Julian and John – two working class Jewish Tories the Old Etonians dislike
It is the summer of 2009 and two small Tory MPs, both from working class Jewish backgrounds, are huddled in a corner of the Members’ Lobby of the House of Commons as MPs stream out of the voting lobbies where they had elected one of them as their new Speaker.
Julian Lewis, like John Bercow, was a Tory outsider who never fitted in to the Old Etonian, Notting Hill set of David Cameron and Boris Johnson. They had linked up in the 1980s when they ran aggressive hard-right Tory training schools to teach wannabe MPs speaking techniques and how to out-argue Labour.
Both are fluent debaters. In their early years both were fanatical anti-Europeans, with Julian Lewis sounding like Nigel Farage in his interventions in the Commons. These included early demands for an “In-Out” referendum long before Cameron had even heard of the idea.
Lewis has specialised as a defence buff, written serious books of defence, called for 3 per cent of GDP to be spent on defence, and is religiously committed to nuclear weapons.
He should have been a defence minister in 2010, but Cameron stymied his ambitions by giving the job to a Lib Dem. In the same election, Chris Grayling was lined up to become Home Secretary. During the campaign he said he supported the right of B&B owners to ban gay couples from booking rooms. Grayling’s homophobia was too much for the very liberal Notting Hill set around Cameron so he was denied cabinet rank.
Grayling later won his promotion, thanks to his reputation as a Poundland Norman Tebbitt — but every ministry he entered just kept getting things wrong. He banned books being sent to prisoners, he was Transport Secretary as timetables crashed and MPs laughed behind his back at the “Failing Grayling” sobriquet.
Johnson dumped Grayling out of the cabinet, but in time-honoured fashion searched for a compensation post and alighted on the Intelligence and Security Committee. Other Tory members of it like Theresa Villiers, the former Northern Ireland Secretary or Mark Pritchard who had been the Conservative Party’s vice-chair in charge of international relations, had far more qualifications than Grayling. The serious adult, veteran MPs and Privy Councillors on the ISC saw Johnson’s decision to impose Grayling on them as nothing less than an insult. It was a classic failure of whipping and party management.
Julian Lewis first entered politics in the 1970s, when he secretly pretended to be a Labour activist in order to infiltrate the Newham Labour Party. He was acting as a secret agent of the well-financed Freedom Association, which funded strike-breakers and clandestine operations against the Labour left and communist party.
Newham militants were getting rid of a rightwing Labour MP called Reg Prentice and the young Lewis, then a graduate student at St Antony’s Oxford, decided to save Prentice. He failed in that task, but a taste for conspiracy and secrecy entered his soul.
Johnson was the author of his own defeat — the imposition of Grayling was too much. (As one Twitter wag noted, Grayling is the first politician in history to lose his own rigged election.) The PM seems to have exploded with anger by expelling Julian Lewis, like he longed to expel John Bercow. It is vindictive and shows the contempt in which the prime minister holds the idea of MPs having some autonomy in deciding who chairs committees.
Jonson could in theory get rid of Lewis — he could use his majority in the Commons to dissolve the Committee and impose a new membership. Julian Lewis cannot however be expelled from the Commons. Not even Dominic Cummings has that power to do that.
There will be Conservative MPs who sympathise with Lewis and will be shaken by his rough treatment. Normally this kind of whipping disaster happens at the end of a government, as leaders and whips lose control. That it has happened on the first anniversary of Johnson’s arrival at the top of the Tory Party signals that all is not well in the party. Management is breaking down — loyalty too — and with it, respect for the party leader and Prime Minister.
