Why today’s MPs don’t drink enough!
As a new book reveals some of our greatest leaders found inspiration in the bottle ...
WINSTON Churchill was infamously thirsty, but how much did our great wartime prime minister really drink? Sometimes there would be a glass of white wine at breakfast. The first (weak) whisky and soda would be served an hour later, and for the rest of the day the tumbler was ‘never empty’.
At lunch he drank a lot of champagne followed by brandy. After an afternoon nap, Churchill would reignite his turbines with an iced whisky and soda — or three. Dinner was always a time for champagne, closing with several ‘doses’ of brandy. During the late evening he would sink more whisky and soda — just to make sure he was properly irrigated.
A prime minister who attempted that scale of alcohol intake today would quickly be exposed as a liability. What handwringing there would be. He would be forced out of office and urged to admit that he had a problem.
Britain has never been more soberly governed. Yet Britain’s politicians have seldom been so powerless, so hesitant, so terrified of popular sentiment.
There is a paradox here — and possibly a connection. Westminster journalist Ben Wright, who has just published a book about political topers, traces the link between drink and politics back to the dawn of modern government.
In ancient Greece, democratic symposia invariably involved urns of wine. In Rome, Cicero wrote a furious denunciation of his rival Mark Antony, accusing the general-statesman of being drunk in the mighty Roman senate.
Mark Antony may indeed have had one amphora over the eight, but it did not stop him becoming one of the inspiring leaders of his age and winning the hand of the Miss Egypt of the day, fair Cleopatra.
The truth is that drink does not break down into Left/Right, class, gender or even behavioural categories.
Tony Benn was a teetotaller whereas his Labour colleagues Roy Jenkins and Anthony Crosland were both enthusiastic tilt-merchants. Crosland, who introduced the comprehensive schools system and thereby did far more to alter (or wreck, depending on your view) this country than Benn, would hose himself down with three large gin-and-tonics before answering questions in the Commons.
The intellectual Crosland drank to overcome not only his nerves but also the boredom of politics, particularly in Opposition. When a Westminster colleague told him not to get so drunk, he retorted bitterly: ‘How else is one to endure being here?’
Jenkins, who liberalised laws against divorce and homosexuality — another significant legislative bequest — spent thousands of pounds on his cellar and was nicknamed ‘Old Beaujolais’.
Harold Wilson (himself a secretively heavy drinker) quipped that Jenkins was ‘a good Chancellor — until seven o’clock in the evening’. That was when Jenkins would amble off to his London club, Brooks’s, and dive into the wine list.
Lib Dem grandee Sir Ming Campbell recalls that if invited to lunch chez Jenkins, there ‘would always be very good drink’ such as Pomerol and Margaux, two of the noblest names in French wine.
Indeed, drink used to make British politics tick, and some of the 20th century’s biggest political names were as pickled as late-winter onions. Herbert Asquith, Liberal prime minister from 19081916, was known as ‘Squiff’ (as in ‘squiffy’), such was his fondness for the bottle. He fell asleep one day on the Commons front bench. Doctors said he had ‘hypertension’.
LABOuR stalwart Ernest Bevin, Churchill’s right-hand minister during World War II, and later Foreign Secretary under the ascetic Attlee, was such a boozer that one of his secretaries said that he ‘used alcohol like a car uses petrol’.
In the Sixties, Labour’s Foreign Secretary George Brown was so notorious a drunk that he gave rise to Private Eye magazine’s expression ‘tired and emotional’ (a euphemism for stocious). Brown could be a political liability but the people liked him. Never a cautious careerist like today’s uninspiring politicians. He was human.
That connection between ruled and their rulers is important for the health of democracy, even if it damages the liver of the MP in question.
In 1966, Labour’s Foreign Secretary George Brown spoke at a banquet for Belgian politicians and boasted about the abilities of the British Army. Belgian soldiers, he declared, were utterly useless and spent their time in ‘the brothels of Brussels’.
Ha! Nowadays, whenever ukip’s Nigel Farage makes a punchy speech at the European Parliament — for example, asking that non-event of a former European President, Herman Van Rompuy, ‘who ARE you?’ — the Twittersphere goes into apoplexy because he has been ‘rude’.
What rot. There is not nearly enough honest, forthright rudeness in modern diplomacy.
