Hard-drinking in Parliament

09 Jan 2006

One of the less edifying sights of recent days has been a series of Lib Dem MPs, hardly any of which anybody has ever heard of, scrambling to get on television in order to denounce Charles Kennedy for being an alcoholic.  Many things made it distasteful. There was the repeated pious assertion that none of it was personal. Whereas, in fact, calling someone a drunk is one of the most personal attacks that you can make. And the nature of the drinking culture at Westminster means that the wise MP refrains from being sanctimonious about alcoholism. For, if Lib Dem MPs were as shocked as they made out by the notion that Kennedy “had a problem with alcohol”, maybe they are all too unworldly to be in Parliament at all.

The vast majority of MPs do not drink to excess; but some do. This is partly because, despite the “reformed” hours, so much of the day in Parliament is spent killing time. The hanging around is worse for those whose families are not in London. And worst still for loyalist backbenchers, who do not even have planning the next rebellion to keep them occupied. MPs from north of the Watford Gap often have long tedious train (or plane) journeys back to their constituencies every week. Custom and practise is that these interminable journeys are whiled away with something stronger than lemonade. Furthermore many MPs come from towns or communities where historically men spent a long backbreaking day in the factory, mill, foundry or coal mine and followed it with an evening in the pub. Most of them have left the manual labour two generations behind; but a few retain the hard-drinking culture.

But Kennedy’s problems with alcoholism were only a pretext for pushing him out.  Lib Dem MPs appear to have persuaded themselves that he was holding them back politically. The truth is (as any London Labour MP could tell them) is that one of the most important reasons for urban Labour voters deserting to the Lib Dems was Iraq. . But the patrician Ming Campbell, who they seem poised to crown as their new leader, was visibly uncomfortable with his party’s position and yearned to support Tony Blair over the war. By the next election Ming Campbell will be the oldest and most “establishment” party leader. So the  Lib Dem offer will be Ming, flanked by the battalion of interchangeable white men in suits who make up their “best and brightest”, together with a set of policies on health, education and other public services( the Orange Book agenda) to the right of where Cameron is positioning himself. If they think that this is going to win them votes in London and other big cities they are delusional.  

A post-Blair Labour party will be blowing the subliminal “dog whistle” to call its core vote home. Cameron is intent on doing everything, short of putting Norman Tebbit’s head on a pike, to coax liberal-minded Tories back into the fold. Squeezed between these two phenomena Liberal Democrat MPs may have cause to reflect that Charles Kennedy was a better politician drunk than most of them are sober.

 

 



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