Sir Bloodyminded Lady Bolshie! AND
The magnificently maverick Wintertons were the longest-serving couple in Parliament. Now, in a riotous book, their daughter reveals their juiciest gossip – from Speaker Bercow’s ‘creepy’ handshake to Nicholas Soames’ VERY peculiar habit
When my parents both decided to retire as MPs ahead of the general election of 2010, it was unfortunate for them that the Commons Speaker then, as now, was John Bercow. As Conservative members for the neighbouring Cheshire constituencies of Macclesfield and Congleton, Mum and Dad — or Sir nicholas and Lady (Ann) Winterton as the outside world knows them — thought very little of Bercow’s capabilities in that role.
Shortly after he was elected to the Chair in 2009, he had issued a pompous and cack-handed rebuke to my father.
After the sitting, Dad stormed into his private office to complain that, as a senior backbencher, he was not prepared to be treated like that — at which point, Bercow flounced out of the room, slamming the door behind him.
Since then, Dad’s comments about Bercow have been mostly unprintable — but for him and Mum there was no avoiding the time-honoured ritual by which outgoing MPs form a ragged queue in front of the Table of the house and shake the Speaker’s hand before departing the chamber for the last time.
What should have been a pleasure was more of an ordeal, not least because Bercow has a rather creepy habit of grasping people by the hand and not letting go, clinging on in a clammy embrace like a malevolent octopus.
Stomaching this must have been all the harder for Dad because he had once nursed his own dream of becoming Speaker of his beloved house of Commons.
A key requirement for that job is an ability to stand above the party fray, and on that benchmark both of my parents scored very well, always refusing to toe the line, even when the Tory whips twisted their arms to snapping point.
I have never been on the receiving end of a telling-off from those gorillas, but my parents assure me that their unparliamentary language has to be heard to be believed. They begin where Scottish football managers leave off.
And not just Whips. Take, for example, former minister Sir nicholas Soames. he is a grandson of Winston Churchill but his choice of words was somewhat less than Churchillian when, in 1992, my parents voted against Prime Minister John Major’s implementation of the Maastricht Treaty, the further hand-over of powers from the UK to Brussels.
‘You’re c***s — and ugly ones to boot,’ he shouted at them.
YoU might wonder what possessed a man so pitifully bereft of good looks to call other people ugly but Soames is an anthropological oddity at the best of times. on more than one occasion, my father recalls him creeping up behind him, putting his arms around him in a bear-hug, then tweaking his nipples, quite hard.
If that was an attempt at intimidation it was doomed to fail.
As current Brexit Secretary and former whip David Davis says: ‘ nicholas and Ann were both members of that rare band of MPs who were utterly unbiddable, grounded in the concerns and welfare of their constituents. They wore their bloody-minded independence as a badge of honour and they had the courage of a lion and lioness.’
It’s thanks to that bloody-mindedness that most people living south of Watford have never heard of them. While many government ministers have reached their positions of prominence by never saying boo to the party leadership, my parents did say boo. Loudly and often.
True to themselves and what they believed in, they never chased the shimmering mirage of popularity and it’s one of the many reasons I am very proud of ‘those bloody Wintertons’, as they were often known.
They were the Conservatives’ first ever husband-and-wife team at Westminster and also the longestserving couple in the history of the house of Commons, with a combined service of 66 years. Quite a feat when you remember that the average length of service for an MP is just seven years.
Their colourful parliamentary careers overlapped for a quarter of a century — an extraordinary tenure that covered four prime ministers, two recessions and various scandals and took them from the sepia-tinged days before Parliament was televised to the days of Twitter, iPhones and the 24-hour news cycle. While politics has broken many a marriage, they remained a double-act, as inseparable as Tweedledum and Tweedledee and known for being passionate, combative, and publicspirited — everything a backbench MP should be.
When it came to issues such as the Maastricht Treaty, they were infuriated by the number of their Tory colleagues who privately agreed with them on the substan-
tive issue but trooped through the government lobby regardless.
These included neil hamilton, who represented Tatton, another Cheshire constituency. Along with his wife Christine, he later became a minor TV celebrity, horsing about on game-shows for a while, but he was then Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Corporate Affairs, one of those minor government jobs which takes longer to say than to do. As such, he was duty-bound to support the party whip or resign.
‘You’re my conscience, nicholas,’ Dad recalls hamilton telling him, with a grandiose wave, as they headed to vote in their respective lobbies.
Didn’t he have his own conscience?
For my parents, it is always better to have honestly aired differences than a pretence of party unity where no such unity exists, and no one is ever in any doubt about their views on a given subject, for we have always been what you might call a decibel-rich household.
I know how Queen Victoria felt about Prime Minister William
Gladstone when she famously said: ‘He speaks to me as if I were a public meeting.’ Get Dad on to politics and, even at the kitchen table, he does not talk, he orates.
His fondness for the sound of his own voice is perhaps explained by the fact he comes from a long-established family of auctioneers in Lichfield, Staffordshire. Mum grew up 30 miles away in Sutton Coldfield, the daughter of a businessman who sold construction machinery, and a nurse at the local hospital.
Both were horse-mad from an early age, Dad doing his National Service with the 14th/20th King’s Hussars, a cavalry regiment, and Mum breaking a national record by becoming joint master of foxhounds for the South Staffordshire Hunt when she was only 17.