Author Ben Wright reluctantly concludes that one celebrated story about Brown is apocryphal. That’s the one about him inviting a crimson-clad figure to
dance at a diplomatic reception, only to be told that the tune was not a waltz but the Peruvian national anthem, and that the crimson-clad lovely was actually the Cardinal Archbishop of Lima.
But at a Hampton Court reception, Brown most certainly did congratulate the president of Turkey on being married to a corker of a girl. Then, when students of the Royal Ballet School began to dance, Brown told the Turkish head of state: ‘You don’t want to listen to this bull***t — let’s go and have a drink.’
Can we imagine today’s Foreign Secretary, that dullard Philip Hammond, behaving in such a raffish way? If only.
Adolf Hitler never touched a drop of the hard stuff. Vladimir Putin is assiduously teetotal. But other colourful leaders from history have been boozers: not just Churchill but also Stalin, Pitt the Younger, Boris Yeltsin, Richard Nixon and, to a lesser degree, Margaret Thatcher.
Although the daughter of a Methodist, she liked whisky. She would relax into a hefty scotch or two at the end of the day. And why not?
For her husband Denis, drink was a companion, an amusement, a defining characteristic. It allowed him to present himself a harmless sot to the suspicious outside world, whereas, in fact, he was a major influence on his wife, steadying her resolve to repair British business.
Mrs Thatcher’s press secretary, Sir Bernard Ingham, recalls the ascending order of nouns Denis Thatcher used to describe his drinks: an opener, a brightener, a lifter, a tincture, a large gin and tonic without the tonic, a snifter, a snort, a snorter and a snorterino. One Thatcher, we can conclude, did like wets.
It has long been thus. Robert Walpole, Britain’s first prime minis- ter, was a wine buff. Surviving receipts show that in 1733 he spent £1,118 at vintner’s James Bennett — equivalent today to more than £200,000. And no, he did not stick it on parliamentary expenses.
Walpole was mad about white Lisbon wine and Rhenish wine, Chateau Margaux claret and Chateau Lafite (he worked his way through a hogshead of Lafite — that’s 66 gallons — every three months). He used some of it for entertaining.
Of course, drink was and remains, even in these censorious times, a lubricant in political schmoozing. It can also buy a man’s affection, if not his loyalty.
Lord Strathclyde, recent leader of the House of Lords, uses the expression ‘the corruption of good catering’. When he was in the Cabinet, I used to visit him for occasional chats at his office in the Lords.
He would plant a large Famous Grouse whisky in my palm, whatever the time of day, and invite me to sit in a deep, squashy armchair. It was hard to dislike Tom Strathclyde.
THe new book quotes a Harvard psychologist, William James, who, in 1902, described the appeal of alcohol thus: ‘The sway of alcohol is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticism of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates and says no; drunkenness expands, unites and says yes. It is, in fact, the great exciter of the Yes function in man.’
Politics is a people business. The best politicians are often those who are most at ease with their fellow subjects in small-talk and joshing. If someone like George Osborne (a half- of-lager- shandy girl at best) only went to pubs a little more, perhaps he would not be quite so priggishly pro-Brussels.
Not being a drinker can be just as much of a problem as drinking too much. In the recent London mayoral election, Conservative candidate Zac Goldsmith was pictured holding a pint of beer so oddly, it was pretty plain he had barely encountered one before. Former Labour leader ed Miliband never looked comfortable with a beer, either. It has to be said that drink
can be deadly, as we saw with poor Charles Kennedy, the former Lib Dem leader who died young as a result of alcoholism.
Also, drink can be faked. On the election trail, Tony Blair used to pose with pints of bitter but I never saw him drain them. What a fraud he was. It is claimed Blair thought he drank too much in power (the odd gin and maybe half a bottle of wine a night). Pah! He was a novice compared to someone like Horace King, Speaker of the Commons in the Sixties.
He drank sherry from breakfast (he regarded it as no more alcoholic than water) and may not have had the photographic memory of today’s Speaker, John Bercow, but he was more popular, and you can see why.
One evening, the bibulous King entered the Chamber so plastered that he twice fell off the steps to the Chair. Labour Chief Whip Bob Mellish called out: ‘You’re a disgrace, Horace, and I’ll have you out of that chair within three months!’
King, his Speakerly wig askew, gave Mellish a bloodshot look and hiccuped back: ‘How can you get me out of the chair, Bob, when I can’t get myself into it?’
Order, Order! — The rise And Fall Of Political drinking, by Ben Wright, published by duckworth Overlook at £16.99.