No Such Thing As Society

by Andy McSmith

  If all that Mandelson had done was enlist professional advice, it would have been enough to establish his reputation as one of the most effective department heads the party had ever employed, and would have kept to a minimum the number of people who resented his activities. But that was the less important part of his work. While the Prince of Wales referred to him in conversation as ‘the Red Rose man’,21 newspapers compared him with Machiavelli, implying that he was up to something more controversial than organizing focus groups and backdrops for press conferences, but his role was not properly explained because there was not a word or phrase that described his particular activity. The phrase ‘spin doctor’, now so well established in the language, drift ed over the Atlantic during the 1988 US presidential election. In that campaign, the professionals had to cope with hundreds of news outlets that reported events almost as they happened – and not only reported but instantly interpreted them, each event being a potential triumph for one candidate and a disaster for another. Spin doctors were needed to put their side’s ‘spin’ before the other side got theirs in. Mandelson was the first person in the Labour Party to understand the importance of spin. For years, the Labour Party had been the underdog, constantly attacked, ridiculed and misrepresented in hostile newspapers, and given only a slightly better showing in the broadcast media. When Margaret Thatcher visited Washington, her personal rapport with President Reagan dominated the coverage. When Kinnock went, in 1987, the young Alastair Campbell, travelling with the press corps as the political correspondent of the Sunday Mirror, was so incensed by their behaviour that he wrote a scorching attack in the New Statesman, accusing a ‘cynical, cowardly and corrupt Tory press’ of colluding with a Republican-controlled White House to denigrate Kinnock.22 For a lobby journalist to attack so publicly the people he worked with every day was unusual; it marked the start of an eight-year trajectory that took Campbell out of journalism and into Tony Blair’s service.

  After Mandelson’s arrival, journalists who were used to Labour being a soft target discovered that they had to be more careful in reporting its affairs. A television journalist broadcasting live about the Labour Party might find that by the time he had come off air, his programme editor had already had Mandelson on the phone complaining. The relentless effort that the new communications director put into combating hostile coverage made him immensely valuable to those whose careers he helped to advance, such as Kinnock, Brown and Blair, and feared and loathed by others. Any politician who ran foul of Neil Kinnock might suddenly find themselves being ridiculed and denigrated in the media, and would suspect that Mandelson had been at work. After the 1987 election, the Labour Party’s rising star was a now halfforgotten figure named Bryan Gould, who topped the poll in the shadow cabinet elections and looked to be better positioned than anyone else to be the next party leader. Then, in his role as shadow secretary for trade and industry, he fell out with both Kinnock and John Smith because he stuck by the old party policy of opposition to the EU, and in 1989 began a political descent that eventually caused him to leave British politics altogether. In his memoirs, he blamed Peter Mandelson and his spin-doctoring:

  It was becoming increasingly clear to me over this period that Peter Mandelson was working to his own agenda – on what I and others began to call the ‘Mandelson Project’. The ‘project’ was to ensure that Peter’s protégés – Gordon Brown as the prime contender, but with Tony Blair as a fall-back – should succeed to the leadership.23

  Because the word ‘spin’ came into the language of politics just when the Labour Party had learnt how to do it well, it is often mistakenly said that ‘spin’ was a New Labour invention. Actually, the practice is much older than New Labour; it is just that before 1988 there was no word for it. Margaret Thatcher’s press secretary, Bernard Ingham, was a skilled spin doctor years before Mandelson entered the scene; the only reason that he could deny ever being a spin doctor was that the expression had barely entered the language when he stopped. The Queen also employed an effective spin doctor in Michael O’Shea. When the Institution of Professional Civil Servants held their annual conference in May 1998, they heard from two members how civil service press officers were being pressured to spin, rather than give out information. Civil servants were required to ‘expound untruths on behalf of the government, produce dodgy material, or leak documents in the government’s interest,’ Peter Dupont of the Central Office of Information complained. Peter Cook, of the Department of Employment, added that some of his colleagues had ‘written articles of a party political nature on behalf of ministers to be inserted in the press’ or ‘have worked on the Action for Jobs campaign – a campaign that said little or nothing about Department of Employment services and much about the Conservative Party’s views on unemployment’.24

