After being booed as we paraded round the pitch, we returned fire vigorously at the various banks and oil companies who came round after us, kept up a barrage of obscene chanting throughout the ceremony, and – having re-arranged the magnetic letters spelling ‘HM TREASURY’ on our banner – paraded out under the legend ‘HURT MY ARSE’. The hours in the nightclub that followed were mayhem.
I was woken in the morning by my fellow Customs secondee and long-time drinking partner, Aakash Patel: ‘Mate, you gotta get up, I’m not kidding. Don’t freak out but this girl from reception just came up and said the Treasury press office is on the phone for you.’ ‘Fucking hell,’ I said. ‘What about?!’ ‘I dunno, mate, something about the Daily Mail.’ Aakash waited until I was running down the corridor before saying: ‘Aaaaah, got ya, dickhead.’
Saying the Treasury press office was on the phone became something of a running joke after that. So when I returned to Customs from a long lunch one sunny day in July 2003, a colleague said with a laugh: ‘I’m really not kidding, but the Treasury press office has been on the phone. Michael Ellam’s left his number for you to call back.’ I couldn’t think for the life of me why he’d want to speak to me, and sat planning excuses and lies-that-aren’t-lies for every terrible thing I’d done that month.
‘Ah, thanks for calling back,’ said Michael, who’d been in the Head of Communications post for three years by that stage. ‘Now, I’m moving jobs shortly so we need to fill my post. There’s been a bit of discussion here about who should do the job and we think you’d be very good at it, so we’d like you to come across for a chat with me and Ed Balls.’
I felt hugely daunted, knowing it was too good an opportunity to turn down, but that I might be humiliatingly rubbish at it. I was also enjoying working with Sue building the new team in Customs and seeing the individuals we’d picked all thriving on the responsibility.
The chats with Michael and Ed just increased the fear factor. Michael warned that one misplaced word or nuance from the Treasury spokesman could send the financial markets haywire or cause a political shit-storm. When I explained to Ed that I found the potential responsibility intimidating, he said blithely: ‘Well, everyone screws up once or twice; it’s only if you keep screwing up we’d have to get rid of you.’
I spoke to Penny and asked what she thought. At that stage, she was working in Great Ormond Street Hospital in a patient liaison role, supporting families whose babies required high-risk brain surgery. Doing that job, she didn’t have much time for me finding things daunting, but she was quite intrigued at the prospect of me working directly for Gordon and said I should go for it. She hadn’t been intrigued about much where I was concerned for a while, least of all VAT policy, so that made my mind up.
So I applied, and had a decent interview with Gus O’Donnell, then the Treasury’s top official, and Ivan Rogers, then Director of Budget and Tax Policy. Of all places, I was on a Customs media skills training course a couple of days later, when Gus called to tell me I’d got the job, subject to having an informal chat with Gordon to check that we would get on.
Having looked over my CV again, Gus said Gordon would almost certainly spend the time grilling me about my Master’s degree on Lyndon Johnson.
While everyone reassured me this would be straightforward, interviews never were with Gordon. He once interviewed two young Treasury officials for a role in his private office, having been told in advance he had to choose between them. He liked them both, told them both that they’d got the job, and his office ended up having to create two roles. From that point on, Gordon’s office only let him interview the final candidate for each job.
I was escorted into his meeting room, arranged with two chairs sat opposite each other, and a sofa to one side crammed with observers – both Eds, Michael, Gus, Ivan and Gordon’s Principal Private Secretary, Mark Bowman. It felt like speed-dating in front of six chaperones. Gordon looked down my CV silently, occasionally muttering a word from it, as if trying to work up some enthusiasm either for me or the process: ‘Customs’; ‘V-A-T’ (each letter spat out with contempt); ‘Riots?’; and then finally, as he read my ‘personal interests’, he came alive:
‘Celtic? You support Celtic? How can you support Celtic?’ He seemed genuinely affronted. ‘Where were you in ’94, eh? I bet you didn’t do any singing that day,’ alluding to Raith Rovers’ famous League Cup final victory over my dad’s team. ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘but it was at Ibrox,’ the home ground of Glasgow Rangers, ‘and they did deliberately flood the pitch so we couldn’t play our football.’
