In October 2020 the footballer Marcus Rashford vented his despair at MPs voting down proposals to extend free school meals during holidays. He was not the only one.
Christian Wakeford, then Conservative MP for Bury South, a few miles north of Rashford’s Manchester United home ground, Old Trafford, was also appalled by the move. The 37-year-old, who had been elected to the Commons the previous year, told friends it was mean-spirited and the opposite of what red wall MPs were elected to do.
Yet rather than voting for the opposition motion on school meals, and against the government, he abstained. His decision was informed by a conversation he had had with a colleague shortly before the vote.
Wakeford says Gavin Williamson, then education secretary, pulled him out of the Members’ Dining Room of the House of Commons and threatened to cancel plans for a new school in his constituency if he did “not vote in one particular way”. He first made the allegation, without identifying the culprit, last week.
Asked today who threatened to scrap the school, he said: “It was Gavin Williamson.”
After asking him to step outside the dining room, Williamson, who kept a tarantula in his office during his year and a half as chief whip under Theresa May, told him: “It’s not very helpful to back an opposition [motion] against the department where you’re wanting an extremely large favour from said department, so do consider what you’re doing.”
“I know the maxim is ‘once a whip, always a whip’, but yeah, that one was Gavin,” Wakeford said.
The following February, the Department for Education approved the long-awaited new high school in Wakeford’s seat, one of four new free schools in Greater Manchester.
If proven, the allegation that Williamson, 45, threatened to pull the plug on millions of pounds of public money would surely amount to a breach of the ministerial code and prompt calls for further investigation.
Wakeford has not ruled out submitting his testimony to Scotland Yard. He is likely to do so directly or through William Wragg, a senior Tory MP who has claimed that No 10 has sought to blackmail colleagues trying to oust Boris Johnson. Wragg is to meet detectives to discuss the matter.
Whether or not police investigate, Wragg and Wakeford’s claims have prompted a debate about how things get done in Westminster.
Is blackmailing or bullying MPs an acceptable way of manipulating votes? Is the wider system of whipping — a term first used in 1772 derived from the “whipper-in” who keeps hounds from wandering during a foxhunt — fit for the modern age? Or, as with the MeToo or expenses episodes, has Westminster again found itself at odds with the rest of the country?
According to many of Westminster’s more experienced parliamentarians, the idea that whips should face consequences — up to and including police investigation — for gathering information on their “flocks” and using it is laughable. To such MPs, the means justify the ends.
The sort of skullduggery and subterfuge deployed by the chief whip Francis Urquhart in House of Cards — a novel by Michael Dobbs, a Tory aide under Margaret Thatcher, which was later rewritten for a US TV audience — never looks good when subjected to scrutiny.
And yet, those MPs would say, the whip has to be able to wield the carrot, and occasionally the stick too, to deliver results, especially for a government which has a democratic mandate to give effect to certain policies and ideas.
During John Major’s premiership, whips retained a “black book” containing a wide variety of kompromat about their MPs, which they did not hesitate to use when trying to peel off rebels on the Maastricht treaty. Trevor Fortescue, a whip under Ted Heath two decades earlier, once told the BBC that whips were willing to help MPs get out of trouble whatever the matter — “it might be debt, it might be . . . a scandal involving small boys” — because they knew it gave them information to use against them in the event of future rebellions.
Johnson’s whips have been accused of threatening to withdraw public funds from rebel MPs’ constituencies on many occasions before the Partygate scandal. Then, last week, Wragg, 34, brought up allegations of blackmail.
Michael Fabricant, 71, the MP for Lichfield and a former whip, spoke for many colleagues when he responded on Twitter: “If I reported every time I had been threatened by a whip or if a whip reported every time I had threatened them, the police wouldn’t have any time to conduct any other police work!”
Dissenters, however, have fuelled a debate on the whips’ tactics.
Many MPs have lost confidence in Johnson, but have not said so yet. They are dismayed by the idea that they or their colleagues could be blackmailed for expressing their views in due course. In the interregnum before the publication of the civil servant Sue Gray’s report on Partygate, the whips are a target for MPs’ anger.