  The practice of ‘burying bad news’ was drawn to public attention by an infamous email written on 11 September 2001 by Jo Moore, a Labour spin doctor. Although she made the device famous, she did not invent it; it had been practised for years. John Major was an outstanding exponent. When he was minister for social security in the mid-1980s, one of his self-appointed tasks was to conceal how poverty had increased under Margaret Thatcher’s premiership. One authoritative way to measure it was to compare the number of people who qualified for supplementary benefit, who by the governments own definition were living in relative poverty. These figures had stayed constant at around 2m until the late 1970s, then rose so rapidly that the Thatcher government decided not to publish them annually any more, but to bring them out once every two years. By the summer of 1985, publication of the 1981–3 figures was long overdue and Major devised a plan, as cunning as any that was ever dreamt by Blackadder’s sidekick Baldrick, to slip them out without anyone noticing. His difficulty was that he was being pestered by written questions tabled by the Labour MP Frank Field, who had a specialist’s knowledge of social security and who demanded to know when the figures were to be made available. Parliament’s rules compelled Major to answer. His way round was to enlist fellow Tory MP Edwina Currie, who was also his lover (though their affair remained secret until she published her diary fourteen years later),25 who agreed to table a written question asking for exactly the same information that Frank Field had requested. Major then had the statistics slipped into the House of Commons library when everyone’s attention was distracted by Prince Andrew’s wedding to Sarah Ferguson, on the afternoon of the last day in July before the Commons rose for the summer. On the same day, he wrote to Edwina Currie telling her that the figures were in the library, and wrote to Frank Field referring him to the answer he had given Currie, knowing that there was no way that he would see it before the library closed for the long summer recess. It was a master plan, worthy of a future prime minister, but Frank Field was too sharp to fall for it. He had a scout posted in the library just in case. His scout seized the statistics as they arrived and ran them through a photocopier, enabling Field to release them to the press. They showed that government policy had driven up the numbers living in poverty by around a third, to 2.64m.26

  Perhaps the most significant development in the Labour Party during these years, though it passed almost unnoticed, was that at some point late in the 1980s or very early in the 1990s the Labour Party ceased to be socialist. In the dictionaries in print at the time, the word ‘socialist’ had a precise meaning, namely someone who believed in the common ownership of the main sectors of the economy. Whether the Labour Party was ever really a socialist party is a moot point, but it certainly fought the 1983 election on a socialist manifesto, replete with sweeping proposals for transferring industries to state or cooperative ownership, and on every party member’s card there was an extract from Clause IV, Part IV of the party constitution, calling for the common ownership of the means of production. (Tony Blair had the clause removed in 1995, but that was several years after socialism had vanished from any Labour policy document.) Even after the 1983 defeat, each time an industry was privatized, Labour routinely promised to renati
onalize it. That promise was still to be found in policy documents passed by the Labour Party conference in 1989, but in the preceding year, when Tony Blair was shadow energy secretary, the main item he had to confront was electricity privatization. Uniquely for a Labour shadow cabinet minister, he made no commitment to renationalize the industry if it was sold off . The sale was delayed because of complex problems about who would pay the cost of cleaning up after the nuclear power generators; by the time it came about, in 1991, socialism had been reversed in all the former Soviet satellite states of Eastern Europe and had begun to collapse even in Russia. Neil Kinnock, once an enthusiast for state ownership, then declared that the majority of the Labour Party had never really believed in it, ‘but they were the tunes of glory that were coming out. Well, we’ve stopped that nonsense,’27 he pronounced.

