When I came to play back the recording of my recent interview with Bob
Marshall-Andrews, the serially rebellious LabourMP for Medway, for a
second or two my bowels ran cold with terror. As I remembered it, while I’d
been drawing him we’d had a wide-ranging conversation about Blair, Brown,
Socialism, Globalisation, MP’s allowances, the Constitution, the Judiciary, the
Media and Society at Large. But instead of all that my tape started halfway
through a long, rambling and very funny anecdote about a hotel where
Marshall-Andrews had once stayed in Wales. My contributions, meanwhile,
seemed to consist solely of monosyllabic grunts, occasional barks of laughter
and increasingly frequent protestations that I must be getting home as I was
feeling very "tired".
As it happens I quickly established that I’d accessed the wrong file on my
whizzy new digital dictaphone, and luckily the other file was still intact. More
worryingly, I realised I must have turned the damned thing back on once we’d
repaired from The Gay Hussar, where I’d drawn Bob over lunch, to the House
of Commons Terrace via the Garrick Club.
However, although on reflection I won’t bore you with a full transcript of the
second recording, which contains an erudite dialogue on matters of vital
national importance before, during and after a quick visit to the gents opposite
the Strangers Bar, maybe I should. It would, after all, probably make as
much sense as Marshall-Andrews’ recent comments since David Miliband’s
now notorious article in The Guardian last week.
To recap, the day after the article came out, Marshall-Andrews appeared on
the World At One, saying that Gordon Brown should sack Miliband for
disloyalty. For anyone who has even the vaguest knowledge of Marshall-
Andrews’ eleven year long career in the House of Commons, this was quite
extraordinary. In last Saturday’s Guardian, in an over-excited paean of praise
to Miliband, Polly Toynbee wrote "Listen to the laughter as deputy chief whip
Nick Brown can only find two of the most disreputably disloyal rebel MPs to
stand up and call for loyalty on the BBC news." And then, in Lady
Bracknellish tones, she squawked "Bob Marshall-Andrews!"
You can see her point. After all, we’ve all come to think of Marshall-Andrews
and Disloyalty in the same way that we think of horses and carriages or Keats
and Embarrassment. Like the Bishop of Southwark, it’s what he does, which
means that anything else Marshall-Andrews might do is almost beyond
analysis. And because the normal rules don’t apply in his case, I can’t tell if
his intervention was a joke, or mischief making, or an attempt to get Miliband
onto the backbenches so he can deliver the coup de grace, or what. Still, it’s
worth pausing for a moment and essaying a brief deconstruction of Toynbee’s
use of punctuation. That defining exclamation mark (the kind you’d use after,
say, Herod the Great in a discussion on nursery provision) is pure Marshall-
Andrews. Despite his rather squat physiognomy - Simon Hoggart has
described him as looking like a cross between Denis the Menace and Denis’s
dog Gnasher - Marshall-Andrews is almost a walking exclamation mark, like
the one at the end of "Oklahoma!"
This is a cheap way of pointing out that, like the previous subjects of this
series, Ann Widdecombe and the Hamiltons, Marshall-Andrews straddles that
blurred dividing line between politics and showbiz. All of them have either
achieved or augmented fame or notoriety beyond the House of Commons by
willingly embracing light entertainment, and all of them have appeared on
"Have I Got News For You", a programme which can bestow on its guests the
mantle of either National Joke or National Treasure, depending on how they
cut the mustard. But while Widdecombe freely admits that she plays the media
in order to get the widest possible audience for her political programme, and
the Hamiltons, more or less by accident, achieved a kind of redemption
through comedy, Marshall-Andrews is different.
Despite always occupying the seat next to Paul Merton reserved for the
programme’s stooges - Marshall-Andrews called it "the seat of death" - he
always gives as good as he gets. In other words - and this is the difference
between him and the others - he always manages to avoid becoming a victim
of satire by very clearly siding with the satirists.
So, despite his apparent born-again loyalty, here’s what he said when I asked
him, in the interview proper, about Gordon Brown. "Gordon is a good man,
and in some ways a great man, but a very flawed one. He has every single
Shakespearean tragic flaw: there’s the years of angst-
ridden jealousy, like Othello; fatal indecision, like Hamlet; futile rage, like
Lear, and surrounding himself with completely inappropriate people, like
Brutus." Now that’s a good gag by anyone’s standards, even though Simon
Hoggart later told me that Marshall-Andrews had left out the punch-line: "But
at least we’ve finally got rid of Lady Macbeth!" But better still, he told it on
the record, loudly, in a crowded restaurant and with Brown’s chief capo di
capi Charlie Whelan sitting within easy earshot two tables away, barking
loudly the alternative punch-line "And I haven’t even mentioned Charlie
Whelan!"
