EX-BREXIT Secretary David Davis said bullying has become a “trend” in the House of Commons and blasted Sir Gavin Williamson for behaving like a character from House of Cards.
Speaking exclusively to GB News, Mr Davis said today: “The trouble with Williamson is he sort of read House of Cards, and thought it was a textbook, not a novel. And he’s played up this image of himself completely, that tarantula and so on, obviously, trying to encourage people to be intimidated by him.
“To be fair to him he’s never tried to bully me, at least not that I’m aware of, but the stories are rampant around the House of Commons of this attempt to bully and he’s a part of a trend which is – it’s actually quite common, unfortunately, in the last few years.
“That’s because some time ago, when Blair pretty much wiped out the party, it lost a lot of its collective wisdom, all of its historic knowledge, including about whipping. People sort of took the fiction that whipping was all about bullying.”
In an interview with Philip Davies and Esther McVey on GB News, he said: “Take Maastricht…generally we basically won that because we out-thought the rebels, we used brain not brawn, but it was always nice for everyone to have this idea that somehow there was pressure and coercion.
“It made them look like heroes. The truth was it was never real.
“I’m afraid Williamson has carried this to an extreme. I don’t actually think he added much to Sunak’s Cabinet.”
He added: “He certainly wasn’t ever any good at winning the public battles. Look back at his time when he was education secretary, he lost every public argument there was to be had then, so I actually think that was right to get rid of him.
“I think it’s a tradition of whipping, which is not real. It’s a sort of synthetic thing. Even his own deputy chief whip didn’t like what he did.
“He corrupted one element of the of the whip’s office role, which is very important, and that’s the welfare roll…there are colleagues along the way who are getting into trouble, whether it’s with their family or with money, or some other pressure point, and the whips’s office very often helps them out.”
Mr Davis told GB News: “I know Theresa May sacked him in due course, but the difficulty with people like Cameron and indeed Boris is they never knew anything about whipping. They didn’t understand, they thought whipping was about bullying and it’s a common misapprehension.
“He appeared to offer to them a method of coercing their own party…it was a very bad misapprehension. There are very good whips around, indeed some of the current ones today. There are some very good ones. Williamson was never one of them.”
He added: “Modern politics is hazardous enough frankly, in this day and age, with people being sort of convicted on allegations without the whip’s office making it worse and worse.
“Officers do a very important job. Somebody once described it as like sewers, that nobody likes to think about them, but they’re necessary.”
