‘I’m not an ambassador for New Labour, I’m an MP’

When I came to play back the recording of my recent interview with Bob Marshall-Andrews, the serially rebellious Labour MP for Medway, for a second or two my blood ran cold. As I remembered it, while I’d been drawing him we’d had a wide-ranging conversation about Blair, Brown, socialism, globalisation, MPs’ 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.

The full transcript, which I won’t bore you with, probably makes as much sense as Marshall-Andrews’s recent comments on 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’s 11-year-long career in the House of Commons, this was quite extraordinary. In last Saturday’s Guardian, in an overexcited 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 on to 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 Dennis the Menace and Dennis’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, 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 he surrounds 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 capo regime 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 complete 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 to ‘Bloody Marshall-Andrews’, and I told him about a 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 l unchtime.) And among the living? ‘Alan Johnson. Not too close to New Labour. Moderate socialist.’ So would he describe himself as a Hattersleyite? ‘What, New Hattersley? No, not really. I’d say I was a Healeyite.’

‘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.