They say that to govern is to choose, but for one former chief whip it meant rescuing a Conservative MP from a suspected “KGB agent” in a London brothel.
The story of said MP is one of many colourful anecdotes in Simon Hart’s political diaries, which have become the talk of Westminster this week.
Hart, who served as Rishi Sunak’s chief whip for nearly two years, offers a rare glimpse behind the scenes of his government — including the sexual misadventures of members of the whips’ office.
He also lifts the lid on Sunak’s troubled premiership, including the tensions between ministers and how whips grappled with a series of misconduct allegations involving Tory MPs.
The ‘KGB agent’ and the brothel
On 24 November 2022, Hart recalls getting a phone call at 2.45am from a Conservative MP from the 2019 intake, sounding “clearly pissed but just about coherent”.
“Hi, chief. Hope I haven’t woken you,” the MP begins. “I’m stuck in a brothel in Bayswater and I’ve run out of money … I met a woman as I left the Carlton Club who offered me a drink, but I now think she is a KGB agent. She wants £500 and has left me in a room with 12 naked women and a CCTV.”
Hart tells the MP to sit tight and calls his special adviser, Emma, who “offers to leave her house and go personally to Bayswater on an extraction mission”. They decide against this but instead send a taxi to extract the MP and return him to his hotel.
Hart is asleep when the MP calls again at 4.10am. He has made it back to his hotel but not without a further twist. “I slipped out of the room and saw the taxi Emma ordered across the road, so I legged it over and jumped in,” he tells Hart. “However, it turned out it was a different taxi being driven by an Afghan agent called Ahmed … He demanded £3,000 for a blow job.”
Asked what he did, the MP tells Hart: “I legged it back to the hotel and locked the door.”
Demands for peerages and knighthoods
Politicians brazenly asking for honours is a recurring feature of the book. In April 2024, Hart met one Conservative MP who was first elected in 2019 in a safe seat — which they now wanted to trade for the House of Lords.
“Give me a peerage and I will give up my safe seat,” this MP said. Told this was not an option, the response was: “Well, you are all bastards and this is unfair.”
A few months earlier on 1 February 2024, Hart recalls a meeting of the honours committee where “one prominent Labour MP seeking an upgrade to his knighthood gets defeated” and a Conservative MP’s campaign for a CBE “gets similar short shrift by the lay members” — apparently amid vague rumours of wrongdoing by said MP on a foreign trip.
Boris Johnson and the privileges committee
On 7 June 2023, Hart gets a call from Harriet Harman who tells him the privileges committee she chairs will publish its report on Boris Johnson later that month and hand it to him that week.
Harman discloses that the report will recommend a 20-day suspension for Johnson, which will almost certainly result in him facing a recall motion and by-election. (As it happened Johnson quit parliament after being handed the findings).
Hart speaks to Johnson, who begins “questioning whether there is any procedural route by which we can kill off the report or at least vote it down”.
“In any normal circumstances, a former PM asking for special treatment would be a big deal but this being Boris, it doesn’t surprise me at all,” Hart muses. He reminds Johnson that it was he who set up the process, approved its terms of reference and accepted Harman as chair. “But I was in India and I wasn’t concentrating,” Johnson replies. “I left it all to the whips.”
Reshuffle tales
The book lifts the lid on Sunak’s cabinet reshuffles and deteriorating relationship with his first home secretary, Suella Braverman. Days after being appointed she got into trouble for leaking confidential information to Tory backbencher John Hayes, an ally of hers, but she survives the scandal.
She survives the February 2023 reshuffle as well, though Hart recalls how “one lucky cabinet appointee is less grateful than her promotion deserves”. The three female cabinet ministers who were given promotions in that reshuffle were Kemi Badenoch, Michelle Donelan and Lucy Frazer.
“Let’s all agree about one thing,” Sunak said about the female minister in question. “She is fucking useless but we can’t get rid of her.”
Half a year later, Sunak is ready to sack Braverman. In the room with the closest members of his team, the prime minister puts her on speakerphone as “all hell breaks loose” and she begins a “ghastly ten-minute diatribe of vindictive and personal bile”.
Getting food delivered in Downing Street
The book also reveals the more prosaic side of being prime minister.
It was 9pm and Sunak was meeting close aides in his office when his phone rang. The room sat in silence as he had “a rather oblique conversation with someone in which he tells them to ‘take the package to the black gates halfway up Whitehall and someone will meet you’”.
Sounding “faintly alarmed”, Rupert Yorke, Sunak’s deputy chief of staff, asked for an explanation. It turned out to be the prime minister’s Nando’s order. According to Hart, Yorke reminded him that “as PM he can ask other people to do that kind of thing, but he seemed rather hurt by the suggestion”.
Ungovernable by Simon Hart (Pan Macmillan, £25). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
This article was amended on 21 February 2025 to put quotation marks around references to a purported “KGB agent”, as Russia’s main security and intelligence agency ceased to be called the KGB in 1991.
