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Intro: [00:00:00] You are listening to Parliament Matters, A Hansard Society production supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Learn more at hansardsociety.org.uk/pm.

Ruth Fox: Welcome to Parliament Matters, Whipping Yarns, our series peering into the hidden world of Westminster's Whips. I'm Ruth Fox.

Mark D'Arcy: And I'm Mark D'Arcy. And in this edition we talk to Simon Hart, the Chief Whip in Rishi Sunak's tortured government. His book Ungovernable, the Political Diaries of Chief Whip, is a tell all memoir by the head of a profession that's supposed to stay permanently silent. When we talked over, it must be admitted, a less than ideal internet connection, I began by asking him if he'd broken the whip's code of omerta. Their code of silence.

Simon Hart: I don't regret it. I think it's unquestionably going to be uncomfortable reading in some respects, but the more I reflected on the last few years, the more I'd [00:01:00] come to the conclusion that there was this sort of narrative creeping in, which was that the only reason we lost the 2024 election was because we chose July rather than October or November. And if only we hadn't done that, then everything would've turned out. Well, the reality is that is just fundamentally wrong and we lost in 2024 partly because we've been in 15 years or nearly 15 years, and that's a long stretch for any government. But our reputation for integrity got done over towards the end of Boris' regime. Whether we think that is warranted or not, it is unquestionably the case. And our reputation for economic competence got done over during Liz's short term in office. Again, we can have an argument about whether that's a legitimate charge, but it is nonetheless charged. So we suddenly found ourselves slipping to 20 points behind Labour, our nearest competitor, in the second week, I think, of Liz's regime and we never recovered. We never went up. We [00:02:00] never went down. The nation had just taken a collective view that the joke had worn a bit thin, and that we were no longer the party that they wanted to be running the country. We have to ask ourselves, if we're serious about not letting that happen again, we have to ask ourselves what were the root causes of that?

And so, that's what I've attempted to do. Yeah, it's a bit colorful in parts. I accept that, but it does demonstrate that we were contesting very strong headwinds coming out of all quarters. I tried to be careful about how to demonstrate the variety and ferocity and frequency of the winds that we were contesting and just to do my little bit in reminding people that Rishi Sunak was a very decent man trying to do a decent job, but it was bloody difficult.

Mark D'Arcy: I mean, there are people who will now say that no future conservative MP who's trapped in a brothel being extorted will feel able to phone a chief whip because he is in trouble.

Simon Hart: Maybe that's true. Maybe they might think twice about going to the brothel in the first place. You know, the Whips office is not the [00:03:00] department of covering up. I think this is exactly the problem. I think there was this sort of belief that somehow it didn't matter what went on, the whips were there to sweep up the mess, bury the damage somehow, and never speak of it again.

Well, that's all very well. But the problem is that that doesn't exactly force us into examining actually other ways we can adjust the modus operandi of Parliament, the way in which we select our candidates, the way in which we help and mentor and support MPs and ministers in a way that actually ends up in them not being.

In these difficult positions, and I feel really strongly about that. You know, the, the reason we lost the 2024 election was because the public got bored of the psychodrama. And it might have been a sex scandal, a financial scandal, a probity scandal, or it might actually, I attach just as much significance in some respects of, of failure being attributed to the fact that there were defections going on. There were threatened defections. There were at least at one stage, I think there were, formal [00:04:00] alternative leadership campaigns going on. You cannot run a political party, expect to be taken seriously by the public, if that is what is happening. And so back to your original question Mark, have I, you know, breached an ancient code. To some extent there was this belief that Chief Whips don't write books, but that is to sort of suggest well we just carry on as normal forever, and big deal.

I think we were past that change. We were reduced from 353 to 123. And that was not because we went for July rather than Autumn for the election. It is much more deep seated.

Ruth Fox: Explore that question then Simon, about who is being selected as candidates. It's a problem not just for the Conservative Party. We've seen it in other parties as well. And you highlight in the book that you came to realise a system of candidate selection, training and mentoring was flawed and at the root of all the problems.

