Ungovernable: The Political Diaries of a Chief Whip

http://www.renaud-bray.com

http://www.renaud-bray.com

The first insider account of life as a Chief Whip inside Westminster, from MP Simon Hart who has served under Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak.Over the course of the last five years Simon Hart has had a front row seat to the most turbulent political years in recent British political history, from negotiations around Brexit to COVID and its political fallout to the impact of Liz Truss' extraordinary 43-day premiership and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And, in 2022, under Rishi Sunak, he witnessed successive dramas unfold while holding the position of Chief Whip.During those Whip years, Simon oversaw a record fifteen Conservative MPs fell by the wayside. Three of these were resignations, including the scandal of Nadine Dorries and her disappearing Peerage; two defected to Labour, and the remaining ten were suspended by Simon for offences ranging from Matt Hancock's unauthorised appearance on I'm A Celebrity, Get Me out of Here to Lee Anderson's refusal to apologize to the London Mayor for his public accusation that Islamists controlled London. Each one of these involved an extensive build up, a complicated process and a noisy and vitriolic public commentary. None of this stopped him becoming one of the few Chiefs to survive for an entire premiership, of which there have been ten Chiefs in fourteen consecutive years.Ungovernable is his revealing, real-time blow-by-blow diaries of that extraordinary period of politics, at-times-salacious at-times-mundane, and a glimpse behind the curtain of what truly goes on in Westminster.