To my beloved Mum, the best person in this best of all possible worlds.
To my late, much-loved Dad, who taught me the joy of writing, among other things.
To my three brilliant big brothers, Chris, Nick and Ben, who had the right idea sticking to law.
To Penny and Balshen, who put up with me for ten years of this story, and deserved much better.
To my closest pals, Steve, Anthony and Damien, who were there through thick and thin.
To Mr and Mrs Bradley, without whom this book would not exist. So blame them.
And to Gordon, the greatest man I ever met: thanks for all you did.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Preface
Slow Ascent into Hell
1. Easter Monday, 2009
2. Warning Signs
3. The Fast Stream
4. Customs as I Am
5. The Treasury Type
6. A Trucking Mess
7. VAT Man Again. And Again
8. Sport of Queens
9. My Demon Booze
10. Meeting the Mother
11. The Art of the Budget
12. Rising to the Top
Going to the Dark Side
13. What Makes the Two Eds Tick?
14. Breaking Bad News
15. The Art of Budget Briefing
16. Interviews: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
17. Dirty Hands
18. Security
19. The Washingtonian
20. Lead in the Pencil
21. Gordon and the Eds
22. The Politics of Poverty
23. Honours
24. ‘The Evil That Men Do’
Mad Dog on the Loose
25. Blair and Brown: The Cola Wars
26. Taking On the Tories
27. Leaks and Leakers
28. The Art of Overseas Trips
29. The Editors
30. Political Footballs
31. Conference
32. The Family Guy
33. Going to the Mattresses
34. Asian Persuasion
35. Becoming the Leader
36. What We Lost the Day We Won
The Rollercoaster
37. The Hacks
38. Riding High
39. Presidents and First Ladies
40. Maggie and Me
41. Too Many Mistakes
42. New People
43. Thursday Night Lies
44. For the Glory of Gordon
45. The Forces of Hell
46. The David Miliband Conundrum
47. The Art of the Reshuffle
48. ‘Rough Seas Make Good Sailors’
Walk Through the Storm
49. The Darker Arts
50. Anatomy of a Resignation
51. Back to the Beginning
52. Politics, Gordon and Me
Acknowledgements
Index
Copyright
PREFACE
I’ve spent many years writing things for other people: heartfelt letters, influential speeches, front-page stories, but all in other people’s names.
Even the emails that got me sacked in 2009 were written for someone else in the voice of someone who doesn’t exist.
This is my chance to write in my own name, and tell my own story, from the point of view of someone who had an extended chance to see behind the scenes, for the benefit of all those who’d like to do so.
This is not a day-to-day memoir. I have taken issues, people and events in the order that I encountered them over the years, and tried to tell a full and rounded story about each of them, from the decadence of party conferences to the dark arts of political spin.
It’s also the account of my dealings with, among others, Gordon Brown, Ed Balls and Ed Miliband, and the impressions I gained of them. Whatever the flaws that I describe about each man, if my story helps people to understand and admire them the way I do, then I believe that can only be a good thing.
In particular, I was never blind to Gordon’s shortcomings, and I acknowledge them in this book, but I also try to explain why he inspired such fierce loyalty from me and others throughout his career.
I started working in government aged twenty-two and was sacked from No. 10 shortly before I turned thirty-five. I gave my best years to that life and, ultimately, all I had to show for it were a lot of stories, experiences and lessons learned.
That’s why I’ve decided to write them down.
SLOW ASCENT INTO HELL
1
EASTER MONDAY, 2009
You know you’re in trouble when you have to introduce yourself to two complete strangers and ask to climb out of their kitchen window.
The young couple in the ground-floor flat were obliging enough, if slightly baffled. As I began my manoeuvre, climbing up onto the window-sill, the bloke’s mum arrived.
‘What’s happened? Why are there cameras outside?’
I got back down again, shook her hand, and said: ‘I’m really sorry, I was staying upstairs, and I’m afraid they’re looking for me, so I’m just making a bit of an escape.’
For all they knew I could have been a mass murderer on the run; nevertheless, they cheerily wished me good luck as I jumped down from the window into the row of garages at the back of the flats, where my girlfriend Balshen had parked the car.
I climbed into the boot and, with a sympathetic smile, she gently closed it on me.
It was only a short drive, past the camera crew and up the road to the local pub, but time tends to lag when you’re locked in the boot of a car.
I lay there curled up in the pitch black, turning over every question in my mind. How had that camera crew found me? Where was I going to hide now? When was life going to go back to normal? What on earth was my ‘normal life’ even going to be now?
And most of all, again and again: why had I been so bloody stupid?
I had everything: a great education; a fantastic, high-flying career; as much money as I’d ever needed. I’d visited places, met people and had experiences that were beyond any of my dreams, and I’d enjoyed power and influence beyond anything I ever deserved.
