Review: Ungovernable. The Political Diaries of a Chief Whip, by Simon Hart

It is a truth universally acknowledged that any book purporting to be a revelatory insider account of contemporary British politics must be in want of a serialisation in the Times, The Telegraph or The Mail—not least because getting one may well net the author more money than they stand to make from sales of the book itself. Admittedly, some people will be persuaded to actually buy that book on the strength of the ‘juicy bits’ they get to hear about in advance of its publication. But there is a downside: unless the reader of said book somehow exists in a self-imposed media-free bubble, then much of its supposedly revelatory content will already be incredibly familiar.

So it is with Simon Hart's account of his time as Secretary of State for Wales in Boris Johnson's government and Chief Whip in Rishi Sunak's. One's jaw might perhaps have dropped on hearing for the first time about an MP trapped in a Bayswater brothel, or a special adviser getting up to no good at an orgy. But when it's the umpteenth time, not so much—especially when (both in those two cases and when it comes to Tory MPs’ endless attempts to secure themselves a knighthood or a peerage) no names are named.

None of this to say that the book—particularly when names are actually named—doesn't have its merits. One of these, for anyone who follows politics, and in particular the politics of the late (but unlamented) Conservative government, lies in its capacity to confirm that all-too-many of those who served in the latter really were every bit as awful as they seemed from the outside looking in.

Some of those whom Hart skewers are now long gone, and maybe best forgotten—Matt Hancock and Nadine Dorries, to name but two. But some are still sitting on the green benches at Westminster, including the party's current leader, Kemi Badenoch. Whether it really was her to whom Rishi Sunak was referring when he confessed, during his February 2023 reshuffle, ‘Let's all agree about one thing, she is fucking useless but we can't get rid of her’, we shall never know. But Hart does confirm what has surely become increasingly obvious to voters who didn't know much about Badenoch before she won the leadership—namely (as he writes in February 2024 after she'd ‘popped in for a chat about trans stuff’) that she ‘lives in a permanent state of outrage.’

Still, the current Leader of the Opposition escapes very lightly compared to the former Home Secretary Suella Braverman—‘a glove puppet for the 1950s wing of the Party’ who, rather than responding positively to Rishi Sunak's understandable (but ultimately badly mistaken) attempt to unite a chronically divided party around his leadership by appointing her to his Cabinet, spent much of her time undermining him, only to fly into an unseemly rage after he finally summoned up the courage to sack her.

Hart, it seems, had Braverman's number right from the start. Yet in a number of other cases, he (rather admirably in some ways) allows us to see how staggeringly naïve he could be. That he believed that all-round bluff Northerner and red wall icon Lee Anderson's assurances that he wasn't off to join Reform UK just before he went and did so is one example. But the best—unsurprisingly given so many of his colleagues also fell under that supreme chancer's spell—comes in his dealings with Boris Johnson, whom he continues to see as some sort of loveable rogue right until (and indeed after) the end.

Fortunately, and somewhat paradoxically, that doesn't prevent Hart from making some acute observations about the nature of the parliamentary party's relationship with Johnson: ‘the mutual respect,’ he writes in January 2022 after the UK had finally left the EU, ‘has always been somewhat transactional and hence skin-deep … BoJo was only elected for one reason (to deliver Brexit) and if that no longer applies what is the point of him?’ He also supplies an anecdote that, in a just one snatch of dialogue, perfectly captures Johnson's character. It comes on the evening Hart (and others) are trying to persuade him that the game really is finally up:

‘[H]e said, “Just give me till Tuesday.”

“Why?,” I asked, “What's happening on Tuesday?”

“I don't know,” said Boris, “but something is bound to crop up.”’

Hart's account of Johnson begging him to somehow kill off the Privileges Committee investigation is equally damning. And nor, for all his residual admiration for Johnson, does Hart hide the fact that, during the race to succeed him as PM, he ran ‘an uncharacteristically effective “anybody but Rishi” operation’ which handed the leadership (albeit mercifully briefly) to Liz Truss.

Perhaps the most glaring failure of Hart's supposedly finely-tuned political antennae, however, is his inability to realise quite how damaging Partygate would be. Almost unbelievably for someone whose career rests on reading voters right, he's convinced, when the revelations first appear in December 2021, that it's ‘not resonating with the public.’ Indeed, it takes him until the following April to realise that the scandal is ‘producing some anti BoJo reactions with real people not just the media’—and even then he believes that the fall-out on the doorstep ‘can be managed with a conversation.’ Then, when the Gray Report eventually appears, he reckons the press ‘have been made to look a little foolish and hypocritical by blowing it all up out of proportion.’

That said, for the student of legislative and executive politics, Hart's book provides an engaging insight into both the pastoral-cum-disciplinary-cum-logistical role of the Whips Office and the sometimes bonkers balancing act that is the British Cabinet reshuffle. As such, while not quite in the same league as Tim Renton's Chief Whip and Gyles Brandreth's Breaking the Code, his diaries provide a degree of reassurance that not much has changed in that respect—apart from Tory MPs behaving with even more of a sense of entitlement and even less commitment to the party's collective good then they did back then. The section on how parliamentary selections are managed (‘managed’ being the operative word) when a snap election is called is also well worth reading.

What comes through most strongly in the end, however, is the extent to which grown-up, supposedly worldly-wise operators like Hart can fall hopelessly in love with those they serve, convinced not only that their boss is trouncing their apparently hapless opposite number at every PMQs and in every televised election debate, but also that duty lies, above all else, in preventing them being taken down by their internal rivals.

That so many ministers and chief whips now seem to see themselves as praetorian guards to the prime minister rather than guardians of the collective good of the party will no doubt be grist to the mill of those who argue that British politics is now irredeemably presidentialised. Whether it actually serves the best interests of those political parties, and therefore parliamentary democracy as a whole, is another matter entirely.

Ungovernable: The Political Diaries of a Chief Whip, by Simon Hart. Macmillan. 368 pp. £25.00