On one occasion, Jon Snow trailed his Channel 4 News bulletin saying he’d be reporting the astounding view of a senior Treasury figure that, in a matter of years, Britain would no longer be making any cars. I went rampaging round the corridors, vowing to eviscerate the culprit with a corkscrew, before Sue Nye – hearing the commotion – drew me to one side and said: ‘I think you might find Gordon sat next to Jon Snow on the plane this morning.’ While he wouldn’t admit his guilt, Gordon was unusually shifty about the story and said we shouldn’t respond.
Much more seriously, on the eve of the 2005 Budget, Gordon screwed up in a way that almost cost him his job. Around 6 p.m., with everything quiet and settled, my phone rang and my email pinged simultaneously. Uh oh. A reporter at one of the broadsheets said he’d just emailed me a photo which had been sent in to their picture desk. It was a close-up of a sheaf of papers Gordon was carrying out of Downing Street, with a large set of numbers scrawled in black marker pen.
‘We’re just wondering if the numbers are Budget-related. Someone on the news desk thought the row in the middle with years next to them looked like they might be the borrowing figures for tomorrow.’
With false bravado, I told him I sincerely doubted it, but I’d ring him back once I’d looked, then waited with a knot in my stomach at the printer for the photo to emerge. I could have been sick when I saw it. There were the borrowing figures, the growth forecasts, net debt, unemployment, the bottom line of the scorecard. Every key, market-sensitive number in the Budget. Everything.
I walked down the corridor to Gordon’s office thousands of times over the years, but never so slowly. When I walked in, he was doing a read-through of the speech in his meeting room with the Eds and a handful of others. He didn’t stop but Ed Balls looked up at me and, seeing the expression on my face, said: ‘Hold on, something’s wrong.’
When I told them all and passed round the photo, the only sound in the room was gulping. Gordon looked up and said quietly: ‘I’m going to have to resign. Hugh Dalton did nothing compared to this’, a reference to the Labour Chancellor who’d been forced to quit for telling a journalist a minor but market-sensitive secret on his way to deliver the 1947 Budget.
‘I’m serious, I’m going to have to resign,’ Gordon said, with genuine shock and distress, before coming back to his normal self and remembering there might be someone else to blame. ‘Blair!’ he roared. ‘Blair made me give him the figures. Why did I ever agree? Why has he done this to me?’
Ed Balls was sardonic as ever. ‘I don’t think you can really blame Tony Blair for this. But look, let’s think this through. The paper asked, are those the borrowing numbers? And when was the meeting, this morning? Well, get Graham Parker round and check the figures are still right.’
Graham, the head of forecasting – currently one of the big wigs at George Osborne’s independent Office of Budget Responsibility – came round, looked at the figures, rocked back and forth on his heels, gave a little wince, and said: ‘If the question is: are those the exact borrowing figures in the Red Book, no they’re not. But they’re pretty bloody close.’
Balls told me: ‘Well, it’s your call.’ There was no instruction to mislead the paper; I’d been given the facts, now it was up to me how to use them. I called the reporter back and did my finest ever lying-without-lying, the key being to come up with a plausible explanation for what the figures were if they weren’t the borrowing numbers, and get off the phone quickly before he thought to ask about the other figures in the photo.
‘Hi there,’ I said. ‘Sorry, it’s manic here tonight, you know what it’s like. I’ve checked the Red Book and no, those aren’t tomorrow’s borrowing numbers. I’m not totally sure what they are, but Gordon was at a political meeting in Downing Street, so they might well be the latest calculations of what the Tory black hole on public spending will be in the next parliament. So you could do a story speculating about that, if you still want to use the picture? No? Ah OK, well, I thought it was worth a try. OK, cheers then, talk soon.’
I knew that mentioning the mythical Tory black hole was the single easiest way to make a journalist’s heart sink, but it was entirely plausible that Gordon would have obsessively worked it out while sat in a meeting. Plus the fact that I was actively encouraging him to use the photo would have allayed any suspicion that it was a problem for us.
I went back to the office and told everyone the good news. The paper wasn’t going to run the photo. I got thumbs-ups and cheers from everyone except Gordon, who just looked back down at his speech and said gruffly: ‘Where were we?’ He’d gone from having to resign thirty minutes previously to acting as though I’d caused an unnecessary interruption.
By then, I’d got used to the fact that Gordon greeted good news with barely a smidgeon of the emotion with which he received bad news. But, even so, I didn’t half walk out of the room thinking: ‘Miserable git.’
Whenever I think about that evening, I feel a pang of sadness because, all alone back at my desk with no one to share the story with, I instinctively went to call Penny. She’d broken up with me the previous year but I was in denial about it, and still rang her often enough that she’d started gently hinting that I shouldn’t.
I told myself: well, surely she’ll want to hear this story, it’s a belter. But I then had a moment of realisation that she didn’t really want to hear any of these stories any more – she wasn’t that interested in whether I got the splash or the page 2 lead in the Telegraph, and the fact that was the only thing I seemed to care about any more was the last nail in my coffin with her.