And now I was locked in a car boot wondering where I was going to stay that night, with no one to blame for the whole bloody mess but myself.
Alone with my thoughts in the darkness, one word came to my mind: ‘Twat.’
2
WARNING SIGNS
I wasn’t always a nasty bastard, but you could argue the signs were there.
For the most part, my years at Cambridge University from 1992 to 1996 were the happiest of my life. As well as enjoying every minute of my degree and Master’s in history, I spent four years managing the bar at my college, Peterhouse, made dozens of fast friends, fell madly in love with at least six girls (even managing to speak to some of them) and – when I wasn’t drinking, quizzing or watching Home and Away – I filled every spare minute of time with some kind of sporting activity.
But throughout that time there were signs of trouble to come, most particularly in my attitude to student politics and football.
I was captain of the Peterhouse First XI, coach of the ladies’ team, played for our Seconds, and – when no formal match was available – I’d go round the college rounding people up for a kickabout in the park. But it didn’t matter what level the game was at; if I was involved, it would at some point descend into a punch-up.
Years hence, when I met people of my age who’d been to Cambridge and compared notes on our sporting experiences, there would be a terrible moment of recognition which would end up with them saying: ‘Oh God, it’s you – you were an absolute wanker.’
One of those contemporaries was Tony Blair’s future top aide, Philip Col
lins, now a columnist on The Times. He was one of Cambridge’s elite sportsmen, captain of the University Blues football team and of the top football college, St John’s.
When tiny Peterhouse drew St John’s in the cup competition, I was never so fired up. We led 1–0 at half-time, at which point Philip put on his fellow Blues players from the subs’ bench. I waited until we went 5–1 down in the second half before loudly instructing my players that it was time to ‘put these fuckers out of the Oxford game’.
The next ten minutes saw a horrible set of ugly challenges and confrontations, before the referee called a halt, told me I was an absolute disgrace and said he’d be reporting our behaviour. Philip himself wrote to the University Football Association asking for me to be disciplined and for Peterhouse to be banned from the cup the following year. Those Blair–Brown feuds started early.
If some part of me had got kicks from rampaging round like a lunatic, you could perhaps understand it psychologically, but I never did. I just could not stand losing and, much as I loved taking a bag of footballs to a pitch and practising shots for pleasure, I played in matches with no sense of fun at all, just a dread of defeat.
The poor Peterhouse girls’ team who I coached probably had any burgeoning love of football destroyed for life by my cynical approach, instructing them to boot the ball out of play at the byline, then surround the box and wait for the opposition keeper to fluff a goal kick.
When it came to fighting, the odds never mattered to me.
Steve, a school friend from Finchley, came to visit one May and we went to the notorious Wiley’s party, several hours of drunken debauchery in a cow field. Steve and I concentrated on the drunken end of the equation and soon got into a fight with some other blokes. We were out-numbered about fifteen to two and all our opponents seemed enormous, but we kept hammering away, eventually limping off with a few bruises and several million brain cells lighter.
The next day it was reported in the student paper that there were renewed calls for the party to be banned after a ‘shocking pitched battle between two townies and the Cambridge Rugby Blues XV’.
But if I was bad when it came to football and fighting, it was as nothing to my approach to student politics. I never got involved in either the Labour or Conservative clubs, or the Cambridge Union. My obsession was running the student side of Peterhouse and ensuring that it was my mates who got plum jobs on the student committee and therefore the best rooms in college. That also meant we could rig the voting on how to spend the student budget, and I could make sure as much as possible went on the sports clubs and on the college bar.
I once succeeded in getting our star footballer elected to a junior position on the committee, even though he had no idea he’d applied for the role. At the hustings I explained that he’d had to run down to London at the last minute because of a family illness, but had asked me to deliver his speech for him. When I told him the next day he’d been elected after a rave reaction to the speech and his manifesto, he couldn’t have looked more baffled. ‘What do I have to do?’ ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I’ll do it all for you. Just turn up at the meetings and vote the way I tell you.’
In my final year, my best female friend was standing for student president, but another friend, Nick Perry, later a Liberal Democrat candidate for Parliament, had been urged to stand against her. I leant on him to pull out and told him that if he didn’t we would be finished – and I’d make sure he didn’t win. He refused and I tried my best to follow through on the threat. But it was a failing cause, not least because as a postgraduate I didn’t command the voting bloc I once did.
My last throw of the dice, at the hustings, was to challenge Nick on his views on homosexuality, which I wrongly thought at the time were closer to Leviticus than Liberace. He gave a perfectly tolerant answer, the crowd cheered and he won handsomely.
A short while later, as I got off a bus taking students home from the funeral of a popular college steward, Nick was waiting with a large crowd around him, and – given the nature of the day – asked me to shake hands and make peace. ‘Fuck you,’ I told him, ‘you fucking hypocrite,’ and walked on. What a twat, the crowd said.