And that was one of the key things I took from reading it. So what should be done differently? Because the huge sense of entitlement that some of this cast of [00:05:00] Conservative MP characters in the book. We don't know their identity, but you know, there's, there's quite a lot of them. They seem to have just a huge sense of entitlement and as you say, expect you to come along and clean up the mess.

Simon Hart: I think you're right that none of this is unique to the Conservative Party.

Ruth Fox: Yeah.

Simon Hart: We've seen the first few months of the new Labour administration, them have to contend with all sorts of unforeseeable and difficult issues around some of their new MPs. So this is not all about us, it's a, it's a problem.

One of the reasons I think it's a problem is that when we select candidates, this is my, this is my personal view, I'm not sure we ask the question often enough or loud enough, or scrutinise the question, which is what makes a good MP? And for that matter, a good minister. A lot of these people will end up in charge of huge departments with multi thousands of people and multi-billion pound budgets.

So we have to think that career progression point as well. And one of the answers I give to that question is we shouldn't be asking just about your [00:06:00] policy expertise or your experience in your previous job. Actually, for politics to work, there has to be the ability to deal with disappointment, to deal with frustration.

To understand the necessity for compromise. Those are quite difficult concepts for a lot of ambitious people. And I, and I, they're difficult enough for anybody. I mean, who doesn't hate compromising? I mean, I always think that my way is the right way and you know, I get forced into compromise rather than willingly go there.

And one of the reasons for that is that our system, it depends actually more often than not on people knocking on our door saying, I'd like to be an MP, or I'd like to be a member of your party, and then a candidate for. That's great, and we get some brilliant people that way, but we don't necessarily get exclusively brilliant people.

And sometimes we get just really fantastic people who might struggle with some of the pressures of politics in 2025 presents. And in those situations, you know, we take people in, we [00:07:00] get them elected, and then we say, right pal, you're on your own. Here's a budget. You've got four or five members of staff.

You may have never run an office before. You've got an office in Westminster. You've got an office in your constituency, so get on with it. Woe betide you if you get it wrong and then a few years in, you might be lucky enough to become a minister. As I say, get all of the trinkets which come with that. You, you know, you.

Your big smart car, your red box, your budget, and you are told immediately, right, report to such and such a department in the next two hours. Um, you're doing a media round tomorrow morning, by the way. Nobody tells you that. Don't you dare for a minute slip up. That is an intense pressure to put on people if you don't also have the support in place to help them, train them, mentor them, and all of the work that needs to go with that.

I think, by the way, it's much better than it used to be. But I think that what it does is leave people who might have fantastic potential, but may not necessarily be cut out for going it alone and doing all of that stuff without any help at all. It leaves those [00:08:00] people exposed and then that's when the wheels fall off.

So I think most people go into politics for the right reason. I think most people are decent people, but I think it's a rocky landscape out there and it's very easy to trip up.

Mark D'Arcy: What you're suggesting is the sink or swim culture in Westminster is a dangerous place for people, but should there not also be possibly much more aggressive weeding out of people who just don't look to be cut out to be Members of Parliament, who are gonna cause the party problem if they become Members of Parliament.

Simon Hart: I do think systems work pretty well, but I'm not sure. As I said, I just don't, and I did a few of these myself, by the way, a load of selections in the run up to the, um, 2024 election, mainly in a hurry, and mainly based on information contained in the first two paragraphs of the cv, which is university.

Always very complimentary. And what I did notice was it highlighted on people's brilliant careers, and their brilliant knowledge of a certain policy area or not, but it didn't [00:09:00] get under the skin of what it's like to be in politics, what it's like to have to vote for something you don't like or not vote for something that you do like, or having your fantastic idea, which you've worked on all of your career jettisoned at the last moment because somebody else has had an even better idea down the line. And you just have to put up with the fact that, sorry, this is not gonna be your lucky day after all. You are not gonna be able to support your amendment or whatever it might be.