True, he then described Brown’s commitment to eradicating poverty, and tried
to mitigate the inevitable damage the joke would cause by saying that great
men have flaws, which is why Shakespeare wrote tragedies about them.
Likewise, getting back to Miliband, when Marshall-
Andrews and I had dinner a few months ago, he described the possible next
leader of the Labour Party with deadly and concise precision as "gap year".
The jokes are coupled with a jovial capacity for completely carefree
indiscretion. For instance, he started the interview, more or less unbidden,
with a long and compelling diagnosis of Tony Blair’s various psychoses. Then
there’s his record of voting against his Party in Government, mostly on issues
of civil liberties and the law, which also manifested itself in his recent public
support for David Davis in the Haltemprice and Howden by-election: "As I
told the chief whip, we needed someone to represent Labour in the
constituency." It’s unsurprising, then, that many people on his own side can’t
stand him. I once overheard Charles Clarke, then Chairman of the Labour
Party, refer over lunch at The Gay Hussar to "Bloody Marshall-Andrews", and
I told him about an Blairite ex-minister (during an entirely off-the-record
conversation about how Gordon was "toast") who told me she thought he was
a "complete waste of space".
So, on top of the anger and hurt he causes his own side, did he have any
qualms about his disloyalty? "I owe a very great deal to the Labour Party. But
the Labour Party I joined 40 years ago." So did that party still exist? "In this
seat it does." And actually, eroded down to one double-
barrelled QC, a fat-cat lawyer with second, third and probably fourth homes
who, despite his relatively humble beginnings ("My parents were working
class Tories with an instinctive suspicion of the left’s illiberalism"), speaks in
a slurring, nasal, Belgravia-cockney snarl, that Labour Party is surprisingly
right-wing. For instance, he was scathing about the Press, even though his
public profile is largely thanks to journalists like Simon Hoggart who
recognise good copy when they see it. He also said he’d ban Grand Theft Auto
IV without a second’s hesitation, although I suspect he’s never seen it, let
alone played it. "Civil liberties aren’t limitless, you know." I asked him who
his ideal Labour leader would be. "John Smith. Very witty. Able
administrator. Moderate Socialist." (And also, for the record, described by a
friend after his death as of that generation of Scotsmen who consider white
wine to be a soft drink which doesn’t count at lunchtime.) And among the
living? "Alan Johnson. Not too close to New Labour. Moderate socialist." So
would he describe himself as a Hatterselyite? "What, New Hattersley? No, not
really. I’d say I was a Healeyite."
Thanks to the brilliant job done by New Labour in painting everyone who
opposed them as raging red Militants, that political formulation of right-wing
Old Labour sounds as archaic as the Whigs. But then again, there is something
distinctly 18th Century about Marshall-Andrews, as much Wilkesite as Hogarthian.
"Some people enter politics to gain power. I entered it to hold power to
account. I don’t like power. It makes me uneasy. One of the ghastly things
Blair said was that we were meant to be ambassadors for New Labour. I’m not
an ambassador for New Labour. I’m not even an ambassador for Medway. I’m
a Member of Parliament whose job is to scrutinise the government and hold it
to account." Which is a vision of politics - about the thwarting of power rather
than its usurpation - which is deeply unfashionable these days, and almost
certainly explains his dislike of a fundamentally Leninist political construct
like New Labour. It places principle above party, and recognises that jokes are
just as valid a part of your political armoury as anything else.
Nonetheless, was he never in danger, having embraced the showbiz aspect of
politics, of suddenly pratfalling into being a National Joke?
"I agree there is always that danger, that element of buffoonery. I’ve
sometimes been compared with Boris Johnson, but I actually think that my
politics is more serious than that."
And, to give him his due, he hasn’t done badly, helping to save trial by jury in
fraud cases and leading the successful rebellion against 90 days detention
without trial. Then again, opposition seems to have been Marshall-Andrews’
destiny, particularly after he introduced Derry Irvine at a Labour Lawyers
dinner in 1996, comparing him to Lord Mackay by saying "It looks like we’re
going to have another Lord Chancellor who’s a teetotal, ascetic Scot. Well, a
Scot anyway." Irvine was, as you’d expect, incensed, and probably made sure
that, in Marshall-Andrews’ words, "I wasn’t even going to adorn a Select
Committee. However, I can say quite clearly that I am happier in politics than
he is." As he said towards the end of our interview, "it’s been enormous fun."
Although, as it turned out, the afternoon was still young, by this stage I’d
finished the drawing, and passed it across the table to him before nipping out
on to Greek Street for a fag. When I returned, Marshall-Andrews was beaming
at me as he tore a sheet of A3 paper into shreds in front of him. That wasn’t
my original, but it was another good gag. Let’s just hope and pray that his
recent comments don’t mark some terrible descent into gravitas.