MP stuck in brothel with KGB agent and 12 naked women, Suella's Rishi diatribe... and the 'f***ing useless' minister we can't get rid of: Tory chief whip tells all - and revelations are jaw-dropping
Barely a month into his tenure as Chief Whip and Simon Hart was roused from his slumbers in the early hours of a Thursday morning by the urgent ringing of his bedside telephone.
The caller, a newish Tory MP, was evidently well-refreshed but, as Hart recalled, 'just about coherent'.
'Hi, chief. Hope I haven't woken you up,' he breezily began.
Hart, a seasoned political operator appointed by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to the key role of chief whip – the enforcer of party discipline – noted sardonically: 'It's 2.45am, for f*** sake.'
The conversation that followed was unusual to say the least, but it was to become characteristic as the former head of the Countryside Alliance found himself centre-stage managing the hapless, hopeless and sometimes pointless final years of the last Tory government.
'What's up,' he asked? The MP, sadly unnamed, replied: 'I'm stuck in a brothel in Bayswater and I've run out of money.'
The impassive Hart listened on as the backbencher explained how he had met a woman at the Carlton Club, spiritual home of the Conservative Party, and that she had offered to buy him a drink.
The only trouble, he tipsily confided, was that now he thought she was 'a KGB agent', adding: 'She wants £500 and has left me in a room with 12 naked women and CCTV.'
Hart organised what he called an 'extraction mission', arranging a taxi to collect the man to return him to his own hotel while he went back to sleep.
This infamous kiss caught on camera revealed Matt Hancock's affair
Suella Braverman was said to have launched a bile-filled 10-minute diatribe against Rishi
Then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak with Simon Hart on the day PM left office
A little over an hour later the phone rang again. Things had not gone according to plan.
The MP told Hart that he had somehow got into the wrong taxi, driven, he said, 'by an Afghan agent called Ahmed' who he claimed, 'demanded £3,000 for a b*** j**'.
'What happened,' asked Hart? 'I legged it back to the hotel and locked the door,' said the MP.
Hart, a former Welsh Secretary went on to tell the Prime Minister about the episode over a pizza in the Downing Street flat, recalling: 'Poor Rishi – he doesn't believe such things happen. He is refreshingly straight-laced and tends to see the good in most people. He should work in the whips' office for a day and that would soon change.' A few weeks later Hart notes that at a security briefing ministers were told not to engage with any 'unusually beautiful Chinese women (or men, I guess)'.
It prompted Scottish Secretary Alister Jack to quip: 'If you think you are punching above your weight, ask yourself why.'
Sexual misconduct – or would-be misbehaviour – frequently came across his radar. Over dinner at the snooty Hurlingham Club in West London he was informed that a senior and married MP had 'got a bit fruity' with a journalist having suggested her 'lovely dress would look better discarded on my bedroom floor'.
To which Hart tartly observed: 'Groan…'
Like all the best chronicles of political power, it is not the recollections of those at the top, but the memoirs of those figures who worked at one remove from them that provide the most compelling account. Some such as the late Alan Clark, minister, historian and serial philanderer, shone a light on how our masters operated and agonised. Reading Simon Hart's hair-raising narrative of his 18 months in the whips' hot seat is more akin to lifting a stone and peering at what creepy-crawlies emerge. But there is agony aplenty too.
So the publication of his diaries Ungovernable – which are being serialised in The Times – have Westminster agog, frothing with curiosity at the indiscretions and near-farcical behaviour of ordinary MPs and the over-weening ambition of ministers who often viewed promotion and preferment with nothing less than entitlement.
For all the venality exposed, Hart's account at times resembles a parody.
Invited into the inner sanctum for Sunak's November 2023 reshuffle, he and others listen aghast at the rant from Suella Braverman after being sacked as Home Secretary and whom the PM has put on speakerphone.
After some pleasantries, Hart says, 'all hell breaks loose' at what follows – a 'ghastly ten-minute diatribe of vindictive and personal bile.'
It was, Hart writes in his journal, hard to know how to react and 'where to look'. At times it felt like 'we are all eavesdropping', but he acknowledged that for the protection of the Prime Minister and the integrity of the government a record had to be taken – and saved. So he describes the scene of onlookers sitting in 'astonished silence' around a table of discarded notes and half-empty coffee cups, doing their best 'not to grimace, smile or give any indication of what we feel'.
Several months earlier he'd written a reminder to tell the PM that Braverman 'is not his friend'. While the whips witnessed 'the real Suella', No 10 saw 'the more house-trained version'.