And some people can cope with that and some people can't, and we don't scrutinize, I don't think, deeply enough or early enough that kind of character trait in our candidates. I mean, I didn't go into politics until I was 45, I don't think. I'll tell you what, if I'd done it at 25, I'd have been truly awful.

I'd have been enthusiastic, but I do think I would've seriously struggled without a big support mechanism in place. It's lonely and I, [00:10:00] I think that it's probably more brutal now with the relentless scrutiny that social media provides. Probably more brutal than it's ever been.

Ruth Fox: How do you address this then, Simon?

Because you've got this challenge that across the country you've got 600 and odd constituencies with voluntary party associations, local members who are giving up their time and effort in each seat, some of whom will have their favourite candidates. You've got a candidate list. You've got this tension between the centre wanting to impose some standards and some guidance on local constituency associations and then wanting their local choice. And the approach to it, you know, the sort of the CV and so on, itself stands by modern standards, quite old fashioned. I mean, at the Hansard Society now, we select our staff through blind review.

We don't even ask for CVs until we've selected for interview, and we do it on the basis of [00:11:00] testing their skillset and whether the skillset they've got is matched to the skills that they're gonna actually need on the job.

Simon Hart: I think the Spectator magazine recruit their journalists the same way and have done for years. You know, for an ancient title they're extraordinarily ahead of the times in terms of how they... go back to this is not a task which is going to be achievable in, you know, a couple of months or a couple of years. I think it's probably a 10 year project, and I think rather than deny paid up members the right to vote for and support the candidate of their choice, I do think there is a probably a better way of making sure that the candidates on offer are of the same sort of universal standard. What I notice is that you could get down to a short list sometimes of say six people, four of whom are absolutely fantastic, and two, you were thinking, well, I'm quite surprised to see them on the list.

I would personally make more use of the parties going out to identify candidates rather than [00:12:00] the candidates identifying parties. And it would cost money and it will take time that we should be making a conscious effort to identify people. They may be in other roles at the moment in their communities who are particularly outstanding and go on an active headhunting exercise in order to try and get as many of those as we can. It's, it's been tried occasionally in different ways, but successful. And so we then know that whatever group of people that we put in front of our local members, we'd be proud of any of them. Whichever one got through that democratic process, we would be happy with, because that short list is, say a short list of six or eight or 10, whatever it might be, really, really top class people who we know, we've pretty stress tested through the recruitment process. And then of course the, the members would have the democratic right to pick whichever one of those they wanted. I think that would be a start.

I've floated that idea before and [00:13:00] people have largely agreed with, but then have you any idea how much that would cost? Well, yeah, it's a very expensive and lengthy process. We have to ask ourselves the question, you know, how are we going to revive our fortunes and gradually attract public confidence? I just think that's one way we could possibly do that.

Mark D'Arcy: Turning to when you became chief whip. When Rishi Sunak took over as Prime Minister, did both of you have in your mind that the previous two prime ministers, Boris Johnson over the Paterson affair, and Liz over a vote on fracking, had been dealt possibly a final mortal blow by whipping mix ups, by whipping disasters?

Misjudged whipping decisions.

Simon Hart: Well, it certainly was in my mind, I was fully aware that, you know, there was significant pressure on the Whip's office and I was always very grateful to Rishi for having not only, you know, putting his confidence in me in [00:14:00] that difficult situation, but also as all good leaders would attest, I think he was then prepared to stand by his man. He was always very supportive and very attentive to the pressures that the office was under. And bearing in mind, you know, we are now 13 years into government, there's always noises of talk, rumor about so and so going to join another party or another person setting up an counter leadership offer, there's always noise in the back, a rebellion on a key piece of legislation.

I was aware and he was aware that you were only ever as good as your last game, or as I say, or in our case, only as ever as good as your last vote. And um, it was always possible that, we might have had a brilliant week this week, but next week could be an absolute nightmare, and it required us to trust and get on with each other.

