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  ORDER, ORDER!

  ORDER, ORDER!

  The Rise and Fall of Political Drinking

  Ben Wright

  Duckworth Overlook

  This eBook 2016 by

  Duckworth Overlook

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  © 2016 by Ben Wright

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  The right of Ben Wright to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress

  eISBN:

  UK: 9780715650820

  Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

  To Poppy

  ‘I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.’

  Winston Churchill

  CONTENTS

  List of illustrations

  Illustration credits

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 Government under the Influence

  Three-bottle Men

  Old Beaujolais

  ‘Tired and Emotional’

  A Rake’s Progress

  A Lost Leader

  Chapter 2 Parliament: Drinks on the House?

  Licensing and Liquor

  The Smoking Room

  The Terrace

  Strangers’ Bar

  The Pugin Room

  Annie’s Bar

  Moncrieff’s: The Press Bar

  The Sports and Social Club

  The Lords Bar

  The Commons Chamber

  Chapter 3 Drying Out

  Kennedy’s Curse

  Reckless Drinking

  Punches and Politics

  Nick Clegg Splits a Bottle

  Boris

  Chapter 4 Prime Ministers: Tipplers at Number 10

  Walpole’s Wine

  Pitt’s Port

  Squiffy Asquith

  Winston Churchill

  Wilson: Brandy takes the Strain

  Thatcher: Winding down with Whisky

  New Labour, New Sobriety?

  Beyond Blair

  Chapter 5 Pubs, Clubs and Parties

  Drinking for Britain

  Spinning with Bottles

  The Political Lunch

  Cherry Soup and Slivovitz

  Members Only

  Clubland

  Party Time

  Supping with the Leader

  A Height for Drinks

  Chapter 6 Cocktails and Congress: Political Drinking in the United States

  Prohibition

  The Presidents

  Nixon’s Nemesis

  D.C. Drinking

  Chapter 7 From Canberra to the Kremlin

  Comrade Vodka

  Protocol and Alcohol

  Chapter 8 Time, Gentlemen!

  Barcelona Comes to Britain

  A Political Price

  Epilogue: Last Orders?

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  1 Sir Francis Dashwood

  2 ‘An election entertainment’ by William Hogarth

  3 ‘Canvassing for Votes’ by William Hogarth

  4 George Brown on the cover of Private Eye

  5 The Valentia Vat

  6 Ted Heath in Annie’s Bar

  7 The Palace of Westminster terrace

  8 Charles Kennedy the day before he resigned as Liberal Democrat leader

  9 Boris Johnson at a London brewery

  10 Sir Winston Churchill drinking with Dwight D. Eisenhower

  11 Margaret and Denis Thatcher

  12 Nigel Farage in a Westminster pub

  13 Peter Mandelson at the Gay Hussar restaurant

  14 Tony Blair at Trimdon Labour Club

  15 US Congressmen celebrate the end of prohibition

  16 Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev

  17 Barack Obama in an Irish pub

  18 Boris Yeltsin

  19 Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt

  20 1908 Licensing Bill campaign poster

  ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

  1 Reproduced by kind permission of Sir Edward Dashwood Bt.

  2 Courtesy of the Trustees of Sir John Soane’s Museum

  3 Courtesy of the Trustees of Sir John Soane’s Museum

  4 Reproduced by kind permission of Private Eye magazine

  5 Image published in Parliament Past and Present by Wright and Arnold, Hutchinson & Co., London c.1905. Kindly reproduced by the Parliamentary Archives UK, BOOK/2300

  6 © ANL/REX/Shutterstock

  7 © Lisa Ryder/Alamy

  8 © Paul Grover/REX/Shutterstock

  9 © Julian Makay/REX/Shutterstock

  10 © Everett/REX/Shutterstock

  11 © Herbie Knott/REX/Shutterstock

  12 © Paul Grover/REX/Shutterstock

  13 © REX/Shutterstock

  14 © The Independent/REX/Shutterstock

  15 © Everett Collection Historical/Alamy

  16 © Everett/REX/Shutterstock

  17 © Tim Rooke/REX/Shutterstock

  18 © Sipa Press/REX/Shutterstock

  19 © Mirrorpix

  20 © Mary Evans Picture Library

  INTRODUCTION

  In his memoir, Tony Blair confessed that his evenings in Downing Street were accompanied by a stiff G&T and half a bottle of wine. Although he thought, rightly, that his drinking was modest by historic standards, he nevertheless worried that it had become a ‘prop’. He also knew that his own rise to the top of the Labour Party had happened because of the sudden and early death of his predecessor, John Smith, who had been a serious drinker.

  It was claimed, too, that the fall of Mrs Thatcher at the hands of her own party could be attributed, at least in small part, to the fact that the Conservative MP running her re-election campaign was sozzled. Then there was the sad fate of Charles Kennedy, the talented and engaging leader of the Liberal Democrats, whose alcoholism had brought him down (and was to end his life).

