You have to do something about this guy
After smoked duck, sourdough and as much wine as guests could stomach, how night at Carlton Club ended with the cry:
There was no champagne flowing, so Chris Pincher had to make do with a large flute of chilled prosecco when he arrived at the Carlton Club in London at around eight o’clock on Wednesday evening. The event, a 30th anniversary reception for the Conservative Friends of Cyprus, felt a touch pale, male, and stale.
But in return for listening to a speech by Tory MP Theresa Villiers, guests were promised as many free refills of red and white wine as they could stomach. All of which placed Pincher, a famously thirsty 52-yearold bachelor, in his natural element.
The (now former) Tory whip is not only a keen boozer but also a noted clubman, who recently used his drinks column in the Critic magazine to sing the praises of the ‘long and luscious’ wine list at his Pall Mall gentleman’s club, The Travellers.
At the Carlton, a Tory establishment on St James’s Street, near the ritz, the 100-odd guests at Wednesday’s bash were shoehorned into the grand Churchill room on the ground floor, where they chatted beneath a vast portrait of Sir Winston wearing white tie and puffing away on a large cigar.
Be-suited waiters glided across the deeppile green carpet bearing trays of canapes: smoked duck with oriental vegetable and hoisin sauce, a goats cheese mousse with beetroot and almond crust, pulled pork on sourdough, mini fish cakes and heirloom tomato tarts. Stewards were on hand to top up empty glasses and ensure that tipsy punters didn’t splash anything on the venue’s custard yellow walls. Like other MPs
‘He was clearly trying to seduce young men’
who’d turned out, Pincher was asked to say a few words.
Then, around 9pm (when the reception wrapped up) he adjourned to the club’s downstairs bar, where a crowd of MPs, peers, lobbyists, club officials and assorted hangers-on were settling into deep leather armchairs.
As with many incidents that unfold after alcohol has been taken, the finer details of what happened next remain unclear. But we do know that at some point a couple of hours later, the visibly inebriated Pincher was accused of groping two men. ‘Quite a few people had decided to stay on for a drink, and at around half past ten I saw him, soporific from alcohol, staggering around the bar,’ a senior Tory parliamentarian who was present tells me.
‘He was lurching towards men and drunkenly propositioning them. He was up to all sorts, and so drunk that it looked like he was about to fall down and break something, or someone. It was embarrassing to watch, actually, and completely out of order.’
Another witness told reporters yesterday that the middle-aged former IT consultant was ‘clearly trying to seduce several young men,’ while a fellow MP said he’d been asked to leave the club by several people and was so drunk that ‘he could barely stand up’.
His alleged victims are believed to be parliamentary staffers. One of them immediately reported what had happened to the Tory whip Sarah Dines, who was also in the Carlton Club.
A source says he approached her looking visibly flustered, saying: ‘you have got to do something about this guy!’ It seems that Pincher was then escorted from the Club. ‘Two backbench MPs had to hold him up to stop him collapsing,’ says the senior parliamentarian.
‘He was frogmarched to the door and poured into a black cab. The guy was so drunk that he could barely speak and was unable to tell the driver where he lived. We had to look it up for him. That was how bad it was.’
The following morning, Dines is believed to have reported Pincher to the party’s chief whip, Chris
Heaton-Harris, who in turn conducted an investigation. By Thursday evening, the MP for Tamworth had fallen on his sword, admitting in his letter he was resigning as a whip: ‘Last night I drank far too much. I’ve embarrassed myself and other people.’
By tea-time yesterday, with further details of the allegations emerging, the Conservative Party decided finally to suspend him pending the outcome of an investigation.
Whether that will be the end of the matter is, for the time being, anyone’s guess. The likelihood is that his future will now hinge on whether any of the young men who have allegedly been on the receiving end of Pincher’s advances decide to bring complaints to the police.
What no-one can deny, however, is that few in Westminster are surprised
‘Frogmarched out and poured into a cab’
by the recent turn of events. For this latest sleaze crisis to envelop Boris Johnson’s Tory Party was a scandal foretold.
Pincher, who was elected MP for Tamworth in 2010, has reportedly been the subject of ugly rumours before.
