For four-and a half years of the last Tory government, Simon Hart sat in cabinet, and was later the government’s chief whip – he has now published an account of that time, in diary form. On the surface, his book, Ungovernable, is a witty and engaging chronicle of what a rolling political permacrisis looks like from the inside.
But it is more than that. As the anecdotes of extreme political dysfunction pile up, what emerges from this book is a cautionary lesson about the corrupting effect that lengthy periods in office can have on governments. Hart presents us with a Tory Party that was morally and politically bankrupted by its decade in office. The people who were meant to be running the government – and the country – had clean run out of ideas. They had grown complacent, and in the end, existed only to serve themselves. After 14 years of rule, during which disasters such as austerity, Brexit, Covid and Donald Trump all happened, the rot set in. Perhaps most alarming of all is the thought that, once that has happened, there is nothing anyone can do about it – until the general election comes round, of course.
So, depressing, certainly – but also hilarious, in a sort of “if you don’t laugh you’ll cry” kind of way. In one entry from early on in his time as Rishi Sunak’s chief whip, Hart receives a call at 2.45am from a colleague who was “clearly pissed but just about coherent”. The MP in question then announced: “I’m stuck in a brothel in Bayswater and I’ve run out of money”. Worse, the trapped MP is convinced that the woman who brought him there and who has left him “in a room with 12 naked women and CCTV” secretly works for the KGB.
What makes Hart’s book all the more startling is that it also contains reminders of how far the Conservative government fell. When the story begins in 2019, the Tories are in a position of total dominance, having just won a crushing landslide against Jeremy Corbyn.
Hart is appointed secretary of state for Wales in the course of a brief chat with a “fired up” Boris Johnson, and on entering government he encounters a world of stress, tribalism and strange anachronistic codes. There are endless morning meetings, afternoons in cabinet where the “usual suspects” drone on, all topped off with long evenings of drinking.
Then Covid appears, first as a small speck in the distance, then as a meteor heading straight for the head of government. In February 2020 Hart describes the virus as “probably still hysteria”. Only a fortnight later, he notes, “even the PM has cut back on jokes”.
As the full magnitude of what is happening begins to dawn on the government, things quickly take a much darker turn. The virus ebbs and flows, there are false dawns, they grow hopeful, only for the numbers to spike again. The government becomes locked in a relentless struggle to save lives and keep the NHS from running out of capacity. The “usual Brexit suspects” turn on the medical experts, Hart says, “whom they have concluded are closet lefties”. Among it all, there are also moments of jaw-dropping absurdity – at one point the cabinet discusses the possibility of building “inflatable mortuaries on your local football pitch”.
And on top of it all is the entirely self-made rolling crisis of Brexit, sucking up endless amounts of time and energy. Increasingly drained by the demands of what they begin to realise is an insoluble situation, the government limps on with an outlook that Hart describes as “another weekend, another crisis”, characterised by embarrassing policy U-turns, forced by-elections and sleaze.
A vaccine is eventually rolled out and the government manages to get a handle on the pandemic. Brexit deals are finally signed off – and yet Hart concludes that the problems “will inevitably rise to the surface”.
And a mere 24 hours after the country emerges from “the wreckage of the pandemic”, Vladimir Putin launches an invasion of Ukraine.
As war builds in Europe, the din of Partygate grows into a cacophony. In December 2021, Hart writes the doom-laden words: “Some helpful soul is alleging that there was a party in No 10 during… lockdown.” Soon afterwards, ministers begin resigning en masse and Boris Johnson’s government begins to fall apart.
Hart’s take on Johnson and his superficially slick operation is that it was all comically amateur. Cabinet meetings under Johnson, he writes, are nothing but “a quickfire 55 minutes in which there was no meaningful discussion”. At one point the prime minister criticises a policy decision made by Alister Jack, because it “resulted in Carrie giving me grief all weekend”. The cabinet eventually becomes so leaky that vital government decisions and information are withheld from them. At this point, the processes of government have ceased to function. As Hart concludes, “We are, at times, simply very bad at politics.”
