Power Trip
Page 17
But back in 2005, the support from those kind of celebrities and the Live 8 concert, alongside the mass mobilisation of charities and faith organisations around the Make Poverty History campaign, undoubtedly helped get the public support and political momentum required to secure pledges on aid and deals on debt relief at the Gleneagles G8 summit, if not any progress at all on trade.
That summit was a difficult moment for Gordon, seeing Tony Blair, who’d done very little heavy lifting on development issues in the preceding years, claiming all the glory. Gordon also felt that, while the Bush administration owed Blair a huge debt for his support for the Iraq War, he’d used barely any of that capital to extort lasting commitments from them on development.
Indeed, when Gordon used his first meeting with Condoleezza Rice to try and persuade her to back his plan to deliver a massive increase in short-term funding for development, financed by long-term bonds, she not only said the US wasn’t interested in the plan but got the White House to complain to Tony Blair about Gordon’s ‘haranguing’ behaviour.
On the eve of Gleneagles, Gordon said quite reflectively that he’d need to keep pushing on this agenda, because if he didn’t, no one would. He said Tony would be back on the Middle East and security as soon as Gleneagles was out of the way. That was more prescient than he realised. The 7/7 bombings happened during the summit and all of the momentum on development – as well as the feel-good factor induced by Live 8 and the success of the London 2012 Olympics bid – was totally lost.
In fact, in the wake of 7/7, Gordon felt under increasing pressure to look active on the international security agenda as well, rather than just ‘banging on’ about development issues. Following the bad meeting with Condoleezza Rice, we would also hear noises from News International contacts that there were concerns at the highest level in the company – i.e. Uncle Rupert – about whether Gordon sufficiently grasped the seriousness of the security situation, and whether he could be trusted to maintain the strength of Blair’s relationship with the Bush administration.
On the morning of 21 July, after copycat bombers made their botched terrorist attack on the Tube, I interrupted Gordon’s meeting with a delegation of senior businessmen to tell him the news. Alarmed, but perhaps also conscious of the need to look like a man of action on terrorism, Gordon became a whirlwind of activity, barking orders to his office about freezing the bank accounts of the suspects once they’d been identified, making asset seizure orders, handing over any HMRC records to the security services, and telling me to get a press statement ready once all that had been done.
As Gordon resumed his discussions with the businessmen, they could not have looked more impressed at what they’d seen, and how seized Gordon was by the security agenda. By contrast, having concluded that this was one day on which there was zero chance of any journalist needing to speak to me, I went back to my office, closed my door, switched on the first day of the Ashes from Lord’s, and relaxed on my sofa.
A big mistake. Half an hour later, Gordon charged into my room with a familiar: ‘Damian, where are we?’, with the five businessmen following immediately behind. I leapt up, grabbed the remote, switched from the Ashes to Sky News, and bullshitted as best I could about the latest developments, as they all listened intently. All except Gordon of course, who had seen what I’d really been watching and was mentally assaulting me with a large cricket bat.
You can imagine why, when he’d asked me the previous year why I hadn’t shaken Mandela’s hand, and I said: ‘It just didn’t feel very professional’, Gordon’s response was a succinct and scornful: ‘Ha!’
23
HONOURS
The late, great John Butterly was a teenager when he took a job working on Glasgow’s docks. He never learned to read or write, but, when his tenement building in Dennistoun was threatened with destruction and his family were told their only option was moving into a block of flats in Easterhouse, he became one of the pioneers of Glasgow’s housing association movement, which turned back the bulldozers and led to the renovation of thousands of Glasgow’s old sandstone tenements.
Dawn Goring was a glamorous, black sixteen-year-old from south London when she turned up for an interview in the Treasury’s typing pool not long after Margaret Thatcher had come to power. She was asked what she thought the Treasury did, giving the immortal answer: ‘I dunno. Something to do with diamonds?’ She got the job and has now worked more than thirty years in administrative positions in the Treasury and No. 10, serving under six chancellors and two prime ministers.
What John and Dawn have in common – other than firm places in my heart – was that, the achievements of their children apart, I never saw them so proud as on the days they went to collect their MBEs from Buckingham Palace. For that reason, I have always been a huge fan of the honours system, and it was a great thrill to see Dawn on the day with her mum, dad and daughter, dressed to the nines and beaming with smiles.
