This arid, fly-blown August has been interrupted by a sermon from something called the Institute of Alcohol Studies.
It claims Parliament is an ‘alcohol-soaked workplace’ where all-day boozing is ‘embedded’ and alcohol has been ‘a driver of harmful behaviours and poor conduct among politicians‘.
The institute, an offshoot of the old Total Abstinence League, may be on to something, although not in the way it imagines.
Westminster does indeed have a hooch problem: In my opinion it does not drink enough.
That, naturally, is not the gist of the report Under the Influence? 38 pages of tight-lipped prose in which the institute denounces our legislature as a soaks’ paradise.
It alleges that recent MPs have had to have their stomachs pumped, such was their inebriation. No names are given.
The report complains that ‘individuals are responsible for self-regulating their alcohol consumption’, as if some clipboard-wielding Rosa Klebb should constantly hover nearby to tell backbenchers not to have another sherry.
The report – a dry read, yet drippy – is aghast that alcohol is ‘linked to a networking culture deemed essential to career progression’. Networking in politics? Whatever next? Footballers who cheat?
Quentin Letts contends that today’s Parliament has become overly sober, sterile, and hyper-regulated, leading to overly energetic ministers pushing unnecessary policies
Let us first admit that some people hate politicians and want them to have a miserable time. Why should there be any bars at Parliament? And why do companies and charities lay on free drink at Westminster receptions? Free wine for MPs and peers? The blighters!
The answer to this charge is that politics is a people business. ‘The Devil’s buttermilk’ (as the Rev Ian Paisley used to call alcohol) can make it more honest, as I will explain presently.
Westminster used to be considerably more liquid. The 19th-century Commons was often plastered.
The mighty Norway debate of 1940, when the Chamberlain government was undone, was held amid the whiff of drink. What a night that must have been: The nerves, the tension, the surging emotions. My goodness, just thinking about it you can almost smell the whisky and the sheer urgency of the hour.
In the late 1960s the Commons Speaker was Horace King, a drinker. One evening he teetered into the chamber at 9.25pm and took more than one go at clambering into his chair. He fell across the clerks’ table, his ceremonial wig at a 45-degree angle.
Bob Mellish, government chief whip, snapped: ‘You’re a disgrace, Horace, and I’ll have you out of that chair in three months.’ Speaker King, suppressing a burp: ‘How can you get me out of the chair, Bob, when I can’t get myself into it?’
BBC political reporter Ben Wright, in his entertaining book about parliamentary drinking, claims that in 1983 a Labour MP, Edwin Wainwright, was escorted to a taxi after overdoing it in Strangers’ Bar.
The Green party’s Zack Polanski is known for not drinking alcohol
Wainwright was not, however, ready to conclude his day.
He stumbled back into the Commons and made a speech so slurred that Hansard’s stenographers were unable to discern what he was saying. Instead of a verbatim account of his speech they simply noted: ‘Mr Wainwright made a number of observations.’
That most languid of Conservatives, Alan Clark, was made a junior employment minister in the same year. He was told to make a front-bench speech about equal opportunities. It did not start until after 10pm, and Clark had spent the first part of the evening at a wine tasting.
As he started reading the speech he realised it was polluted by civil-service jargon. To spare the House he spoke at ’78rpm rather than 33rpm’, i.e, a ridiculously high speed.
Labour’s Clare Short did not see the joke and complained. Clark was undoubtedly naughty but did he not have something of a point? Why should anyone be exposed to officialdom’s cliches after supper?
As for Ms Short, five years later I was drinking in the Imperial Hotel, Blackpool, on the first afternoon of Labour’s party conference. Clare was at our table. I used to think I could drink a lot. Next to her I felt a puny amateur.
The past often shimmered on booze fumes. George Brown was a stocious economics minister and Foreign Secretary in the 1960s. The public warmed to him.
Ernie Bevin, most serious and capable of 1940s statesmen, ran on drink in the way ‘a car uses petrol’. Roy Jenkins was nicknamed ‘Old Beaujolais’.
Politics is not, as the Institute for Alcohol Studies claims, a ‘profession’. You do not need to pass exams to become an MP.
The one piece of paper you need is the returning officer’s confirmation that you won your constituency’s election.
Letts highlights how Parliament has a long, colourful history of heavy drinking, suggesting it humanised politicians and fueled bold decision-making
Parliamentary politics is about life, and life can sometimes be drunken, particularly when under the sort of stress that MPs must endure. I am no longer a big drinker. I can quite see that alcohol, in excess, is a poison. But it is something much enjoyed by millions of voters. Politicians are citizens, not saints.
In recent times we had poor Charles Kennedy, who was killed by drink, and there have been one or two cases of MPs bouncing off the corridors; but we have also had Nigel Farage, whose beery image helped liberate us from the European Union.
He was more popular when he radiated that pubby bonhomie. Politics is as much the art of conviviality as debate.
The Green party’s Zack Polanski does not drink alcohol. Maybe he would seem less fanatical, and therefore more persuasive, if he did.
The late David Lipsey, a political adviser in the Wilson years, told Ben Wright: ‘Drink stopped the manic compulsion to do something every single day.’
Today’s ministers, Lipsey suspected, were ‘too sober and too energetic, thinking up wheezes they’d forget about if only they had a couple of large drinks’.
I would offer a more positive case for drink, namely as a truth drug. Ministers are more likely to learn what backbench MPs and their constituents think if they mingle with them over a pint.
One of the criticisms of Sir Keir Starmer as PM was that he seldom mixed with his MPs. The celebrated lawyer did not spend enough time at the bar.
Not that today’s Commons is dissolute. Despite those horror stories of stomach-pumping in the institute’s report, today’s MPs strike me as a clean-livered lot.
A few snifters might make them more prepared to disagree with party whips and wake up to the ridiculousness of regulatory over-reach and much welfare spending.
The institute suggests that arguments in bars are a bad thing. If they help MPs work out what they honestly think about bad Bills, I’d say that was a good thing.
Fainthearts will say ‘but it’s a workplace and you shouldn’t drink at work’. Parliament is much more than a workplace. It is the cockpit of our politics, an arena for debate and awkward truths. In recent times those truths have been tamed by too much sobriety.
Winston Churchill said: ‘I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.’ If Boris Yeltsin had not been so keen on vodka, would he have risked his life by standing on that tank and resisting Soviet hardliners in 1991?
One of the best backbenchers in the Blair years was Labour’s Bob Marshall-Andrews, no stranger to the Garrick bar at lunchtime.
It was Marshall-Andrews who in the Commons came up with the winning description of David Miliband’s tenure as Foreign Secretary.
‘A pillock on his gap year,’ drawled the magnificent Bob. The only surprise was that he did not follow it by crying, ‘and another bottle of club red, please!’
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