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Andrew Liddle
Guest Writer
1:00 AM 25th January 2025
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Opinion

A Political Pinch Of Salt

Andrew Liddle vents his spleen on the Westminster Bubble

An MP was talking this week about weight-loss drugs, the good and the bad. Let’s not name this person and make it about ‘them’ or ‘their’ party. What was said brightly and intended to be helpful on how to naturally lose weight, struck me as summing up the world our political class inhabits. “Why not get off the tube a stop earlier and walk the rest!”

Now if you were speaking to the nation, on mainstream television, would you be making casual reference to how you wended your way to work. Possibly, I suppose, if you lived in a ‘tram town’ like Sheffield or Manchester but you’d be aware that most of the country was not blessed with such systems.

We hear a good deal about the ‘Westminster Bubble’, the cosy ‘village’, inhabited by politicians of all persuasions - although most of them at heart seem of one and the same - and their compeers. I was tempted to call them ‘fellow travellers’ except they generally don’t travel very far from London, unless going on fact-finding expeditions to warm climates, of course.

‘The Bolsover Beast’, Dennis Skinner, once remarked drily that none of them ever felt the need to source their data in a Siberian winter. In 50 years in the House, Skinner never went on one, preferring to spend his time in his constituency.

He was, in so many ways, the archetypal outsider, unlike most of the political class, the whole caboodle, the members of the House of Lords at one extreme and the hubbub of lobbyists at the other. Yes all those who hang on to a strap on their daily commutation - and somebody else’s coat tails at work. Strappers, understrappers, hangers-on all.

And there’s thousands of them, the battalions of famously ‘unflappable’ civil servants flapping about, the phalanxes of secretaries and correspondents, the diplomats and doormats, those who salute and those who expect salutation, the researchers on their phones, researching what they hear and see in their own backyards, the acolytes of acolytes, the alpha and omega.

To paraphrase Jonathan Swift, they are so fond of each other because their ailments are the same. They appear to be wary of each other, though, and appear paranoid about losing their place on the inside. Harold MacMillan, the original ‘Super Mac’, gives insight in his polished aphorism: ‘A man who trusts nobody is apt to be the kind of man nobody trusts’.

One of the reasons why I read politicians’ diaries is because so many seem drawn, no doubt encouraged by their publishers, to spill the beans retrospectively, when out of it - bizarrely revealing outrageous practices in matter-of-fact tones.

Now if you do the tourist thing and stroll around Parliament Square, when it’s not being occupied by protest groups, you will rub shoulders with these village people, city slickers, nature’s boot-lickers, in their natural milieu. You’ll never stop their music!

If you manage to get into one of their lunchtime-o-boozers, like the Clarence or Jugged Hare, you won’t see many old Barry Mackenzie chunderers. They are mostly young nerdies, Dominic Cummings-types, shrewd but crude, these days. Of course the real topers will be in their heavily subsidised House of Commons Bars. (Last time I was on my own fact-finding expedition, several years ago, in the Red Lion, I paid seven pounds for my pint.) The Strangers’ Bar, currently in the news for an alleged drink-spiking incident, mercifully doesn’t open until half-six.

Speaking of the strange, unexpected clubbability of the political class makes my mind go back to the early 1980s, when I called for a lunchtime pint in a pub on the moor, above Thornton, Bradford.

Imagine my surprise to recognise Bob Cryer, the Labour firebrand, Keighley MP. The other was someone you might think was his polar opposite, Marcus Fox, Tory MP for Shipley. He was later Chairman of the 1922 Committee, commonly thought to be a somewhat right wing organisation. (Does that term mean anything, these days, by the way?) They were clearly friends and according to locals they sometimes met there after their Saturday morning clinics.

I’ve always suspected that politicians spend far too much time playing political games with each other rather than getting on with running the whole country for the benefit of the people who elected them. Frances Urquhart, the amoral Tory Chief Whip, in Michael Dobbs’s wonderful House of Cards’ trilogy, is pretty much based on life. I happened to be reading Alan Clark’s diaries, recently, covering his period as Trade Secretary under Margaret Thatcher. He records in gleeful tones how he put one over on a rival by getting a friend to appear to blurt out a drunken revelation about the unfortunate man.

Edwina Currie’s appallingly salacious novel, A Parliamentary Affair, cashes in on her self-promotional fling with John Major and brings sex into the political process. Elaine Stalker, her ambitious heroine, uses her personal attractiveness to cultivate the whip, Roger Dickson (there’s a name). Before that Stalker was an outsider. We don’t hear much about good works and social improvements.

Presumably the book was motivated by money. After an earlier publication, one that Major and his wife had read with avid interest, Currie had chortled in her diary: “I’m carrying round cheques in my handbag and taking weeks to bank them …. I must say, I’m enjoying this!” Major, a self-evidently decent bloke, said later that the four-year affair was the event in his life of which he was most ashamed.” Currie riposted that she was ‘slightly indignant’ when she heard that. Oh really!

On a different level of naive popularity-seeking stupidity, Currie was the Junior Health Minister who appointed Jimmy Savile to lead a task force to run Broadmoor Psychiatric hospital. Anybody who knew the arch-narcissist record-spinner, in Leeds in the 1950s when he ran a dancehall, would not have been impressed. I have this on the authority of several of his direct contemporaries who had once known him well. Savile, knighted by Thatcher (at the fifth attempt), the friend of many of influence, was only unmasked posthumously, after crimes spanning six decades.

Of course, there are laudable exceptions, those who are not part of the club. Mercifully there are people of integrity in the know to blow the whistle, as did Matthew Parris, the liberal-minded former Tory MP for West Derbyshire, in his insightful An Outsider’s Life in Politics.

His parliamentary sketches are always compulsive reading. A couple of years ago he dismissed Boris Johnson as ‘a shallow opportunist with a minor talent to amuse’, and Liz Truss as ‘a planet-sized mass of overconfidence and ambition teetering upon a pinheaded of political brain’. Events have rather given credence to these well-turned put downs.

Recently the charmless Starmer, not a man who looks like he’s gripped by visionary fervour, was attempting to divert from his current multiplicity of problems by launching Britain as a world mover and shaker in Artificial Intelligence. The maladroit manipulator rather blew the effect by instancing the benefits of pothole-identification.

In spite of this monumental bathos, I was transported back to when I first began to take a lifelong interest in politics. Back in 1964, Harold Wilson, the Labour Prime Minister, was truly inspirational, declaring Britain being on the brink of a New Age powered by ‘the white heat of technology’ that would see the end of economic privilege and the abolition of poverty. We were now, ‘the go-ahead people with a sense of national purpose.’ (Hasn’t Donald Trump just said something similar!)

Here was a man, from Huddersfield, who spoke like I did and said what I wanted to hear. Sixty years later, I look back at my naiveties. Everything since has told me not to believe what politicians say, not even in their self-inflated diaries. There are still, by the way, so many claims and counterclaims about what lay behind Wilson’s shock resignation from politics. Nowadays he’s nobody’s hero, never rehabilitated, cancelled, you might say in modern parlance.

Apart from a profoundly unrepresentative cross-section of the electorate and some political zealots does anybody care what those in the bubble affect to believe and repetitively babble. More to the point, why don’t they ever learn to take notice of what real people are thinking and saying?