Short-tempered and ‘given to profanity’, Major William Beresford was not one of the more attractive personalities to hold high office. However, it was his foul play, and not his foul mouth, that eventually brought him down. A Conservative minister in 1852, his job was to help organize the election campaign that year. But he carried his Cabinet responsibilities as Secretary of State for War a little too far, approaching the election campaign with an aggression that would have been commendable in a general. Although the Great Reform Act of 1832 had ended the worst instances of electoral corruption, it was still possible to bribe your way into Parliament, often by the simple means of buying voters a drink and a slap-up meal. ‘Canvassing’ usually took place in the local pub.
The election was closely fought, and Beresford was keen to pick up as many seats as possible. One campaign he followed closely was in Derby, for which he gave some very specific instructions. He wrote to one of his agents to find ‘a good and safe man’ to send to Derby and to go to a particular tavern. There, he directed him to send a card to a local contact, which ‘would be enough’ to set certain matters in motion. A special committee of inquiry found that the man sent by Beresford had helped implement an organized system of bribery to help swing the election.
Although the committee could not prove conclusively that Beresford knew about the bribery, they did find ‘a reckless indifference to consequences, which they cannot too highly censure’. History failed to record which profanity he used when he received their verdict, but he never held high office again. It is still frowned upon to wear a rosette in a pub during elections.
33. Derek Conway
(b.1953) Conservative, Shrewsbury & Atcham 1983–97, Old Bexley & Sidcup 2001–
Imagine that you are one of Derek Conway’s constituents. Plop onto the mat; Derek has sent you a Christmas card! And being from a senior Tory MP, it goes straight onto the mantelpiece. How nice of Derek to put his office staff on his Christmas card, you think. Perhaps he is thanking them for their hard work during the year. There’s that nice Colette, his secretary. Then you remember Frederick whom you met once, and who Derek said was his researcher. And there’s Henry next to him, apparently another researcher. You open the card: ‘Merry Christmas from the Conways!’
Many MPs employ members of their family, but few as brazenly as Conway. The Daily Telegraph reported that tax-payers paid members of Conway’s immediate family a total of more than £260,000 over a six-year period. However, it was found that Henry and Freddie were full-time students for some of the time they were employed, and the Commons Committee for Standards and Privileges began an investigation. In 2008, it concluded that Conway had ‘overpaid his younger son, Freddie’ and had ‘awarded him excessive bonuses’, despite the fact that he appeared to have been ‘all but invisible during the period of his employment’. The sums involved were eye-watering. Young Freddie ‘earned’ up to £11,773 a year, plus bonuses, for almost three years. In total, he was paid £45,163 in gross salary, in addition to picking up pension contributions of about £4,500, which isn’t bad considering he was meant to be studying geography at Newcastle University at the time. In 2009, the same committee found that Conway had also overpaid his son Henry. He was ordered to pay back thousands of pounds. Conway is standing down at the next election.
32. Peter Baker
(1921–66) Conservative, South Norfolk 1950–4
Peter Baker was expelled from Parliament in 1954. His crime, forgery, was not particularly heinous, and we mention him here only because we think it time for him to lose his distinction of being the last MP to be expelled from the House of Commons. Surely it is time for more?
31. Christopher Perne
(d.c.1566) Bossiney 1555, Plympton Erle 1558, St Ives 1559, Grampound 1563
Perne is proof that Parliament has always had its fair share of madmen, and even some kleptomaniacs. He first gained a seat in the Commons through his Protestant connections during the reign of Edward VI. But when Catholic Queen Mary came to the throne, he was involved in Henry Dudley’s plot to replace her with her sister Princess Elizabeth, and was arrested and temporarily excluded from Parliament.
He was also excluded from the Royal Court, and told not to ‘come near [it] by the space of seven miles, upon pain of forfeiture of £500’. This odd instruction may be connected to reports of Perne having taken up ‘picking’, or pickpocketing. In 1563, when still an MP, he was ‘taken into a great mishap’ and began to act in a ‘lewd manner’. He was found stealing ‘gold buttons’, presumably from the clothing of wealthy colleagues, and was ‘committed to the Marshalsea for pickery, without any notice given to the House’. Marshalsea Prison (later made famous by Charles Dickens) was not a nice place, and there Perne went mad. In 1566, he was declared a ‘lunatick’, and a new election writ was moved for his seat. There is no record of his death or later life.
30. Nicholas Ridley
(1929–93) Conservative, Cirencester & Tewkesbury 1959–92
When, in 1972, the then Prime Minister Edward Heath decided to change the direction of his government’s economic policy, he knew he would lose a number of ministers in protest. He was prepared to dismiss most of them, but seemingly calculated that the brilliant but abrasive Nicholas Ridley would be, to paraphrase Lyndon Johnson, better inside the tent pissing out, rather than the other way round. He offered Ridley the post of minister for the arts, but Ridley acidly declined the post, saying he did not believe the arts should even have a minister. Whether inside the tent or out, Ridley pissed on everyone; that was his style.
Although he was one of the most talented political thinkers of his generation, and an architect of a decade of Thatcherite economic policy, Ridley was often painfully unsuited to the demands of modern politics and the media age. This was mainly due to his unstinting inflexibility. He refused to believe in any opinion other than his own, and dismissed his critics with all the subtlety of Basil Fawlty. Once, during a BBC interview, he responded to a question by sneering, ‘That is the most stupid question I’ve ever been asked.’ When the interviewer bravely repeated the question, he replied, ‘That is the second most stupid question I’ve ever been asked.’ But the question was undoubtedly not as stupid as his answer to an interviewer on the subject of European integration in 1990; he claimed that it was ‘all a German racket designed to take over the whole of Europe… I’m not against giving up sovereignty, but not to this lot. You might as well give it to Adolf Hitler, frankly.’ The Germans were not amused, and Ridley had to resign as Secretary of State for Trade and Industry.
But gaffes aside, Ridley’s intemperate nature led to serious miscalculations on matters of policy. He was right on many things, but also occasionally spectacularly wrong. For example, when at the Foreign Office during the early years of Thatcher’s government, he advocated ceding sovereignty of the Falkland Islands to Argentina, against the wishes of the local residents, a decision which in part encouraged the Argentinean junta to believe that Britain would not fight for the Islands before they launched their invasion in 1982. Arguably, Ridley’s greatest political blunder was his enthusiastic endorsement of the Poll Tax, about which he refused to tolerate objections. The tax was not his idea, but, as the Cabinet minister responsible, he wholeheartedly pushed for its immediate introduction. His phrase, ‘Every time I hear people squeal, I am more than certain that we are right’, seemed to sum up the Thatcher government’s uncaring attitude.
29. Hazel Blears
(b.1956) Labour, Salford 1997–