Power Trip

by McBride, Damian

  As well as there being one key to every politician’s personality, I believe each of them has one – often related – driving ambition. It’s easy to say they all want to be Prime Minister, but if that was true, they’d all work as hard at it as Gordon. There’s usually more to it than that.

  For Ed Balls, I’d say his driving ambition has always been to deliver a Budget. Not just that, but to take all his years of experience and observation, and deliver the perfect Budget. Perfectly calibrated with no screw-ups; cheered by the punters, applauded by the FT; loved by his own side, grudgingly admired by the opposition; one to go down in recent history alongside Geoffrey Howe’s in 1981 and Gordon Brown’s in 2002.

  And, perhaps most of all, it would be an opportunity to stand and speak to a packed House of Commons and a watching TV audience of millions for an hour: the ultimate test, and potentially the ultimate triumph, for a man who has refused to let his stammer hold him back.

  Ed would feel that he was thrice denied that chance: first when Gordon played safe on his choice of Chancellor in June 2007; second when he cancelled the election later that year which would have allowed him to recast his Cabinet; and third when he bottled his planned reshuffle after the local elections in 2009. Ed might have thought the chance had gone forever when Ed Miliband chose Alan Johnson as his shadow Chancellor in 2010, but now it is there again in touching distance.

  For Ed Miliband, I think his driving ambition, in terms of fulfilling his father’s legacy, would be to win a second term in office as Prime Minister, having proved he was up to the job and earned the right – with the public and within his own party – to set out a more radical plan to change Britain’s society and economy for good. It’s what Tony Blair wanted to do but couldn’t achieve after 2001. It’s what every American President dreams of doing but rarely delivers in their second term. Ed has the innate self-confidence and sense of destiny to think he would be different.

  The way I see it, each man is to some extent reliant on the other to achieve his ambition: Ed Balls needs Ed Miliband to keep him in post for starters, and Miliband needs Balls to deliver an election-winning formula and message on the economy, both in 2015 and again, if successful, in 2020. If they can keep their personal relationship on the rails, there is no reason both things can’t happen.

  When working together in the Treasury, Ed Balls was clearly always the senior partner in terms of his set of responsibilities compared to Ed Miliband’s, but it was a genuine partnership. Back in 2003, in my first month in the job, I was hanging around their office on a Friday afternoon, and Ed Balls invited me to come and join them for their usual end-of-week drink at Rebato’s, a tapas restaurant on the South Lambeth Road, now sadly closed.

  They held court there all evening, enjoying telling their old stories to a newcomer: Balls all anecdotes and impressions; Miliband more of the straight man, but with a sharp line in sardonic asides. They were a proper double act. The idea that Miliband was ever made to feel subordinate to Balls is just baloney, along with the myth of him bringing Balls his morning coffee.

  However, the reality is that Miliband often found himself acting as confidant for some of the more sensitive members of the Treasury special adviser or ministerial teams who occasionally felt ignored or dismissed by Balls, and – besides reassuring them that they were geniuses – it was natural for Miliband to sympathise and say he knew what they were going through; it was the same for him. That’s how such myths grow.

  Whether that was just good management, or artful bolstering of his clique, it worked. When the two stood against each other for the Labour Party leadership in 2010, it was interesting to watch how many of those former Treasury advisers and ministers who had cried on Ed Miliband’s shoulder in the Treasury years joined his camp, while the more robust types who never sought or required his sympathy – Ian Austin or John Healey for example – were firmly with Balls.

  But if Ed Miliband did snipe about Ed Balls behind closed doors with some of my former colleagues, it was never reciprocated. The first time I ever heard Balls say anything remotely negative about Miliband was at the end of 2008, when the latter had effectively threatened to resign from the Cabinet if a decision was made to build a third runway at Heathrow.

  Balls was genuinely outraged that Miliband could ignore the need to expand airport capacity just for the sake of his reputation with the green lobby and his own political positioning. He was also angry that Gordon had been made to look weak in front of his Cabinet at a time when he was already so vulnerable, by having to kow-tow to a supposed ally.

