The House of Commons still has a WhatsApp problem… thank goodness

As the Andrew Gwynne scandal reveals, the public ought to be grateful that media-savvy politicians have ‘secret’ back channels, such as private chat groups with names like Trigger Me Timbers, in which to let slip what they really think about the rest of us, says Sean O’Grady

Embarrassing and shameful as some of the private thoughts of Labour MPs captured on their WhatsApp messages undoubtedly are, there is also dark humour to be found in this macabre content.

The juxtaposition between public piety and private invective is inevitably amusing. We all know that our rulers, with rare exceptions, are rarely as nice as they would wish us to think them, and there is some satisfaction in knowing that they seem – astonishingly – not to realise that.

Further, in assuming that WhatsApp and other “NCC” (non-corporate communications) channels are entirely secret for ever, our politicians also display that great occupational hazard of the politician – vanity.

And how we love to see them fall when a public inquiry or a journalist breaks the code and prises their thoughts into the open. In journalistic terms, you should never put anything in writing that would “fail the Private Eye test” – seeing it in cold print and having to justify it.

So it has turned out with Andrew Gwynne. In contrast to the respectful and endearing tone he has adopted (especially at election time) towards his local electorate, in private he can’t stand them – or at least the ones with the temerity to complain.

Back in 2005, when he was freshly elected as the member for Denton – the area he grew up in – he proudly declared it an “honour and a privilege to represent in parliament the area where I have always lived, where I grew up, went to school and am now bringing up my own family”. He continued: “I genuinely believe that, and restate my pledge to do my very best for all the communities of Denton and Reddish.” Now? A little more jaded, perhaps understandably.

The WhatsApp group he established with some local councillors and others, “Trigger Me Timbers”, has him saying he hoped a 72-year-old woman would soon be dead after she dared to ask about her bins. The cheek!

In a unnecessarily cruel (even in private) mock message, he allegedly wrote on the Trigger Me Timbers WhatsApp group, which includes Labour councillors: “Dear resident, F*** your bins. I’m re-elected and without your vote. Screw you. PS: Hopefully you’ll have croaked it by the all-outs.” “All-outs” refers to a round of council elections across all wards, though it may also soon enough apply to the careers of the local councillors, along with Gwynne and his fellow WhatsApper, the MP for Burnley, Oliver Ryan.

Ryan, who is gay and presumably anti-homophobia, apparently made disparaging comments about the sexuality of another MP. These have not been published, but were apparently grim enough to make Angela Eagle, a senior minister as well as a woman of the world, feel, in her words, “pretty queasy and astonished”.

Gwynne – who ran Jeremy Corbyn’s election campaign in 2017 – has always presented as a conventionally egalitarian, socially liberal, progressive type, in stark contrast to the sexist, racist and snooty content of the WhatsApp group. Yet he seems not to have had much time for Black History Month or Diane Abbott.

Was he always like that? Or have two decades in the Commons and even longer in the fractious world of Tameside Labour politics driven a good man beyond cynicism?

He’s hardly alone, of course, and a bigger act of hypocrisy would be for those now attacking him to pretend that they’d never been bitchy about a colleague, ridiculed a voter, or made some politically incorrect “joke”.

It does not take much effort of memory to recall the profanity of the then prime minister’s WhatsApp Covid group. Boris Johnson staunchly supported his health secretary, Matt Hancock, in public, and reassured cabinet colleagues that Matt was doing “an amazing job in hellishly difficult circumstances” – but in the encrypted code of WhatsApp, Johnson was entirely uncoded and candid about his minister, calling him “totally f***ing hopeless”.

So the odd thing there is that Johnson actually agreed with a large section of the population, who’d come to the same conclusion about the hapless, lovestruck Hancock – but he couldn’t admit it, because he’d then have to make excuses about why he had hired him. This was pure politics: Johnson didn’t want to hand the opposition a scalp. It would also have called his own judgement into question for appointing Hancock in the first place. Then again, we knew about that.

In a way, it’s just gossip, and the best backchat is always the most inventively vicious and blunt. The most amusing political memoirs – a sort of analogue WhatsApp – are the catty diaries left behind by the (reasonably) well connected and the indiscreet: Chris Mullin, Alan Clark, Dick Crossman, Jock Colville, Thomas Creevey, Samuel Pepys.

In Scotland, they’ve banned politicians from using NCCs, and for the UK, the ministerial code now discourages them. It’s a shame, really, because it just means we will never discover the truth; they should be permitted, but stored for subsequent exposure. Then again, would Johnson have been quite as frank about his colleagues, or Dominic Cummings referred to his boss routinely, and accurately, with a shopping trolley emoji in place of his name?

Talking of Johnson, for example, a personal favourite indiscretion for many must be what the late Queen said about him to a family gathering towards the end of her life, when he had just been replaced by Liz Truss: “At least my funeral won't be organised by that idiot.” If only – if only! – she’d been on WhatsApp.