‘That’s a bloody lie!’ he yelled at me, then – turning to the sofa of rather confused Englishmen – ‘These bloody Celtic fans; they can’t take losing. Always the same. You got beaten fair and square. Fair and square!’ My CV was now scrunched in his hand. At this point, I was more worried about escaping alive than getting the job, but we ended up going back and forth for half an hour swapping stories and jokes about Scottish football. ‘When can you start?’ he concluded, with a beaming smile.
His only comment about the press role was to tell me I was going to be having lots of lunches with journalists, so I’d have to learn to order salad if I didn’t want to get ‘too fat’. I went out of the room with a new corridor sobriquet, ‘Bloody Celtic’, and a new job. Ed Balls shook my hand and said: ‘An entire interview talking about football. You jammy sod.’
The buoyant feeling didn’t last long. Word got around the Treasury about the appointment and when I went to the nearby Westminster Arms that afternoon, there was a large group of officials standing outside who ushered me over for a congratulatory pint. Or so I thought. What they actually wanted – with the benefit of a few drinks in them – was to take a pickaxe to my bubble.
‘We were just talking about you,’ said one, ‘and we were saying that – while we can imagine you speaking to the political editor of The Sun, and you’ll probably be quite good at that – we were thinking that the economics editor of the FT might be more of a challenge.’
I wish I’d thought of something clever to say in response, but I didn’t, and the conversation continued in similar vein, my new colleagues barely disguising their contempt that some oik from Customs had landed one of the plum Treasury senior civil service posts.
It was easy to develop an arrogant streak working for the Treasury. In those days, before they introduced their own graduate recruitment scheme, they had their choice of the best new Fast Streamers, so were taking the pick of an already highly refined crop. And the reason that my appointment seemed to cause resentment – even bafflement – was that I was going to spend at least two years blocking one of the real crème de la crème jobs for that group.
Crucially, it was one of the jobs which were regarded as gateways for ex-Fast Streamers into top jobs in 10 Downing Street, the ultimate fast track into roles as directors and permanent secretaries, within touching distance of the Cabinet Secretary’s job, the pinnacle of the civil service profession.
The current Principal Private Secretary (PPS) to David Cameron – effectively the top official in No. 10 – is Chris Martin, a former Treasury Head of Communications. Bar one short-term stint by ex-Palace spokesman Simon Lewis, the last three prime ministers’ official spokesmen have all been former Treasury Heads of Communication. And of course, Gus O’Donnell – doyen of all Treasury civil servants – took that same route to become Cabinet Secretary.
Being a top civil service aide to the Chancellor has almost become the pre-requisite of getting a senior post in Downing Street. Prior to Chris Martin, the role of PPS had been held by four Fast Stream graduates of Ken Clarke’s or Gordon Brown’s Treasury private office, and one who was Gordon’s key adviser on public spending.
It could be argued that, since the Treasury gets the best Fast Stream recruits to the Home Civil Service and the best of those will usually end up in the most important Treasury positions, then their further ascendance to the top jobs in No. 10 is simply a case of natural selection
doing its work.
It could also be argued that there is no better training for those No. 10 jobs than their equivalent posts in the Treasury, and that the preference for Treasury types reflects the centrality of the economy to No. 10’s work, at least since 2008.
Before then, it tended to be a case of Tony Blair poaching the best of Gordon Brown’s talent, or Gordon putting his best spies in place, depending where your paranoia lay. Now it’s more simply a case of No. 10’s chief political strategist, George Osborne, recommending people who have worked for him who he thinks are up to the job.
