The Dark Arts

Nobody elects the whips. Nobody can hold them to account. And every single person in a position to change that has a reason not to.

In 1995 I watched a BBC documentary called Westminster's Secret Service by Michael Cockerell (who has made a great many programmes of that sort over the years). It was about the dark arts of the whips office, and the phrase was very much in quotation marks.

The bit everybody remembers now is the interview with Tim Fortescue, who had been a whip in the early 1970s. He made an off-the-cuff remark about the sort of thing whips dealt with, which was the problems MPs would have and how the office would handle them, and one of the problems he mentioned as he was talking was small boys.

He did not elaborate, and at the time it seemed to pass. Not unremarked exactly (there was some reaction) but nothing like the reaction you'd expect now.

And yet the remark surfaced many years later, when the whips office came into sharp relief again over things other people had said in Parliament, and suddenly Fortescue on small boys was a serious story. I was left wondering why it had not caused such a big problem at the time.

I am not sure I know the full answer. Partly cultural, presumably, but mostly I think it is the institutional frame these things get looked at through now: post-Savile, so post-2012 or 2013, and after MeToo in the late 2010s. They are viewed differently.

Here is the part that ought to bother us more than it does. That programme went out in the 1990s and nothing changed, and nothing changed when the story resurfaced either, which tells you how sticky these institutions are, how deep the roots go, and how hard they are to shift.

Answerable to themselves

The whips office bothers me because it isn't elected by anyone, it sits in the shadows, and there is no accountability for it at all as far as I can tell. It does an important job in keeping party discipline, but its members appear to be answerable only to themselves and, ultimately, to the leader of the party.

You would not know any of this from the job titles. The Chief Whip is formally the Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury, the Deputy Chief Whip is Treasurer of the Household, junior whips are Lords Commissioners of the Treasury, and others hold offices like Comptroller and Vice-Chamberlain. Those titles give them a place in the infrastructure of parliament and government, and a veneer of respectability, when what the whips office is actually about is the enforcement of party discipline using tactics that are in some cases brutal and in most cases eyebrow-raising.

And then there is the Vice-Chamberlain, who is still held hostage at Buckingham Palace during the State Opening as a guarantee of the monarch's safe return.

It is all jolly hockey sticks. Yes, we are going to take someone hostage and stick them in the palace, but what does it achieve? It belongs with the pomp and ceremony, the carriages and Black Rod knocking on the door, and it serves no purpose at all. It is just a waste of time and, frankly, money.

The whip is also a document

I should be clear about what the job involves, because the word does a lot of work.

Whips exist to make sure MPs do what they are supposed to do as far as the party is concerned, so they turn up to the right debates, they ask the right questions, and they vote the correct way. That last one is the point of the exercise, because without it a government would struggle to get legislation through and an opposition would struggle to defeat one when the arithmetic is close.

The whip is also not merely the name of the people who go round enforcing discipline. It is a document, a physical document that gets issued. A one-line whip is, I think, optional, and gives guidance on what needs to happen (which debates to attend, how voting should work). A two-line whip is a stronger version of that. A three-line whip means you must come and vote, and if you don't, you are in serious trouble. Failing to vote on a three-line whip has in the past been a disciplinary offence, and sometimes grounds for expulsion from the party, so they take it seriously.

There is also a system called pairing, where if a government MP and an opposition MP agree that one of them will be absent, the other voluntarily stays away too so the numbers balance out.

But they do other things, and this is where the real problem lies. They keep track of MPs' personal lives and any difficulties they might have, and they are supposed to function as something like an HR department. So they enforce discipline, and they also perform an HR-adjacent function.

Those two things are in conflict with each other. The people you go to when you are in trouble are the same people who decide what happens to you when you step out of line, and everything else in this piece follows from that.

Half as much

I went and counted. I analysed the last seven parliaments worth of Hansard and found that government backbenchers speak, on average, about half as much as opposition backbenchers. In this parliament the median government backbencher makes 0.38 contributions per sitting day against 0.81 for the median opposition backbencher, and the gap holds in every one of the seven parliaments I could measure.

How much of that do I put down to the whips specifically?

Quite a lot.

When a party's in government, discipline is enforced far more strongly, because it is trying to get legislation through. Oppositions have whips and use them, but their backbenchers are given more freedom to speak as they wish (they are going to be attacking the government anyway and doing it in their own voice). Whipping makes government backbenchers much quieter than they would otherwise be.

I think ambitious new MPs keep quiet because, aside from the occasional constituency issue, the party leadership sees backbench interventions as unhelpful, because if a backbencher is speaking, the leadership cannot control what they are about to ask.

It does try, mind you. You see it at Prime Minister's Questions, where ridiculous questions are asked along the lines of, could the Prime Minister please answer why he is so wonderful and brilliant forever and ever amen. It becomes tiresome hearing these contrived questions that have plainly been geed up by the whips. But new MPs keep quiet because the whips don't want them out there speaking unless it is on their terms.

Two details sharpen the incentive. Whips draw government or ministerial salaries, which matters. They are an integral part of the machine, they are paid to do the government's bidding, and it gives them a strong reason to do the job the way they do it. If they were not paid for it and took only an MP's salary, the attitude would probably be more relaxed (whether that would suit the government of the day is another question).

