If only Gavin Williamson had been allowed to build an underground lair inside a volcano. Or else to dig a moat around the whips’ office, and fill it with crocodiles.
But instead, Westminster’s wannabe Bond villain was forced to make do with keeping a pet spider on his desk. Like the enormous bullwhip he showed off to visiting photographers, Cronus the tarantula was meant to convey an aura of menace, while succeeding only in making one wonder what kind of grown man brings a pet spider to work. Less Lord Voldemort, perhaps, than reedy Gareth from The Office.
It was smart of Keir Starmer, then, to greet Williamson’s downfall this week not with outrage but derision, mocking him as the kind of “sad middle manager” noisily throwing his weight around who most of us will probably encounter somewhere in our working lives. Williamson thrived on the fear he generated in people whose livelihoods depended on him. What he could not survive, however, was scorn. When the former chief whip Wendy Morton published his stroppy texts about the Queen’s funeral – which were admittedly rude, but about as menacing as a 14-year-old railing at his mum for grounding him – she sent a powerful signal that the time for being frightened of Williamson was over. In turn, that seems to have emboldened others who had previously felt too scared to speak up. What began as a reckoning for one individual, however, could yet pose a bigger challenge to the way politics is conducted.
Williamson may have been something of a cartoon ogre, but the power he was granted during his cabinet career was all too real. Chief whips on both sides like to say they’ve moved on from the bad old days, when “persuading” an MP to vote with the leadership involved punches being thrown in corridors, or threatening to tip off the tabloids to the existence of a mistress. The modern whips’ office is portrayed instead as a kind of HR department, maintaining order while keeping a pastoral eye on MPs who might be struggling with the stresses of Westminster life. Yet Williamson’s former deputy when he was chief whip, Anne Milton, painted a significantly less flattering picture to Channel 4 this week.
She described Williamson gleefully regaling the office with gossip about MPs’ sexual proclivities or personal woes which she believes he would later use as leverage “if the need arose”. After arranging an emergency bailout for one MP in financial difficulties, Williamson reportedly told Milton to make sure that “he knows that I now own him”. “I’m sure if you ask Gavin Williamson about this, he will say it was a joke. I don’t think it was a joke,” she told Channel 4 News. (Incidentally, the public is surely now entitled to know where exactly that money came from, and whether its recipient subsequently changed his vote in ways his constituents might find interesting.) Williamson’s reward for the relish with which he seemingly approached all this, meanwhile, was promotion to the role he craved: defence secretary. He allegedly went on to tell a civil servant to “slit your throat” and “jump out of the window”, causing what the official described as an “extreme impact” on their mental health.
Rishi Sunak insists he didn’t know the details of any specific allegations against Williamson when he brought the latter back into government, despite being told that Morton had filed an official complaint. But Sunak has been around Westminster long enough to know exactly what he was getting, and why. You don’t bring back the man who, as defence secretary, once suggested Russia should “go away and shut up”, before being sacked over an alleged national security breach, and expect distinguished service for the nation. You don’t hire him for his grip on a big Whitehall department either, given his stumbling performance as education secretary during the pandemic.
The point of having him help to run your leadership campaign – the service which originally earned Williamson his third cabinet comeback – and then giving him the usefully vague role of minister without portfolio is to get him to do what he did so very successfully for David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson, which was to make problems go away. You hire him for the same reason governments of all political stripes have hired their own Williamsons since time immemorial, much as they hate admitting it; to suppress revolts, hush up embarrassments, make the leader’s writ run across a government. The deal is that in return, leaders don’t inquire too closely as to how the sausage gets made. But lately, that deal looks increasingly unsustainable.
It was the inevitable consequences of Boris Johnson’s reckless decision to put Chris Pincher back in the whips’ office, despite claims of sexual misconduct, that succeeded where all else failed in finally prompting Tory MPs to turn on their leader. Tales of tearful backbenchers being manhandled through a vote on fracking similarly helped convince them to move more urgently than planned against Liz Truss.
The writing has been on the wall for months now, flashing a neon warning that this generation of MPs – much like millennials in other walks of life – won’t put up with the toxic working practices their elders did. They’re not prepared just to accept that this is how things have always been, or to be fobbed off with stories about how it was worse in the 1970s. Some are well aware that management techniques have moved on in the corporate world. Others are understandably more frightened of their constituents, or of a social media backlash, than of the whips. And while the wheels of the new independent complaints and grievances scheme to which Morton referred Williamson grind slowly, it’s given MPs and staff somewhere to take complaints that would once have been conveniently buried. Times are changing; not fast enough for some, but fast enough to catch out an unwary prime minister.
It would be naive beyond belief, of course, to imagine the era of Westminster enforcers is over now. There will always be arms to twist, revolts to crush, and dirty work to be done on behalf of a leader who needs to keep their hands clean. But what’s changed, perhaps, is the idea that the dark arts can remain reliably in the dark. Whoever ultimately succeeds Williamson as enforcer in chief will have to do the job in the uncomfortable knowledge that sooner or later the light will probably find its way in, or else their texts will find a way out. Even cartoon villains, it turns out, must eventually move with the times.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
