The lost arts of drinking and thinking

The last argument I had with the columnist Peter Jenkins before he died was about whether politicians were less interesting than they used to be. The word "argument" is commonly used now as a synonym for a blazing row, as in "they were having a bit of an argument, like," which means that the saucepans were flying all over the place and there was the risk of grievous bodily harm to one or both of the parties. My argument with Jenkins was a civilised disagreement.

I maintained that there was no one in active politics with whom I looked forward to having a conversation, as I had (I specified) with Tony Crosland, Dick Crossman or Iain Macleod. Certainly Michael Foot, Ian Gilmour, Denis Healey and Roy Jenkins were still around. But they had all more or less retired from the struggles of Westminster. The only politician who was both actively involved and even remotely entertaining was Ken Clarke.

Nonsense, Jenkins responded. My trouble was that I was getting old. We were both getting old (for it was 1992, and we were in our late fifties). If we were 30 again, just beginning what we laughingly called our careers, we should soon discover politicians who were every bit as stimulating as those I had just mentioned. I doubted this. While I had no wish to judge politicians as Fred Trueman judged cricketers, holding they were all giants in his day, nevertheless there had been a perceptible diminution in the willingness to take risks, at any rate in conversation – somehow a fear of being overheard saying the wrong thing.

This disagreement happened just over 10 years ago, when the Tories were in office and Neil Kinnock was about to be succeeded by John Smith as Leader of the Opposition. I think I was right then and am even more right today. There has, if anything, been an increase in the caution quotient. Several observers recognise this in addition to myself. They tend to attribute the growth of self-interested prudence to the professionalisation of politics.

It is a career which people now enter as they might go into, well, accountancy. They take an interest in politics at university and, on leaving, join either a think-tank or the entourage of a minister or shadow minister sharing their political inclinations. The more diligent may even try their hand at writing a pamphlet. Then the search is on for a parliamentary seat. Some gain a safe seat at the first attempt. There were numerous Labour members who managed this in 1997 and 2001 because at both elections the party won seats which it would not have expected to hold in the normal way of business. This step surmounted, it is then a matter of gaining a toehold in a ministry. To win this position, maintain it and progress further up the government staircase, it is essential never to say the wrong thing.

Clearly there is a good deal in this explanation. Nevertheless it is worth pointing out that the politicians I cited at the beginning as members of the interesting classes first became MPs in their early-to-mid thirties; while Lord Jenkins was a youthful 27. This means they were all early set on a political career. Indeed, two of them, Macleod and Healey, were by trade party apparatchiks. Of the rest, Crosland was an Oxford don; Crossman a don and then a journalist; Foot a journalist; Gilmour a barrister and then a journalist; Jenkins from an early age a professional biographer, whose first work of this kind, a Life of C R Attlee, appeared in the year when he became an MP. His other early work, the Tribune pamphlet Fair Shares for the Rich: the Case for a Capital Levy, remains a gap on my shelves waiting to be filled.

I used to repose high hopes in Mr Graham Allen and Dr Tony Wright, but they seem to have dropped by the wayside, though Dr Wright pops up occasionally as chairman of the Commons Administration Committee. I do not know what they have done wrong exactly. Others are excluded because they are the wrong age.

Thus Mr Denzil Davies is widely thought to be "impossible" and to hold the wrong views on Europe anyway. But the Government is not so stuffed with intelligence that Mr Tony Blair can afford wholly to dispense with his services. Mr Tam Dalyell should have been in the Cabinet years ago. Lord Radice (who is shortly to publish a book on Crosland, Healey and Jenkins) is less rebellious by nature, sharing as he does many views with Mr Blair. His former exclusion remains a puzzle. Mr Gerald Kaufman may be 72, but he would still add sharpness to the administration and colour to the front bench in his customary garb of the Mayor of Miami Beach.

A few weeks ago the papers made much of the story that beer consumption in the Commons had doubled, or whatever it was supposed to have done. It was what the papers like: drunken, idle legislators, wasting their time and our money, and so forth. In fact political drinking is but a shadow of its former self. Crosland would customarily start lunch with a dry martini, that is, a treble or quadruple gin, go on to share a bottle of retsina ("let's leave the vintages to Roy," he would say) and finish off with a cup of coffee and a glass of brandy before returning to his ministry to work till between seven and eight. The others I have mentioned had an intake scarcely less generous.

The culture of the drinking lunch has disappeared. It went sometime in the 1980s. This is undoubtedly a good thing if you want to get any work done in the afternoon. How Crosland, for instance, managed as he did continues to amaze me. But the disappearance of the alcoholic lunch has been accompanied by the virtual disappearance of the political lunch itself. It is, in its way, as important a development as the disappearance of the great country house (about which we have been hearing so much recently) was to the politics of the Tories and, to a lesser degree, the Liberals before the war.

Ministers have to seek the permission of Mr Alastair Campbell before being allowed out to play – or they think they have to seek it. Once they have secured it, they turn up at the appointed place and the arranged hour accompanied, without so much as a by-your-leave, by a youth or young woman of about 19 and-a-half who proceeds to take a note of the conversation on a pad held under the table. Afterwards you do not get a thank-you letter. Labour ministers, to be fair to the present lot, have rarely sent such missives, believing as they do that all journalists are persons with unlimited wealth at their disposal who do not have to be thanked for anything.

I ask: Is it worth it? For one of them it might almost be so. Mr Gordon Brown glowers. He lowers. But he remains both interesting and attractive. There are also signs that his miracle may now be coming to an end, which only goes to make him more interesting still.