THE political party, for good or ill, is how governments in the UK (including the devolved constituent nations) are formed and deliver their programmes. Local authorities and councils too, of course, though the further down the hierarchy you go, it tends to become less rigid: there are more defections and independents, and English parish councils have little, if any, party political input.

Some sort of organised grouping is probably inevitable to get anything done. The progression from Royalist and Parliamentarian to Tory and Whig, Tory and Liberal, Conservative and Labour has seen the set-up become more formal and less flexible.

Though the fortunes of individual parties (the Liberals’ decline at the beginning of the last century, the SNP’s rise at the beginning of this one) change, and there have been periods when particular issues (the Corn Laws, free trade, Irish Home Rule, Brexit) blur lines, on the whole you now have to sign up to one side or the other, not least because it’s almost impossible to get elected otherwise.

However much MPs occasionally declare that their priority is country before party, or constituency before ministerial dictates or even (echoing Edmund Burke to the ungrateful people of Bristol) their conscience and judgment above voters’ opinions – all aims that can from time to time be presented as laudable – the reality of modern politics is that they’re supposed to do what they’re told and shut up about it. This is called delivering on your manifesto promises and mandate from the electorate, and keeps on being called that even when ministers are doing the exact opposite of what was in the manifesto.

You might have thought that people selected by their preferred party and then elected to the House of Commons would be aware of this depressing fact of life. The department for internal party discipline is called the Whips’ Office, a metaphorical indication of the use of the stick, rather than the carrot, in keeping backbenchers in line.

It’s true that some politicians rebel regularly: until he became leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn paid scant attention to those who ran it, voting against his own party more than 600 times between 1983 and 2016. He got less keen on such independence once he was in charge, but no one suggested he didn’t understand the system.

Anyone on the government payroll or opposition front bench – except in exceptional circumstances – is still expected to resign, and thus give up quite a lot of cash and endanger their career, in order to defy the whip. And the whips’ general raison d’être is to do whatever it takes to deliver the vote.

Historically, that has included what the rest of us might characterise as bullying, blackmail, threats and bribes. One former Labour whip threatened to turn an errant backbencher’s spectacles into contact lenses if he didn’t get into the correct lobby; this anecdote was widely held up as evidence of his being good at his job.

The implied promise of ministerial office or some gong or other are the traditional carrots in the whips’ bag, while a dead-end career in the party, deselection and releasing disobliging information about the politician are the obvious threats. These may strike you as dirty tactics, but they’re the traditional ones used by all parties, and are at least largely about internal party standing. They’re not seen by most MPs as the same as the kind of bullying for which John Bercow was recently condemned, which he says he will appeal against.

Some people are trying to claim that the Tory MPs sending in letters asking for a leadership contest (those go to the 1922 committee chairman and 54 are needed to spark a vote) have been insufficiently housetrained; most never expected to win, quite a few were only newly recruited to the party, and the pandemic shut down the normal operation of parliament just after they arrived.

There may be something in that, but the complaints by William Wragg, a Manchester MP and vice-chairman of the 1922, aren’t quite the same. He has form, admittedly. He was (jointly with two others) the most rebellious Tory MP on the last count (in June last year); amusingly, Sir Graham Brady, chairman of the 1922 and the man who tots up the complaints about the PM, was just behind at fourth.

Mr Wragg’s specific allegation, however, is that the whips’ office said that his constituency wouldn’t get funding that it might otherwise have secured if he were disloyal. That’s obviously a different sort of thing from saying he wouldn’t, for example, get a junior ministerial post. One affects Mr Wragg’s standing in the party (and is arguably fair enough, since collective responsibility is part of being a minister), the other is potentially about whether his seat, and thus his constituents, get a new school or funding for a roads upgrade.

That will strike most people as beyond the normal intimidation or bribery that – whether you approve of it or not – gets used for internal party politics. It’s hard to see that it’s a matter for the police, though, and not just because we’ve only got Mr Wragg’s say-so; even if it was said, there’s nothing to suggest the whips have the power to do such a thing, or that anyone has ever actually done it. There are, in fact, quite a few rebellious MPs who have nonetheless had quite generous “leveling-up” funding, and come forward to say so.

A problem for the PM, even if you make the highly contentious assumption that he can ride out the next week or so and stay in his job, is that most people, particularly people of a conservative disposition, respond better to incentives than to threats. But we’ve had two years of threats and restrictions: public anger about parties isn’t the gatherings themselves, which most acknowledge weren’t a serious health danger, but that the rest of us were subject to severe, and probably useless, restrictions that those who imposed them flouted.

The carrots promised by Mr Johnson – levelling up, a freer society, a Brexit trade bonus – have not appeared. Instead, we’re in for tax rises, inflation and constant, new, interfering regulations on everything from fast food to voter ID, and restrictions on protests to declaring lobsters sentient. Those are sticks that may prove a sticking point. If they do, the party’s over.

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