She was still at Great Ormond Street on 7 July 2005 when two of the 7/7 bombs went off nearby. I called her office non-stop in panic for what seemed like hours, until a nice, young Australian guy named Richard answered, and very kindly and gently told me that he knew how worried I must be, but everything was fine, Penny had been at work early before the bombs went off, and was now busy performing heroics in the emergency triage tent.
Penny and that lovely guy became a couple not long after that, and they now live together in Australia with their beautiful son, Dylan.
15
THE ART OF BUDGET BRIEFING
Aside from those occasional nights when the Chancellor almost had to resign and I realised I would never get back together with my ex, working on the Treasury’s media in the run-up to the Budget was the best job in government.
So here’s how it all worked.
The first story we always did was the date of the Budget, which was usually announced to Parliament, although on one of Gordon’s trips to China we were short of a story for the final day, so did the date with the travelling press entourage, accompanied by some words from Gordon about the need for the Budget to show that Britain could respond to the global challenge. It worked a treat, although some constitutional sticklers weren’t too pleased.
Next we did a scene-setter, usually a briefing to the economics editors and columnists about our priorities for the Budget and the economic and fiscal backdrop. While this was often fairly bland, it was crucial to get expectations in the right place on some of the key growth or borrowing figures, just so there were no nasty surprises on the day for the markets and no shocked headlines in the post-Budget papers. We’d brief nothing remotely specific, but we might take the most accurate of the external forecasts that were out there and gently nudge the journalist to describe that as the ‘emerging market consensus’.
If that sounds a bit dodgy, the next stage of briefing the Budget was downright skulduggery. In the fortnight before the speech, you want as little speculation about the Budget as possible, to keep your powder dry for the crucial few days beforehand.
So I’d tend to leak a few stories or planned announcements from other government departments that could be guaranteed to cause a bit of distraction and keep the journalists busy for a day or two. That obviously wasn’t very helpful to my Whitehall colleagues, but it’s a time-honoured trick to help the successful presentation o
f the Budget, which was to my mind the biggest priority.
If all that activity worked successfully, it meant we would get to the weekend before the Budget without a single good story from the package having leaked and with any bad news on the fiscal side already reported and discounted ahead of the day.
That’s when it became fun. From the forty to fifty ready-made stories in the Budget, we would generally decide two to three that had to be held back until the day at all costs, and a few dozen that were too complicated, boring or unpopular to do in advance. That left us with about fifteen that could be released before the day, equating to one each for the main Sunday and daily papers, if the Sundays couldn’t be persuaded to go for some skulduggery instead.
There is a certain etiquette to these Budget stories. Journalists tend not to write definitively days in advance that a particular measure will happen, both because – from the Treasury’s point of view – it looks a bit too ‘leaky’ and because – from the journalist’s – it’s always wise to have a get-out clause in case the scorecard changes at the last minute. So the usual form is to say, for example, that the Budget is ‘expected to freeze fuel duty’ or that the Chancellor is ‘considering announcing a boost for first-time buyers’, and so on.
Now, what do you do if some enterprising journalist calls up, either because they’ve had a genuine tip from elsewhere or – more likely – because they’re just having a punt, and says: ‘I’m thinking of writing that you’re going to scrap TV licences for pensioners’ and that is exactly the big headline measure that the Chancellor wants to announce with a fanfare at the end of the speech, not see wasted on one newspaper a few days out?
Well, frankly, you’re back to lying-without-lying: ‘Hmm, I’ve seen some external representations on that, so I know where this is coming from, but I would be very, very cautious if I were you. The costs and the admin are very difficult, and frankly if it came out in advance and it looks like someone’s trying to bounce us, it almost certainly won’t even be floated, so you’d end up looking a bit silly. I’ll keep you posted if anything changes, but if I was you, I’d steer clear of that one for now.’
Obviously that particular journalist risks ending up a bit miffed when they hear the announcement on Budget Day, so you need immediately to follow up by offering them the best of your fifteen stories as an alternative, or even a couple if you’re really worried.
Before Alistair Darling’s 2008 Pre-Budget Report, The Times thought they’d ask whether there were any plans for a temporary VAT cut and, rather than urge caution and offer an alternative as I would have done, Alistair’s people stood up the story, thus pissing away the centrepiece of the whole statement, and the only good news in it, several days in advance, leading to predictably disastrous headlines on the day after the PBR.
The day before the Budget, we would do the first of our two photo-calls. This involved a snapper and a TV cameraman being invited into the Chancellor’s office to get stills and film of him sitting around flicking through a copy of the final Red Book – fresh from the printers – and chatting casually with his staff, projecting an image of relaxed bonhomie for the evening news and the next day’s papers.
Everything about this photo-call was a lie. The Red Book was not the Red Book, because that tends not to be printed until the early hours of Budget morning once all the last-minute scorecard shenanigans are complete. What Gordon would be flicking through was last year’s Red Book with the new front cover stuck on it. The people with whom Gordon would be chatting casually were often not his staff – they were usually a sample of the most attractive, diverse, smartly dressed and smiley Treasury officials that could be rounded up at the time. And the relaxed bonhomie? Well, this was Gordon the day before a Budget; anguished hostility was more like it.