  A clear subtext to Ed Balls’s irritation that day was seeing his former junior partner so brazenly betraying his political ambitions. Doubtless David Miliband felt the same way, and you could see that same irritation again and again during the leadership hustings in 2010, Balls and David regularly exchanging looks of incredulity when they’d hear Ed Miliband distance himself from New Labour.

  If David could never reconcile himself to his brother’s leadership, Ed Balls clearly has. While there will be inevitable disagreements between them over policy issues and rivalries between their respective staff members and allies, they have inherited from Tony Blair and Gordon Brown the ability to sort those things out between them, but crucially without the unresolved tension of who is really in charge which made Blair and Brown’s disputes so toxic.

  People say Labour needs more hardened, experienced greybeards in its shadow Cabinet. They are wrong, chiefly because the longest-standing veterans are already running the show.

  By the time of the next election, whatever posts they’ve held or brief sabbaticals they’ve enjoyed along the way, Ed Miliband and Ed Balls will have been working at the heart of the Labour Party – central to its strategising, decision-making and election-planning – for twenty-one years.

  None of the other truly integral characters of that period have lasted as long. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown only notched up fifteen and eighteen years respectively from the time they assumed true central status under John Smith in 1992. And Alastair

  Campbell, David Miliband and Peter Mandelson have all left the stage, even if they can occasionally be heard whispering advice from the wings. Compared to David Cameron and George Osborne, who will only have enjoyed a decade of true central influence by 2015, the two Eds will go into that next election with more experience of how to frame debates, win arguments and demolish opponents than anyone else currently at the top of British politics. If they can’t do it for Labour, no one can.

  14

  BREAKING BAD NEWS

  The first time I got front-page newspaper coverage was a total accident.

  Well, for me it was. The journalist – the Telegraph’s then economics editor, George Trefgarne – knew exactly what he was doing. It was late on a Friday, always a dangerous time for phone calls. George started out discussing with me the upcoming meeting of OPEC, when the world’s major oil producers would decide whether to increase production levels, something which in theory would cut oil prices and eventually mean cheaper petrol at the pumps.

  In the course of that chat, George pointed out that Gordon had deferred the Budget inflation increase in fuel duty to the autumn because of the high level of world oil prices. He then asked: ‘Is it unreasonable to assume that he’ll maintain the freeze if oil prices are no lower?’

  My rather mannered answer was: ‘It’s not an unreasonable assumption that the Chancellor will take the oil price into account – along with other factors – when making his decision.’ Goodnight Vienna. The resulting front-page splash said Gordon was due to cancel the duty increase, quoting the Treasury’s spokesman saying it was not an unreasonable assumption.

  I’d committed the first sin of spin-doctoring: echoing the question. There’s a reason journalists phrase their questions in a certain way; so if you say ‘Yes’ or echo the question in your answer or even refuse to respond, they’ve got enough of a basis to write the story. Always take the question they’ve asked and re-phrase it
into one you’re prepared to answer.

  If a journalist puts a series of allegations to you, especially if they’re true but can’t be proved, all you can say is that you find the very question extraordinary and will not dignify it with a response, or that you’ll be consulting your lawyers. You say that again and again no matter how often they ask the question, and usually the story will evaporate. If, on the other hand, you repeat the allegations back at them or actively deny them, they have something they can write.

  If – worst of all – a journalist asks why these allegations are knocking around and whether someone may be trying to smear you, and you agree that it’s all very unfair and upsetting, then a story that otherwise wouldn’t work can be written up as your fury or anguish about anonymous, unproven smears, which enables the paper to allude to their substance and the internet to do the rest.

  When the Telegraph appeared with the fuel duty splash, I was advised by Michael Ellam to go and speak to Ed Balls for advice on how to handle it. Balls rolled his pen in his hand when I told him, said ‘Oh dear’, then told me to come with him and learn how to break bad news to Gordon.