  It was all this that started me thinking about the role of alcohol in politics; and whether there was a story to be told about it. I soon discovered that there was. It is a story full of remarkable characters and extraordinary events. There is much that is amusing, but also much that is disturbing. As a political reporter working in Westminster, I knew that alcohol had long lubricated political life (including for journalists), but I wanted to explore how its role had changed over time. It soon became clear that Blair’s concern about alcoholic over-indulgence would not have impressed the dedicated political drinkers of the past.

  These have included Winston Churchill, of course, a whisky and soda always close at hand. And his wartime Minister of Labour, Ernest Bevin, who was said to use alcohol in the way a car uses petrol. Herbert Asquith’s fondness for a drink earned him the soubriquet ‘Squiff’ and shortened his tenure in Downing Street at the start of the First World War. Several Prime Ministers drank more the longer they stayed in office. In fact, alcohol threads its way through the political past, bridging time and place.

  When Labour MP Clare Short caused uproar in the House of Commons by accusing the Tory minister (and diarist) Alan Clark of having s
uch slurred speech that he was clearly drunk in charge of a dispatch box, she was not the first politician to make this charge against a political rival. Two thousand years earlier, the Roman statesman Cicero launched a ferocious attack on his political enemy, Mark Antony, claiming that he had been incapacitated by drink at a meeting of the senate: ‘At an assembly of the Roman people … when it would be disgraceful for a man even to burp – he was sick! And he filled his own lap and the whole tribunal with scraps of undigested food reeking of wine.’1 Before Cicero’s time, the Greeks believed wisdom flowed from wine and upper-class men would assemble in symposiums for drinking and discussion. Alcohol has lubricated politics ever since.

  It is largely a British story that is told here, but alcohol is woven through the history of international politics too. Joseph Stalin flushed out traitors with vodka. Franklin Roosevelt’s evening ritual was to mix martinis for friends on the Oval Office desk. The two leaders carved up post-war Europe during alcohol-fuelled dinners with Churchill at Yalta. The disintegration of both Richard Nixon and Boris Yeltsin was largely down to drink. Whether in Britain or abroad, alcohol is a bridge between the politicians of the past and those of today. It enhances the exhilaration of political success and numbs its disappointments. It unknots in moderation and unbalances in excess.

  For politicians under pressure and burdened by difficult choices, alcohol can be a seductive friend. Tony Blair was not the first political leader to agonise about its power and wonder whether the upsides outweighed the downsides. In the early years of the Mughal empire, alcohol was widely enjoyed by its Muslim rulers. Babur, the empire’s founder, created a dynasty that stretched from Afghanistan to southern India. A warrior, poet and writer, he produced a remarkably candid and colourful autobiography that includes several paeans to the pleasures of alcohol and drinking parties. But in 1527, on the eve of a major battle for the future of India, Babur made a vow to give up drink, smashing all his goblets and destroying his stocks of wine, a decision he soon regretted. By February 1529 he was having second thoughts, writing in a letter:

  Through renouncement of wine bewildered am I;

  How to work know I not, so distracted am I;

  While others repent and make vow to abstain,

  I have vowed to abstain, and repentant am I.2

  In part at least, it is through his soul-searching over alcohol that Babur is brought to life and becomes a person we can recognise half a millennium later. The hope is that this will also be the case with the people who appear in this book, revealing something of the personalities of politicians known otherwise only for their public lives and political actions.

  Of course, this is an incomplete story. In giving attention to the political drinkers, it neglects both the teetotallers (except as noises off) and the moderate imbibers. This is like telling the story of motoring only through the antics of dangerous drivers, ignoring those who kept assiduously to the speed limits. Alcohol is a discriminating political lens, though not a distorting one. It is also a depressingly male story of chaps drinking with chaps. Apart from such rare exceptions as Margaret Thatcher, this glimpse into the drinking habits of politicians is a reminder of how far politics has been dominated by men. Yet when politicians fret about the drinking habits of the public, it is usually women – whether in Gin Lane or Binge-Drinking Britain – about whom they panic most.

  There are politicians who drank with epic enthusiasm and are remembered for adding to the vitality and gaiety of parliamentary life. There are others, including some of the same ones, who drank too much and died too young. Some had a capacity for consuming large amounts of alcohol without any noticeable damage to their performance as politicians, while for others even a small amount produced unfortunate consequences for their behaviour. Some drinkers reached the political heights, while others are the forgotten casualties of Westminster life who turned to alcohol to relieve loneliness, boredom and frustration.

  When Charles Kennedy died in June 2015, a searchlight was briefly cast across Westminster. Why did Kennedy drink? Was there something about politics that made its practitioners more susceptible to the bottle? Were the abundant bars of the Palace of Westminster somehow to blame? Did Kennedy’s drink problem and our attitude to it mirror Britain’s relationship with alcohol? In the days after his death such questions swilled around in the press.

  When preparing this book, I had planned to write to Charles Kennedy to ask if I might talk to him. I wanted to ask him why he drank and whether the pressures of political life had pushed him towards the bottle. But I hesitated for months, wary of causing offence, and then it was too late. Yet the questions remain.