Um, I think that was an enduring feature of our time in our respective roles.

Mark D'Arcy: Were you effectively consulted? I mean, the, the hit against Boris Johnson and Liz [00:15:00] Truss was that decisions were being taken in the Downing Street bunker too often rather than in consultation with their whips and if they'd listened to theirs'.

Simon Hart: I can't speak for Liz or Boris's, uh, regime in terms of that relationship. All I can say is that I made it my business, as indeed did colleagues in Number 10, to make sure that there were no gaps and no secrets and no surprises, and I had a, I think, I hope, a very good relationship with, um, Chief of Staff and Deputy Chief of Staff in, in Downing Street.

And I went to all the relevant meetings, at the 8:30 meeting when these things used to get discussed. So I don't think there was ever a moment where I suddenly woke up to some curious decision having been taken, which we were blindsided by. And it was one of the things which I actually think went really well in our, in our two years.

Occasionally we would have to change course. Policy might change, and Rupert or Liam, the deputy and the, and the chief of staff [00:16:00] would occasionally say, right, you know, they would make sure I knew we we're gonna do things a little bit differently, we're gonna do this a bit faster or that, so that was all fine, but there was never a sort of, you know, a shadow whipping operation being run out of Number 10 or anything like that. That didn't happen.

Ruth Fox: When you went into the role, Simon, did you think to yourself, the last couple of leaders have lost confidence, it can. It can come quite quickly or it can come over an extended period of time. Did you ever sort of think, what are the telltale signs that I need to be looking out for to have Rishi's back?

Simon Hart: Yeah, I mean, we always had a sort of thermometer plugged into different parts of the building and the party to sort of measure where things were. And also, let's not forget, we had, I think 16, 17, 18 members of the Whips' office who were always spread evenly around a whole parliamentary estate all the time.

And there weren't really very many secrets. Um. People talk to somebody who talked to somebody who talked to a whip normally. So we always pretty well knew what was going [00:17:00] on and who was doing what and when, and how serious they were. I mean, our daily measurement of all of this was were we winning votes and were we winning votes comfortably?

And also, really importantly, I thought. Were we getting the turnout? Were colleagues turning out to vote in the numbers that we anticipated and we had a absolutely brilliant whip, Stuart Anderson, who was responsible for the numbers, and he ran the spreadsheets and gave us a daily indication of what he thought our numbers looked like, what, what he thought the opposition's numbers looked like.

He was rarely wrong, often only maybe about one. I always took some comfort from that. I always used to think that if things were about to collapse completely, then the first thing that would've done, that would've shown up on Stuart's spreadsheet. That's where we would've sort of got wind of that first.

And you know, there were difficult cases, don't get me wrong, and there were some people who sort of made more noise and and threatened things, which we were fairly confident wouldn't happen. Of course, we were always trying to second [00:18:00] guess how many letters of no confidence had gone into the chairman of the 1922, and from time to time we'd do a sort of thorough scrub top to bottom of our colleagues and put them in sort of green, amber, or red categories.

Our worst case scenario was 22 people we thought might have submitted a letter of no confidence to Graham. It turned out in Graham's book that I think that was nearer 13. So we were erring on the side of caution, but actually we never, thanks to Graham's confirmation, we were never in the danger zone in terms of a no confidence vote.

And as we got closer to election year, I think more and more people came to the view, look, it would be crazy, even by our standards have yet another leadership election now. So even people who might have been minded to go down that route as we got into 2024 accepted that this is how it's gonna be. This is who's taking us into the election, and we should support him to the best of our ability.

Mark D'Arcy: You've given us there a, a little bit of a glimpse into the world of the Whips office. Perhaps I could get you to just take us through your typical day [00:19:00] as Chief Whip. When do you arrive? Who do you talk to first? What meetings go through a a, a typical Chief Whip's diary day?

