The British Prime Minister in an Age of Upheaval. Mark Garnett

to British politics; and as the Conservative Party moved to the right, Labour lurched to the left. MPs on both sides whose overall loyalty to ‘the tribe’ had allowed them to overlook misgivings about their respective party’s stance on specific issues now began to wonder if they had dedicated their careers to the wrong party. The formation of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in 1981 gave MPs with loosening tribal loyalties an opportunity to join forces under a new banner; but for understandable reasons the prospect of ‘realignment’ looked much more tempting to MPs whose party was currently out of office than to disaffected members of the Tory tribe. Had a senior Conservative joined the ‘Gang of Four’ ex-Labour ministers who launched the SDP, British political history could easily have been very different. As it was, Thatcher’s numerous Tory opponents chose to keep their powder dry for future internal battles. It was not until Thatcher’s third term (1987–90) that ‘One Nation’ Conservatives began to mount serious challenges against key elements of the government’s agenda; for example, thirty-eight MPs voted for an amendment to the poll tax legislation which would have ensured that the charge was related to the ability to pay. Reluctant to organize concerted parliamentary revolts against their party, discontented moderates focused on the possibility of removing the leader; but it was only when the battle-scarred Thatcherites, Nigel Lawson and Geoffrey Howe, lost their patience with the regime that this ‘decapitation’ strategy became feasible, and Thatcher’s sliding opinion poll ratings did the rest.

Initially, the derogatory nickname ‘wet’ had been applied to Conservatives who, according to Thatcherites, were unwilling to stand up to the trade unions (and ‘socialism’ more generally). However, it could easily have arisen from their non-confrontational approach to internal party debates. Once Thatcher had fallen from office the critics of the new Prime Minister, John Major, showed no such inhibitions, particularly on the issue of ‘Europe’ which, in tandem with the Poll Tax, had precipitated her downfall. If the party whips had played any part in deterring attempts to modify Thatcher’s agenda, after the general election of 1992 it became clear that their powers had been exaggerated. The psychology of rebellion had been transformed by the course of events, notably the ERM disaster and Heseltine’s pit closure programme. While ‘One Nation’ Conservatives had voted against her governments in a spirit of semi-apology, Thatcher’s avengers regarded Major as a usurper, so that any shame should attach to parliamentary colleagues who continued to support him. Unlike the ‘wets’, Major’s opponents enjoyed the crucial advantage of considerable sympathy from the right-wing press, which in turn ensured invitations from the broadcast media to eloquent Eurosceptics like Teresa Gorman, the hormonally enhanced MP for Billericay. This kind of attention not only gave MPs who opposed the ratification of the 1992 Maastricht Treaty an invaluable opportunity to convey their message to nationwide audiences, but also bolstered their existing feeling that they were heroic figures in a last-ditch battle to save ‘conservatism’ from traitors to their fallen leader, to their party and to their country. Gorman even published a book whose title (and contents) proclaimed her contempt for the tactics of party managers (Gorman, 1993).

Although Major survived the Maastricht ratification process, his subsequent attempt to relaunch his leadership effectively destroyed his hopes of restoring discipline within the Parliamentary Conservative Party. On the face of it, the response to his appeal at the 1993 party conference for Britain to go ‘Back to Basics’ showed that the public was still highly moralistic, and that rebellious MPs still had reason to fear the ‘dark arts’ (sometimes verging on blackmail) which the whips could employ in extremis. In reality, when Major’s spin doctors wrongly implied that the leader was referring to private morality, they unwittingly transferred part of the remaining power of the whips to the muckraking media. Right-wing tabloid newspapers chose to interpret Major’s campaign as a licence to expose the kind of personal peccadillos which whips had presumably known about, but only divulged if all else failed. The tabloid press had no such reservations: if a story had the potential to sell newspapers, it could now be used at the first opportunity, especially if it related to an MP who had not been unswervingly loyal to the cause of Thatcherism. In other words, the information which the whips had kept from public view in the cause of party discipline was now, in the hands of the media, being used to damage the government and make rebellion look sexy. As post-war moral certainties continued to blur into ambiguities after the 1990s, even whips who were tempted to use the old methods of persuasion could no longer be confident that their threats would have any effect. A more ‘open-minded’ society – partly the product of ‘permissive’ legislation passed after unwhipped votes in Parliament – certainly added to the complications of party management. One might even consider the role of ‘Thatcherite’ philosophy in the turbulent years that followed: since dogmatic individualism had wrought radical changes in so many of Britain’s institutions, was there any reason why parliamentary parties should be spared from the process of ‘creative destruction’?