  ‘You know that bloody Tory at the Telegraph, Trefgarne…’ Ed began. Even before hearing the rest of the sentence, Gordon knew who to blame: the bloody Tory rather than me. ‘He’s totally screwed us over,’ the use of ‘us’ reinforcing a sense of collective responsibility. ‘He’s taken some throwaway line from Damian and turned it into a splash about us scrapping the fuel duty rise. Total tosser.’

  It was a magnificent performance, and left Gordon fuming about bloody Tory journalists rather than his incompetent new spokesman. As Ed and I walked out, he said: ‘Right, next time, you have to do that yourself, but try and make sure there’s no next time.’

  Ed wasn’t always so collegiate. A few weeks later, Penny and I made our first journey back to Cambridge together as a couple, but in desperately sad circumstances, attending the funeral of a close and very young friend of my family. On the train journey up from London, my phone exploded with calls and urgent text messages from Ed Balls, Ian Austin and Michael Ellam.

  Penny asked me to turn off the phone for the day and focus on what mattered, but I didn’t ignore Ed Balls’s phone calls at the best of times, let alone a month into the job. That time, I wish I had. He was in a highly animated state. I’d given a set of quotes to Reuters that morning in his name, gently putting pressure on the Monetary Policy Committee over interest rates, which Reuters had – with our agreement – presented as though it was an interview.

  The trouble was that the reporter who’d filed the ‘interview’ – Ashley Seager – had followed it up five minutes later with a near-unprecedented and highly market-sensitive leak of the upcoming monthly retail sales figures. People naturally assumed Ed Balls was the source of the leak and would have to resign, while Ed himself knew I was the only person in the Treasury to speak to Ashley that morning and assumed it was me.

  And this was the dilemma. For Ed’s name to be cleared, either he needed to admit we’d falsified the Reuters interview, which he wasn’t prepared to do, or I needed to admit responsibility for the leak, which I was even less prepared to do. There was huge tension in the phone calls between us, given he was suspicious of me, I was wary of him, and it was assumed one of us was going down over this.

  Eventually the truth started to emerge from Reuters – that the ‘source’ was a junior Treasury official stupidly boasting to his Reuters flatmate about the secrets in his briefcase – and Ed and I were reconciled. But it did occur to me afterwards that at no stage did Ed or anyone else apologise for intruding on the funeral that day, and nor did I protest at them doing so. I’m not sure which appalled Penny more, but her early taste of politics was a total turn-off.

  I had my first experience of breaking bad news to Gordon as a follow-on from the Trefgarne fuel story, when the OPEC meeting that was supposed to increase oil production – and therefore lower prices enough for Gordon to go ahead with the duty rise – instead announced a surprise cut in production, leaving prices even higher.

  I went into Gordon’s private office with a print-out of the Reuters story on OPEC’s decision. The poker-faced Mark Bowman said: ‘You’d better go and tell him then,’ ushering me into Gordon’s office, and shutting the door behind me, leaving us on our own. ‘What is it?’ Gordon said with alarm. I told him the news. It was the first time I ever saw him really lose his temper.

  He got up from his chair and came storming across the room to read the Reuters story, shouting: ‘How has this happened?’ The way he approached – fists balled and a face like thunder – I genuinely thought he was coming at me. I took up a defensive stance with my own fists balled. Not that I planned to hit him. I mean, you don’t ‘plan’ to hit your boss at the best of times, let alone when you’re brand new to the job and he’s the Chancellor. But I thought I might need to defend myself.

  Then I thought of a different approach; I just went berserk – kicking a chair over and screaming about the fucking idiots in the DTI who’d given us bad advice on OPEC’s intentions. It had an instant effect, Gordon looking at me with alarm, telling me to calm down, and picking up the chair with a disapproving glare.

  I went out having learned another lesson about working for Gordon: always to be angrier than him about bad news, even if that was sometimes near-impossible. The patrician figure in him didn’t like to see his staff ranting and swearing.

