Paying that no heed, I headed down to London that night for a friend’s birthday and I took along the questionnaire to show my mates the kind of thing I was being asked, discuss which of them should be my personal referees and generally boast that I was going to be the next James Bond, or – after I’d had a few pints of Guinness – the next David Neligan, if you know your 1920s Irish history. It was a long night on the town and, almost inevitably, I woke up in the morning minus one questionnaire.
I rang the number on the cover letter for anyone unable to attend the centre on the given dates, and explained – to silence at the other end – that I had spilled ink on the questionnaire and needed a replacement. A clipped female voice said: ‘Just fill it in as best you can.’ ‘Ah, but I’ve thrown it away now.’ ‘Well, you shouldn’t have done that,’ she replied. ‘We can’t offer you a replacement.’ She hung up. If the intention was to assess whether I was spy material, they and I both found out in a hurry.
I saw the same form seven years later for the process of ‘developed vetting’, the screening that every civil servant or special adviser who is going to have access to ‘Top Secret’ material must undergo. Until I had received my DV status, briefing sessions with Gordon would routinely be broken up by Mark Bowman or another senior official saying: ‘Damian, you need to go out for a bit’, usually when they’d be presenting some top-secret intelligence.
We spy on other countries to gather some of that intelligence because they are all routinely spying on us. Everyone is at it. Not that anyone obeyed the rule, but we were always told very seriously not to use mobiles in Downing Street because the Chinese and Russians were routinely intercepting conversations, and – God knows how – using live mobile phones inside No. 10 and No. 11 to hack into nearby computers.
On overseas trips and foreign summits, we were routinely issued with new mobile phones for the trip and instructed not to switch on our existing phones and BlackBerrys on the grounds that all phones would be hacked into by various security agencies during the trip. We were also told – especially when visiting China – that we should assume that our hotel rooms and anything we left in them would be searched as a matter of routine by security agents whenever we were out.
One night in Shanghai, at a launch party for Richard Branson’s new Virgin airline service to the city, our small gaggle of mostly male Downing Street staff and accompanying journalists found ourselves accosted on one side by a beautiful posse of Chinese girls and on the other side by an equivalent group of Russian blondes. Even before our resident security expert could warn us that their interest was not to be taken at face value, we looked up and saw one of our number disappearing up the stairs to the exit with one of the girls, beaming back at us and doing the ‘Chelsea Dagger’ dance as though he’d won the lottery.
Needless to say, he woke up in the morning minus his BlackBerry and half the contents of his briefcase, and with a very bad head from the Mickey Finn nightcap she’d apparently fixed him once they’d got back to his room. When that story emerged in the Sunday Times, it wasn’t my doing, but I helped the journalist get the details of what happened correct, in return for which he agreed not to name the individual concerned. That spared a few blushes, although it didn’t go down too well with the other male Downing Street aides on the trip, all forced to deny to their other halves that they were the unnamed guilty party.
Given the prevalence of spying, honey-traps and blackmail operations, it’s understandable that the security services put so much emphasis on the vetting process, which – above anything else – is designed to test whether each individual is reliable when it comes to being told top-secret information. If your vulnerability hasn’t been thoroughly checked out, you remain the potential loose brick in the wall.
As well as filling in the enormous form on background details, including everything from bank account details to my maternal grandmother’s maiden name, I had to supply a handful of potential referees, at least one of which would be interviewed either before or after I’d been seen to check whether I’d answered truthfully. I was then asked who I wanted to do my interview: the choice was described as ‘a kindly spinster aunt-type who’ll wish you’d settle down and get married or a retired sergeant-major type who’ll think you’re a poof’. I went for the spinster aunt.
When we sat down together, she looked over her half-rim glasses and said these chilling words: ‘Now I’ve done hundreds of these interviews and this is your first one. My only task is to decide whether you can be trusted to tell the truth, so your only task here is to answer my questions honestly. If you do not, I won’t give any indication, but I will write on your form that I cannot recommend you for clearance.’
With that jagged shard in my throat, we began. She started by skipping fairly quickly through the main ‘risk’ areas: sex and relationships; family and friends; booze and drugs; gambling and money. Based on my answers, she decided what to hone in on, which in my case was sex, family and booze. The next three hours were by turns excruciating and exhausting.
The first focus was on my sexual history and, in probably the worst five minutes of my life, this kindly spinster aunt listed every deviant sexual practice you can think of and asked if I’d ever engaged in them. My answers went something like: ‘No… No… No… Erm, no… No… Yes, but only once… No… No… No… Erm, I don’t even know what that is. Oh, bloody hell – of course not…’
She then moved onto my partners, testing whether I would be susceptible to honey-traps or liable to bring strangers into my home, and where the risks lay of previous partners suddenly re-entering my life now I’d got this new job. We went through every bit of that history, from long-term relationships to one-night stands: names, locations, details and current status.
Because you have no way of knowing what information the interviewer already holds on you, there is no real option to hide something. You end up telling them everything. The only way that a senior individual could avoid disclosing details of an embarrassing affair is to avoid going through the vetting process full stop.
