That was brought home to me the one time we cocked things up, when – after I’d given him the facts and figures far too late – Joe hurriedly inserted them into sentences like: ‘Gordon Brown is expected to ease the burden on motorists’, but forgot to change the tense, so it read as though he was still speculating but knew the exact detail of what Gordon would announce. Questions were asked in the House of Commons with angry Tory MPs waving that edition of the Standard, demanding an explanation. They didn’t get one.
After the Standard really cocked up at the 2013 Budget, and posted their Budget front page before George Osborne had started speaking, there was an inquiry by the Treasury into whether these pre-briefing arrangements should continue. When I read their final report, I was genuinely astonished at how lax things had become since 2007, both in terms of how early Joe and others were being given full details of the Budget, but also that my successors were now briefing the fiscal data in advance and even showing the broadcast political editors the full scorecard on Budget morning!
Anyway, once Joe was sorted, I’d go and take my appointed seat in the parliamentary press gallery. There was a genuine satisfaction in looking around the gallery as each of the fifteen pre-briefed stories were announced and getting a grateful nod from the journalist who’d written them as their Budget exclusive. Then Gordon would announce the other big stories, and those same journalists would look over and smile, as if acknowledging that – yet again – we’d managed to hold back the best stuff, and give them their headlines for the following day.
Once the speech was over, there were perhaps the most crucial forty-five minutes of the day. Everyone would ignore the Leader of the Opposition giving his response and troop outside to the large room leading to the press gallery for the post-Budget briefing. I’d stand with Ed Balls and later Michael Ellam behind the table in the centre of the room, and we’d scan the crowd to see if any especially sharp hacks had made it in, on one occasion prompting a terrified whisper of: ‘Fuck me, what’s Paxman doing here?’
About a hundred journalists would be standing in front of us, ripping open their Budget press packs and poring over the Budget measures table. Some would start scribbling questions in the margins of the Red Book; others would get out their calculators and work out how much extra tax they and their editors would have to pay.
Then a hush would descend, and Ed or Michael would effectively present the Budget all over again, focusing on the key facts the journalists needed to know, explaining some of the measures in more detail and summarising the overall impact of the package. They’d also flag any measures that we knew were going to prove controversial so neither the hacks nor the Tories could later claim to have ‘discovered’ them in the Budget small print. They’d then take dozens of questions and answer them properly – not just bat them away press-conference style – with me occasionally chipping in.
This exercise served one purpose above all: it communicated the sense – and usually the reality – that the Treasury knew exactly what it was doing, that there were no hidden horrors and that this was definitely not a Budget that was going to unravel. Not on that day at any rate.
Speaking to journalists who were present at the briefing that followed George Osborne’s 2012 Omnishambles Budget, they say the exact opposite was true and any chance the Treasury had of turning the media reaction around was immediately scuppered.
After the briefing, we’d go and catch up with Gordon and tell him what the press mood was, chivvying him up for the important task of ringing round all the daily newspaper editors and senior columnists, something which – in good times – made them write even better headlines, leaders and columns, or – in bad times – made them feel guilty about sticking the boot in too hard.
I’d spend the rest of the day zipping round the press gallery mopping up any fresh questions from the political hacks or taking calls from their economics counterparts. I’d go back to the Treasury where my team of a dozen press officers – all with different areas of responsibility – would be fielding calls from specialist journalists, and I’d sit and brief all the ministers doing the rounds of evening TV news on what issues were coming up and what they should say.
Around 9 p.m., there would be a brief moment of respite. Sarah would lay on lasagne and drinks in No. 11, and Gordon’s inner circle would gather to toast him on a job well done and another Budget complete, and he would work his way round the room saying his trademark phrase ‘Thanks for all you do’, but in a more heartfelt way than normal.
My work for the night was just beginning. I’d watch the late evening news bulletins and wait at Victoria station until midnight to check the first editions of all the papers, where necessary ringing the two or three journalists who’d got something wrong to demand changes for the second edition, or – if one paper had gone big on some obscure aspect of the Budget – fielding calls from all the others worried that they’d missed something.
I’d get home, never risk going to sleep, have a shower and change clothes, and be back in a car at 5 a.m. to meet Gordon in his flat at Great Smith Street for the morning round of interviews. I’d have all the papers piled up next to me, ordered by how much Gordon would like the headline. He’d barrel into the car and – almost by rote – say: ‘The papers awful, are they?’, then start flicking through them with the occasional approving ‘Hmm’ at each positive headline or favourable cartoon.
I’d wait until he was in just the right frame of mind, then take him through some of the problems that had emerged and what he should say about them, Gordon scribbling the lines as I talked with his black marker pen, me watching to make sure he didn’t get ink all over his hands, shirt or tie. Not for nothing did his special protection officers nickname him Zorro – every plane, car and meeting room he was sat in for more than five minutes would end up criss-crossed with swipes of his pen.
