Philip Cowley on Parliamentary Politics

 Tell me about your first choice, Gyles Brandreth’s Breaking the Code.

Gyles Brandreth is very funny and very indiscreet, isn’t he? It’s a great read. I think it’s one of the most under-appreciated ‘set-top’ diaries. It makes you laugh out loud but it’s also incredibly insightful. It achieves the astonishing feat of making you like Gyles. You start to read it thinking he’s a prat, but you begin to like him by the end of it and you realise he’s quite clever and insightful. His public persona isn’t at all like him and probably does him an injustice. But it’s a good insight into being an MP, particularly learning to be an MP.

He comes in at an astonishingly low level of knowledge and understanding to the point where you find yourself wondering how an earth he got selected – he seemed to know nothing about politics at all. You track his transformation as a fully functioning political creature for good or for ill. It has also got a great insight into the whip’s office – for part of the book he’s a whip and you see the reality of being a whip is far less exciting and powerful than the myth. And, of course, it’s a fantastic insight into a declining government that’s about to die.

I must say I think it was a fantastic read, I think it’s the best book I’ve read about government. I preferred it to Alan Clark’s Diaries.

I also preferred it. The Clark Diaries are quite good on being a minister, but in terms of learning what it’s like in actuality, Brandreth is very good. The Clark Diaries are great fun to read but I’m not sure they tell you that much about politics, or the actual day-to-day functioning of it, whereas Brandreth’s is just full of that. Apparently the new set he’s just brought out is a broader set of diaries, going back to childhood, so the politics is in there somewhere.

The next book: Wilfred Fienburgh’s No Love for Johnnie. Fienburgh was a Labour MP, was he not?

He was. There was a film made of No Love for Johnnie in 1961, which at the time was very well known. I’m quite a fan of political fiction but one of the problems with it is that a lot of it is not very good. You read a lot of political fiction that’s either written by outsiders so they don’t understand politics properly or it’s written by insiders, and not very well written. Fienburgh’s book is written by an insider, is very well written and a stand-alone novel.

One of the reasons I like it is that it’s 50 years old now and yet, if you read the opening scene, for example, of a Labour MP arriving to give a speech somewhere and being told that the audience isn’t very big – they hoped to get more people and they haven’t, there’s terrible disappointment. It’s that sense of apathy in politics, a lack of enthusiasm for politics. These things that we erroneously think are new, that are products of the Blair era, Thatcher politics, or anti-Iraq war, have actually been with us forever.

Now Richard Fenno, Home Style. This is about American politics; he travelled with Congressmen to discover how they behaved with their constituents rather than how they behaved in Congress.

He draws a picture, which varies at times, of how Congressmen behaved in the House and what he knew about procedures and forms of behaviour in the House – and ‘home style’, which is what they are like once they get on a plane or the train to go back to their constituencies. And he points out that any successful American politician kind of has to have a House style and a home style but they are utterly unrelated.

I chose this book for three reasons: firstly, it’s a really accessible, interesting academic book, and frankly there are too few of those and for that reason I think it’s worth reading. I wish there were more academic books written by Fenno.

It’s also doing the kind of research that we don’t do enough of. He spent years hanging out with politicians, watching what they do, how they behave, and we don’t do enough of that academic work.

And the third reason I’m interested in it is that when he wrote that book, the sort of stuff he’s talking about would not have been recognised, particularly in Britain. It is recognised now. British politicians have a much more clearly defined home style, which, for the more recent MPs is taking up about half of their time. They spend about half of their time, the new MPs, either in or working for their constituencies. Now there are some good points about this and there are bad points but, actually, we don’t know very much about it. We know quite a lot about how MPs behave in the House; we know almost nothing about how they behave in their constituencies – what they do with their time and then whether it matters. We think it matters but maybe not electorally or at least as much as they think. But in terms of generating good will amongst the constituents – does any of this matter or is it a big waste of time.?

What’s your conclusion?

My conclusion is that it probably has much less impact.