It was a great relief when she moved onto family, but I realised then that all the background checks had kicked up some concerns. ‘Would you describe your father as an Irish nationalist?’, ‘What about his family?’, ‘How often do you travel to Donegal?’, ‘Do you meet your cousins there?’, ‘Have any of your cousins ever spoken to you about Irish nationalism?’ I knew what specifically she was driving at, and – rather than have it crushed out of me – I told her up front exactly what I knew about my dad’s cousin who’d served time for IRA-related offences.
After all that, booze was easy. Unlike a doctor, she couldn’t care less how much I drank but just wanted to know where I drank, how loudly I talked, whether I took any papers from the office with me, whether I ever lost things and, most of all, could I remember how I behaved when actually drunk. My answers wouldn’t have been totally reassuring but they were honest, and – crucially – they were consistent with those my friend Anthony Glackin gave when she asked him afterwards.
And that was it. She thanked me, I went away and two weeks’ later I was told I’d been cleared. I could now be told the secrets that I always had to leave the room for, the first of which concerned the then secret US Terrorist Finance Tracking Programme.
In all the controversy in June 2013 over the US security services accessing people’s social media interactions through the PRISM system, it’s often forgotten that they had since 9/11 been accessing details of most of our financial transactions through the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication system (SWIFT).
Clearly that was an invaluable source of intelligence when trying to trace suspects, or identify suspicious money transfers that might indicate a terror plot was being financed, and the British security services were among the beneficiaries of that information when it came to stopping plots in this country. But it also raised uncomfortable issues around America’s potential access to the private finances and spending re
cords of prominent politicians and businesspeople around the world.
All that made this a difficult secret for Gordon and the Treasury to be sitting on, even more so when Mervyn King, the Bank of England Governor, was informed. Things came to a head in the Boca Raton holiday and retirement resort in Florida, where the Americans had chosen to host the G7 finance ministers’ and bank governors’ meeting in February 2004.
Election year in America means every summit or conference hosted by the federal government takes place in a battleground state, no matter how inopportune the venue. It was certainly the oddest summit I ever attended. Finance ministers had to pick their way around the sunbeds surrounding the pool to get from the conference room to the press centre, and the meetings themselves were regularly interrupted by elderly men in bathing costumes looking for the toilet.
Back in the UK, the Hutton Inquiry into David Kelly’s suicide had just reported, and – in the acrimony that followed – there was much soul-searching in the UK media about the cost of standing shoulder to shoulder with the Americans in the ‘War on Terror’. At that precise moment, Mervyn’s conscience told him that he had a duty to blow the gaff on the SWIFT deal, and tell the British people that the CIA had – with the Treasury’s connivance – been secretly accessing that financial data.
It’s not hard to imagine – in the post-Hutton atmosphere – the damage this could have done to the Labour government, and particularly to Gordon, who’d up to that point largely resisted being tainted with the shitty stick that was the Bush administration.
When Mervyn announced his intentions in a small meeting room in Boca Raton, Gordon quietly told everyone else to leave, aside from the SWIFT expert, Mark Bowman. As Mervyn’s aides hesitated, Gordon suggested rather more firmly that we should all ‘get out’, and Mark led us into the corridor. As he was ushered out, one of Mervyn’s aides said pleadingly: ‘But I need to hear this.’ ‘Don’t worry,’ Mark said laconically, closing the door on us all. ‘I think you’re about to.’
For the next five minutes, Gordon unleashed a volcanic tirade at Mervyn, very properly saying that he’d be putting Britain’s counter-terror operations at threat if he went public about SWIFT and that it would do huge damage to our relationship with America, but adding – perhaps rather harshly – that Mervyn was talking ‘fucking bullshit’ when he said he had a duty to speak out and that it was his ‘fucking ego’ dictating his position, not his duty to the country.
However rudely Mervyn felt he was treated – and he enjoyed some cold revenge in his future Mansion House speeches and economic forecasts – there is no question Gordon was right and, as a result of his intervention, the SWIFT deal remained a secret for another two years, until it was exposed by the New York Times, and safeguards and formal treaties were put in place governing its use.
Despite the angry confrontation with Mervyn, or very possibly because of it, I’d rarely seen Gordon in such a chipper mood as at the end of that Florida summit. We had time to kill before our flight home and Gordon asked the driver to take us somewhere lively for a drink. American drivers don’t do half-measures. If the man wants lively, he’ll get lively. He drove us to a resort on the Florida coast and dropped us at the top of a road leading down to a strip of bars on the promenade.
It happened I was on the phone to Ian Austin in London at the time, who said the papers were full of debate about what the outcome of the Hutton report meant for Blair, and inevitably for Brown. Ian had just got to his usual lecture about the need to be disciplined and avoid any controversial press coverage as we turned the corner onto the promenade, and saw what appeared to be an advance guard for the upcoming spring break holiday.
Ian could suddenly hear in the background the crashing of glasses and bottles, the roars and whoops of several parties in full swing in every bar, and a large number of American men vociferously suggesting that the equally large number of American women remove articles of clothing, even though they didn’t look like they had much more to remove.