I never slept the night before the Budget. There were too many press notices and web pages to read through and sign off, and a number of other overnight rituals to complete: providing a generic briefing to all the broadcasters about the main Budget themes and providing a quote along the same lines to the Evening Standard, which they were always able to present as their exclusive from Gordon on Budget morning.
For me personally, the other ritual for the night before was briefing Gloria De Piero – then the political editor for GMTV, now the Labour MP for Ashfield – with one of the big stories we’d be holding back for the day of the Budget.
I did this for several reasons: first, Gloria always said that the generic briefing I’d given to all the other broadcasters was bullshit and demanded to know how the Budget was going to affect the lives of her millions of viewers; second, I’d rapidly become great mates with Gloria and her colleagues, Clare Nasir and Katie Myler; and third, despite Gloria always having fantastic scoops on the morning of every Budget and PBR, no one ever noticed. They were all too busy watching Nick Robinson and Adam Boulton fishing in the dark on the BBC and Sky.
While the timings have changed since I was doing the job, every Budget morning started with ‘sorting out the Standard’. They are usually in the hideous position of needing to produce an edition which will go to print while the Chancellor’s making his speech, but hit the streets after he’s sat down, in which they’re expected to have full coverage of what he’s said.
So at 6 a.m., I’d have a strictly confidential discussion with the Evening Standard political editor, the great Joe Murphy, to ensure he could get his pages and themes right for the first edition, and then be able quickly to update them later. I’d tell him: ‘Big boost for primary schools’; ‘Small boost for apprenticeships’; ‘Massive Whitehall efficiency package – that’s the biggest revenue-raiser’; ‘Nice surprise on gambling taxes’; ‘No big surprises on the other duties’; and ‘Nice measure for pensioners at the end – that’s the biggest expenditure’.
That conversation was also a chance for Joe to check the reliability of any other stories that had been around the previous week, to which my responses varied from ‘That’s fairly safe’ to ‘I’d be very cautious with that’ to ‘They’re in the right territory but they’ve got the wrong rate’. Again, that would help Joe plan his pages, and – where I’d indicated a story was reliable – he could write it hard in his first edition and save himself a job later.
I’d also point Joe towards one phrase in the exclusive quote we’d given him from Gordon, for example ‘further help for those who need it most’, which – put together with the broader briefing – would allow him to write a splash headline for the first edition saying something like: ‘Brown’s Bonanza for OAPs’.
Having sorted the Standard, we’d then tackle the broadcasters. This consisted of Ed Balls in his capacity as Chief Economic Adviser (and later his successor Michael Ellam) having a similar planning conversation with Nick Robinson, Adam Boulton and anyone else who’d be doing live coverage or putting together evening bulletins, although with a little more emphasis on timing: ‘He’ll do about a minute on tax avoidance, and announce a few measures, then a whistle-stop through all the duties – no big surprises there.’
The final bit of legitimised leaking before the speech was called ‘giving the snaps’ to Reuters. Whenever Gordon was giving a speech containing important messages on the economy, I’d pull out about a dozen extracts – single lines from the speech – and give them in advance to Sumeet Desai, the suave and canny Reuters economics editor, with strict instructions that he had to wait until they were delivered before publishing them on the wire. This was vital in the good old days when the closest equivalent to Twitter was the Reuters terminal every journalist in the country had on their desks pumping out breaking news as it happened.
There was a practical reason for this: if Gordon misspoke or missed a crucial word out of a sentence, you risked the markets going haywire – even just temporarily. Similarly, if a stressed Reuters journalist was listening and typing at the same time, they could be the ones to make the mistake. There was also a presentational reason in that other journalists would often look at Reuters to s
ee what was perceived as important in the speech, and the snaps allowed us to highlight the lines where we wanted the attention focused.
After that, it was time for the second photo-call – the departure from Downing Street with the famous red Budget box or from the Treasury on PBR days. There was rarely anything different or difficult about this, aside from telling Ten-Foot Timms to crouch a bit so he didn’t tower above Gordon too much. My main function was texting or calling the dozen or so Treasury press officers and other staff at No. 11 to facilitate the departure, and telling them alternately, repeatedly: ‘Stop opening the fucking door’ or ‘Get out of the fucking shot’.
Once Gordon was over in the House of Commons, I’d run into his office, wish him good luck, and show him the splash in the first edition of the Standard with a large thumbs-up and a ‘Wahey!’ just to boost his confidence and let him know everything was on track.
I’d then run up to the parliamentary press gallery and have the second crucial conversation with Joe Murphy, usually a frantic two-minute whisper just after Gordon had got up to speak, going through all the themes discussed previously and filling in the gaps with detailed facts. Joe would run off and make the necessary additions to his stories, fire them off to the Standard news desk and their presses would begin to roll.
People might wonder why we had to be so coy and secretive with the Standard, the broadcasters and others, but the reality is there are vast amounts of money to be made – not least in the betting markets – from any advance information on the detail of Budget announcements, and I knew it would be career death for me, if not Gordon, for any market-sensitive numbers to leak in advance.
Power Trip Page 10