Simon Hart: In some ways there is no typical day, but it always started in an orderly fashion and generally sort went, I won't say it went haywire, but it sort of used to take on a life of its own after that. I would always start with an eight o'clock meeting over in Number 11 with the civil service team, the whips civil service. We stuck to the same formula, that was about the business of the day, the business of the week, timings of votes, what might have been going on in bill committees. House of Lords, other areas of sort of legislative activity.

So that would normally take from about eight till about 8 25. I'd then slip over the uh, road into Number 10 for the 8:30 meeting, which I don't know if they still happen in the same form, but that was a brief 15 minutes chaired by Chief of Staff, with the PM and various advisors, legislation, media, myself, probably 10 or 15 people around [00:20:00] table.

And that was just about where we, what was happening in Number 10 that day. I would give a 15 second report on, on the legislative fallout from yesterday and what we were expecting coming up and, uh, any particular problem areas. And then I would normally have then an informal meeting after that with the deputy chief of staff, just on some of the nitty gritty of how we were going to actually implement some of the things that we decided.

After that back over to the Commons. By what we probably talking about mid-morning, we would have Whips meeting. There was always a Whips meeting at 11 o'clock. That was chaired by the Deputy Chief Whip, Marcus Jones. Order of play for today. You know, the house sits at X. Making sure we had tellers in place. Making sure we had a whip on duty. Front bench rota. We have people in all the bill committees. There were some welfare issues. There were always welfare issues. There were what we call slipping issues. A slip was the leave of absence. A little, traditionally, probably a piece of paper, but not anymore, where somebody might have said, well, look, I've got a constituency visit, [00:21:00] I've got a hospital appointment, I've got a a childcare thing, I've got some reason to be off the parliamentary estate. And Stuart Anderson would be the person who would calculate and recalculate numbers to see how many people we could let go. I would have formal meetings with the opposition chief whip, Liberal Democrat chief whip, SNP chief whip. Not every day, most weeks. Plus always a range of colleagues who might have got advice, observations, information, you name it. You know, the, the, in the end, the, the whips office dealt with everything from legislation to HR, and sometimes it made me feel a bit uncomfortable that we were dealing with issues which probably required legal advice or financial advice or formal HR advice. And in the end we were a bunch of MPs trying to get the government's business through. But what we were able to do, and I think it's one of the great improvements that, that I've witnessed in the House, is [00:22:00] the much more professional help we were able to direct people towards.

Mark D'Arcy: You had been around in politics for quite a while. By the time you became Chief Whip you'd been in the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Wales, for example, and you had other ministerial jobs before that. What was your learning curve like when you became Chief Whip? Did you instantly know how to do it or was there a a lot of new skills that had to be acquired?

Simon Hart: I don't think there's a job remotely like it in politics. I mean, I suppose if you've been deputy or opposition Chief Whip for a while, you can morph into the Chief Whip's role with greater ease. I don't know because I didn't do that. It is very much about personal attitude and relationships and therefore I think an element of gray hair is probably quite a useful attribute.

I mean, I think one of the things which I learned over a period of time was don't flap. There is no room for flapping. You have to remain at [00:23:00] least externally, incredibly calm, even in the face of what appears to be like a complete disaster heading your way. Because I think if the chief flaps, it's very contagious and suddenly the whole thing can fall apart quite quickly.

And the classic sort of sworn analogy comes to mind, but um, taking that deep breath and sort of stepping back from a situation saying, right, okay, let's just think this through. Gimme 10 minutes to whoever might be pressuring us to do something. And by the way, having to right people around you is crucial. I was very blessed with Marcus Jones as the deputy.

I had a great team. I mean, I had a really good team. One of the things Rishi did back in, uh, the time I was appointed was make sure that the whip's office was not just made up of the sort of remnants of a reshuffle, but they, we were actually appointed people. We almost treated the Whips office appointments as the most important part of the reshuffle.

And so we had quite a lot of senior people in the Whips office. That was incredibly [00:24:00] important because that helped us remain sort of calm and not overreact to situations. And know when was the right moment to panic and when wasn't.

