First the WhatsApp group for female Conservative MPs started sharing cat pictures. Then it became a forum for complaints about “nasty lefties” in the election. More recently it’s been used to swap gardening tips.
But the worst thing, one member sighed, is that “every other day it is somebody’s bloody birthday”. The group, which includes cabinet ministers, exchange emoji bottles of fizz, animations of people being pampered and vanilla platitudes for the birthday girl. “It has set the cause of women in politics back by a generation,” grumped one MP.
With the exception of Ken Clarke, who always struggled with mobile phones, most MPs will tell you that the WhatsApp messaging service is changing politics and only partly for the good. With Twitter and email increasingly monitored, WhatsApp is vital for instant confidential discussions between small groups. It is a tool for upsetting the established order. Almost every political interest group, friendship clique and ministerial collective has a WhatsApp group now.
When discipline holds, and participants use it to agree a common goal, these groups are the acme of politics. Before the general election, Downing Street was beholden to eurosceptic Tory MPs on the “ERG DExEU/DIT Suppt Group”, which led to WhatsApp co-ordinated attacks on enemies of Brexit. The chief whip Gavin Williamson neutered them after polling day, reshuffling key faces into government jobs. The group continues now, a little less energetically.
At the other end of the spectrum is Labour’s all-female MPs group. At the start of the year the former shadow education secretary Lucy Powell was criticised by fellow MPs for an article she wrote and vented her fury on WhatsApp. In a peroration intended for friends but accidentally sent to all female Labour MPs she criticised shadow education team members Angela Rayner and Tulip Siddiq, saying: “Angela and Tulip really think they’re going to be ministers in an actual Labour government very soon.” She later apologised for being a “cow”.
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An all-Tory MP WhatsApp group is more like a Mexican stand-off, with everyone conscious of the danger of an inopportune comment leaking. Only Michael Fabricant’s constituency selfies interrupt and annoy.
Etiquette is a problem. Who is in charge? Do you have to participate? Will refusal to engage offend? What if the plan being proposed just sucks? Will you be coerced by the majority?
Meanwhile a silent majority sit both slightly appalled and mawkishly amused, as unintended slights obviously rankle. If, as Ayn Rand claimed, civilisation is “the process of setting man free from men”, ugly WhatsApp exchanges are helping us slide into reverse.
Amber Rudd spent last week in Silicon Valley trying to persuade tech companies to dilute the end-to-end encryption that keeps these messages private. If she succeeds, the next species to walk the earth will marvel at how the human race chronicled on WhatsApp their own decline from peak civilisation to the abyss.
Sam Coates is deputy political editor
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Matt Chorley is away