He added: 'We see the leaks, the tearoom briefings and the general lack of solidarity.'
But the story which has grabbed the greatest attention concerned an earlier shake-up of ministerial posts. One fortunate Cabinet appointee is described as being 'less grateful than her promotion deserves'.
It was not her appointment that was so tantalising, but Rishi's observation, as recorded by Hart. 'Let's all agree about one thing,' the normally prim PM is quoted saying. 'She is f****** useless but we can't get rid of her.'
By last night, the devastating observation had triggered an extraordinary Whitehall guessing game to identify the ungrateful minister.
There were just three female Cabinet level appointments in that February 2023 reshuffle: Lucy Frazer became Culture Secretary while both Michelle Donelan and Kemi Badenoch were handed revised portfolios. Which of those three could Sunak have allegedly been referring to?
Judging by comments on social media Kemi, the current Conservative Party leader, appears the likeliest culprit.
In a later entry, Hart describes an encounter with Badenoch in what he calls a 'chat about trans-stuff'. Trying but failing to find 'a mutually useable wavelength', he added pointedly: 'She is another one who lives in a permanent state of outrage. It must be so tiring.'
Mischievous and insightful, it is the most hilarious examination of parliamentary misbehaviour since Sasha Swire's Diary Of An MP's Wife in 2020. She had a ringside seat during David Cameron's premiership.
But Hart is also a merciless critic. The maverick Tory MP Andrew Bridgen, who lost the whip over crass remarks comparing the Covid vaccine roll-out to the Holocaust, is labelled an 'utter k**b' and 'malevolent creep'. He said there was a 'massive cheer' after he announced that the whip was being taken away from Bridgen.
When he learned that Blackpool MP Scott Benton has been the victim of a newspaper lobbying 'sting', Hart noted that there appeared to be no innocent explanation 'unless rank stupidity is included'.
Problems come thick and fast. A standards committee report into the behaviour of Chris Pincher, a one-time deputy chief whip accused of groping a young man had concluded with an eight-week suspension.
'He is finished,' Hart recorded while acknowledging that the punishment seemed 'unbelievably harsh given he has lost his job, all his money and most of his friends'.
But he reasoned that 'maybe we are all discovering that 'squeezing people's arses' is not acceptable, however fleetingly or however drunken the circumstances'.
However, sometimes he cannot help but treat some MPs' peccadillos with a comic sense of incredulity. One day the veteran Peter Bone informed him that he was being suspended for bullying a young male assistant, insisting it was all a bit of a misunderstanding. A disdainful Hart noted: 'Peter was 60 and the lad was not yet 25, so the claims he exposed himself and had a habit of making the lad sit with his hands between Peter's legs as punishment for wrongdoing will eliminate much chance of public sympathy.'
Reassurance for wayward MPs was his stock in trade, but it was not just MPs who needed it.
Simon Case, the former Cabinet secretary, raised concerns with him about MPs 'being overtly rude about civil servants'. He wrote: 'He asserts if there's 'open season' – in which MPs and ministers blame all our problems on the civil service – then we could trigger a go-slow on areas of controversial legislation.
'In other words, if you are rude to the waiters, don't be surprised if they eventually spit in your food.'
It can't have helped that Robert Jenrick, now shadow justice secretary, believed civil servants were placing asylum seekers in hotels in Tory marginal seats in a bid to damage them. 'Jenrick thinks the Home Office doesn't give a s*** whether the scheme works or if our people are offended,' Hart wrote.
However, six months into his job and Hart was no longer surprised by his colleagues' lack of self-awareness as they swarmed around the King and Queen during a royal visit to Westminster Hall.
He despaired: 'It became a scrum with some MPs manoeuvring themselves so they could have a second or even third attempt at a selfie, or ... monopolising the King, which included, in one notable instance, producing an envelope of poetry to read.'
One of his first controversies concerned former Health Secretary Matt Hancock, who had been forced to resign when it was revealed his affair had breached Covid restrictions.
Hancock said he was asking for leave of absence to appear on I'm A Celebrity...Get Me out Of Here!
But when he then disclosed that he was going into the ITV jungle that day, Hart observed: 'So Matt, you aren't so much asking me as telling me.'
Other, more sordid encounters concern a special adviser (or Spad) who, he noted, had gone to an orgy and had ended up 'taking a c**p on another person's head'.
On the same day he learned that a Commons employee had attended a party dressed as the paedophile Jimmy Savile where he had sex with a blow-up doll.
'Just another day at the office,' he drolly recorded.