The most famous chief whip is undoubtedly the fictional Francis Urquhart in Michael Dobbs’ novel and TV series House of Cards, who at one point throws a pesky journalist off the roof. So perhaps it is fitting that Simon Hart, the real-life chief whip until very recently, has invited me to meet on the top floor of Waterstones in central London, although he assures me the job is “more HR” and less “dangling people over the parapet over the Thames”.
Hart, 61, has caused a stir in Westminster with the publication of his diaries. Titled Ungovernable, they cover the ups and downs of the last Conservative parliament, from the exit poll on 12 December 2019 to the exit poll on 4 July 2024. Hart, the Tory MP for Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire from 2010 until he lost his seat over the summer, served first as Secretary of State for Wales for Boris Johnson then as Rishi Sunak’s chief whip.
It is during his time in the latter role that the most salacious stories from his book occur. They include a phone call from an anonymous MP claiming to be stuck in a brothel in Bayswater being blackmailed by a suspected KGB agent; when a rescue attempt is made, the MP calls again to say he got into the wrong taxi, driven by an Afghan agent who “demanded £3,000 for a blow job”.
“The phone call is exactly as described,” Hart assures me, though he declines to name the individual concerned, or say if they are still an MP. “Is there a tiny bit of me that wonders if we were dealing with a fantasist? Possibly.” He also refuses to say more about his account of a report sent to the Whips Office when “a departmental Spad went to an orgy over the weekend and ended up taking a crap on another person’s head”.
But he is happy to lift the curtain on the mysterious and often misunderstood world of the whips, a job unlike any other in politics. According to Hart, “whips are confidants, spies, counsellors, therapists and HR managers.” Theirs is an almost impossible task: getting hundreds of MPs to behave, vote with the government, and avoid causing trouble.
The notorious way to achieve this, as employed so compellingly by Francis Urquhart (and Frank Underwood in the US House of Cards adaptation), involves keeping tabs on MPs’ transgressions, bailing them out of trouble (such as by sending a taxi to a brothel in Bayswater) and then pointedly reminding them of the consequences if their secrets were to get out. Hart acknowledges the rumours of a “black book” kept by the Whips Office to note down misdeeds, but says he never saw it. Nor did he keep a giant spider in his office to intimidate unlucky MPs, like one of his predecessors in the role, Gavin Williamson.
But Whips have other, less sinister tools at their disposal. For a start, they are in charge of assembling the government benches, cajoling ambitious MPs with hints about their promotional prospects. Ungovernable covers several reshuffles orchestrated by Hart. (In one, he recounts Sunak saying of one female MP unhappy with her promotion: “She is f***ing useless but we can’t get rid of her.” There has been much speculation about who this might be, given only three women were promoted in that particular reshuffle, one of whom was Kemi Badenoch. In another diary entry, Hart describes Badenoch as someone “who lives in a permanent state of outrage”. When pressed about that, he laughs. “Well maybe being permanently outraged is a good thing… As long as you’re outraged you still care.”)
Reshuffles are a far larger, more complex operation than they appear. “We’d start the next reshuffle the day after the last one, literally the day after”, Hart tells me, because the process took so long to get right. He shows me a photo of an “early draft” of one of the reshuffles: the headshots of hopeful MPs stuck on a huge magnet board, with a “gene pool” in the corner of options for various ministerial positions. Getting the right person for each job whilst maintaining a balance in terms of gender, ethnic and regional diversity, not to mention maintaining good will and party unity, was a Herculean task. “It’s like having a jigsaw with the wrong number of pieces.”
And then there’s the Honours system. Hart originally thought of calling his book “About My Knighthood”, because of the number of times an MP would meet with him about something else then casually inquire “about my knighthood” before leaving. The entitlement of some individuals detailed in the book is truly breath-taking. Nadine Dorries was very public about her fury at not being granted the peerage she believed she had been promised by Boris Johnson, quitting as an MP in protest. But she is hardly alone. Hart writes of one MP from the 2019 intake demanding “Give me a peerage and I will give up my safe seat”. (They did not get one.)
“To some it seemed to be a rite of passage, people assumed that they were owed it,” he tells me. “I was trying to persuade people that being an MP is the honour.” At the same time, towards the end of a 14-year stretch in government, “stepping stone” junior roles that might in other times be the route to a ministerial career had little allure, so the Whips had to use other incentives. “My already over-dangled carrot gets another airing,” Hart writes resignedly in January 2023, when yet another MP inquires about their (unlikely) knighthood.
The final, most radical weapon in the whip’s arsenal is suspending the whip altogether, ejecting an MP from the parliamentary Conservative Party, either temporarily or permanently. Several Tory MPs lost the whip during Hart’s time, from Matt Hancock (for his unauthorised absence from parliament to go on I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here) to Julian Knight (following allegations of sexual assault) to Lee Anderson (for comments about Sadiq Khan, including that the London mayor was “controlled by Islamists”).
The breadth of these offences, all met with the same “clumsy, one-size-fits all tool”, does not sit right with Hart. “There should have been a more obvious tariff system,” he tells me, with a set amount of time for different infractions, so people knew how long they’d be out in the cold for. It’s a sentiment he imagines Alan Campbell, Labour’s chief whip, might sympathise with. Four of the seven Labour MPs who lost the whip for voting against the government on the child benefit cap has had it restored; three have not, and some in the party feel they have been unfairly treated. “I feel his pain,” he says of Campbell’s dilemma.
There was also a new complicating factor for the Conservative Whips Office to consider: “the presence of Reform looking to hoover up anybody we’d got rid of”. That’s exactly what happened in the case of Lee Anderson, who (according to Hart) offered personal assurances that he wouldn’t defect. (“I have tried to avoid the conclusion that he is a total knob, but he has made it nearly possible” is Hart’s assessment in Ungovernable.) One of the themes of the book is how, as an inevitable election defeat loomed, party discipline broke down. The added pressure of Nigel Farage “standing there with open arms saying come to us” made it harder, Hart says, to threaten Tory MPs into line.
Is that why the book is called Ungovernable? “I think everybody will automatically assume that I’m referring to the Conservative party,” Hart answers. “It’s deliberately provocative”, because his real point is a wider one. “I think it is nigh-on impossible for any prime minister to succeed in British politics at the moment.” Rishi Sunak emerges from his account as a hardworking, well-meaning man facing insurmountable expectations in unimaginably tough circumstances. Now Keir Starmer is in the same position. “It seems that the expectation cannot be matched by delivery, however brilliant or awful people are… It worries me that we’re giving people about 15 minutes to get it right, and if they don’t get it right in 15 minutes, we say we’re bored of you, you’re useless.”
Hart started keeping a diary when he first became an MP, as a record of amusing things to tell his children when they asked what he was doing while they were growing up. At some point it became something else, a “‘rise and fall’ account” of the government, as he writes in the introduction: “What started as a comedy, ended as a tragedy”. There are amusing anecdotes aplenty, but underneath the brothel rescues and the knighthood chasing is a darker lesson about the expectations we place on politicians, “to be both normal and abnormal simultaneously”, and what happens when they fail. In some ways, Parliament is its own world. But at the same time, Hart says, “It’s much more a reflection of humanity than I think people give it credit for.”
[See more: Why we’re stuck in Ancient Rome]
Content from our partners
This article appears in the 05 Mar 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Fall Out