Commons People

When I first started working at the House of Commons, back in 2001, Philip Hensher was still discussed in dark tones by my colleagues. He was the only employee in living memory to have been sacked. Five years before, he had written Kitchen Venom, a novel set in the Clerks’ Department where we worked, about John, a secretly gay, hunchbacked senior clerk who spends his workday afternoons sneaking off to see a beautiful Italian rent boy in Earls Court.

Hensher wasn’t sacked for the novel, per se, although senior management weren’t entirely happy about his depiction of clerks as workshy fops who have no respect for the MPs they advise and who ‘treat Members to their faces with civility, and behind their backs as inferior undergraduates who have mistaken their ambitions’. The sackable offence came while Hensher was publicizing Kitchen Venom. He gave an interview to Attitude in which he expounded upon how many Members were gay, how ugly most of them were and which ones he found attractive. He revealed he had always rather liked Gordon Brown’s ‘shagged-out look’. My colleagues were primarily upset by what they viewed as thinly veiled poison-pen portraits of certain individuals, and, according to Hensher, in an interview in the Independent, by small details such as

the clerks sitting round composing lists of the 20 stupidest MPs in the House. It was just too galling to have someone say that Commons life is full of people playing stupid games. But then the point of the book is the interplay between ordinary human beings and the jobs they occupy.

When I read the book, I could vaguely recognize some traits of some people (others had since retired), but it was hard to understand why my colleagues couldn’t view the novel objectively and judge it on its literary merits. Kitchen Venom is set in 1990, during the lead-up to Thatcher’s forced resignation. Thatcher appears herself at intervals throughout the novel, reflecting grandly on her power and the loss of it and sometimes acting as an omniscient narrator of the main characters’ stories. This lends the novel part of its off-kilter quality. After a prelude in which the Prime Minister relates an anxiety dream about her loss of power, the novel starts with the funeral of John’s unpopular wife. Hensher relishes the social awkwardness of the occasion, detailing the hypocritical conversations about the dead woman and the conventional platitudes that everyone, apart from John’s drunken elder daughter Jane, feels obliged to spout. Jane and her sister Francesca are 31 and 29 respectively. Neither works, both are single and both still live in the family home, somewhere in an unnamed but obviously upmarket area of London. Francesca, who has adopted this more exotic version of her real name, Frances, is a passive aggressive, affected pain in the neck. ‘She moved through her life as if expecting to be looked at . . . Those who noticed her often felt that they were being instructed in Francesca’s mood by her posture. Sometimes they went along with it . . . More often, they looked at her and were enraged.’ Jane is permanently enraged by her sister. Jane and Francesca are like two Edwardian spinsters lolling about in a drawing-room with not enough to do. Their upper-middle-class milieu and the unchanging nature of the House of Commons, in which many scenes are set, give the novel, if not quite an archaic quality, then a curious timelessness. Hensher seems to be channelling the spirit of Ivy Compton-Burnett; indeed, John’s colleague Henry has read all her novels and at one point lends Two Worlds and Their Ways to Francesca. Hensher’s tone has a similar cold, drawling wit and urbane subversiveness – a funeral guest is like ‘a dwarf in Velázquez, blackly festive’; at the funeral the guests eat asparagus – ‘And when they pissed, the stink of asparagus would remind them of what they had eaten, and where they had been’; a murder scene is ruthlessly dispatched in one sudden line. He breaks conventional rules about dialogue serving plot and allows idle conversations to continue long enough for characters to be hoist by their own petards. His style also borrows from the ‘smooth unfeeling poetry’ of the Journal of the House, in which the proceedings of the House of Commons have been recorded in a quasi-biblical, quasi-legalistic tone since the sixteenth century. John is the Clerk of the Journals and, as John Walsh noted in the Independent, Hensher views the Journal as ‘a large and potent metaphor of human behaviour’:

They kept the minutes of the House, which was called the Journal of the House. Everything needs its minutes to be kept. Everything needs to be reduced from what occurs to what it means. We are human, and we cannot write down what happened, not everything that happened. We can only write down the significance of the events, in the end; we can only write down, and record, the decisions that are come to.

My favourite parts of Kitchen Venom are the descriptions of the House of Commons itself, which convey its cloistered, claustrophobic atmosphere.

The corridors; the hundreds of stairs; the thousands of windowed rooms looking out on windowed curtained courts and spires and a scrap of sky. Whenever [he] walked, lost, through the corridors of the Palace, they were so dimly lit; so silent, private and, in their green warm light, so underwater, that into his mind often came the thought ‘The secret Ministry’. In this public place, into which the public never came, upon which so many thoughts were daily bent, he walked, removed from the world of men, unsuspected by any, unheard, unwatched in this secret place, performing his secret ministry. He had no hidden purpose, but he felt like an anarchist when he walked the streets, hiding the round black bomb of his job.

In The Threat Level Remains Severe, my own novel about the House, I explore its archaic absurdities and its beguiling secretiveness, the sense of being in an enclosed world with its own peculiar rules, cut off from supposed real life. It’s this secretive quality and the secretiveness of the clerks themselves, the impassive role they are supposed to play, contrasted with their hidden hatreds and desires, that form the backbone of Kitchen Venom. You sense Hensher is speaking through Jane when, at her mother’s funeral, she says to Henry that his job is ‘like a mask or a coffin’ and observes, ‘Look at John. You can see he’s sad but it’s all terribly public . . . All that self-control. The way he’s taking it, it’s so correct and public. He never stops. None of you do.’ The novel is character- rather than plot-driven; it’s an unnerving, modulated chamber piece, in which the most dramatic events are not described. To explain the story fully would risk spoilers, so I’ll give a coy summary. After the funeral, John continues to visit Giacomo, his handsome rent boy. He loves the secrecy of these illicit assignations, beyond wanting to keep up respectable appearances. ‘He relished secrecy, and he created it around him. Perhaps it was why he decided to do the job that he did. He was secretive about it even when there was no need.’ His new junior colleague, Louis, is also gay but ‘out’. While walking through Trafalgar Square together one day after work, they bump into Giacomo. Although John pretends Giacomo is one of his daughter’s friends, Louis understands immediately the true nature of their relationship. His understanding and what he does with this knowledge have terrible consequences. In the seventeen years I have worked in the House of Commons, it has become less stuffy and cut off from the outside world. The Clerks’ Department has gone through several name changes and is now the cosily inclusive Chamber and Committees Team. My own job title has changed from ‘secretary’ to the more gender-neutral ‘committee assistant’. The old brand of clerks, who were knowledgeable about opera and could name all the novels of Trollope, as they do in Kitchen Venom, are now nearing retirement and the new clerks are eager young people with a terrifying work ethic, who did not all go to Oxbridge and are not all men. We now have a normal amount of annual leave, rather than the languorous recesses Hensher’s characters enjoy. Some of these changes are for the better but, overall, the place has become blander. In my own novel, the House is on the cusp of change, but its new, more corporate rules still force people to dissemble, and those who don’t play by these rules are deemed failures. The entire time I was writing, I worried about getting sacked if my novel were published. In the end, I happened to meet Hensher at a book launch. His advice was ‘Publish and be damned . . . after all it worked out quite well for me in the end.’ And so I did. So far, I have not been sacked. But then again, I haven’t yet revealed to any magazines which MPs I fancy.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 61 © Rowena Macdonald 2019