The revelations are out from Simon Hart’s book: The Political Diaries of a Chief Whip. There’s the one about being woken at 4am by an MP who was being held in a Bayswater brothel by blackmailers, not to be confused with another MP, Mark Menzies, who found it difficult to extricate himself from “bad people” and allegedly paid for his release from local party funds (which he denied); then there was Rishi Sunak’s observation about the female minister promoted to the Cabinet who was “f***ing useless but we can’t get rid of her” — which may or may not have been Kemi Badenoch. There was Boris Johnson’s attempt to kill off a disobliging report by the Privileges Committee on his lockdown activities which did not, by that time, shock Hart.
That’s probably all most people need to know. But there is more of the same: Tory MPs who were accused of sexual assault or bullying subordinates or in one case, child abuse. And just to show that old habits die hard, there was the senior married MP who suggested to a female journalist that her lovely frock would look better on his bedroom floor. Hart’s reaction, as with so much else, was: “Groan”.
