£32,000 spent on punch to bribe voters, streaking through the streets, unpunished

When I was an infant and teachers kept imploring the class to pipe down and behave, one only had to look at the House of ­Commons to see what sort of an example grown-ups set – everyone yelling and bouncing up and down; my countryman, and Speaker, George Thomas howling, ‘Order! Order!’ and nobody taking any notice.

These adults, jeering and crowing, surely belonged in a farmyard or lunatic asylum. If memory serves, Michael Heseltine ran amok with a ceremonial mace.

Raucous: Drunken high jinks by the political and social elite at The Smoking Club, London

Unruliness goes back a long way. As Debbie Kilroy demonstrates most ably, ‘acts of ­gratuitous savagery and vindictiveness’ were found to be present in our Parliamentarians from the outset, the members generally ‘erratic, impulsive and volatile’.

Over the centuries it proved impossible to sift out nepotism, bribery and corruption, as these were simply ‘an unavoidable fact of life’.

Especially bribery. William Pole (Wiltshire, 1818) spent £32,000 on 130 gallons of punch, with which to tempt voters. Robert Rich (Dunwich, 1689) offered a constiuent a house for the sum of three pounds to be paid in lobsters.

As regards corruption, members collected taxes and rents on behalf of the Crown, issued fraudulent receipts, and pocketed the entire proceeds. Giles Mompesson (Great Bedwyn, 1614), on hearing a warrant had been issued for his arrest, escaped through a window, ran to the river, and hopped on a boat bound for France. Though ‘the House was livid’, he later returned and became Sir Giles Mompesson.

Bad behaviour was frequently forgiven or overlooked. Sent to prison, members would be out after a few days, and they never ­troubled to pay fines. George Monck (Devon, 1653) who during the Civil War massacred innocents in Scotland, was made Duke of Albemarle. Henry Belasyse (Grimsby, 1666) killed passersby in Hampstead, claiming, on no evidence, they were highwaymen. He was immediately pardoned by the ­monarch. There is a lot of duelling in this book – the coroner was ­routinely directed to find victims had died from ‘causes unknown’.

George Hudson (Sunderland, 1845) embezzled £750,000, so he was returned to Parliament twice more.

Cartoon of the wild and brash goings on at The Union Club, published 1801 

Richard Brinsley Sheridan ­(Staffordshire, 1780 – an MP as well as a playwright) missed crucial appointments because he’d drunk five ­bottles of port, two of madeira, and one of brandy the night before.

Charles Stanhope (Somerset, 1717), though the Treasury Secretary, was charged with theft, so sat in the House for another 20 years.

These were people never to be trusted near money, especially when the stock market got under way, ‘a trade founded in fraud, born of deceit, and nourished by forgers, falsehoods and all sorts of ­delusions’. Members always went in for ­insider-dealing, to bolster share prices and ­destabilise competition.

Thomas Guy (Tamworth, 1695) made £234,000 by these means – and established the hospital in London still bearing his name. This is the sole act of selfless public duty ­mentioned in the entire book.

When City bubbles burst, and ­politicians screwed up, the consequences were the same in the 18th-century as in our time.

Samuel Pepys (Norfolk, 1673), was far from a charmer and his diaries reveal a darker side to his relationships

Money stopped circulating, ­payments couldn’t be met, tradesmen’s bills weren’t settled, bankruptcies proliferated.

The nation suffered from ‘the ­universal poverty which is the result of universal avarice’.

When it comes to the members’ private lives, it’s hard to know where to look. The treatment of women was an outrage.

Edward Coke (Suffolk, 1589) ­married Elizabeth Hatton, an ­heiress, so he could steal all her goods. When she raised objections, ‘his rage was such he came violently into my chamber and rent my muff from my neck’.

When Mary, wife of Richard Grenville (Cornwall, 1628) ­complained about his behaviour, Grenville had Mary’s solicitor hanged.

It is shocking to learn diarist ­Samuel Pepys (Norfolk, 1673) was also a rapist. Kilroy dubs him a ­‘vindictive toe rag who used coercion and blackmail’ to bed servants, wives of ­clients, daughters of friends.

As Pepys put it, ‘with many hard looks and sighs’ and ‘after many ­protestings, by degrees I did arrive at what I would, with great pleasure’. Government funds were plundered to buy silence.

How much did this differ from Lloyd George (Caernarvon, 1890), two centuries or so later, who ‘couldn’t keep it in his trousers’, as Kilroy delicately phrases it?

He was a liability with village girls and ­society ladies, secretaries and ‘all manner of other staff, even a beekeeper’. And what was Prime Minister William Gladstone (Newark-on-Trent, 1832) up to, ‘rescuing’ prostitutes and fallen women, ‘taking them to meals and even bringing them back to Downing Street’?

Though I can perhaps ­sympathise with John Wilkes (Aylesbury, 1757) who, in his 70s, was seen hastening to his ­mistress – ‘Don’t stop me. I have got an erection now. Did it go down, I don’t know when I shall have another’. In earlier years he’d gone to the Vatican and ‘emerged from the darkness at the most sacred part of the ­ceremony, lashing out severely with an English horsewhip’.

Politicians – it wasn’t safe to know them. Charles Sackville (Sussex, 1661) and Charles ­Sedley (New Romney, 1668) were found ‘running up and down all night with their bottoms bare through the streets’. Sackville was created variously Lord Buckhurst, Earl of Middlesex, Earl of Dorset, a Knight of the Garter and a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Eyre Coote (Devon, 1812) paid schoolboys to let him flog them, then pulled his own breeches down ‘and encouraged them to return the favour’.

Another popular vice was ­gambling. Charles James Fox (Midhurst, 1768) ran up £120,000 in gambling debts, but at least he steered the abolition of the slave trade on to the statute books in 1807.

Members Behaving Badly ­c­ontains rogues, miscreants, maunderers, kidnappers and murderers aplenty. Have things changed? Underneath, human nature is much the same in my view.

It ought to be funny, the farcical bad behaviour, except that we must abide by the laws Parliamentarians come up with. ­Kilroy’s book is enough to make the reader question democracy, when we are confronted with such a grim catalogue of egomania.

I hope Kilroy writes a second volume, bringing the saga up to the present day.