However, if every time there is a vacancy in a senior post in No. 10 it is filled from the same narrow gene pool of top Treasury candidates, all with similar outlooks and experiences, there is a clear risk of exacerbating the homogeneity which already exists in the civil service Fast Stream, leading to a loss of fresh, or even just different, ways of thinking about and doing the job.
The longer that same cycle of recruitment is unbroken, the more the effects are multiplied. Given that interviewers tend to select the candidate who most resembles themselves, the fact that almost all of those PPSs and prime ministers’ spokesmen recruited each other at various points continually reinforces the trend, as does the fact that they all came at the top of the selection process to get on the Fast Stream originally.
Again, given that these individuals are generally the best and brightest Whitehall has to offer, this could be viewed as no bad thing, and some will say I’m not in a position to criticise it, being one of the beneficiaries. And yes, like all the others, I’m white, male and heterosexual, with a degree from Oxbridge. Most of those involved in the process of appointing me as Head of Communications – either as interviewers or chaperones – were the same.
But – while I may have looked the same as everyone else, and enjoyed the same educational background – the reality was, as my ‘colleagues’ at the Westminster Arms that day were only too keen to point out, I didn’t quite belong there. It was a curiosity that I’d got so far, and nobody in their right mind would have had me marked out as a future Cabinet Secretary.
In that moment outside the pub, I had the same feeling I’d experienced just once before when an extremely posh history fellow at Peterhouse put my weekly essay to one side after praising it fulsomely, and asked me: ‘Why are you good?’ I told him I didn’t understand.
‘What does your father do?’ I said he taught kids who’d been excluded from school. ‘Mmm, what did his father do?’ I said that he’d done the bins in Glasgow and dug peat in Donegal. ‘I mean,’ he went on, rolling his eyes, ‘with that kind of background, the school you went to, all this hanging around in the college bar and playing soccer, you really shouldn’t be any good. So I’m asking: what makes you good?’
Even redder in the face than normal, I again couldn’t think of anything clever or articulate to say in response, even – God forgive me – to speak up for my dad, who’d taught me every inch of history I knew up to that point, after teaching himself most of it from scratch.
He continued: ‘The reason I say this is that you have to realise that you’re good, that you’re better than you have a right to be, and that you have to set your aspirations high, otherwise you’ll waste your talent, you’ll revert to type and you’ll end up amounting to nothing.’
As I left his college room that day, I had the same response I did when I walked away from the Westminster Arms that night in 2003: ‘I’ll fucking show you.’ And, after a fashion, I guess I did.
GOING TO THE DARK SIDE
13
WHAT MAKES THE TWO EDS TICK?
Given that they feature heavily in my story from this point on, it’s worth pausing to give some reflections on Ed Miliband and Ed Balls: who they are in reality and how they worked together.
Besides having my own formative early encounters with them – being called a genius by one, being made to feel like I’d gravely insulted the other – I attended two meetings long before I became the Treasury’s Head of Communications which I thought told me everything I needed to know about the two men. And I was dead wrong.
Before the Budget in 2001, Ed Miliband was chairing a meeting about funding for museums, which was joined late by Ollie Robbins, a studious and loveable official who went on to be Tony Blair’s last Principal Private Secretary. Ed started reeling off a set of questions he’d been saving for Ollie, who became visibly distressed.
He explained that he’d just been working out the costs of the ongoing cull of thousands of cattle affected by the foot-and-mouth outbreak, and was feeling upset by the whole thing. Rather than be embarrassed or dismissive, Ed said he totally sympathised, was very sorry, and would understand if Ollie would rather take a break and do the meeting later. What a lovely bloke, I thought.
Some time later, in a scorecard meeting very close to Budget Day with a large number of officials present, a senior Treasury tax adviser who’d been working on an anti-avoidance measure – raising huge sums of money – suddenly announced that he was worried he may have misjudged the impact it would have on the financial sector, and it might be better to withdraw it.