  CHAPTER 16

  THE HAND OF GOD

  Sometimes, a sporting contest breaks its boundaries to become a political event, not necessarily with happy consequences. Sometimes, minor sports that do not normally attract a mass following throw up performers who create such a sense of drama that suddenly there are millions watching their progress. The 1980s began and ended with political controversies that tore into the world of sport. One was stressful, but did no actual harm: that was the argument over whether or not to boycott the 1980s Olympics in Moscow. The other was the disaster at the Hillsborough stadium in Sheffield, in which ninety-six football spectators were crushed to death. These and other events on the pitch or track threw up questions about whether sport is just popular entertainment or has wider significance.

  Denis Thatcher gave his view when, at the age of seventy-one, he received an unexpected accolade from the Central Council for Physical Recreation (CCPR), who elected him Spectator of the Year because of his enthusiasm for golf and his past services as a rugby referee. Interviewed by the BBC after the award ceremony in May 1986, where he was presented with what was claimed to be the world’s largest bottle of champagne, Mr Thatcher remarked: ‘We need money for everything, but sports for kids happens to be my desire in my advancing years. I believe that perhaps we can increase the belief in the Christian ethic, because that is what sport’s about.’1

  This was a different take on what sport is ‘about’ to that of the marketing director of Slazenger sports rackets who, when explaining why his company invested so much and so consistently in making its brand name visible during Wimbledon fortnight, said: ‘Sport is about winning, so it makes sense to link our products with an event that is all about winning.’2

  The champion jockey Peter Scudamore had yet another definition. Sport, he said, was about ‘making the most of it when things are going well’.3 More directly self-aggrandizing, an early 1980s television commercial carried the slogan ‘Nike – What Sport is About’.

  But the athletes who had spent years training to compete in the 1980s Olympics regretfully discovered that sport was also about world politics. On 27 December 1979, the Soviet Union’s elderly leaders dispatched the Red Army into Afghanistan, where the government (friendly to the Soviets) had collapsed. Their troops were soon caught up in a guerrilla war, which would last ten years and end in humiliation for the invaders. Some of their opponents were volunteer fighters from other parts of Asia, including the young Osama bin Laden. Before the invasion, a number of well-known Soviet dissidents, such as Vladimir Bukovsky, had been urging the western democracies to boycott the Moscow Olympics because of the USSR’s disregard of civil rights. After the invasion, President Jimmy Carter called for an international boycott and ordered US athletes not to go. More than sixty governments issued similar instructions to their athletes, including a few such as China and Iran, who had quarrels of their own with the Kremlin.

  In London, Mrs Thatcher had not been in office long. She was beset with economic problems, her government was deeply unpopular and she accepted that she could not start banning British citizens from travelling to Moscow, though her views were clear enough. To her, this was the story of the 1936 Berlin Olympics again. When a delegation from the CCPR, who met her in February 1980, protested that they should not be put under political pressure, Mrs Thatcher retorted: ‘When did the defence of freedom become a political issue?’4 One of her ministers, Angus Maude, declared on another occasion: ‘Trying to prevent a nuclear Third World War is not politics, in the conventional sense of the word, and it is childish and perverse to pretend that it is . . . Let us hear no more of this nonsense about sport and politics.’5

  What Thatcher wanted, as she told the House of Commons on 14 February, was for the sports associations to arrive voluntarily at a decision to pull out. The next day, the British Olympics Committee and each of the bodies representing an Olympic sport was sent a letter setting out the government’s position. The British and American governments were considering whether they could organize a rival Games in the USA or Canada, and were prepared to put money into it, but that would have destroyed years of painstaking work that had gone into building up the number of nations participating in the Olympics. There were also travel agencies who had sold thousands of holiday packages to Moscow, who feared being beset by customers wanting their money back, and the sporting organizations had to take heed of what the athletes thought, and the athletes wanted to compete, after their years of training. In March, seventy-eight of them signed a petition delivered to Mrs Thatcher saying that they were prepared to boycott the opening and closing ceremonies, but not the games themselves, because ‘we are not prepared to preside over the destruction of the Olympic movement’. The official who passed the petition to Margaret Thatcher added a note pointing out that it was not signed by the athletes most likely to bring gold medals home – Geoff Capes, Sebastian Coe, Brendan Foster, Tessa Sanderson, Daley Thompson, etc.6 – but that turned out to be false comfort. Even Seb Coe, who would later rise to prominence in the Tory party, did not want to take part in a boycott.

