Hart is far too kept to be a good diarist

Unmanageable: the political newspapers of a chief whipBy Simon Hart

Simon Hart should never have published these intimate newspapers. So let's say the traditionalists, who are faced that he revealed that the secrets were entrusted to him as a chief whip. Charles Moore explained their argument in The spectator::

“Tort is obvious that whips cannot do their jobs unless their deputies trust them to ensure the security of their secrets. Their silence is the secular equivalent of the confessional seal. unmanageable.

But the problem with Hart newspapers with regard to readers is that it is far too discreet. Large diarists – Samuel Pepys, Chips Channon, Alan Clark – are wonderfully prying. They transmit all the most fun and embarrassing gossip and also give us a lot of their own transgressions.

Hart has experted his intimate newspapers, either by not writing the most embarrassing things, or by deleting it before the publication, or at least by deleting the name of the person concerned.

It is probably thus that he reconciles the publication with the reasonable expectation of conservative deputies that when they told him about their difficulties, he would not put them in a book, in particular a published less than nine months after his visit to the end of the Whip.

The book has no clue, which will reduce its value to any historian who wants to discover if Hart highlights a politician in the years 2019-24.

Hart's most pleasant anecdote, printed in serialization in Time,, speaks of a conservative deputy who rings him at 2.45 in the morning to say:

“I am stuck in a brothel in Bayswater and I lacked money. I met a woman by leaving the Carlton Club who offered me a drink, but now I think she is a KGB agent. She wants 500 and left me in a room with 12 naked women and video surveillance. ”

The rest of the book is not up or below at this level. Hart has no ear for the tongue, and no desire to record what his colleagues initiated say when he has a drink or a meal with them.

But his story offers, in particular in his second half, when Hart is in chief Whip for the entire Minister of Rishi Sunak. A way to assess the morale of those who strive, in adversity, to keep the show on the road.

In the first half, from victory in the 2019 general elections to Boris Johnson's fall in the summer of 2022, Hart is a Welsh secretary, a position of little consequence, because most of the decisions are made by Mark Drakeford in Cardiff.

Hart remembers, when he prepares the field, “once I think it would be difficult for me to stay at a party led by” Johnson,

“But then, I quickly found myself happy to serve … under him and to go out on the defending the waves. He was a hypnotist like that, and I became the total opportunist. I loved our occasional conversations, even if we were never really friends as such.”

During the debacle of Owen Paterson in November 2021 Hart Records: “As the Bordeaux goes, he enters directly into the charts in the front row.”

In January 2022, he wrote by Johnson: “You can feel love to exhaust him”, in July of the same year, he found the Chris Pincher affair, who finished Johnson as PM, “unbearably terrible”, and in March 2023, when Johnson was locked in battle with the Privileges Committee, Hart said to Hart.

The imminent victory of Liz Truss on Rishi Sunak in the race to replace Johnson is considered by Hart as “a total disaster”, and after having won, he writes that “I am absent, little likely to come back”.

But the farm proves a transitional figure, although “in electoral terms, we should never recover”, and it is succeeded by Sunak, who makes Hart her chief whip, and receives in these pages the following testimony:

“Rishi Sunak is a man whose ability to learn, absorb and analyze is in a separate league.

Rory Stewart, “it seems crazy that we have lost it from our ranks” – and David Cameron, whose return in November 2023, as Minister of Foreign Affairs, lost our ranks “.

From time to time, Hart darkly comments on the weakness of the party system to select the candidates, after having seen some of the defective figures that have succeeded. On May 30, 2024, he recorded that the party must find candidates for 160 seats before June 7, the end of the appointments for the next general elections.

Hart helps check the “convenience”, at a rate of 30 per day, the short lists of three candidates whose local association will choose:

“In an evaluation, poor James Forsyth and Rupert Yorke should judge whether the defense of a candidate, that a photo of his penis had been sent by mistake to contact rather than his doctor as expected, was sufficient to allow him to ask for seats. This was not the case. “

Once seen behind the scenes, the operation of the government often does not seem more than a series of body improvisations, with some qualified employees who somehow hold things. Here is the Hart Description of the Fuets Office:

“This is the campaign hospital, in which damaged colleagues are delivered, distributed and returned to front line tasks. It is the funnel through which everything is channeled. ”

Hart's work, as a chief whip, is to win votes by maintaining unity, it therefore does not generally see the interest of the rebels, and is, in fact, extremely bored by them.

It is certainly true that without maintaining a kind of internal cohesion, the conservative party cannot make a convincing offer of its services to the British public.

One of the racing difficulties posed for several decades by Nigel Farage is that he speaks for a lost conservative tribe, without which the party is weakened. On June 3, 2024, Hart recorded that Farage must be held in Clacton:

“Colleagues suggest that we conclude an agreement, but what does he want that we have not already delivered?”

How to reach these 25% of the most angry voters? Cameron and Sunak were mostly too reasonable to do so, although Cameron finished the problem for a while promising the referendum.

Johnson, with his disruptive anti-establishment instincts, reached angry voters both in the 2016 referendum campaign and in the 2019 general elections. Sir Keir Starmer has no call to these voters. One of the unanswered questions of British politics is the place where the majority of angry will go next time.

Hart becomes furious in these pages with Bill Cash, John Redwood, Suella Braverman, Nadine Dorries, Natalie Elphicke and Andrew Bridgen, who are all, in their different ways, more than capable of being exasperating.

But if freedom has to last, the government must be precarious and rebels are necessary. At great moments in parliamentary history, the ruling party becomes unmanageable, having failed to reach the level of events, and leadership passes in other hands.

Hart himself was a not very noisy rebel, a chief of the campaign alliance, but we do not read anything here.