Why William Wragg’s whipping complaints matter

To an old Westminster lag like me, there is something slightly grating about MPs complaining about nasty whips and political intimidation. I’m thinking about William Wragg, who says the government is ‘blackmailing’ MPs to support Boris Johnson and suggested the police should get involved.

Wragg says that MPs are facing threats over constituency funding and even their personal lives unless they fall into line.

Some people are surprised and outraged to learn that governments threaten to do horrible things to their own MPs. Those people have not spent much time in Westminster, where such things are quite mundane.

Indeed, the sort of things Wragg describes strike me as being at the milder end of the spectrum of whipping – he makes no mention of either the threat or the reality of physical violence, for instance. Such violence would not have raised many eyebrows in earlier decades around Westminster, when every good whips’ office included at least one hefty chap who could leave backbenchers at least wondering if they’d get a snack in the face for rebelling.