Secrets, lies and a taste for torture…How Whips work in the Westminster shadows

Summer 1987, and Michael Dobbs, former Tory party chief of staff, now a member of the House of Lords and a best­selling author, was lying in the Gozo sunshine with a bottle of wine and a writing pad as he contemplated the novel he was working on.

His departure from the Tories had not been particularly amicable and he had been given a brutal dressing down by the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, who thought she was about to lose the coming election. He wrote two letters down on the front page, F.U. It was a handy guide to the name of his chief protagonist, Francis Urquhart. It also represented his feelings about his former employers.

Ian Richardson and Sussanah Harker in House of Cards 

The book, published in 1989, became House Of Cards, and was a No 1 bestseller, spawning highly successful TV adaptations here and in the US, and for a while that Urquhart ­catchphrase, ‘You might think that; I couldn’t possibly comment,’ was endlessly recycled whenever scandal was in the air.

The novel charts the exploits of a scorned chief whip whose promotion is sidelined by a new prime minister. Urquhart plots, schemes and entraps – with the full support of his wife – in an attempt to seize total power, using all the secrets and skills he had acquired from his time in the whips’ office. It was a Shakespearean saga of corruption, deceit and murder.

So who are the whips of Westminster, and why do they have this mythic reputation? ‘Once’, it was said, ‘the theory was that you never discussed what went on in the whips’ office till your dying day, as though you worked at Bletchley Park.’

And decades of silence have stirred up intrigue and suspicion about their activities.

Their job was simple enough: to keep the parliamentary machine going, make sure votes went the way the government wanted, and keep rebellious MPs on the straight and narrow. They monitored MPs’ activities, knew who was drinking too much, who was susceptible to a foreign trip, whose personal life was disreputable enough so the whips could apply a little heat if needed. They made ­politics work.

Now comes this extraordinary work. I thought I was a bit of a ­political nerd myself, but Whale’s book is the bible of nerdishness.

It is also a detailed history of the last 50-odd years of British politics, with familiar names if, like me, you have spent too much time peering into the dark recesses of politics.

Here are the Browns, Gordon and Nick; Barbara Castle; Neil Kinnock; John Prescott; Bob Mellish; Michael Heseltine; Jim Callaghan; John ­Bercow. On it goes to the very end of a tight index in some of the smallest type you will ever see. There’s a lot of names.

The Houses of Parliament 

The book is a huge hit for any Westminster political junkie, and what makes it work is the feast of political anecdotes that pepper the 500-plus pages.

B ut it’s not for the prudish: what is also scattered across this volume are more four letter f-words than you will get on the toughest building site. Our parliamentarians certainly did love to give some ripe Anglo-Saxon ­language a good workout.

Whips might now have to spend a lot of their time on ‘pastoral’ care (yes, truly), though as Harriet ­Harman said of one chief whip, ‘the idea that Michael Cocks could do pastoral support is like putting Dracula in charge of a blood bank’.

But it wasn’t always like that. In the 1970s and 80s, Westminster was a highly charged political environment and people behaved accordingly. Jack Straw (remember him?) was one of Labour’s 1979 intake and a rising star of the party’s shadow Treasury team. As he put it himself, he was ‘getting a bit cocky’ until the chief whip, a bluff Northerner called Walter Harrison, ‘took me in hand’.

Spotting Straw near the Labour whips’ office, Harrison, who ­disagreed with some highly technical aspect of his tactics in the Budget debate, grabbed Straw for a word. Harrison fixed his eyes on Straw and as he did so the future foreign ­secretary ‘felt a pain between my legs that I had not experienced since the school rugby field.

‘His grip tightened. I rose on tiptoes as he pushed me up as well. My mouth came open; only a little screech came out. “Now lad,” said Harrison, “Have you got the point or do you want some more?” That was proper politics, as you probably wouldn’t want to say.’

L abour had a razor-thin majority of three in 1974, though they could count on the independent Irish MP, Frank Maguire, who ran a pub in Fermanagh. But not everyday.

‘Frank can’t come Tuesday, it’s dance night,’ Maguire’s wife ­Philomena would explain to the whips when they rang her.

‘What about Wednesday?’

‘Oh that will probably be OK.’

As one whip said, the business of the government depended on dance night at a pub in Fermanagh.

When he arrived in London, the whips would take Maguire to a bar, ‘where he’d get quietly p****d until ten o’clock and then he’d vote for us. After we got his vote, it didn’t ­matter if he slept on the Thames as far as we were concerned’.

Another (probably apocryphal) tale comes from the 1974-9 ­Parliament when both parties sometimes had to bring sick MPs in from hospital to make sure they got as many votes as possible.

One was wheeled in after a severe heart attack, indeed still in the ambulance. ‘How do we know he’s alive?’ the Tory whip asked.

The Labour whip, Joe Harper, a former miner, leaned forward and turned the knob on the heart ­monitor. He saw the green light flashing to indicate a heartbeat.

‘There you’ve lost – we’ve got 311.’

It was the events of the 1974-9 ­Parliament – ending with a vote of no confidence in Labour and a victory for Mrs Thatcher – that was the ­subject of James Graham’s ­compelling drama This House.

It was voted play of the decade by the way, and set in the offices of the chief whips as Labour try to survive and the Tories try to bring them down.

The play focuses on the relationship between the sets of whips, the ‘usual channels’, as they try to sort out votes on tricky measures.

Some of the sharpest creative minds around have seized on the dark arts of the whips’ office to make great drama, whether on the stage, on the TV screen or between hard covers. And reading this book you can see why. It’s not for everyone though: you really do need to love your politics.

And swearing, of course.