Coffee House Shots: How the Whips' office really works

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🗓️ 22 February 2025

⏱️ 35 minutes

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Summary

Simon Hart joins James Heale to talk about his new book Ungovernable: The Political Diaries of a Chief Whip. Having stepped down at the 2024 election, Simon has become the first former Chief Whip to publish his diaries. What are his reflections on the Conservatives' time in office? Simon explains why his decision to resign under Boris Johnson was so difficult, why the Rwanda vote under Rishi Sunak was their finest hour, and why the Whips' office is really the government's HR department. Just how Ungovernable was the Tory Party?

Produced by Patrick Gibbons.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Spectator magazine is home to wonderful writing, insightful analysis, and unrivaled books and arts reviews.
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0:14.7	Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher.
0:29.8	Hello and welcome to the special Saturday edition of Coffee House Shots.
0:33.7	I'm James Hill and I'm delighted to be joined today by Simon Hart, former Welsh Secretary and Chief Whip.
0:35.4	He has just written the first diaries of a chief whip that have come out.
0:39.5	Simon, welcome. Thank you for joining us here at the spectators today.
0:41.6	Thanks. Thank you. So first of all, I suppose you just ask, you know, why did you decide to blow the lid of what was like life in the WIPP's office?
0:49.2	There's always been a bit of a code of a murder around that. Why now? There has. I mean, I started the whole diary thing back in 2010
0:55.8	because my kids were 8 and 10 or 8 and 6 at the time. I wanted something to show them in 25
1:02.5	years time, where I'd been for that sort of missing 15 years of their lives. So that's how it all
1:09.3	started. But there was a slightly more serious element to this
1:13.4	when I was doing stuff within government, which was there was some comic, you know, darkly comic
1:22.3	elements of it. There were some extraordinary moments where you just thought, you know, you couldn't
1:26.7	make it up type moments.
1:29.1	And I actually just thought it would be useful to have some kind of a record, which hopefully
1:34.0	was not too overly serious, but made a serious point about life not being straightforward
1:41.1	and not being straightforward in anything, any of us do. And in government and in government and in Parliament and in politics, it's just as complicated and just as unpredictable as in any other walk of life.
1:52.3	And I thought that, you know, just shining a bit of a light on that would be interesting and helpful.
1:57.9	I mean, there's a huge amount of your career before you become Chief Whip in October 2022 and you take over after the Listerust's interregnum, shall we say,
2:06.3	post Boris Johnson. But I'm a little bit interested in also in a few months prior to that when
	...

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