It took me several days to find the right word to describe An Unexpected MP by Jerry Hayes. This book is vile. We are defining ‘vile’ here, along with the online dictionary, as ‘foul, nasty, unpleasant, bad, disagreeable, horrid, horrible, dreadful, abominable, atrocious, offensive, obnoxious, odious, unsavoury, repulsive, off-putting, repellent, revolting, repugnant, disgusting, distasteful, loathsome, hateful, nauseating, sickening’.
Hayes, a former Tory member of parliament for Harlow, is obviously an intelligent and talented man. Yet his book mostly involves the word ‘c***’ and reads like the outpourings of a teenage public schoolboy trying to get expelled.
Let me give you a flavour: there is the hilarious time Julian Amery threw up on the carpet and ordered a House of Commons waiter to clear it up. Or the time George Brown called an MP ‘the ugliest c*** I’ve ever met’. Or the time when, at the parliamentary regatta on the Thames, one of the ‘pretty young girls in short skirts’ was ‘administering blow jobs round the back of the tent’. Or the time Hayes said the word ‘c***’ in front of Ann Widdecombe in the taxi queue. Or the time John Prescott allegedly called Hayes a ‘Tory c***’ and punched him. Or the time Simon Walters of the Mail on Sunday ‘beat the shit’ out of Hayes in the press bar. Then there is the racist ‘black pussy’ remark made on television to a black woman.
And on and on it goes. Pointless swear words. Endless bragging about being drunk. Story after story about freebies, junkets and liquid lunches. The book depicts a Westminster populated entirely by drunken idiots, sexy young researchers and avaricious MPs on the make. It makes a vague nod at the MPs killed by their alcoholism: Iain Mills, the MP for Meriden, was found dead after three days decomposing in his Pimlico flat, having drunk himself to death, alone. But, apart from him, the rest of the drunkenness is written up as a bloody good laugh.
There are mistakes. Denis Healey is described as a veteran of D-day, when he was famously beachmaster at Anzio. The funniest bit of the book, unintentionally, is when Hayes claims to have mindreading powers to know what Tony Blair was thinking when he made a face at him at some event. He was probably thinking ‘Who are you?’
There is a serious issue in Westminster about alcoholism, subsidised bars and long hours. There is also a serious issue about sexual harassment and mistreatment of researchers. There is a huge issue about the disconnect between people and parliament. This book exacerbates each of these for the personal gain of the author, like the oxpecker picking at the scabs on the back of a hippopotamus looking for ticks.
What annoys me most is that Hayes was an MP for 14 years. He rose to the dizzying heights of parliamentary private secretary at the Northern Ireland Office. When you consider the calibre of the best of our politicians – there to serve the public, make change, and fight for great causes – the contrast could not be starker. What a criminal squandering of a precious platform in parliament, which in the hands of someone less self-obsessed, less self-serving and less pissed, could have been used to make the world a slightly better place.
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Paul Richards is author of Labour’s Revival: The Modernisers’ Manifesto
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An Unexpected MP: Confessions of a Political Gossip
Jerry Hayes
BiteBack Publishing | 320pp | £18.99