We’d go across the river to do GMTV live in the studio, then back to Millbank to do Sky and BBC Breakfast just looking down a camera lens, 5 Live with Nicky Campbell, ITN, then the big set-piece interview with the Today programme at 8.10 a.m.: Gordon and John Humphrys or Jim Naughtie in the studio, with Nick Robinson sat alongside them. I always had to admire the professionalism it took for Nick to deliver his instant post-interview analysis – often tinged with criticism – with Gordon glowering at him across the desk, and occasionally throwing his papers or his headset down in reaction.
It didn’t matter how well the Today interview had gone, Gordon would be in a funk afterwards, so we’d do some quick, small interviews to get his head back in the game, one of which would always be with Sumeet from Reuters, an incredibly important journalist for us who also became a good friend.
Even after the demise of Reuters TV, I’d still tell Sumeet to turn up with a camera so we could make the interview look official to Gordon, even if it would only appear as a wire story. More often than not, I’d end up holding the camera. This might have looked odd to other journalists in the building – the Treasury’s Head of Communications pointing a camera that clearly wasn’t rolling at the Chancellor – but Gordon himself never seemed to notice.
By 9 a.m., we’d be done. We’d head back to the Treasury, I’d sit at my desk and breathe. It was the end of at least two months of intense pressure and – for me – a 48-hour period with no sleep, no let-up and no room for error. Briefing the Budget may be the best job in government, but it’s bloody hard work.
16
INTERVIEWS: THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY
There’s one problem with having the remarkable political longevity of someone like Gordon Brown: everything changed around him but he never did. Or maybe he never could.
Gordon grew up at a time when political interviews were an invitation for a minister to summarise the speech they’d just made for the benefit of those who hadn’t heard it. He came into politics at a time when ministers or prime ministers facing even slightly awkward questioning could either just walk off the set or berate perfectly polite members of t
he public.
He spent his years shadowing Tory Treasury ministers leaping on their every slip in interviews at a time when they could and did routinely move markets by saying ill-judged things about Britain’s currency, exchange rates and so on.
So when he came to government in 1997, Gordon determined to re-invent the political interview. Just not in the way any broadcaster or sane member of the public would be interested in. He determined to prove that it was possible to do political interviews on the economy year-in, year-out without ever moving the markets and without ever screwing up. He would go on with one mantra and repeat it like a stuck record, side-stepping all possible traps and diversions.
Even on GMTV, the ultimate opportunity to speak directly to millions of uncommitted voters, Fiona Phillips used to complain to me that Gordon would sit down on the sofa during the ad break as personal and engaging as he always was in private, but as soon as they went live, his Easter Island game face would be on and he’d be back to drilling out a prepared message.
This got worse before it ever got better, because the more established his reputation became for dead-batting all interview questions and continually contriving a way back to his main message, the more interviewers genuinely did try to wrong-foot him or catch him out. Gordon’s reaction wasn’t just to keep avoiding those traps, but to start seeing traps that weren’t there.
This became Gordon’s equivalent of Ed Balls’s stammer: an inability to answer questions fluently and naturally because he was thinking too much about the words coming out of his mouth and whether they were going to trip him up.
And whereas Ed eventually realised that the only way he could give a good interview was to relax and not over-think what he was going to say, Gordon could never instinctively allow himself to let go in that way; his default settings were diversionary tactics over direct answers and obfuscation above honesty; to maintain his innate discipline rather than reveal his natural charm.
And that is the paradox: that stubborn commitment to caution may have helped Gordon to become the longest-serving Chancellor for centuries, but it also contributed to him becoming one of the shortest-serving prime ministers. It always made me think of a great defensive boxer who would win plaudits for going ten rounds without a scratch. But if he actually wanted to win the fight, surely he had to lower his guard at some stage and go on the offensive.
What was so frustrating was that when he was good, he could be exceptionally good, but for the most part his interviews will be remembered as bad, and occasionally downright ugly.
That said, the best ones in my time were superb: all what I’d call long-form interviews, where the journalist or broadcaster was able to spend a whole day or a weekend with him, talking informally as well as on the record, seeing him interact with other people and building up a proper picture of him as a man, and then writing or piecing together a broadcast package or newspaper feature on the whole thing. The key for me was getting Gordon to a point where he forgot there was a camera or tape recorder there, and just engaged with the individual talking to him.
Gordon did excellent ‘day in the life’ pieces for Sky, with Kay Burley and Julie Etchingham, both searching but empathetic interviewers, capable of extracting his funny and emotional sides. Bel Mooney did the equivalent in print for The Times, and there were many others in my time who produced brilliantly insightful profiles in that form for TV or newspapers – Martha Kearney, Suzie Mackenzie and the Mirror’s Julie McCaffrey to name a few.
They all obviously have something in common, and it’s undoubtedly true that Gordon found it easier to open up and relax with female interviewers. Or maybe they just knew better than most of their male counterparts how to put him at ease.
That said, the best three interviews I ever heard Gordon do were with men: a scintillating discussion in his North Queensferry dining room with The Guardian’s Ian Jack about his upbringing; forty-five compelling minutes talking about the world economy in the blacked-out studio of the American Charlie Rose show; and, best of all, an extended guest appearance with Eamonn Holmes on 5 Live drifting naturally and easily across various topics, both sporting and political.