Mark Spencer, Johnson’s chief whip, draws particular ire: he is accused not only of threatening behaviour but incompetence. He is long said to have been at risk of being sacked or demoted, yet Johnson kept him on after reshuffles last year, sources claim, because they have a good personal relationship and make each other laugh.
According to colleagues, Spencer 52, a farmer by trade, is given to schoolboy humour and has private nicknames for many of his backbenchers: Anthony Mangnall, the MP for Totnes, is “Anthony Wanknall”. Tom Tugendhat, who represents Tonbridge and Malling, is “Tom Tugentwat”.
Beyond the jokes and profanities, MPs criticise him for insufficient seriousness and say he has little authority over them.
Nor is he an exponent of Lyndon Johnson’s first rule of politics: learn to count. In the run-up to the debate over the proposed suspension of Owen Paterson, one MP says Spencer had “no real idea” how many Conservative MPs resented the idea of supporting the North Shropshire MP.
Last week Johnson was forced to call upon Grant Shapps, himself a keen student of LBJ, to compile a spreadsheet recording where MPs stood on the issue of Johnson’s future.
For the time being, Shapps, 53, is expected to function as the primary collator of parliamentary intelligence for Downing Street, traditionally the bailiwick of the whips.
Yet structural factors are also feeding into the present controversy surrounding whipping.
In 2019, 109 Conservative MPs were elected to parliament for the first time. Many of them were neophytes who barely knew nor cared about the rules and conventions of politics. A significant number of red wall MPs also felt a greater loyalty to their constituents than to the Conservative Party itself.
In a normal parliament, whips might have developed close personal relationships with members of their flock and inspired the loyalty, or fear, on which a successful whipping operation is based. Covid, however, undermined that.
MPs have instead spent much of the past two years in their constituencies and often felt greater pressure from local residents in person or on social media than from members of the whip’s office communicating over WhatsApp.
As one 2019-intake MP said: “It isn’t a criticism of the current age, it doesn’t work [any more]. And obviously collectively, the number of people rebelling is getting higher and higher.”
The question for the government is whether such indiscipline portends a greater rebellion against the system itself.
Last night Williamson said: “I don’t have any recollection of the conversation as described but what I do remember is working tirelessly with Christian and others in order to be able to deliver this school, which I did.
“Such major investment decisions are made after close analysis of the benefits that the investment will bring and certainly not something that can be decided in a brief conversation like the one described.”
Gabriel Pogrund
Will this get reported to the House of Commons standards commissioner, given what Chris Bryant was saying earlier? Seems unlikely, but you never know.
>After asking him to step outside the dining room, Williamson, who kept a tarantula in his office during his year and a half as chief whip under Theresa May,
Great article but that sentence is a grammatical nightmare.
Why would he keep only half a tarantula when May was PM?
>He is long said to have been at risk of being sacked or demoted, yet Johnson kept him on after reshuffles last year, sources claim, because they have a good personal relationship and make each other laugh.
The natural party of government …
Williamson was known for using Kronos, his tarantula, to intimidate MPs who did not follow the party whip. He was also the worst education secretary since Gove and hopelessly out of his depth. It’s not hard to believe he would stoop this low.
another benefit to the govt of the privatisation of education, they get to make the schooling decisions directly and local councils arent allowed to open new schools.
so you get a nice bit of leverege over your mp and you build a school and give it to a lovely private entity who will suck up to the govt to ensure they get given more schools and therefore more tax money.
im sure we would be seeing a lot more issues with schools complaining about the “let them rot” policy if so many of our schools weren’t run and controlled by people hand in glove with the govt.
I first learned about whips blackmailing MPs when I learned civics as a kid. At the time I was shocked, but as an adult you just think to yourself “oh yeah, that’s how our system works”, and you stop thinking any further than that.
Wragg’s statement has been somewhat of a national slap in the face in that regard. It’s not like it’s some new revelation that whips blackmail MPs, it’s been an open secret for decades, but it’s never been questioned in such a direct way.
It’s obviously completely wrong that MPs can get away with behaviour that would get any _common_ person thrown in prison, especially when public money is involved.
