Government defeats in the Commons. The current Parliament has seen a series of huge rebellions, thwarted only by the Government’s similarly huge majority and, as in the case of the 99-strong rebellion against vaccine passports last month, Labour support.

Labour, for their part, have less of a discipline problem than the Tories at present, but this is most likely because whipping is easier when you’re in opposition. The SNP also maintain a high level of discipline, which is probably down to the fact that, almost by definition, every SNP politician cares primarily about Scottish independence, and will put their ideological bugbears on ice until that’s been achieved. SNP voters are also highly unlikely to vote for a unionist party because of, say, minimum pricing for alcohol. It’s notable that the SNP’s rare policy disputes tend to be over strategy for achieving independence, rather than policies as an end in themselves.

Whips still retain an immense amount of power. They provide enforcement and pastoral support to MPs, like an uncomfortable combination of HR and a protection racket. Even though select committee chairs and members are elected by secret ballot these days, the whips can informally pick winners and attempt to sweep away anyone on their own side who might get in the way. Bizarrely, they’re even responsible for the allocation of office space. Why is this powerful toolkit proving less and less effective?

A week usually isn’t a long time in politics. Like Neighbours, you can safely ignore Westminster for a few months and get back up to speed with a couple of lines of information. Several years, however, is a long time in politics, and politics has become more and more unpredictable over recent decades, making the whips’ customary threats about promotion opportunities ring less and less true.

In 1993, Iain Duncan Smith was told he was committing political suicide by rebelling against Maastricht. In 2001 he became Tory leader, and in 2010 he became a Cabinet minister. Jeremy Corbyn was Labour’s most rebellious MP before becoming his party’s leader. Many of the current Cabinet spent much of the 2010s as Eurosceptic malcontents. Most MPs are still ambitious and desperate to climb the ministerial ladder, especially once they realise how little power they have as a backbencher, but they’re considerably less likely to pay heed to a whip telling them they’re ‘finished’ and ‘will never get promoted’ if they rebel.

Even the ultimate penalty — the withdrawal of the whip — seems less fearsome after Brexit. Almost half of the 21 Tory rebels who lost the whip in September 2019 had it restored in time for that year’s election. In one of Julian Smith’s desperate and mostly vain efforts to avoid a Government defeat in his tenure as Chief Whip, Anne-Marie Morris, who had rightly lost the whip for saying the N-word (at a public event!), found herself welcomed back into the fold hours before a major vote.

Some MPs have also looked at the odds and decided that a ministerial career of any note is so unlikely that it’s not worth sucking up to the whips in pursuit of one. This is particularly common among white male Tory MPs, who have realised that they’re the likely casualties of successive governments’ drive for a more ‘diverse’ ministerial payroll. As a general rule, any white male Cabinet member over 50 who isn’t a) the Prime Minister, and b) Michael Gove is on borrowed time. They’re simply not influential or interesting enough to keep around when space needs to be made to provide opportunities for younger ‘rising stars’.

Robert Buckland was seen by some as a ‘surprise’ casualty of the most recent reshuffle, but he was 52. The last few years have also seen the shuffling out of, among others, Philip Hammond and Sir David Lidington (then both 63), Greg Clark (51), Jeremy Hunt (52), Chris Grayling, Liam Fox, and David Mundell (all 57), and Sir Patrick McLoughlin (60). Many of these are due to ideological or personal differences with the Prime Minister, but it’s not difficult to notice an underlying trend. Ben Wallace, George Eustice, Grant Shapps, Brandon Lewis, and (ironically) Mark Spencer might want to worry.

Given how long it can take to rise through the ministerial ranks, and how each election brings with it a new cohort of MPs desperate for promotion, it’s understandable that white male MPs of a certain vintage might be less moved by the threat of missing out on a ministerial career that might never happen, and even if it does, is likely to be relatively short. Stephen Bush had noticed this trend as early as February 2020.

Will Wragg, for one, has clearly chosen to carve out a niche for himself in a modern political environment that offers him fewer ministerial opportunities but, crucially, more freedom. His statement about the whips’ recent conduct, filmed and duly repackaged for social media by journalists, shone a direct light on the inner workings of Westminster in a way that would have been much more difficult even 15 years ago.

Westminster is as much theatre as anything else. There have been numerous occasions where something the entire Westminster bubble has known about and treated as normal has provoked outright rage among the public once it’s become widely known — take the recent ‘second jobs’ brouhaha, or the £10,000 office costs uplift during COVID, for example. Journalists, of course, know all these things all along; but in the social media era, public outrage, and outraged clicks, are never too far away. Gradually, therefore, the inner workings of Westminster are being exposed to an increasingly irate public. Wragg has simply exposed another cog in that machine.

The whips’ own attempt to open themselves up to the public, a perplexing decision to let ITV News follow them around while trying to drum up support for Theresa May’s doomed Brexit deal in 2018, didn’t do much to improve their image or their effectiveness. Viewers were treated to a hapless Julian Smith, like a novice used car salesman, plaintively trying to convince an unmoving Philip Davies to support the deal (which he eventually did, on the second and third meaningful votes).

MPs simultaneously have more freedom to speak directly to their voters, and are more exposed to their voters’ ire. Unlike in decades prior, a controversial or embarrassing vote can unleash intense, targeted attacks on each individual MP who voted a certain way. Sites like TheyWorkForYou can do the same by distilling a series of votes over a long period of time into a pithy but grossly unrepresentative statement along the lines of ‘voted consistently against human rights’. Left-wing Labour members are currently poring over recent defector Christian Wakeford’s voting record in an effort to get him deselected.

Put simply, where MPs used to get themselves in a lot of bother by rebelling, they now also get themselves in a lot of bother by not rebelling. Of course, sometimes that bother is worth it — but the balance of incentives has changed.

It’s easy to see the whips as a drag on our parliamentary democracy, and I suspect that’s the way most of the public sees it. They exist to nullify parliamentary scrutiny and encourage MPs to vote against their conscience, and their tactics would probably not be considered acceptable in most workplaces. It’s tempting to say we’d be better off without them.

But the whips still have an important role to play. MPs are almost all elected under a party banner, and virtually none of them would have been elected without it. Without the whips, there would be precious little ensuring that voters who elected (say) a Labour MP actually get a Labour MP. If MPs aren’t going to listen to their whips any more, who will they listen to instead?

The optimistic answer is ‘their constituents and their consciences’, but optimistic answers have an annoying habit of being wrong. Many MPs in a whip-free world could easily end up being unduly influenced by the most organised and well-funded lobbying campaigns, rather than the actual wishes of their constituents as expressed in the last election. Some of them could even become fiercely loyal to bees and little else. We would not be better governed if we swapped the Conservative and Labour whips for the Dogs Trust and Palestine Solidarity Campaign whips.

Will Wragg’s intervention lays bare how the whips’ traditional toolkit is increasingly unsustainable. A toolkit put together in the mythic age of the wacky rigmarole, it’s now increasingly ineffective and unacceptable to the public. Somehow a new balance needs to be struck, where MPs can be loyal to their consciences and to the genuine will of their constituents, improving actual parliamentary scrutiny while ensuring MPs stay true to the label that got them elected.

This would be a difficult endeavour, and it goes against the instincts of the whips’ offices. But if things carry on as they are, they might find themselves replaced altogether by the whip of 38 Degrees.