In November that year, he was forced to resign from the Whips’ Office for the first time after the Mail on Sunday carried a shocking article by Alex Story, a former Olympic rower turned Conservative activist.
Story claimed to have been 26 when Pincher – who was in a group of Tory staffers drinking in a Westminster pub – allegedly persuaded him to adjourn to a restaurant for dinner. But after they got in a cab, he claims he was instead taken to Pincher’s home and poured a large whisky, which made him feel ‘woozy’. Pincher became ‘unusually
tactile’, Story claimed. ‘He then started untucking the back of my shirt, massaging my neck and whispered: “You’ll go far in the Conservative Party.”’ Story added: ‘He rushed into another room saying: “Let me just slip into something more comfortable,” and returned in a bathrobe like a pound-shop Harvey Weinstein with his chest and belly sticking out… It was like a sordid Carry On movie scene.’
In an apparent effort to kill the story, Pincher hired Dominic Crossley, a libel lawyer at Payne Hicks Beach who had achieved fame helping the late Formula One founder Max Mosley sue the News of the World for publishing images of him at a masochistic sex party. Pincher insisted that ‘I do not recognise either the events or the interpretation placed on them’ and continues to deny Story’s claims.
Within two months, an internal party inquiry concluded that ‘there has not been a breach of the code of conduct’ and Pincher was allowed to return to the Whips’ Office.
In a separate incident, he was accused of ‘touching up’ the former Labour MP Tom Blenkinsop, who told him to ‘f*** off,’ and he soon earned the nickname ‘a*** pincher’ because of the allegations that he propositioned young men in the bars and on the terraces of Parliament.
‘He gets hammered and does all sorts,’ is how one Tory peer puts it. ‘Anyone else would have been kicked out years ago. We got rid of that chap from Tiverton who watched porn, which is far less serious. But because Boris thinks he’s loyal he’s been hopelessly indulged, which is why this has now happened.’
Says a backbench MP: ‘What we’ve got here is someone who... becomes inebriated instead of just finding a boyfriend like the rest of us would have done. He’s been told not to get p****d and behave like that before.’
So bad was his reputation that the website Politico has claimed Pincher was at one point given a ‘ minder’ to ‘ensure he leaves events without getting too drunk and getting into trouble’.
Meanwhile in February, when Boris Johnson attempted to promote him to
Chief Whip during a reshuffle in return for his support when backbenchers were demanding a leadership challenge, Cabinet Office minister Steve Barclay attempted to intervene.
‘ Officials were made to interview him at length about various allegations,’ says one source who explains that Barclay knew of Pincher’s history. ‘It led to the reshuffle being delayed for several hours, which sparked all sorts of conspiracy theories. In fact it was to work out whether he ought to get the job of chief whip. Obviously he didn’t in the end, but
Boris wasn’t prepared to let him go and that’s why we’re now in this mess.’
Given the number of ignored warning signs, Pincher’s inevitable demise has sparked renewed complaints about the PM’s leadership.
One critic, a disgruntled Tory MP, told reporters yesterday: ‘This means people are asking about Boris’s judgment of character again. He [Pincher] got the job because he was co-ordinator of Operation Big Dog [designed to bolster Boris’s position as leader]. That’s it.’
An un- named minister meanwhile was quoted saying: ‘This feeds straight into the leadership questions. What does it say about Boris’s judgment? He had no shortage of people telling him [not to appoint Pincher] but he gave him the job because Pincher helped save his leadership. The other problem is that the pressure for a byelection in Pincher’s seat will start in the next ten minutes. We’ll lose.’
In Downing Street, heads appear to remain firmly stuck in the sand. The Prime Minister’s spokesman Guto Harri reportedly told staff at yesterday’s Downing Street morning meeting that Pincher now needed to be protected on the grounds that he was emotionally vulnerable and had lost his career, meaning critics should be asked to ‘ think about how he feels’.
As they prepare for yet another grisly weekend fending off an entirely avoidable scandal, staff in No 10 may feel Mr Pincher has done quite enough feeling for one week.
‘Like a sordid Carry On movie scene’