How are MPs coping with Brexit? The amount of booze they drink gives it away

It’s getting like the last days of the Roman empire, is Brexit Britain. According to the Government Hospitality Service (chummier cousin of the Home Office’s “hostile environment”), vast sums of taxpayers’ money are being expended on booze. Our rulers knocked back some 4,000 bottles of wines and spirits last year, 20 per cent up on 2016, the year of the EU referendum and the arrival of Donald Trump. By the way, researchers at Kings College London blame Brexit for a relative rise in the use of tranquilisers after the vote. (Antidepressant prescribing in England rose after the UK voted to quit the European Union, in stark contrast to widespread decreases in the prescribing of other medicines).

There’s also been a huge increase in the number of ambulance call-outs to deal with people zonked out on the synthetic cannabinoid spice. And how did Theresa may get through her latest week of Brexit hell? With her “rock” of a husband, Philip – and with a few tumblers of Scotch.

It seems we cannot get through Brexit whilst compos mentis, which seems plausible, with our rulers turning to the bottle to deal with the pressure. Some of the wine was consumed after last week’s marathon cabinet meeting to approve Ms May’s EU-UK withdrawal treaty. Or perhaps the convivial event was in reality a “lock in”, designed to prevent her rivals briefing against her and her text before the No 10 machine got its story out first?

Of course, politics and alcohol have always mixed well. It isn’t all that new. The most famous drunk ever was George Brown, lost to history but in his day a power in the land – deputy leader of the Labour Party, deputy PM, de facto, cabinet minister, massive personality and one of that select group of statesmen unlucky enough to have been photographed after falling over in the street. As foreign secretary in the 1960s, the legend goes that he was once on an official visit to Chile and he asked a beautiful creature in scarlet for a dance at an official reception. The subject of his advances – he had more than one weakness – declined the invitation: “I’m sorry sir, there are three reasons why I can’t – you are blind drunk, this is not a waltz but the Chilean national anthem, and I am the Cardinal Archbishop of Santiago.”

Sadly, the story is untrue, but I much prefer the line his prime minister, Harold Wilson, came up with after one of Brown’s many attempts to resign from the government after he had rendered himself “tired and emotional” as Private Eye always called it. When a colleague attending some ministerial committee asked Wilson where George was, he replied “he told me he’s been thinking. Or least I think he said ‘thinking’”.

Westminster is full of bars, still, open all hours and long benefiting from yet another public subsidy denied to most other businesses (and in stark contrast to the battering the pubs have received from HM Treasury). It is perfectly possible, if honourable and right honourable members are especially busy to spend every waking, or not so awake, hour propping up a bar in some corner of the mother of parliaments. The Sports and Social Club Bar, which had little to do with sport it must be said, was shut down last year after a scrap in which someone got glassed. So much for the rules of debate and the crusade for law and order.

Nor has the Strangers Bar, for the convenience of members and their guests, been a stranger to booze-fuelled civil disturbance. Because of the risk of legal action, and because it reads so much better in terse, dry terms, I have taken this quite deliberately from the Wikipedia entry for Eric Joyce, Labour member of parliament for Falkirk from 2005 to 2015:

“Joyce was arrested at 22.50 on 22 February 2012 in the Palace of Westminster by the Metropolitan Police on suspicion of committing assault. He was reported to have attacked as many as six politicians, including a Labour whip, after having gone “berserk” following a dispute with a group of Tory MPs sitting nearby. He headbutted and punched the Conservative MP, Stuart Andrew, after striking Labour assistant whip, Phil Wilson, while Wilson was attempting to restrain him. He also headbutted Thurrock Conservative councillor, Ben Maney, and punched Basildon Conservative councillor, Luke Mackenzie, both of whom were attempting to break up the incident. Two more Conservative MPs, Alec Shelbrooke and Jackie Doyle-Price, were also caught up in the fracas while attempting to intervene and calm Joyce down. A door window was smashed as Joyce attempted to resist arrest before being removed by police and taken to Belgravia police station.”

Still, most of the boozing is done quietly at corner tables or leaning on the bar where they swap gossip, tell dirty jokes and bemoan the state of the world they were once idealistic enough to imagine they could change. I myself once spent an evening doing just that with the late Charles Kennedy, matching him drink for drink. I can’t remember much about it. And we all know what a tragic end awaited him. Becoming Liberal Democrat party leader merely opened up fresh opportunities for refreshment, as you get invited as a part of the “constitutional wallpaper” at those grand functions for visiting presidents and monarchs, and having a few helps can get you through often dull events and company. And it becomes habitual: Wilson probably knocked back too much brandy after a tough day holding his government together, and Margaret Thatcher might have cut down on the whisky a bit. Tony Blair, even, acknowledged that he found himself becoming too fond of a bottle of red wine.

After Brexit, I suppose one of the few advantages for “Global Britain” will be the opportunity to import yet more alcohol from ever more exotic corners of the globe. A disproportionate quantity of the Mongolian gin, Kenyan liquers and Tongan vin rouge will be heading to London, SW1 0AA.