Parliament holds a whip-round for man who kept democracy afloat

Telegraph

13-05-2025

The role of chief whip on the Westminster stage is normally a non-speaking one. Unheard by the public, at any rate. Their job is to lurk in the shadows, nudging and cajoling, whispering and promising, applying thumbscrews if necessary and doing whatever they can to get the Government through another difficult day.
Some have liked to 'put some stick about', as Francis Urquhart called it in House of Cards, but modern party management is a bit less harsh. As Sir Gavin Williamson, Theresa May's first chief, once said: 'It's amazing what can be achieved with a sharpened carrot.'
It is rare for one chief whip to speak about his job. To hear six is extraordinary. What would be the collective noun? A flagellation? It takes something special for them to open up, and that something was the death of a man who made their lives much easier (or, in the case of Simon Hart, a publisher's advance).
Formally, Sir Roy Stone, who has died in his early 60s, was called principal private secretary to the chief whip, a civil service role he held for 21 years under five prime ministers and 13 chiefs, five Labour, eight Tory. In Westminster, they knew him by a euphemism. Yesterday, they said goodbye to The Usual Channels.
As ducks float serenely across a lake while paddling like mad underwater, so Stone was the opposite: his job was to make democracy run smoothly no matter how chaotic it looked on the surface. It was appropriate that tributes to The Usual Channels followed Foreign Office questions, for it is important to realise that amid such rancour and unrest, with questions on Gaza, Ukraine, Iran, Trump, politicians can put aside their differences to say 'well done, good and faithful servant'.
Sir Alan Campbell, the current Chief, rose first to praise Stone's integrity in 'tumultuous times'.
Sir Julian Smith, May's second chief, reminded MPs that The Usual Channels was how legislation, debates, statements and, most importantly, recess dates were arranged. Stone was 'fair to all sides', he said, but often frustrated by politicians' ineptitude.
Williamson said that Stone told him he 'worked for me 51 per cent of the time and for the Opposition 49 per cent'. The former chief asked if he should study the manual of parliamentary procedure (that Williamson thrice referred to it as 'Erskine and May' suggests he didn't make it past the cover) and was told that 'only strange people and clerks' do that. After the 2017 election, when May didn't get the landslide she expected, Stone told Williamson 'you clucking screwed that up' (he may have misheard), and then calmly got on with working out how the Government could function. Up to a point.
The smaller parties valued him too. Wendy Chamberlain, a Lib Dem, had a lump in her throat as she expressed gratitude for the respect he gave her as chief whip for a party of 11. Further praise came from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. It fell to Alistair Carmichael, however, to speak of Stone's finest balancing act, when he served two masters in the coalition years.
There was only one occasion when Stone's mask slipped, Carmichael said, and that was early in the power-sharing era when he had been called on as Lib Dem chief to look after an MP's baby in the whips' office and Stone walked in mid-nappy change. To the unflappable Usual Channels, a chief wiping a baby's backside was a modernisation too far.
'One glimpse at his face,' Carmichael said, 'told me that this realised his worst fears about having Liberal Democrats in government'.
Perhaps, however, Stone was simply thinking of the line that is often attributed, wrongly, to Mark Twain: 'Politicians and nappies should be changed regularly and for the same reason.'