Crap MPs

Crap MPs*

Bendor Grosvenor & Geoffrey Hicks

* In our opinion

Dedication

This book was written on an impulse in August, and published just two months later. My special thanks are therefore due to The Friday Project and HarperCollins for their enthusiasm and support, in particular Victoria Barnsley and Scott Pack. I am also grateful to Corinna Harrod, Robin Harvie, Caitlin Doyle, Leo Nickolls, Chris Gurney and the various lawyers we have consulted for working so hard to turn an idea into reality. I would like to thank my co-author Geoffrey Hicks for the prompt delivery of his excellent text, and for letting me interrupt his summer. Finally, although it must be deeply unromantic to dedicate a book called ‘crap’ to someone, this is for Edite.

Bendor Grosvenor

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

Symbols

40. Sir Peter Viggers

39. Robert Carteret

38. Lord Randolph Churchill

37. Tom Driberg, 1st Baron Bradwell

36. George Galloway

35. James Alexander

34. William Beresford

33. Derek Conway

32. Peter Baker

31. Christopher Perne

30. Nicholas Ridley

29. Hazel Blears

28. Anthony Steen

27. Sir John Trevor

26. Sir Samuel Hoare, Viscount Templewood

25. Horatio Bottomley

24. Fletcher Norton, 1st Baron Grantley

23. John Fuller

22. Sir William Blackett, 2nd Baronet

21. Antony, Lord Lambton

20. Terry Dicks

19. Michael Martin

18. John Story

17. Frederick North, 2nd Earl of Guilford, ‘Lord North’

16. Thomas Harrison

15. Ron Brown

14. Rt Hon John Aislabie

13. Tim Smith

12. William Parry

11. Jabez Spencer Balfour

10. Margaret Moran

9. Edmund Hope Verney

8. The Rt Hon Andrew Mackay & Julie Kirkbride

7. Rt Hon John Thomson Stonehouse

6. The Rt Hon John Prescott

5. Jonathan Aitken

4. John Profumo

3. Rt Hon George Brown, Lord George-Brown

2. Sir Oswald Mosley

1. Sir Edward Grey, Viscount Grey of Fallodon

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

Some people say that the expenses scandal of 2009 has done more damage to our political system than any other single episode in modern British history. Actually, the reverse is true. Thanks to the recent revelations of fraud, arrogance and incompetence, we are now more aware of the shortcomings of our leaders than ever before. We are governed by a uniquely crap generation of politicians. And now that we know, we can begin to do something about it.

But just how bad are today’s MPs, compared with their predecessors? This book attempts to answer that question by looking at MPs from the sixteenth century to the present day. It includes the murderous, the corrupt, the perverted and the merely useless. We have chosen forty – about one-quarter of whom are made up of current MPs. Only three of the forty are women. Strangely, there are eight Johns. The criteria for crapness are not scientific, and are based (libel lawyers, please note) purely on our own opinion. Some may wonder at the absence of those who ended up mired in political manure, such as John Major, James Callaghan, or even our own Gordon Brown, but political failure does not qualify anyone for this list. Individual failings do.

Symbols

A guide to the symbols used throughout this book. They are not to be taken entirely seriously.

40. Sir Peter Viggers

(b.1938) Conservative, Gosport, 1974–

After thirty-five years as an MP, during which he held ministerial office only once (as junior minister for Northern Ireland from 1986–9), Viggers found perhaps his greatest fame by submitting a claim for a five-foot-high ‘duck island’ costing £1,645 to be paid out of Parliamentary expenses. He was then ordered to stand down as an MP by his party leader at the next general election. There is no more to be said. Duck off.

39. Robert Carteret

(1721–76) Yarmouth, Isle of Wight, 1744–7

Before the Parliamentary Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867 abolished corrupt electoral practices, many seats in the House of Commons were controlled by aristocrats simply for the benefit of their sons. Sometimes a peer’s son was made an MP to give him something to do, with the Commons seen as a political nursery before assuming the responsibilities of a seat in the House of Lords. In the case of Robert Carteret, however, the Commons was his nursery in the fullest possible sense of the word, for he was completely mad.

His insanity was well known even before he was elected MP at the age of just twenty-three. Once, while a guest at Woburn Abbey, he suddenly woke his hosts, the Duke and Duchess of Bedford, at five in the morning, covered in blood. He held up his coat, and presented them with a great mass of horses’ ears. A guest wrote: ‘He had been in the [Duke’s] stable and cropped all the horses.’ According to another contemporary, Carteret was ‘deficient in his intellects, fond of low company, profuse, fickle and debauched’. He spent most his time wandering aimlessly in St James’s Park, dressed in the garment of a groom or a coachman.

Nevertheless, his father, Earl Granville, was determined that he should represent the family in the Commons, and he was elected for Yarmouth in 1744. There is no record of Carteret ever speaking in debates, and he seems to have figured out how to vote only once, in 1746. He stood down at the 1747 general election. He did manage to marry one Molly Paddock, ‘a woman of vile extraction, bold, loose, and vulgar’, but evidently did not succeed in working out the rest, for he died without issue in 1776, the last of his line.

38. Lord Randolph Churchill

(1849–95) Conservative, Woodstock 1874–85,

South Paddington 1885–95

Churchill’s career was one of those that promised much but delivered little. Despite being the architect of a new, populist form of Conservatism, which he called ‘Tory Democracy’, his main contribution to political history was his dramatic resignation.

From the outset of his political career in 1874 – the year when his son Winston was born – Churchill was seen as a rising star. But he had a knack of antagonizing the very people whose influence and support he needed. In 1875, he helped to save his brother from being named as co-respondent in Lord Aylesford’s divorce case by threatening to publicize incriminating letters sent by one of Aylesford’s friends to Lady Aylesford. Since that friend was the Prince of Wales, this was not, perhaps, the shrewdest move, and social ostracism beckoned for several years. He survived this, however, and began to build up his own power base within the Conservative Party.

His success in appealing to the grass roots made him a force to be reckoned with, although he never endeared himself to Sir Stafford Northcote, the leader of his party in the Commons. He openly undermined Northcote in opposition after 1880, with the creation of a party-within-a-party, the so-called ‘Fourth Party’. However, this did not matter unduly, as Northcote was rapidly being eclipsed by the party leader in the Lords, the Marquis of Salisbury. Salisbury recognized Churchill’s significance and made him Secretary of State for India and then Chancellor of the Exchequer (which he combined with the job of Leader of the Commons). But in 1886, Churchill threw away all his political advantage by attempting to bluff Salisbury. He threatened to resign in order to achieve cuts in defence. Salisbury called the bluff and let him go.

After his resignation, it seemed as if he might return, but no opportunity ever arose. Salisbury refused to offer him the Paris Embassy that he sought. Meanwhile, his health deteriorated. It was (and still is) widely suspected that he was suffering from secondary, and then tertiary, syphilis. Despite his son’s subsequent denial of this diagnosis, Lord Randolph’s behaviour became ever more erratic, and he died in 1895. We suspect that history might not have paid him much attention at all, had it not been for the achievements of his more successful son.

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