7 comments
In October 2020 the footballer Marcus Rashford vented his despair at MPs voting down proposals to extend free school meals during holidays. He was not the only one.
Christian Wakeford, then Conservative MP for Bury South, a few miles north of Rashford’s Manchester United home ground, Old Trafford, was also appalled by the move. The 37-year-old, who had been elected to the Commons the previous year, told friends it was mean-spirited and the opposite of what red wall MPs were elected to do.
Yet rather than voting for the opposition motion on school meals, and against the government, he abstained. His decision was informed by a conversation he had had with a colleague shortly before the vote.
Wakeford says Gavin Williamson, then education secretary, pulled him out of the Members’ Dining Room of the House of Commons and threatened to cancel plans for a new school in his constituency if he did “not vote in one particular way”. He first made the allegation, without identifying the culprit, last week.
Asked today who threatened to scrap the school, he said: “It was Gavin Williamson.”
After asking him to step outside the dining room, Williamson, who kept a tarantula in his office during his year and a half as chief whip under Theresa May, told him: “It’s not very helpful to back an opposition [motion] against the department where you’re wanting an extremely large favour from said department, so do consider what you’re doing.”
“I know the maxim is ‘once a whip, always a whip’, but yeah, that one was Gavin,” Wakeford said.
The following February, the Department for Education approved the long-awaited new high school in Wakeford’s seat, one of four new free schools in Greater Manchester.
If proven, the allegation that Williamson, 45, threatened to pull the plug on millions of pounds of public money would surely amount to a breach of the ministerial code and prompt calls for further investigation.
Wakeford has not ruled out submitting his testimony to Scotland Yard. He is likely to do so directly or through William Wragg, a senior Tory MP who has claimed that No 10 has sought to blackmail colleagues trying to oust Boris Johnson. Wragg is to meet detectives to discuss the matter.
Whether or not police investigate, Wragg and Wakeford’s claims have prompted a debate about how things get done in Westminster.
Is blackmailing or bullying MPs an acceptable way of manipulating votes? Is the wider system of whipping — a term first used in 1772 derived from the “whipper-in” who keeps hounds from wandering during a foxhunt — fit for the modern age? Or, as with the MeToo or expenses episodes, has Westminster again found itself at odds with the rest of the country?
According to many of Westminster’s more experienced parliamentarians, the idea that whips should face consequences — up to and including police investigation — for gathering information on their “flocks” and using it is laughable. To such MPs, the means justify the ends.
The sort of skullduggery and subterfuge deployed by the chief whip Francis Urquhart in House of Cards — a novel by Michael Dobbs, a Tory aide under Margaret Thatcher, which was later rewritten for a US TV audience — never looks good when subjected to scrutiny.
And yet, those MPs would say, the whip has to be able to wield the carrot, and occasionally the stick too, to deliver results, especially for a government which has a democratic mandate to give effect to certain policies and ideas.
During John Major’s premiership, whips retained a “black book” containing a wide variety of kompromat about their MPs, which they did not hesitate to use when trying to peel off rebels on the Maastricht treaty. Trevor Fortescue, a whip under Ted Heath two decades earlier, once told the BBC that whips were willing to help MPs get out of trouble whatever the matter — “it might be debt, it might be . . . a scandal involving small boys” — because they knew it gave them information to use against them in the event of future rebellions.
Johnson’s whips have been accused of threatening to withdraw public funds from rebel MPs’ constituencies on many occasions before the Partygate scandal. Then, last week, Wragg, 34, brought up allegations of blackmail.
Michael Fabricant, 71, the MP for Lichfield and a former whip, spoke for many colleagues when he responded on Twitter: “If I reported every time I had been threatened by a whip or if a whip reported every time I had threatened them, the police wouldn’t have any time to conduct any other police work!”
Dissenters, however, have fuelled a debate on the whips’ tactics.
Many MPs have lost confidence in Johnson, but have not said so yet. They are dismayed by the idea that they or their colleagues could be blackmailed for expressing their views in due course. In the interregnum before the publication of the civil servant Sue Gray’s report on Partygate, the whips are a target for MPs’ anger.
