Chief whip’s diaries reveal rescue of Tory MP from ‘KGB agent’ in London brothel
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,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.”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.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”.Sign up to First EditionOur morning email breaks down the key stories of the day, telling you what’s happening and why it mattersafter newsletter promotion“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.”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”.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.
Watchdog investigates Andrew Gwynne over offensive WhatsApp messages
Parliament’s standards watchdog has launched an investigation into Andrew Gwynne, who was sacked as a minister over offensive comments made on a WhatsApp group.The MP was also suspended from the Labour party after messages were revealed in which he said he hoped a pensioner who did not support him would die before the next set of elections.A second Labour MP, Oliver Ryan, was also suspended last week after he was revealed to be a member of the same WhatsApp group, which also featured misogynistic and classist messages.The parliamentary commissioner for standards’ inquiry into Gwynne was opened on Tuesday, according to an online update, which said it was looking into “actions causing significant damage to the reputation of the house as a whole, or of its members generally”.Gwynne, who is now sitting as the independent MP for Gorton and Denton, has been facing fresh calls to resign after new WhatsApp messages emerged in which he suggested that an Anglican priest should be “burned on a bonfire”
Trump is tearing up the transatlantic alliance. Can Starmer’s US visit change the weather?
In November 1940, Winston Churchill sent a telegram to Franklin Roosevelt expressing relief both at the US president’s re-election and the victory of his anti-appeasement policy. “Things are afoot which will be remembered as long as the English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe, and in expressing the comfort I feel that the people of the United States have once again cast these great burdens upon you, I must now avow my sure faith that the lights by which we steer will bring us safely to anchor,” he wrote.As Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron prepare to meet a very different US president, things are once again afoot that will live long in the memory – but this time the lights seem to be going out on a ship adrift in a sea of chaos.In his Arsenal of Democracy speech, Roosevelt spurned those who asked to “throw the US weight on the scale in favour of a dictated peace”. He also saw past Nazi Germany’s “parade of pious purpose” to observe “in the background the concentration camps and ‘servants of God’ in chains”
Don’t be fooled by Putin’s ‘imperialism dressed up as realpolitik’, Lammy warns
The west should not be “fooled” by Vladimir Putin’s attempts to dress up imperialism as pragmatism in advance of any talks over the future of Ukraine, David Lammy has warned.Speaking before Keir Starmer’s visit to Washington next week to discuss Ukraine, the foreign secretary said Britain was “ready to listen” to Russia but it had not yet heard that Moscow was prepared to meet the conditions for a durable peace.“What I heard was the logic of imperialism dressed up as a realpolitik, and I say to you all, we should not be surprised, but neither should we be fooled,” he told the G20 in South Africa, after a speech by the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov.He added: “If Putin is serious about a lasting peace, it means finding a way forward which respects Ukraine’s sovereignty and the UN charter, which provides credible security guarantees, and which rejects Tsarist imperialism, and Britain is ready to listen. But we expect to hear more than the Russian gentleman’s tired fabrications
Nigel Farage dissents from Trump’s Zelenskyy ‘dictator’ claim
Nigel Farage has contradicted his ally Donald Trump, saying Volodymyr Zelenskyy “is not a dictator” after the US president’s attack on the Ukrainian leader this week.Farage, who became one of the last UK party leaders to distance himself from Trump’s remarks, said he had been delayed in calling it out earlier because he was heading to the US to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference.The US president said on Wednesday that the Ukrainian leader was a “dictator without elections” in a rant on the Truth Social app, and warned Zelenskyy “better move fast or he is not going to have a country left”.Trump also said Zelenskyy had “done a terrible job”, dismissing the Ukrainian leader as a “modestly successful comedian” who “talked the United States of America into spending $350 Billion dollars to go into a war that couldn’t be won, that never had to start”.Speaking to GB News from Washington DC, Farage said: “You should always take everything Donald Trump says seriously, you shouldn’t always take things Donald Trump says absolutely literally
The cameras weren’t rolling, so no one saw Lammy neglect to tackle Dictators United | John Crace
If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If the foreign secretary makes a speech to the G20 in South Africa and someone forgot to switch on the televised stream, did it really happen?This was meant to be David Lammy’s big day out. His Foreign Office team had briefed in advance that this was to be his most forceful intervention on Ukraine yet. No more Mr Nice Guy. No more couching his words in the language of twisted diplomacy. Just shooting from the hip
‘Russia has learned nothing’ over Ukraine war, says David Lammy – as it happened
Foreign secretary David Lammy has been speaking at the G20 foreign ministerial meeting in South Africa.Referring to the Ukraine war, he criticised Russia for having “learned nothing”, adding: “we are at a crucial juncture in this conflict, and Russia faces a test”.He said that the only “just and lasting peace” will be a peace “consistent with the UN charter” which “rejects Tsarist imperialism”.Lammy was also critical of Russian minister for foreign affairs [Sergei] Lavrov for his “logic of imperialism dressed up as realpolitik”.He said:You know, mature countries learn from their colonial failures and their wars, and Europeans have had much to learn over the generations and the centuries
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