Hearing all this, Ian gently inquired: ‘Erm, Damian, where are you?’ ‘Ah, at a beach resort. We’ve just got here, but it looks like there’s some kind of student party going on.’ More crashing glasses. More whooping and hollering. A chant of ‘TITS! TITS! TITS!’ ‘Right,’ Ian said patiently. ‘And I presume Gordon’s not there.’ ‘Err, yeah, he is, he’s trying to get served.’ ‘Right, right…’ Ian said, mustering all his patience. ‘Well, can I possibly suggest you get out of there reasonably quickly – like, maybe right bloody now.’
We walked down the promenade and found a quieter bar, where Gordon happily held court, telling stories and drinking a beer. On the bus back to the airport, he sat looking out of the window singing ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ to himself, and I don’t think I’d ever known him more content.
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THE WASHINGTONIAN
Gordon may have been happy in Florida, but he was always at his most relaxed when spending a week in Washington. If you’ve never been there, it is an intoxicating city: full of life, but rich in history; burnt-out apartments still left from the 1968 riots a stone’s throw away from the plushest ambassadorial residences.
Before I ever became a civil servant, I spent the happiest summer of my life as an intern in Washington, working in the office of Congressman Thomas C. Sawyer, a Democrat from Ohio. His staff told me that he always went on the ballot as ‘Tom Sawyer’, and could usually count on about 10 per cent extra votes because people recognised the name from somewhere.
I became a minor star in their eyes after somehow ending up in the front row of the Washington Mall Independence Day concert in 1995. I say ‘somehow’; I was in fact very drunk, after taking a case of twenty-four beers and – having failed to find any of my fellow British interns or new American mates – drinking them all myself.
So when a rope was lifted and a large group of children charged to get to the front, I simply ran along with them. That was fine until the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ and ‘America the Beautiful’ were played. Twice, on national TV, the camera panned down the front row to see the angelic children sweetly singing, hands on their hearts, and me in my Ireland football shirt simultaneously slurring and miming the words.
That summer was the height of the Newt Gingrich revolution, with Republicans in the ascendancy and Bill Clinton’s re-election at that point looking doubtful. Of course, things turned around for him, and I’d like to think I played my part. One day, when travelling at speed round the cavernous tunnels under the Capitol Hill complex, I whizzed round the corner and knocked Senator Bob Dole flat on his back, the man who would end up losing to Clinton in 1996. I say he never recovered.
One thing I learned in Tom Sawyer’s office was the astonishing amount of effort put into each letter from a constituent. The response had to be as personal and empathetic as possible, impeccably researched, guaranteed to win the vote not just of that constituent but all his friends and family. That never left me, and I was amazed when I saw how casual the approach was in Whitehall and Westminster: hundreds of form letters churned out each week without any personalisation.
My next visit to Washington was my first with Gordon. Early in his time as Chancellor, he’d assumed the presidency of the International Monetary and Financial Committee, the key decision-making body for members of the IMF’s executive board. While the presidency was in theory meant to rotate between the finance ministers from different countries, Gordon simply assumed the chair’s position at every meeting from that point on and used the authority it gave him to steer the IMF round to his agenda.
It also allowed him to spend a full week out there twice a year having preparatory meetings before the spring and autumn summits of the IMF. Obviously those meetings were important but, for a man who famously never took things easy, those weeks in Washington were as close as Gordon got.
For a start, we did much more socialising than usual. On that first visit, I joined the others in the hotel reception, and my eyebrows were raised at the numbe
r of women in clingy dresses seemingly involved in an international pilots’ convention. I relayed my suspicions to the two Eds when they joined us. They looked incredulous and said they were clearly just the wives of the pilots. When Gordon finally came down, Balls said: ‘Damian’s got a theory about this hotel to tell you.’ Before I could say anything, Gordon said: ‘I know, we’ve got to get out of here, this place is full of hookers.’
That evening, we met Gordon’s great friend and adviser, Bob Shrum, who at the time was heavily involved in John Kerry’s campaign for the Democratic nomination to take on George W. Bush in 2004. Bob started tearing into Kerry’s upstart rival from Vermont, Howard Dean, saying he was a joke and that his campaign was based on appealing to naive college kids.
Ed Miliband shot me a look, given I’d told him previously I was a huge Dean fan. I thought I’d better speak up: ‘Um, I should say, Bob, I’m one of the founder members of the London Howard Dean supporters group, and I’m not sure I go along with that.’ There was a great roar of laughter. Ed Miliband said with a big smile: ‘You passed the test’, Bob clapped me on the back and Gordon shook my hand. As initiation rituals go, it was pretty geeky.
During the daytime, when Gordon wasn’t in meetings, and even sometimes when he was supposed to be, Washington meant two things: bookshops and football. He could spend literally hours in Barnes & Noble and other bookshops, reading half the history, politics and economics books, and buying the other half. British tourists visiting the city must occasionally have passed this middle-aged man with wild hair, shirt open almost to the waist, carrying two bulging plastic bags of hardback books, and thought: ‘That guy looks just like Gordon Brown.’
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