Mark D'Arcy: So you weren't with people who were given a whips job as a consolation prize.

Simon Hart: No, I remember talking to Rishi about this right at the start, and I thought he made a wise decision as far as I'm concerned. He said, no, you, you choose who you need. The sort of balanced whips office I said we need. This is going to be quite a bumpy ride. We knew that from day one and therefore we needed some serious experience people in there, so I was blessed with that.

That was a hugely significant part of this. I also had very good special advisors who were equally unflappable, and that was important. And the other thing which occasionally gets overlooked is the fact that the civil service team in the Whip's office are top of the trade. Totally professional, totally impartial.

And they might not have realised that, that at the time, but they didn't half help keep me calm because I sort of knew that, you know, the whole [00:25:00] usual channels bit was always going to be done to a high standard. That was just a headache I didn't need to have. So you were very dependent on good people around you.

I mentioned Stuart Anderson and Stuart was, you know. When journalists used to ring up and say, we've been told that there's going to be a rebellion of, you know, 60 people and the Government's going to fall and or there's going to be a challenge of this and, and I would go to Stuart and say, what do the numbers look like Stuart?

And he would say, well, I'm confident. He said, I think the absolute maximum that are going to rebel on this particular issue might be, you know, 16 or something like that. And I was able to then organise the day or the week very much on the basis of just relying on Stuart's numbers, and he was never wrong, and I used to tease some of the lobbies, some of your former colleagues in the lobby, but the fact that, you know, actually they, they're listening to the wrong people and that our numbers were reliable.

And time and time again after a vote, Stuart would give me a piece of paper showing how [00:26:00] far we were out, and it was one or two, you know, somebody had forgotten to vote or gotten locked in a lift or some other nonsense. That was very reassuring.

Ruth Fox: Interesting, Simon, about the usual channels. You, you mentioned them earlier. For our listeners, can, can you explain how it works?

Simon Hart: Well, in some ways. I can't explain how it works, which is why it works. And, and it's such a, it's such sort of cryptic expression and, uh, full of mystery. I mean, basically one of the things I, I, I think everybody learns in politics is that nothing happens by accident and that the Whips office has to organize the government's program of, uh, legislation, and that means making sure that we liaise with the opposition, with the speaker's office, with our counterparts in the House of Lords, with other departments so that, for example, if in the King's speech there is a commitment to a bill on digital inclusion, the [00:27:00] usual channel is the system, normally led by the civil service team at the Whips office, that makes that happen. The politics is down to the politicians, but booking a slot for the second reading debate, assigning the right amount of time, making sure that the department knows what its deadlines are, making sure that the speaker's office knows how they are going to organise their part of this, making sure that the House of Lords, our team in the House of Lords knows when the legislation is going to reach them. And roughly, you know, we'd map out roughly when we'd hoped we might try to get to Royal Ascent, might be several months down the line. All of that happens by liaison behind the scenes between civil servants, officials and all the other people I've mentioned. There isn't much of a paper trail about that because it then all becomes public knowledge when all of these things get published on the order paper anyway.

But it's an absolutely crucial function undertaken by some very skillful and [00:28:00] discreet people. And so it's not part of that in any way at all. It's just making the machine work.

Mark D'Arcy: Just a final thought really to sum up what's in your book. My impression when I read it was that you didn't so much resemble that the ringmaster of government business, the pivot on which the whole legislative machine turned, you seemed a bit more like the designated driver on an out of control stag weekend.

Is that how you felt about it?

Simon Hart: Um, there's no doubt that being in the Whips office, in the fourth term of a long period in Government, when you are 20 points behind in the opinion polls and you've got multiple noises in the margins, is a testing environment. To be clear, I still maintain, to sort try and finish on a positive note, that most of the people I encountered in politics on all sides of the House were actually thoroughly decent people trying to do a thoroughly decent job for the right reasons.[00:29:00]

But I do think that like a lot of other workplaces, it's not always straightforward. People get themselves in a terrible. Terribly complicated situations from time to time. A wrong word here, a misjudgment there. You know, they are ultimately proud of the fact that Parliament is diverse, drawn from the ranks of the public in a very democratic way.