      For Labour MPs and potential candidates enjoying the Tory turmoil between 1992 and 1997, the obvious lesson was that the worst fate for any politician was to belong to an ill-disciplined party. The problem, as we have seen, is that this apparent truism made its greatest impression on a party leadership which had its own reasons for advising MPs to put party before conscience. If Tony Blair pushed loyalty too far, Labour MPs could hardly forget that their Tory counterparts had been celebrated, rather than vilified, in the press during the Major years. The standard disciplinary weapon for whips is the gentle suggestion that dissent, if followed through to a vote, will either delay or destroy any prospect of promotion. Yet recalcitrant MPs who have taken their objections to the party line close to (and even beyond) the point of formal expulsion have occasionally ended up as leaders – Harold Macmillan, Winston Churchill and (early in our period) Michael Foot fall into this category. More recently, Iain Duncan Smith (Conservative leader, 2001–3) and Jeremy Corbyn (Labour leader, 2015–20) have been elevated to the top jobs within the parties because, rather than in spite, of their repeated rebellions (see below). The culmination of this process came in 2019, when Boris Johnson was elected Conservative leader and Prime Minister despite a record of calculated, rather than principled, disobedience.

Looking back on the years since Maastricht, the former Conservative Chief Whip Tim Renton pronounced that ‘the ability of whips to maintain unity on the government benches has disappeared’ (Renton, 2004, 319). The change since his short stint in the role (1989–90) was symbolized by the removal of the whips’ office from No. 12 Downing Street to another location within Whitehall, in order to accommodate government ‘spin doctors’. A more poignant piece of evidence – which happened a decade after the publication of Renton’s book – was David Cameron’s decision to appoint Michael Gove to the position of Chief Whip (2014), despite his glaring unsuitability for the task. Gove’s predecessor, the veteran George Young, had been another strange appointment. At least Young knew a good deal about the psychology of rebellion, as a veteran of the battle against Thatcher’s poll tax; but he was the kind of person who would help elderly people across the road, whereas most Chief Whips before 1997 would have swerved to knock them over if their superior officers deemed it necessary.

      However, the downgrading and semi-humanizing of the whips did not necessarily entail a complete abandonment of parliamentary discipline. If the party’s team of corporals could not keep order in the ranks, one could always wheel in the top brass, even including the field marshal. Renton recalled that before the key vote on the poll tax (April 1988) he asked Margaret Thatcher if she would meet ‘a handful of rebels to whom I felt she could usefully talk’. However, the poll tax clearly involved Thatcher’s personal authority, since she was closely associated with a policy which had been a manifesto commitment. Renton thought that Tony Blair was right to grant interviews to wavering MPs before the vote on Iraq, which was clearly a ‘confidence’ issue. However, Renton was deeply concerned by the use of the Prime Minister and senior colleagues as means of persuasion on important but less pivotal issues. In particular, he deplored the involvement of Blair, his Chancellor Gordon Brown and even the Secretary of State for Education, Charles Clarke, in attempts to dissuade MPs from voting against the government’s policy on variable tuition fees (January 2004; see above). This, after all, had not been a manifesto pledge; indeed, Labour’s 2001 programme had ruled out such a change (Renton, 2004, 319, 337, 335–6). The recourse to this kind of tactic suggested that the problem lay with wrong-headed government