The new MP is right that parliament’s drinking culture is fundamentally weird. But to change it, we need to reset the whole institution
Seven o’clock on a Monday night and I am standing in the House of Commons, nursing a glass of vinegary white wine.
All around me are people doing the same, though it’s polite sipping rather than getting sloshed. Waiters ferry bottles between the terrace function rooms, where MPs are hosting dinners or campaign launches like the one I’m at. Between the clanging division bells summoning MPs for votes that will go on tonight until gone 11pm, the Strangers’ bar is doing its usual trade.
Welcome to the working-but-not-quite-working time of night, where professional shades into slightly social; a fuzzy grey area that can sometimes get too fuzzy for everyone’s good. But it can also be a surprisingly productive time, as I realised only after having a baby for whom I needed to get home in the evenings, and realising how painfully out of the loop that made me.
For Hannah Spencer, the new Green MP for Gorton and Denton, parliament’s drinking culture was clearly a shock. “You can smell the alcohol when people are in between votes,” she told PoliticsJoe, adding that she’d have been sacked for boozing on the job as a plumber. After backlash from other MPs who found the outrage rather performative, she hit back on Instagram, arguing that MPs didn’t have “a right to get pissed at work”. All of which will do wonders for her image as an outsider bursting Westminster’s bubble. But what if she has made the classic newbie mistake of antagonising colleagues before she’s even got to know them, when she could have been building an alliance for change?