And with that comes some complications. So I don't necessarily want to point a finger of blame. I mean, I've obviously, the press has alighted on a few particularly jaw dropping stories, but, and I'm, I don't mind about that because it's got this subject being talked about because I think it does need to be talked about.

Otherwise, we'll just continue to repeat the mistakes or, or build in an artificially unrealistically high level of expectation, which can never be met. I think there's lots to be proud of and lots to be hopeful about, but we do need to be honest with ourselves. There are some things we're not in the right place.

And was it emotional? Yeah. I mean, we're talking [00:30:00] about people whose careers, um, life plans, ambitions were falling apart in front of their very eyes. We talk about people who were struggling with extraordinary pressures being imposed on them. As I said, I'm not trying to excuse that, but it's what we saw and we didn't always make the right calls.

Uh, I hate it, but I hear people think sort of MPs are there to feather their own nest or get one over on the voters. That's not the Parliament that I saw. But it's a, a Parliament, which has got some flaws. Yep. And we could do better. Yep. But it's still an extraordinary, rewarding and privileged place in which to exist.

Even as I say, if there's, um, a few things which, uh, you know, they're not meant to be funny, by the way. They're meant to be, you couldn't make it up moments, rather than some kind of hilarious stag weekend joke. Wasn't like that. I said to somebody, we, we went slightly from, you know, and I started all of this, it was intended to be a sort of lighthearted look at life and politics for the purpose of my kids, [00:31:00] and it started as a comedy and slightly ended as a tragedy. Actually, some of these realities came into full view.

Mark D'Arcy: Simon Hart, thanks very much indeed for joining Ruth and me on Parliament Matters. Thank you both very much.

Ruth Fox: Thanks, Simon. Well, Mark, what did you make of all that?

Mark D'Arcy: Well, it was clearly a memoir of the end times, and I do think that the sense of political disintegration that haunted his term in in the Chief Whips' chair must have been very, very demoralizing to live through. Every day there was someone with another scandal or another threatened rebellion, or someone threatening to defect or actually defecting to another political party.

The hits just kept on coming and you really did begin to feel very sorry, quite sorry for him.

Really? It must have been an absolutely miserable experience and he toughed it out. You read the book and he, he's off on shoots. He has agreeable dinners in agreeable restaurants from time to time. But the sheer grinder that, my goodness.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, and, and some of the stories are just, I mean, in the book are just quite extraordinary in terms of the behaviour and [00:32:00] the, the sense of, of of entitlement. I was thinking as he was talking, you know, he's, he's clearly felt that above all what's needed is a system for getting better people into Parliament.

Mm-hmm. And that the system that we have today across all the parties, I think isn't working. And I was thinking as, as he was talking, you know, you reflect on the, the different systems, the different approaches that parties have taken over recent years to trying to improve candidate selection. Yeah. Um, you know, we've had the, A-list under David Cameron, which I think has had a mixed record.

Liz Truss, of course, was on the, the A-list. We had open selections.

Mark D'Arcy: All those open primaries. Yes. Yes, I remember that. And that produced people, a couple of people, at least for David Cameron, who ended up in, in the Liberal Democrats. Yeah. Sarah Wollaston, and other people like that, um.

Ruth Fox: Successive governments have tried to bring in business people, you know, so that you've got not just MPs put through that sort of route through to ministerial careers.