It helped that, like Dad, she has a carrying voice, reminiscent of Bertie Wooster’s Aunt Dahlia — ‘an energetic chivvier of the British fox, who could lift fellow members of the Quorn and Pytchley out of their saddles with a single yip, though separated from them by two ploughed fields and a spinney’.
They met at pony club when they were teenagers and, following their marriage in 1960, they became loving if occasionally erratic parents, Dad’s loyalties divided between family life and his work as a county councillor in Warwickshire.
Mum has never forgiven him for being late in picking her up after she had given birth to me at the local hospital in 1967.
The reason was that he had been attending a council meeting. If not for her, I would probably have been christened Agenda or Any Other Business.
Dad enjoyed the cut and thrust of local politics. But the House of Commons was the place where he found his feet and, from the moment he was elected MP for Macclesfield in a 1971 by-election, he ploughed his own, sometimes lonely, furrow. In his very first parliament, he’d barely had time to find the lavatories when he blew any chances of promotion by speaking out against the Heath government’s policies in Northern Ireland. Over the following years, he went on to savage the Thatcher administration for ‘insensitive and inflexible’ policies which had thrown thousands out of work, and he described the pit closures announced by John Major’s government as ‘quite doolally’. Those are not the kind of comments that get a backbencher promoted. Much of the time, Dad came across as a true-blue, flag-waving pillar of the British Establishment, regarding Michael Heseltine, Kenneth Clarke and others from the Left-wing of the party as closet socialists. But he was a wayward and unpredictable mass of contra- dictions on many social issues. Rumours of impending cuts to his beloved NHS saw him react like an angry rhinoceros, charging head first at the minister responsible. And during his time as chairman of the Commons Health Select Committee he took a special interest in midwifery, learning more about the subject than most women of child-bearing age.
It was during an inquiry into maternity services that he had the distinction of being the first chairman of a Commons committee to allow a woman to breastfeed her baby while giving evidence in public. Hard facts about the NHS had to be punctuated with contented gurgling noises from the baby.
‘I wasn’t totally comfortable with the situation,’ he admits. ‘But there she was, giving evidence, and her baby was clearly hungry, so what could I do? I listened to her and averted my gaze, like an officer and gentleman.’
Above all, he fought tirelessly on behalf of the people who had elected him.
Indeed, there’s a nice story about a man who was stopped in the middle of Macclesfield by a reporter and asked whether he would be voting Conservative at the next general election.
‘No way!’ he said indignantly. ‘I’ve never voted Tory in my life. I’ll be voting for Winterton.’
That story could equally have been told about my mother — a woman for whom the word ‘feisty’ might have been invented.
By THE time Dad had been in the Commons for ten years, she was getting itchy feet. She had things to say and she wanted to say them, hence her decision to run as a Tory in Congleton in 1983.
‘To be fair to Nicholas, who is the original male chauvinist pig, he was totally supportive throughout,’ she told an interviewer of her husband’s reaction.
The Tory old guard was never totally comfortable with her — you could say the same of Margaret Thatcher — but Mum just told them where to stick it, using the sort of crisp Anglo-Saxon expletives she had deployed in her hunting days.
Sometimes she and Dad might find themselves side by side at Prime Minister’s Questions, or they might pass, with a cheery grin, in a corridor. But they spent most of their time apart, working on the different select committees on which they were a constant thorn in the government’s side.
Like many long- standing backbench MPs, their lives can be understood and appreciated not in terms of one memorable accomplishment but through the aggregation of thousands of smaller deeds, trifling in themselves, but cumulatively compelling. Not that their efforts
were appreciated by the Tory leadership. When Dad was knighted in 2002, it was because his name had been put forward by Tony Blair.
If he’d waited for the Tories to nominate him, he’d still be waiting. Mum still is waiting.
But serial rebels are overlooked in the honours process. That’s how politics works.
All that aside, my Dad is inordinately proud of his knighthood which was for ‘services to Parliament’ rather than the designation ‘political and public services’, which is often just code for ‘lick-spittle and time-server’.
During the ceremony at Buckingham Palace, the Queen looked him straight in the eyes, as if contemplating a much- loved corgi of advanced years, and said: ‘ You’ve been around a long time.’
Dad came within a whisker of saying: ‘Not nearly so long as you, Ma’am,’ but, instead, they chatted amicably about a recent visit the Queen had made to The King’s School in Macclesfield, at which Dad had also been present.
TWo old troupers steeped in the traditions of public service. In fact, if you were to imagine a queen who was not just conscientious and hard-working but also had trenchant opinions and a voice like a fog-horn on the Mississippi, you might end up with an approximation to my father.
Both he and my mother are too realistic to think that their names will be remembered centuries after they are dead, nor are they expecting statues of themselves to be erected by public subscription in the squares and marketplaces of Cheshire.
They simply want to be remembered as MPs rooted in their communities, who related to ordinary people and, when asked a question, just said what they thought, in plain English, without clearing the answer with No. 10 first.
Every constituency should have one, though alas, not many do.
It is the careerists, the timeservers, the party hacks, who get advancement. But Macclesfield and Congleton did — thanks to the magnificently bolshie couple who brought me into the world.
AdApted from the Wintertons Unmuzzled: the Life & times of Nick & Ann Winterton, two Westminster Mavericks by Sarah Winterton, to be published by Biteback publishing on Monday at £25. For an offer price of £18.75 (25 per cent discount) until February 4, go to mailbookshop. co.uk or call 0844 571 0640. p&p is free on orders over £15.