Bagehot: A damn good whipping "I THINK it'd all work fine, this thing, British democracy," says Walter Harrison, MP, in "This House," a crackling New Westminster farce playing at the National Theatre. If it weren't so damn reliant on people...People who change their mind, who forget who they are. It was the job of the real-life Walter Harrison to remind them. Harrison, who died on October 19th, was a Labour whip for 17 of his 23 years in parliament. That the minority Labour government of 1974-79 - the subject of "This House" - survived for as long as it did was partly a testament to his ferocity. His car registration, KHE 2L, stood for "Kick Harrison's Enemies To Hell." While once chatting with a young Jack Straw, Harrison, a bluff Yorkshireman, grabbed the future foreign secretary's testicles and when Mr Straw, gasping, asked the reason why, the whip snarled, "Nowt. But think what I'd do if you crossed me. How David Cameron must yearn for such a man. On October 31st his coalition government lost a vote on the European Union's post-2014 budget after its whips - led by Sir George Young, a courteous septuagenarian - failed to dissuade 53 Eurosceptic Tory rebels from voting against the government. At issue was Mr Cameron's negotiating position on the budget, which is due to be discussed at an EU summit later this month. Mr Cameron had asked Parliament to support his demand for a real-term budget freeze. But an amendment tabled by Tory rebels proposed to cut the budget and, after Labour piled in to support it, the motion was carried by a slender margin. The defeat is unlikely to alter Mr Cameron's negotiating position much. But it raises pressure on the prime minister over his party's most fractious issue, Britain's strained relations with the EU. It is also the latest of many indications that Mr Cameron's grasp on his party is slipping. There are problems at the top. In recent weeks several Tory ministers have made statements that second-guess or flatly contradict government policy. The newly appointed energy secretary, John Hayes, has attacked wind turbines. Yet they are one of the main spars of the government's energy policy. Eric Pickles, the communities secretary, has warned against passing any new law to regulate the media. Yet Lord Justice Leveson, a judge charged with looking into the matter, may be about to recommend one - and Mr Cameron has said he should not be pre-empted. The threat to the prime minister in Parliament, as the EU budget defeat has shown, is more serious. The government has suffered bigger rebellions: including last year when 81 Tory Eurosceptics voted for a referendum on EU membership. Yet the budget vote is the first to end in defeat for the government and it was organised, remarkably, in only three days. "Every rebellion is better organised than the last," a Tory MP laments. Each leaves more blood in the water. Mr Cameron does not seem terribly worried. Opinion polls suggest he is still Britain's most popular party leader and his personal ratings are steady, even though his party's are flagging. Yet in an effort to restore his party's fraying discipline, he has at least tried to find a Harrison. In September Mr Cameron appointed Andrew Mitchell, a former army officer nicknamed "Thrasher," to be the government chief whip. The prime minister also gave him a talented fresh cohort of junior whips to command, including Jo Johnson, a brother of Boris, London's mayor. Under Mr Mitchell's predecessor, Patrick McLoughlin, the Tory chief whip since 2005, the whips had been considered too friendly and ineffectual. Many Tories - including, masochistically, some of the rebels - thought a spell of barking and ball-grabbing was in order. Mr Mitchell made a good start. He attached his juniors to MPs with whom they had an affinity - thereby ending a decades-old tradition of divvying up MPs into regionally delineated flocks. Yet Mr Mitchell lasted barely a month. He was forced to resign on October 19th (the day Harrison died) after offending a policeman with an outburst of rude language. Mr Cameron backed him; many Tory backbenchers and junior whips did not. In a way, therefore, the chief whip fell victim to the very problem he had been dispatched to solve - Mr Cameron's fading authority over his own party. A bad leader blames his whip That is a problem too great for whips to solve - even under Thrasher. In fact, the days of outrageous arm-twisting, à la Harrison, are mostly past. The whips office is weaker than it has ever been. In recent years the chief whip (or "patronage secretary," as he is still known) has lost control over the last of the blandishments - including peerages, jobs in national companies and berths on parliamentary select committees - that were once within his gift. Moreover, the rebelliousness of the current parliament is deep-rooted and hard to quell. One reason for this is disenchantment with coalition politics, especially among Tory backbenchers, who tend to blame Lib Dems for taking their jobs and Mr Cameron for letting it happen. Another is a surge in independent-minded MPs, especially among the many Tory parvenus in parliament from the 2010 intake, who tend to be much keener to get their views out on Twitter than to take them from a whip. Finally, of course, there is the cancerous issue of Europe, which can put the most reasonable Conservatives into a self-destructive rage. These are tough problems. Yet, if he is to staunch the blood, Mr Cameron must grapple with them. Many Tory MPs consider that he does not listen to their complaints; the Tory leader appears in particular to have paid too little heed to Mr McLoughlin. He must do better by Sir George. The new chief whip is no bully boy, but he has a deep knowledge of parliament which Mr Cameron needs to learn from.