Eamonn stopped at one point and asked him in all seriousness why he didn’t sound like this in all his interviews. It was the only time Gordon tensed up, imagined a trap and reverted to his usual guarded self, including some forced bonhomie: ‘Well, maybe you should invite me on more often.’
I thought it was a desperately sad moment, and a reckless part of me wished he’d just seized the opportunity to tell the truth: ‘Do you know why, Eamonn? ’Cos I think you’re an OK guy, and I think the rest of them are bastards out to get me and maybe I’m wrong about that.’
Now you might well ask, if those long-form interviews worked so well, why didn’t we do more of them or, indeed, why wasn’t that all we did? The reality is we did as many as we could fit in for each paper and broadcaster, and – for someone like Gordon, who instinctively regarded the demands of the media as wasteful drains on his time and energy – it was always a massive commitment.
Worst of all, those profile pieces didn’t always go to plan. One journalist accompanied us on a visit to do a day-in-the-life feature on Gordon and get reactions from the people he met, before doing a formal interview. In reality, he spent most of the day getting reactions from local barmen, and turned up for the interview totally smashed, with no material for his feature at all.
Gordon sensed something was awry when the journalist took a very detailed interest in his diet, and – when I politely asked him to get to the questions – announced that he didn’t want to do a normal interview, but was much more interested in having a chat and getting to know the real man, hence his interest in what he’d eaten so far that day.
Gordon, who still had a speech to make that night, gave me his most volcanic look and asked me quite openly: ‘What the hell is this about? What’s wrong with this bloody guy?’ I gave the ‘bloody guy’ a last chance, going so far as to remind him which questions we’d agreed in advance might be fruitful – that is, the ones for which Gordon had a fairly decent story prepared. But the journo was too far gone. He said: ‘I don’t want to do all that boring shit. Come on, Gordon, why don’t you lighten up for a change?’
That did it. Gordon reared back out of his chair and stormed out of the room, only stopping to tell me that this was bullshit, it was all my fault and I should bloody fix it. And I did, but not in a way sticklers for press freedom might welcome. I wrote the journalist about 600 words of colour from the day, balanced and factual enough that he could stick it straight in the paper, and then provided a dozen paragraphs of quotes in Gordon’s name, including the story we’d prepared and a smattering of personal stuff about dietary habits, which he could present as his in-depth interview.
It splashed the paper with a good feature inside. It looked perfectly kosher and there were only three people who knew the reality, although strangely, when Gordon read it, he observed without irony that the journalist had actually done a pretty good job, and we should do more stuff with him.
If that interview could be filed under ‘bad’, at least it was mostly the journalist’s fault. Usually, it was all Gordon’s doing and, more often than not, I’d have to provide those ‘dozen paragraphs of quotes’ after an interview to make up for the fact that Gordon hadn’t said anything interesting or newsworthy himself.
One of his even worse habits in newspaper interviews – if he knew the journalist fairly well himself – would be to start very obviously reading out my prepared script for our agreed story, and then – to my horror and the journalist’s embarrassment – just hand over the briefing note, and say: ‘There you go, all the quotes are there.’
Professional pride would dictate that they’d carry on asking him questions, but he’d start looking increasingly bored and frustrated at the waste of time, and say: ‘You’ve got it all there; that’s all you need.’ Journalists with heaps of goodwill towards Gordon would come away from an ex
perience like that feeling genuinely hurt and a little offended.
The broadcast equivalent of those ‘bad’ interviews would come when, for example, the Today programme would decide that they really couldn’t be bothered just giving Gordon a fifteen-minute platform to recite his mantra for the day about the importance of skills or reform of the Common Agricultural Policy, so would do two questions on that and then change the topic to something completely different.
If Gordon was face to face in the studio, he might just about behave himself when that happened, but if he was doing the interview down the line – in a radio car on a visit, in a sound booth at Millbank or in our little interview room at the Treasury – he would begin miming acts of extreme violence in my direction, while giving the most desultory answers possible or, even worse, protesting about the line of questioning and bemoaning the BBC’s failure to focus on important issues.
When those interviews would end, Gordon would wait until a producer’s voice had appeared in his headset saying: ‘That’s it. Thank you, Mr Brown’, and then unleash a tremendous volley of abuse, usually just a stream of unconnected swear words. I’m convinced he didn’t care that the BBC were still recording at the other end; he wanted them to hear what he thought of their interview. I’ve always fantasised that someone at the BBC has kept all those clips and carefully spliced them together to play Cinema Paradiso-style at John Humphrys’s retirement party.
If those interviews were bad, I always consoled myself that it could be worse. I still shudder when I think about the real carcrashes and near-misses.
We were never far away from a Demolition Derby when Gordon had to do rounds of interviews in the Treasury or at No. 10, on foreign trips and at party conference; one broadcast political editor after another coming into the seat opposite Gordon and giving him a ten-minute grilling. He wasn’t particularly fond of any of them, and felt downright hostile towards the big three – the BBC’s Nick Robinson, Sky’s Adam Boulton and ITN’s Tom Bradby.
Power Trip Page 11