  There was no meeting of minds when Sir Denis Follows, chairman of the British Olympic Association (BOA), was called before the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. Some of its members could barely comprehend how the BOA could consider sending athletes to the heart of the Communist empire, particularly when the organization was party to an international boycott of South African athletes. (Conversely, it mystified Zambia’s president, Kenneth Kuanda, that the governments now demanding a boycott were the same ones who, when African states were calling for a boycott of South Africa in protest against apartheid, had told them that sport and politics should not mix.) All attempts to get Sir Denis to express a personal view on communism, apartheid or world affairs met with the response that in his official capacity he had no such opinions. He said, ‘I firmly believe we must keep politics out of sport. You either accept the world as it is, or quit it.’ After prolonged, hostile questioning, Sir Denis finally brought God into the discussion in an unexpected way. He told his interrogators, ‘I am just not on the same wavelength as you, and that is how God made me.’7

  Since the government would not lay down a policy, the House of Commons held a free vote, which, given the preponderance of Conservative MPs, predictably came down in favour of the boycott. Nicholas Winterton, whose long parliamentary career would come to grief during the MPs’ expenses scandal thirty years later, thought a boycott of the Games was ‘totally inadequate’, and that they should be voting for a complete ban on trade and cultural exchanges with the Soviet Union. Jill Knight, the future champion of Clause 28, asked whether ‘if one had arranged to play bridge on Wednesday with an acquaintance who had spent the previous weekend overpowering and murdering a neighbour’s family, one would still do so’. Whether to go to the Moscow Olympics or not was ‘essentially the same question,’ she maintained.8 Archbishop Runcie even threw in his ha’penny worth by telling the athletes that in this instance, ‘it is an illusion to suppose that you can separate sport from politics’.9 The novelist Arthur Koestler described those who thought otherwise as ‘innocents’.10 Yet when the BOA met, on 26 March, hockey
was the only sport whose representative supported the boycott – though the Royal Yachting Association, the Joint Shooting Committee and the British Equestrian Federation later joined the British Hockey Board in refusing to go – but the majority was for taking part. ‘We believe that sport should be a bridge, not a destroyer,’ said Sir Denis.11 Their decision effectively saved the Moscow Olympics.

  One good reason for ignoring Thatcher was the very high chance that the nation’s athletes would return festooned with medals. Britain’s middle-distance runners were then the fastest in the world. Track racing was dominated by the rivalry between Sebastian Coe, then aged twenty-three, and Steve Ovett, who was twenty-four. They were rivals, but not friends. Coe was a university graduate who trained lightly by world standards, using unorthodox techniques designed for him by his father, and found time in his life for literature, jazz and other interests; Ovett had dropped out of art school to devote himself single-mindedly to the track. In Oslo, three weeks before the Moscow Olympics, Coe became the first athlete ever to hold world records over four distances simultaneously, the 800 m, 1,000 m, 1,500 m and one mile, but the distinction lasted for less than an hour. Ovett ran the mile and clipped a fifth of a second off Coe’s record. In Moscow, Ovett came from behind and won the 800 m, with Coe coming second. Six days later, Coe came from behind to win the 1,500 m. Daley Thompson, a twenty-two-year-old Londoner, took the gold medal in the decathlon, but Jamaican born Tessa Sanderson, who was just 0.26 m short of achieving a world record for the javelin a few weeks earlier, was off form and did not qualify for the final round. In all, Britain took five golds, more than any other country outside the old Soviet block. Uniquely, not one of the gold medallists featured in the New Year’s Honours list six months later. They were not forgiven for being there, though the most famous of them, Seb Coe, went on to be elected as a Conservative MP twelve years later.