Confronted with the prospect of the entire Budget arithmetic being thrown into disarray at the last minute, Ed Balls was less than sympathetic or understanding. He eviscerated the guy, suggesting he was just covering his own arse when he already knew it was too late and implying that he’d been got at by his friends in the City. It was vicious, so much so Ed Miliband needed to intervene and tell Balls to go easy. What a scary bloke, I thought.
Yet, over the years, I came to realise that Ed Balls’s tough exterior and bullish style belied real warmth and sensitivity, as well as some level of insecurity, while Ed Miliband’s friendly demeanour and natural good humour obscured a steely ruthlessness about his ambitions and a single-minded sense of mission.
I always believe that there is one key to every politician’s personality: one thing that explains so much else about them. With Gordon, I think it was almost certainly the several weeks he had to spend after a rugby accident at the age of sixteen just lying on his back in total darkness in a hospital bed hoping that at least one of his eyes would heal and he wouldn’t be left blind.
For Ed Balls, I think it is his stammer. I worked with Ed for years before I even knew about his condition, and that tells its own tale. Throughout his time as a special adviser, he favoured informal situations with small groups of people, where the stammer tended not to surface. Before 2004, the closest I ever saw him come to speaking in public were his briefings for journalists after the Budget, themselves quite informal and spontaneous occasions.
The problem came – and often still does – when there was some formality to proceedings or a set script to be delivered – a TV interview or an actual speech – where the pressure of the situation and the fear of making a mistake compounds the ever-present dread simply of being unable to get the words out. That would have put many people off a career in front-line politics altogether, and it says a lot about Ed that he hasn’t let it do so to him.
In those early days when he hadn’t yet gone public about his stammer, watching him do interviews or make appearances in the House of Commons was almost as much of an ordeal for us as his friends and colleagues as it was for him. We’d see his throat tighten and his fist clench – the telltale signs that he was fighting to get through a ‘block’, in the days before he realised that was exactly the wrong thing to do.
And strange as it might sound to people – given Ed’s robust reputation – but, whether it is the stammer or the very introspective treatment required to deal with it, he has an awareness of his own weaknesses and a vulnerability that is all too often missing in politicians. That comes across most clearly in his desire to reach out to journalists and fellow politicians who’ve been critical of him in a way Gordon would never have done. When told by others how much David Cameron hates him, he doesn’t revel in it; he seems genuinely baffled.
For Ed Miliband, I think the k
ey to his personality is his father. There’s a whole book to be written about British politicians and their paternal relationships: Gordon, Tony Blair, Ed Balls, David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson have all been hugely influenced by the character and drive of their fathers. How often do you hear of a successful modern British politician who lost their father early, or regards them as a philanderer, chancer or drunk? In America, Presidents Clinton and Obama – who barely knew their fathers – have shown the reverse can be true.
But few fathers have influenced their politician sons as much as Ralph Miliband, the refugee from Nazi-occupied Belgium who rose to become one of the top academic analysts on modern socialism. He died just a few days after John Smith in 1994, and Ed started working for Gordon Brown two months later. The domestic triangulation and aggressive foreign policy of New Labour would probably have appalled Ralph, and his younger son would doubtless have sympathised but equally felt he wasn’t in a position to effect wholesale change in that approach. Now of course he is.
It’s hard to listen to any of Ed Miliband’s occasionally tortured, over-academic speeches about New Labour’s record and his own political vision without hearing his father’s voice, especially when he talks about recasting the capitalist model, and re-shaping society through the empowerment of ordinary people in the decisions affecting their communities and workplaces.
And that’s not just about Ed’s politics; it’s also undoubtedly central to how he explains to himself and to the rest of his family why he felt it essential to challenge his older brother for the Labour leadership. What better reason than needing to achieve his father’s vision and ensure that David Miliband did not traduce it? An act of supposed disloyalty to his brother becomes transformed in his mind into the ultimate act of tribute to his father.
Power Trip Page 8