Mark Spencer, Johnson’s chief whip, draws particular ire: he is accused not only of threatening behaviour but incompetence. He is long said to have been at risk of being sacked or demoted, yet Johnson kept him on after reshuffles last year, sources claim, because they have a good personal relationship and make each other laugh.
According to colleagues, Spencer 52, a farmer by trade, is given to schoolboy humour and has private nicknames for many of his backbenchers: Anthony Mangnall, the MP for Totnes, is “Anthony Wanknall”. Tom Tugendhat, who represents Tonbridge and Malling, is “Tom Tugentwat”.
Beyond the jokes and profanities, MPs criticise him for insufficient seriousness and say he has little authority over them.
Nor is he an exponent of Lyndon Johnson’s first rule of politics: learn to count. In the run-up to the debate over the proposed suspension of Owen Paterson, one MP says Spencer had “no real idea” how many Conservative MPs resented the idea of supporting the North Shropshire MP.
Last week Johnson was forced to call upon Grant Shapps, himself a keen student of LBJ, to compile a spreadsheet recording where MPs stood on the issue of Johnson’s future.
For the time being, Shapps, 53, is expected to function as the primary collator of parliamentary intelligence for Downing Street, traditionally the bailiwick of the whips.
Yet structural factors are also feeding into the present controversy surrounding whipping.
In 2019, 109 Conservative MPs were elected to parliament for the first time. Many of them were neophytes who barely knew nor cared about the rules and conventions of politics. A significant number of red wall MPs also felt a greater loyalty to their constituents than to the Conservative Party itself.
In a normal parliament, whips might have developed close personal relationships with members of their flock and inspired the loyalty, or fear, on which a successful whipping operation is based. Covid, however, undermined that.
MPs have instead spent much of the past two years in their constituencies and often felt greater pressure from local residents in person or on social media than from members of the whip’s office communicating over WhatsApp.
As one 2019-intake MP said: “It isn’t a criticism of the current age, it doesn’t work [any more]. And obviously collectively, the number of people rebelling is getting higher and higher.”
The question for the government is whether such indiscipline portends a greater rebellion against the system itself.
Last night Williamson said: “I don’t have any recollection of the conversation as described but what I do remember is working tirelessly with Christian and others in order to be able to deliver this school, which I did.
“Such major investment decisions are made after close analysis of the benefits that the investment will bring and certainly not something that can be decided in a brief conversation like the one described.”
Gabriel Pogrund
Will this get reported to the House of Commons standards commissioner, given what Chris Bryant was saying earlier? Seems unlikely, but you never know.
>After asking him to step outside the dining room, Williamson, who kept a tarantula in his office during his year and a half as chief whip under Theresa May,
Great article but that sentence is a grammatical nightmare.
Why would he keep only half a tarantula when May was PM?
>He is long said to have been at risk of being sacked or demoted, yet Johnson kept him on after reshuffles last year, sources claim, because they have a good personal relationship and make each other laugh.
The natural party of government …
Williamson was known for using Kronos, his tarantula, to intimidate MPs who did not follow the party whip. He was also the worst education secretary since Gove and hopelessly out of his depth. It’s not hard to believe he would stoop this low.
another benefit to the govt of the privatisation of education, they get to make the schooling decisions directly and local councils arent allowed to open new schools.
so you get a nice bit of leverege over your mp and you build a school and give it to a lovely private entity who will suck up to the govt to ensure they get given more schools and therefore more tax money.
im sure we would be seeing a lot more issues with schools complaining about the “let them rot” policy if so many of our schools weren’t run and controlled by people hand in glove with the govt.
I first learned about whips blackmailing MPs when I learned civics as a kid. At the time I was shocked, but as an adult you just think to yourself “oh yeah, that’s how our system works”, and you stop thinking any further than that.
Wragg’s statement has been somewhat of a national slap in the face in that regard. It’s not like it’s some new revelation that whips blackmail MPs, it’s been an open secret for decades, but it’s never been questioned in such a direct way.
It’s obviously completely wrong that MPs can get away with behaviour that would get any _common_ person thrown in prison, especially when public money is involved.