Terry Kemple is a retired GP living in Bristol with various roles promoting greater sustainability in general practice. He is past President of the Royal College of General Practitioners. He is on X: @TKemple
Once upon a time, the UK Government seemed powerful and great, much like the Wizard of Oz. But just like in the Oz story, when the curtain was pulled back, the reality wasn’t as impressive. Instead, the hierarchy and dysfunction seem to resemble more that of a public school than the government of a great and powerful nation.
What is revealed behind the curtain seems more unfathomable than just ungovernable. This insider’s record of the eventful years of the Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak premierships emerges as a worrying mixture of comedy and tragedy. It’s not surprising that we may wonder if many of our members of parliament are competent enough to be our leaders.
“Hart observes from an extraordinary position inside Government … but reveals very little of great interest.”
Simon Hart is not well known. Outside the Westminster bubble a Chief Whip is not usually well known. National anonymity seems to be expected.
Hart was first elected in Wales as a Conservative MP in 2010 and started writing his diary every night in order to note down interesting and amusing anecdotes for his family. He was re-elected three times until, following boundary changes, failed to be re-elected in 2024.
In parliament, as a back bencher, he served on four Select Committees and on the executive board of the 1922 Committee. In Theresa May’s Government he was her representative on the Committee for Standards in Public Life. In Johnson’s first Government, and without the Prime Minister or him really knowing what the post involved, he was appointed Minister for Implementation in the Cabinet Office. When the Secretary of State for Wales was forced to resign in 2019 he was asked to fill the vacancy, and from 2019 to 2024 (except for Truss’s 44 days in power) he was always a member of the cabinet.
Sunak appointed his loyal supporter Hart as Chief Whip and he remained in that role until the 2024 general election. The Chief Whip is appointed to ensure their party colleagues vote according to the leader’s agenda. It’s the herding of cats job, using any and all available means to ensure that their MPs follow their party’s direction. The duties also include allocating MPs’ offices, promoting deserving MPs for national honours and titles, and sometimes stretches to middle-of-the-night tasks like saving the reputation of a drunken colleague who finds himself trapped in a brothel without any money.
His brief diary entries give us a glimpse into what was happening at the centre of Government during Brexit negotiations, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the final years of the Sunak Government. His diaries were written as events happened, cover six journals, and contain a total of 200 000 words. Over 14 years, that’s not many words each day. The usual entry in this published diary is about 70 words, but some may extend to 400 words. A great diarist is one who can make an ordinary day interesting.
These diaries support the belief that our structures and processes of government need improvement.
In contrast, Hart observes from an extraordinary position inside Government during extraordinary events, but reveals very little of great interest. He does not tell us much about himself, his role in events, and publishes very few of the promised interesting or amusing anecdotes that he must have witnessed. He does record the timeline of the main events and the good and bad actions of others. He makes it clear who he likes and respects, in particular, he really likes and respects Sunak. Of his fellow MPs he says, ‘With each passing day I came increasingly to realise that our system of candidate identification, selection, training and mentoring was flawed and is at the root of almost every challenge the Party and the Government was facing’, and, ‘Maintaining a democratic system of appointments whilst ensuring only the best get through has become a recurring dilemma.’
In the run up to the 2024 general election he is in Zoom meetings vetting around 30 prospective candidates a day so that Conservative HQ can provide a shortlist of three approved candidates for the final pick by local associations. A propriety check eliminates those who have sent ‘dick’ pictures of themselves, made inappropriate comments on social media, or who have a worrying financial background. Despite his worries about the quality of candidates he seems to contribute little to improving the flawed process of selection.
There is an entitled air as he condemns others for their entitled behaviours as they seek his support for nomination to a knighthood/damehood or elevation to the House of Lords. He says ‘Rishi’s take on the honours system remains that it should be open only to those who have gone beyond their role as an MP or Minister requires. Honours shouldn’t just come round with the rations’. Fortunately for him, despite breaking the tradition that the Chief Whip does not write books, the title of his book, and its disclosures, he himself gets elevated to the House of Lords in the April 2025 Rishi Sunak resignation honours list.
These diaries support the belief that our structures and processes of government need improvement. Unfortunately, those same structures and processes seem to perpetuate its hierarchy and dysfunction.
Featured book: Simon Hart, Ungovernable: The Political Diaries of A Chief Whip, Macmillan, 2025, HB, 368pp, £21.99, 978-1035068791.
Featured photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash.