So, going back to William Hague's time as as party leader, [00:33:00] he tried to strengthen the Conservative Party after its routing in 1997. He tried to bring in business people. You remember the, the guy from Asda

Mark D'Arcy: Titans of business. People like Archie Norman. Yeah, Archie, Archie Norman had just, I felt, begun to be a truly effective MP, had figured out how to function in Westminster when he decided to leave and resume his business career.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, they get frustrated with life at, at Westminster. And that's part of the problem, isn't it? That the style of life, you know, living in two places, I mean, as Simon said, the extent to which you're battered by social media and, the abuse, frankly, that they get.

Mark D'Arcy: Uh, all, all the constituency duties and all the rest of it.

And if you are at the top of your profession in law, medicine, business, whatever it is, the 90 odd grand that an MP gets doesn't look like all that much money to you. So you're being asked to make a fairly considerable financial sacrifice. And you can't easily, in these transparent days, maintain outside business interests and devote any time to them.

So it's become a [00:34:00] much more exclusive job. The days when barrister MPs would come in to Parliament from the law courts after an afternoon litigating that turned to legislating in the evening.

Yeah, those days are largely over except for a few figures.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. The extent to which it's corrosive to family life.

I mean, I, I dunno what the divorce rate was in the last Parliament, but certainly in previous Parliaments, it's been horrific. Yeah. Yeah. A couple of years in, uh, lots of things. Yeah, marriages crash and burn.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. And it, and it's terrible. But I think that one of the points that I think he could have talked about a little more in, in that discussion was that there is, I think a need, for much more pastoral care of MPs when they're elected because the crushing sense of disappointment and the sheer grind of political life, I think overtakes a lot of new MPs once they've been in for a few weeks or months, quite a dramatic return to earth after the high of winning your election and making your triumphant speech at the count.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Well, it goes to that question of, of political resilience and finding the right character traits in people as part of the selection [00:35:00] process. Mm-hmm. I mean, in a sense, you know, it's almost too late. By the time they get into Parliament, you actually need them to have that sort of ingrained mental resilience beforehand, and also to prepare them better for what to expect and how to get the most out of the career, and to recognise, I thought he, he was, he was really interesting on that, that point about, as an MP, you've gotta recognise sometimes you're gonna have to vote for something you don't like, and sometimes you're not going to be able to vote for something you do like. Yeah. And you've spoken about that on the podcast before about how it can sort of, you know, destroy and empty souls.

Absolutely. And, and it is the ability to withstand that.

Mark D'Arcy: The resilience that you need for that life and to expect to do it. because I, I think MPs don't often spend a great deal of time preparing to be MPs. They're too busy being candidates. Yeah. They're too busy attending the opening of an envelope somewhere in their constituency.

They're too busy having all those campaign meetings and preparing their literature and getting their photo shoots and going on social media and doing all the other things that candidates do and not necessarily boning up on legislative process and [00:36:00] working out their priorities once they're in office. And quite suddenly you get through the door, you've gotta set up an office, you've gotta decide what you're gonna do, maybe try and get in a committee, maybe just sit there and learn the trade a bit. But you're doing the on the job learning there, there's no training period beforehand. It's just, you know, you, you've now won your election. Get legislating.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. I mean, they get sometimes training in, in how to deal with the media because at the local level they're gonna have to, they get training in how to be, you know, make speeches.

They get training in some of the, sort of the basics of what being a parliamentarian is, and certainly the basics of campaigning, but frankly, at the moment, too much unwillingness to contemplate that candidates need to do much more preparation. Mm-hmm. Even if there's a risk they're not gonna win, they, they need to, to develop that skill set and that knowledge base beforehand, almost by the time they get to Westminster, it's too late.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. Well, so I think the golden rule for aspiring parliamentarians for people who want to be candidates for the next election is listen diligently to this podcast every week.

Ruth Fox: Spot on.

Mark D'Arcy: And with that, [00:37:00] Ruth, let's leave it for now. Whipping Yarns will be back soon.

Ruth Fox: See you soon.

Mark D'Arcy: Bye-bye.

Intro: Parliament Matters is produced by the Hansard Society and supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust.

For more information, visit hansardsociety.org,uk/pm or find us on social media at Hansard Society.