And whips do not conventionally speak in debates themselves, which is understandable, since the work is supposed to be done behind the scenes. But it does mean the people doing most to determine who speaks in that chamber never have to account for it in it.

The dark arts

I am fairly sure dirt books have existed. I don't know whether they still do, but there has been enough discussion of them over the years. Off the record, never documented, and it makes sense given the way whips work. This was what Fortescue was referring to.

Does it matter whether one literally exists?

It does. You have got a function that is supposed to be simultaneously HR and enforcement, and if the people in the whips office hold secret files on their own side that can be used to blackmail them, that is a dangerous position for anyone to be in.

Nor did it stay in the seventies. In 2022 William Wragg, a Conservative MP but a very independent-minded one, publicly alleged that whips were threatening to withdraw funding from MPs' constituencies. It was officially denied, he reported it to the police, and nothing appears to have come of it. That is the end game you get when an unaccountable clique answers only to the party leader, who for reasons of plausible deniability would rather keep his hands clean and not know the murky details. I think it is shocking that it could have happened, and although we can't be certain it did, I've no reason to disbelieve William Wragg.

Not least because Christian Wakeford (then Tory MP for Bury South, who defected to Labour that same week) backed up Wragg's claims immediately. Wakeford publicly alleged that a whip explicitly told him he wouldn't get a much-needed new high school for Radcliffe in his constituency if he didn't vote with the government.

And there is more than that, because some of what has been talked about over the years, including on the Cockerell programme, amounts to literal physical threats.

Look at who traditionally becomes a whip. Not always (but often) they are big burly men, and that is not an accident: they are chosen because they can physically intimidate people. They can block them in corridors, they can stop them getting where they need to go, and they have been known to grab members by the lapels and hold them against walls. I have certainly heard the allegations.

That is bullying, and it wouldn't be tolerated in a modern workplace. Why is it tolerated in theirs?

That is the end of your career

The sanction behind all of it is the withdrawal of the whip.

Withdraw the whip from an MP and they are expelled from the parliamentary party, they lose its support, and they become effectively independent. More to the point, if an election is coming and they are not reinstated, they have to stand as an independent, and that almost always means losing the seat. Very few have held on in those circumstances (a tiny fraction), so expulsion is usually the end of a parliamentary career. If it happens at the start of a five-year parliament you have got five years to repair it, and if it happens six months before a general election you are finished.

And there are no hearings, there is no appeal, and reasons do not have to be given. They will usually know the reason, because there'll have been a vote they defied or something they said publicly, but it speaks again to the lack of accountability.

No other employer in the country is permitted to behave like this. MPs have themselves passed laws to stop precisely this happening in companies and organisations across the land, which is a double standard, and it shows that in this respect MPs are a law unto themselves.

In fairness to the whips

I don't want to pretend the job should not exist, because it should.

The strongest case for whips is that discipline has to be enforced somehow, and six hundred and fifty MPs voting whichever way they fancy on any issue of the day is a recipe for chaos. There is a democratic argument underneath that too. Most people, standing in the polling booth, are not weighing up an individual candidate's position on this issue and that issue, because they do not pay that kind of attention and there is no particular reason they should.

What they know is that Labour is broadly for higher taxes and more public spending and the Conservatives are broadly the opposite. They may have seen a party political broadcast, some posters, the odd debate, and they come away with a feel for what each party stands for. The idea that they also know how their own MP will vote, on an issue from among the hundreds or thousands that MP will face, just is not realistic.

So MPs do have to vote the party line most of the time, and I am not arguing with that at all.

What I object to is the secrecy. The behind-the-scenes shenanigans, the dirt books, the allegations of blackmail, the threats to constituency funding. Discipline isn't the problem. Nobody outside the room having any idea how it is enforced is the problem.

Kicking the can down the road

In 2009 I wrote that MPs as a group cannot be trusted to act in the best interests of democracy when it comes to the system that elects them. That was about electoral reform, and they cannot.

They have been shown incapable of handling their own expenses, and that was taken away from them. There is a real question over whether they can be trusted to vote on repairing the building they work in, which has been going on for decades. There are fires, there are mice, there are pipes bursting and water coming through walls, and it still is not fixed, because they keep kicking the can down the road, because they want to stay in the building.

This is the same thing again.

The whips, and the way the whips operate, serve the party leadership very well, because they get their policies through in government and they can vote policies down in opposition. I think it is difficult to imagine any government reforming the whips office. Andy Burnham said something adjacent to this shortly before he became Prime Minister, but once his feet are under the table and he wants his legislation through, he will not touch it.

Backbenchers are broadly content with the arrangement too, because they are ambitious. They want to get into government, and once they are there, they will want their policies to go through as well.

Which is the whole problem in a sentence. The people who could fix it are the people hoping to inherit it.

So what would I change? I would make it public, I would make it accountable, and I would make whips answer for what they do, perhaps through a select committee process, with a requirement that allegations against them are examined rather than absorbed.

I have no objection to party discipline, but the way it is implemented has to be transparent. What we have got instead is whispers and rumours about what goes on behind a door nobody is allowed through.

I just do not think that is acceptable in 2026.