InAt a small morning, the phone rings next to Simon Hart’s bed. There’s a drunken Tory lawmaker on the line. He claims he is stuck in a Bayswater brothel with a woman who appears to be a KGB agent.
It sounds like something from its thick, but for the last major whip to conservative government, all such calls were part of the day (or night) work.
“In today’s HR joy, he later said, “A report from Emma (his special advisor) that the department’s SPAD went to an orgy over the weekend and put crap on other people’s heads. Worse yet, in another case, a House employee went to a party he dressed to Jimmy Saville, and then he ended up having sex with a blown doll that he was later dismissed.”
This is a light relief compared to some of the things he dealt with, which highlights the central message of the diary. It has become almost impossible to have something wrong with a system where people are chosen, guided and trained to run the country smoothly. Hart, who lost his seat in 2024, said, “I want to show that a tiny opportunity in the fifth period has disappeared because a relatively small cohort of people deliberately worked so hard. He doesn’t think that as many people who go to brothels as they would in Brexiter bands, “we haven’t forgotten the numerical reality of what they are demanding.” And if the wrong people make it in the Commons, wait until you see the pipeline to the Lord: Hart called his diary “about my knights.”
This very readable book served in the Cabinet for over four years as Welsh Secretary under Boris Johnson and Chief Whip under Rishi Snack, whose author had served in the Cabinet for over four years, which is less of a government explanation than what has been done for the Conservative Party and the rest of us. If he could not place Hart, one of the national hunting and shooting types that ran the country alliance, the portfolio he had, had taken him deep into the government’s plumbing and wiring. As Wales’ secretary, he attended a massive pandemic conference and was in touch with the delegated administration on lockdown rules. Later, as Chief Whip, he had his ringside seat in constant plots against various leaders, many of which sounded like something from a bygone era. (At one point during Johnson’s downfall, he writes about causing the chairman of the committee in 1922 – the unconfident letter keeper from Buckventures “go away from his inbox and buy precious time” from Buckventures, who can trigger a shooting in Scotland.”
Heart has great eyes in high farce moments. Jacob Reese Mogg is down the zip wire in a tweed three-piece suit. Thérèse Coffey wants to wheel clamp people for Covid Compliance. Kemi Badenok exists in a “permanent state of anger” that exhausts everyone. Liz Truss’ spud explaining the “mayonnaise situation” (obviously she doesn’t eat anything that contains mayonnaise, just drinks pet coffee). Heart writes: Heart writes:
Allowing the Cabinet Office’s red pen to run through all the minister’s memoirs, this is very cautious about both the material and the deeper emotions of what actually happened, especially on the surface of the pandemic. Hart is clearly furious at the latter, unwonderful classic Dominic Cummings, due to his now-notorious day trip to Bernard Castle, when the first story began to cycle about the lockdown party in Whitehall, but he “judgments the strange tales I think resonate with the public.” Drinking beer with a colleague you’ve worked all day is really so bad, does he wonder?
Instead, what begins as a diary intended as a light-hearted record for a child comes down to the infinitely dark. A series of entries on serious sexual offences allegedly committed by lawmakers and suffering victims seeking assistance patently seeking lashing are not trained to be given. The whip work he writes is not a darker art than an outdoor hospitalization surgery, but constantly patches and sends back to the front of the injured.
As an enforcer of discipline, he appears to be empathetic, seeing most of the confusion he has to wipe out as a result of those with problems that collapse under the pressure of “human frailty” and the “human frailty”; He was also one of the kind portraits of his work with Johnson that I read, presenting his downfall as a more tragedy than a scandal, which may not yet have a favor in the former prime minister’s household. If you’ve ever wondered whether he started all the rumours about Carrie Johnson Medling like Mrs Macbeth, or who started all the rumours in policy, then it seems that he was her husband, moaning forever to the colleague behind her back on this account. In one of the vignettes that induce flinch, Hart explains that the Prime Minister allegedly gave him grief by disciplining Scotland’s secretary Alistair Jack for claiming his grouse shooting resume after lockdown, as wildlife-loving Carrie gave him grief.
But the book offers little clear answer to the important question of why so many scoundrels end up in Congress. This is somewhat inexplicable given that Hart was responsible for party discipline and candidate reviews, and his own deputy, Chris Pincher, resigned from exploring two men intoxicated. (What he did for Johnson was the rage of MPS who gave him a man who was once known as “Pincher by name, essentially Pincher.”
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There is an equally nasty moment in which his friend Neil Parish catches watching porn on his phone in the Commons room, causing By-Elect. In his diary, Hart wrote, “It was stupid and inappropriate, but he would be sent to the course with a warning that stated whether he was a factory worker.” If a lawmaker watching porn in front of a female colleague and is not considered a contract-breaker by the Chief Whip when he intends to represent his own members, he is on his way to answer his own questions about why the wrong person is riding?
Diary entries are scattered with short retrospective reflections, but there is no great opportunity to propose reforms, but no one will soon be around. Can’t govern or simply no government?
Unlimited: Chief Whip’s political diary by Simon Hart is published by MacMillan. To support Guardians and Observers, order a copy from GuardianBookshop.com. Shipping charges may apply.