His picture of Johnson is of a man who brims with optimism and self-belief when in public, but in person is prone to be cold and distant. “I never feel close to him and wonder if anyone ever does,” Hart writes. But the overall picture here is of an absent-minded joker. Johnson signs off on big decisions without knowing what they are. He is never briefed or prepared. He is clearly unfit for office.
When Johnson finally leaves, there follows a stifling summer leadership contest, after which the Tory Party’s members – Hart describes them as “insane and totally ignorant” – deliver Liz Truss as their new leader.
If the Johnson period was The Thick of It, the Truss era was pure Fawlty Towers. Truss cuts a completely bizarre figure. One of her special advisers (SpADs) tells Hart that she “will only drink coffee from Pret” and absolutely cannot eat anything with mayonnaise in it.
But prime minister Truss will be remembered for only one thing – the notorious and catastrophic “fiscal event” delivered by her chancellor and co-ideologue Kwasi Kwarteng that introduced massive tax cuts funded by government borrowing. This stew of hardcore libertarian economic ideas tanked the stock market, the bond mrket and the mortgage market, and sent shudders through the pensions industry – all at the same time.
After 44 days Truss is swept into the refuse bin of history, and replaced by Sunak, who is, according to Ungovernable, the first adult in the room since 2019.
He is competent, efficient, and immediately sets about rationalising the chaotic government apparatus. He makes life in Downing Street “a much more serious, organised and less comedic affair.”
Sunak calls Hart and asks him “simply and slightly awkwardly” to be his chief whip. Hart takes the job, which he describes as “the field hospital into which damaged colleagues are delivered, patched up, and returned to frontline duties”.
The chief whip’s primary task, Hart reminds us, is to make sure the motley crew of Tory MPs vote together to pass government business. And the crew is very motley. Ungovernable offers countless insights into the whole coterie of the final Tory government. Jacob Rees-Mogg is a painful Victorian caricature with an aversion to modernity. We hear of him demanding “a bath not a shower wherever he stays”. Nadine Dorries, we hear, “is, of course, crazy”. Kemi Badenoch exists “in a permanent state of outrage”.
Suella Braverman gets a particularly bad rendering. She is depicted as a tic in the skin of a government that is afraid to dislodge her. “Suella has screwed up again” is a common refrain. But she is not only incompetent. Hart sees a chilling, sadistic streak in her: “She really does give the impression of disliking asylum seekers,” and is “gleeful” about the more cruel aspects of small-boat legislation.
But as well as the parliamentary day job, Hart also has other kinds of problem, for example the departmental SpAd who goes to an orgy and ends up “taking a crap on another person’s head”. In another sensitive case, Hart recalls the time when “a House employee went to a party dressed as Jimmy Savile”.
Somewhere, somehow, as the Conservative Party descends into the mire, Sunak manages to force some of his agenda into existence. But the PM is fundamentally a weak political operative, deeply uninspiring and fatally held back by the mistakes of the past. In the end, the party goes down with a whimper and is thrown out of office by Keir Starmer.
Throughout this book it’s hard to escape the sense that Hart is trying to absolve himself of responsibility for the mess his government created. The book opens with a quote that reads, “Proximity to power deludes some into thinking they wield it”, a line that suggests that Hart himself never really wielded power. There are moments of lucidity, such as in the early stages of his cabinet career when he writes, “I do wonder… how entitled I am becoming.” But Hart cannot escape the fact that he did hold power – and he was part of the problem, a fact that can be seen clearly in his inability to accept responsibility for any of what happened.
Ultimately this is a story of how a party that governed for too long sank into the mire. Although we may laugh at some of its scenes, in the end, it’s not really funny at all.
Ungovernable: The Political Diaries of a Chief Whip is published by Pan Macmillan. Cormac Kehoe is a freelance investigative reporter
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