The bitterness of that election and my behaviour in the aftermath destroyed my friendships with about two dozen individuals across the college and killed what remained of my reputation.
Fortunately, the one person who didn’t even notice – she was too busy reading Henry James to bother with student politics – was a brilliant and beautiful Shropshire lass named Penny Tallents, with Huguenot blood and a regal air. I was madly in love with her throughout my twenties and ended up going out with her for the latter half of them.
Penny notwithstanding, most fellow students were glad to see the back of me when I left Peterhouse, and the college authorities were pretty glad too.
I was frequently in trouble with them for all the fighting and such, but no more so than when the student common room in one of the thirteenth-century buildings was hit by a fire in 1995. It was a total accident and I wasn’t the culprit, but a guest of mine from London was, and – given I’d been seen with him in the room before the alarms went off – I was immediately the prime suspect.
I know I should have owned up to the accident immediately and faced the music, but given I was in my final exam year and everyone expected the guilty party to be dismissed from the university, my survival instincts kicked in and I determined to tough it out, even when the college announced that all student facilities would be closed until the culprit came forward.
When the college authorities finally summoned me for a grilling, I walked in and, almost without waiting for a question, launched into a long and impassioned argument that, as long as they kept the college bar closed, it was going to be impossible for me to gather intelligence on possible suspects, and, while I wanted the individual caught as much as anyone, I wasn’t sure these punitive measures on the rest of the student body were the right way to go about it.
I also told them the rumour was that two lads from a neighbouring college had been boasting about their act of arson, but frankly I didn’t believe it – I knew one of them and he didn’t have it in him.
Avoidance, obfuscation, diversion, but no actual lies, and I came out of the interrogation unscathed. An interesting lesson to learn, and when – nine years later – I was grilled for ten hours over three gruelling sessions as part of a leak enquiry by retired Special Branch officers, I remembered that Peterhouse experience and followed exactly the same method of lying-without-lying.
To understand that concept, it’s always worth remembering the earliest recorded lie, which came just after the earliest recorded murder. In the Book of Genesis, Cain initially answered God’s question ‘Where is Abel?’ with an outright lie: ‘I don’t know’, but quickly followed it up with a spin-doctor’s classic: ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’
Incidentally, while I was learning all these dubious skills, I also managed to get a good 2:1 in my history degree. One of my tutors, the Balkans expert Dr Brendan Simms, wrote a reference for me afterwards saying that if I’d concentrated on revising rather than playing so much football I would have got a First. He had a point.
I then did a Master’s dissertation on the policy impact of black urban rioting in the United States from 1964 to 1968. Listening to and reading the interviews with President Lyndon Johnson’s inner circle describing the policy-making process and the pressures they faced, and explaining how the application of any principles came and went according to the mood of the media and the state of the opinion polls, I was totally fascinated.
So it was that, just turned twenty-two, I left university hooked on the intricacies of power and policy-making, with a talent for avoiding the truth without actually lying, a win-or-die competitive streak, a penchant for negative, thuggish tactics, and a reckless disregard for the consequences of my actions.
There was only one possible career choice.
3
THE FAST STREAM
&nbs
p; The civil service is the last great closed shop in all the British professions.
While almost every other bit of industry and public service has been forced to break down any restrictive recruitment practices over the last forty years, the civil service is allowed to plough on – recruiting new members to its own fixed standards and in its own image.
To get on the Fast Stream Civil Service scheme, an accelerated career development programme in either the ‘Central Departments’ or the ‘Diplomatic Service’, you must first of all be a graduate with at least a second-class degree. So even before one application form is filled in, millions of young people have been ruled out by the criteria, and a numbers bias has been built in towards those from better schools and more affluent parts of the country.
As for the recruitment process itself, while all the material says the civil service is looking for a diverse range of people, what they’re actually looking for is good members of a pub quiz team. That means someone who’ll get on with everyone, with good ability across a range of subjects and a bit of specialism in one key area. If they’re good at working out anagrams, that’s a bonus.
Of course, this is simply an extension of what already happens during the university application process, where a good personal statement about a student’s wider qualities, accomplishments and interests will give them the edge over a more introverted person with the same academic record.
To use a cricketing analogy, it’s like picking a team full of players who are not only good at batting, bowling and fielding, but the first to lead the songs at the bar afterwards.
But that search for all-rounders necessarily leads to the exclusion of the specialists, the eccentrics, the quiet types and those lacking in confidence or experience. I used to look at Penny and think she wouldn’t stand a chance in the civil service recruitment process – she’d just be too thoughtful and analytical for it – and yet she could wipe the floor with anyone in terms of intellect and common sense.
Power Trip Page 1