  I once had to turn that act on to protect Sue Nye, Gordon’s indispensable adviser on all things political and personal. After one comically irrational outburst from Gordon about some screw-up, Sue followed me back to my office and we were laughing about it, doing impressions of his reaction, when in he walked behind us. Sue was in mid-flow and had her back to him, and would have been rumbled for sure, but I went into full-scale rant mode, kicking my bin over and shouting that the whole thing was a shambles.

  He cut me off: ‘What’s wrong?’ ‘I’m sorry, Gordon,’ I said holding my head as if I was suffering real anguish, ‘but we’re just letting off a bit of steam – you know, so many of these fuckers keep letting you down.’ Sue’s face had gone white, but Gordon bought it and gently chided us that, as the experienced people in the office, we couldn’t let the pressure get to us. If he was wondering why Sue apparently lapsed into a bad Scottish accent when angry, he didn’t say so.

  Screw-ups are an inevitable fact of life in any press office, especially in government, although it helped that as well as having the best events-planners, the Treasury also had the best press officers in Whitehall – long-serving class acts like Charles Keseru, Malcolm Graves, Steve Field, Simon Moyes, Shazia Ejaz, Paul Kissack, John Battersby and Alex Dawtrey. But they couldn’t all be as good as that lot, and every so often, I’d discover there’d been a screw-up in someone’s handling of a press call.

  The worst of those was when – of all the terrible places to put out a terrible quote – the Press Association quoted a ‘Treasury spokesman’ in 2003 explaining that tax credits for middle-income families had been frozen because ‘they don’t need the money’. I got the quote withdrawn, but the Standard still splashed it the next morning as: ‘Brown: Middle Classes “don’t need the money”.’

  Ian Austin came into our open-plan office, face puce with rage, staring at the paper and shaking with incredulity. He looked up and said to us all: ‘Why? Why? I put all this effort into persuading people that Gordon’s not anti-Middle England, and then you do this!’ He hurled the paper with huge force against the far wall and shouted at me: ‘You’re telling Gordon!’

  I had many such occasions to break bad news to Gordon over the years, and I’d like to think I became about as good at it as Ed Balls, relying less on my own Incredible Hulk routine, and more on getting the timing and wording right, and – most importantly – knowing what he’d want done about it and ensuring that was already happening.

  There is a Westminster myth that you’d deliver bad news to Gordon in what’s descr
ibed as a ‘news sandwich’, where you’d give him one bit of good news to improve his mood, slip in the bad news and then give him a second bit of good news to cheer him up again. This is utter bollocks. Anyone who worked for Gordon would know that would be a total waste of two pieces of good news, which he would ignore to focus only on the bad thing you’d told him.

  Individual newspaper stories aside, the worst bit of news I had to break to him was that Robin Cook had died in August 2005. I’d been called by George Pascoe-Watson at The Sun asking if we’d heard anything, long before the news broke officially. I phoned Gordon in Scotland, told him that I had some very sad news and he should brace himself, then said: ‘Robin Cook seems to have been taken ill while he was out hill-walking, and there’s a strong rumour that he’s died. I’ve got the office on the phone checking and I’m drafting a statement for you in case it is true.’

  Gordon was so upset he could barely speak. He and Robin had only recently resolved their long-standing feud and become firm friends again, talking almost every day. It was central to Gordon’s plans for his premiership that Robin would become his Deputy Leader or Chancellor, or be restored as Foreign Secretary, symbolising a break from the Blair years more than any other appointment could, following Robin’s resignation over the Iraq War.

  As the silence continued on the other end of the phone, a text came through from George saying: ‘Definitely true.’ I told Gordon, and said I was very sorry. It was strange to hear him use one of his catchphrases – ‘How has this happened?’ – not with the usual roar of anger, but with a quiet, breaking voice. He called out for Sarah and hung up the phone.

  The only time that Gordon didn’t get upset or angry about bad news was when he’d been the one responsible for the screw-up and couldn’t find anyone to blame but himself. In those circumstances, he became reflective, sheepish and almost apologetic, as though he’d let everyone down. People who assumed he would have had several staff members summarily executed after the Mrs Duffy incident at the 2010 election don’t know him at all.