  Simply telling a ribald story about the antics of drunken politicians, of which there are many examples in this book, would not be complete if it did not also recognise that alcohol has ruined the lives and families of many politicians, just as it has ruined the lives of others. While many can safely navigate their way through the bars, receptions and trays of free drinks, others clearly cannot. The enduringly seductive power of alcohol was memorably described in the celebrated 1902 lectures by the Harvard psychologist and philosopher, William James:

  The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms 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. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth. Not through mere perversity do men run after it.3

  Politicians have certainly run after it, as this book will show. Perhaps there is something about the activity of politics that has made alcohol particularly attractive to its practitioners. It breaks the ice, oils the wheels, enlivens conversation, perks one up, boosts one’s confidence (even if falsely) and provides a shortcut to camaraderie. All this matters in politics. But it can also depress and deaden, leading to a dangerous dependency and making people a liability both to themselves and to others. Perhaps this, along with a growing concern for their livers, is one reason why today’s politicians have started to sober up. Only Charles Kennedy knew why he drank and I never had the courage to ask him. But I hope this canter around political drinking might throw some light on why so many of us reach for a bottle, whether we are in politics or not.

  CHAPTER 1

  Government under the Influence

  Before Twitter, television, universal suffrage and party discipline, Britain’s leading politicians were free to drink with impunity. Spared the scrutiny of the press and the opprobrium of voters, government ministers could drift through their days in a state of inebriation. In Georgian Britain, politicians flaunted themselves in drunken revelry while bribing voters with alcohol. Political drinking today is very tame by comparison. Now a brawl in a parliamentary bar leads to tabloid scorn and resignation. Campaigning party leaders pose with pints for the cameras but their glass is merely a prop, a symbol that they have something in common with voters.

  The past three centuries of British politics is, in no small part, a story of sippers, swiggers and bon viveurs; political sybarites who enjoyed the pleasing effects of a good drink. It is a story of political casualties too, such as the former Labour Foreign Secretary George Brown, who Harold Wilson thought brilliant in the job until four o’clock in the afternoon. It is also a story of change. In the 1970s, the drinks cabinet was still a crucial piece of Whitehall furniture and its spirits used to oil the cogs of government. But the days when senior politicians could drink themselves into oblivion while they held high office were coming to an end. Ministers became more wary about trying to do the job half-cut and they started to sober up. Today’s most prominent politicians are practically teetotal compared to the dissolute rakes of the eighteenth century.

  Three-Bottle Men

  There was a time when privileged young men dressed in bow ties and tai
ls shamelessly paraded their wealth in rituals of frivolous debauchery. These men were members of secret dining societies and clubs such as White’s and became the most prominent politicians in Britain. But the political ancestors of David Cameron and George Osborne felt no need to airbrush away their antics to placate the press or public opinion. In the eighteenth century, excessive drinking, gambling and carousing with cronies in Pall Mall clubs did not stop if a gentleman went into politics. As London’s poor destroyed themselves with gin, the leading statesmen of Georgian England played their own part in this era of huge alcohol consumption.

  One of the most extravagant politicians of the time was Sir Francis Dashwood, who became Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1762. A lecherous rake with a riotous private life, the aristocratic Dashwood founded the Society of Dilettanti in 1732 after spending time cavorting around Europe. The stated qualification to join Dashwood’s new society was having been to Italy, but Horace Walpole, a Whig MP and son of the first Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, said the real test was being drunk.1 But it was for founding a hell-fire club in a ruined Cistercian abbey near his home in West Wycombe in Buckinghamshire that Dashwood is remembered. He had rented Medmenham Abbey since the 1740s and there, according to various accounts, he presided over an orgiastic, drunken, debauched cult dedicated to reviving the decadence of the original hell-fire clubs.

  The Brotherhood of the Knights of St Francis met at Medmenham on Wednesdays and Saturdays between June and October. Because the Commons was in recess, this was handy for the many MPs who were members. Lord Sandwich, the First Lord of the Admiralty, was one of the ‘brothers’, as was Thomas Potter, the Paymaster General. Other MPs who went included Sir William Stanhope, John Tucker, Sir John Aubrey, John Martin, Richard Hopkins and John Wilkes.2 The Earl of Bute was the only Prime Minister who is believed to have belonged to the Brotherhood.

  The extent of their debauchery has long been disputed by historians. For instance, it is questionable whether the brothers actually did drink wine out of a human skull or administer the sacrament to a baboon. However, there is plenty of evidence that Sir Francis Dashwood and his friends enjoyed dressing up as monks and seducing the masked ‘nuns’, who may have included the wives and sisters of members as well as prostitutes recruited from London brothels. By flickering candlelight they frolicked in the caves that Dashwood had excavated, holding elaborate rituals and ceremonies fuelled by the contents of Medmenham Abbey’s vast cellar. As one historian says: ‘Grave statesmen would not have indulged in this outrageous behaviour without copious libations.’ Horace Walpole wrote that ‘Bacchus and Venus were the deities to whom they almost publicly sacrificed’, and the cellar accounts of the club, some of which survive, suggest deep toping.3 The brothers left gin drinking to the poor; claret and port were their drinks of choice, although the wine books also list calcavella, hock and Dorchester beer. When Sir Francis Dashwood died in 1781 there was £6,000 worth of wine in the abbey’s cellar, the equivalent to £900,000 today.4