I became even more of a fan of the honours system when I realised what a rich seam it offered for tactical leaks to key newspaper contacts, especially around Christmas when political stories are notoriously thin on the ground.
Twice a year, I would move heaven and earth to obtain a copy of the full honours list from Cabinet Office colleagues, scan it for any interesting names from TV, film, music and sport, and – while I’d be subtle about the actual leaking process, humming a TV theme tune or doing a few bars of a song – it would usually lead to a splash in The Sun or another tabloid, and another few months of goodwill for Gordon in the bag.
But it did require a bit of background knowledge. It was no use hoping you’d see the name Status Quo under ‘Services to Music’ – you had to know who Messrs Francis Dominic Rossi and Richard John Parfitt were. One of my successors discovered that to their cost after going through the 2010 New Year’s Honours list when the Quo pair were honoured, and telling the Sunday Mirror there were no interesting celebrities on the list.
There were certain things it also helped to know about the system. For example, when Bruce Forsyth was awarded a CBE in 2006, The Sun began a long campaign to get him upgraded to a knighthood. I knew that couldn’t happen because you usually have to wait at least five years for a higher gong than the one you’ve received and to have done something significantly new in the meantime. Twice a year, The Sun would ask whether they’d be able to claim victory on Brucie, and twice a year I’d tell them, no, it definitely wasn’t going to happen.
After I was sacked in 2009, they got some bad intelligence from another source and splashed the Brucie knighthood story in advance of the Birthday Honours. I knew it couldn’t be right and, sure enough, they had to wait another two years before the story finally came good.
If the honours system provided some of my best tabloid splashes, it also produced my biggest disappointment – probably the only time going back to my Customs days when I personally tried to drive through a policy change and failed.
The idea of awarding posthumous honours has been around for many years, most notably with the campaign for Bobby Moore to receive the knighthood that many of his surviving 1966 peers received in the years after his death. After all, posthumous honours already exist, but usually only for members of the armed forces or emergency services killed while engaged in acts of great bravery.
In 2008, the Holocaust Educational Trust (HET), led by the unstoppable Karen Pollock – herself now an MBE – began campaigning to see honours awarded to those Britons who had helped Jewish people to escape the concentration camps, often while working in Britain’s embassies in occupied Europe, but whose heroic deeds had gone unknown and unrecognised in their own lifetimes.
I started to cause a stir about this internally. Gordon was keen on the idea, both because of his own interest in wartime acts of bravery, but also because he wanted a way to publicly recognise Alan Turing, the Bletchley Park codebreaker persecuted over his sexuality, rather than just apologise in the House of Commons for the way he had been treated.
But beyond that, I saw this as something that Labour MPs could get heavily involved in, canvassing nominations in their constituencies for any local heroes whose acts of charity or community had never been recognised during their lifetimes, or even realised until after their deaths; the kind of thing that would lead to local newspaper campaigns and petitions championed by the local MP.
Given the support of Gordon and then Cabinet Office minister Tom Watson, and my own experience of driving through policy changes, I was confident that it would happen. However, I then encountered the combined strength of the senior civil service and Buckingham Palace officials. They were not having it, not under any circumstances.
The debate raged back and forth over a period of weeks: they would list ten reasons why it couldn’t possibly happen; I’d challenge all of them; they’d concede two but insist on the remaining eight; I’d challenge again, and so on, like boxers going toe to toe seeing who would drop first.
They argued: ‘We cannot impose honours on people who do not have the opportunity to refuse them’; I came back with: ‘But you give posthumous honours to police officers and soldiers, no one’s able to ask them, and in any case, why not just ask their surviving families, the way you would with organ donation?’ Point conceded.
They argued: ‘We cannot second-guess the judgements made by honours committees in previous years who chose not to honour these individuals’; I replied: ‘But some of them, as with the Holocaust cases, died without anyone knowing what they’d done; and some of them, like Jock Stein, dropped dead in the middle of their careers.’ Point conceded.
They argued: ‘We cannot make judgements now based on today’s criteria and standards and apply them retrospectively to previous eras when different criteria and standards applied.’ I didn’t know what that meant, but I went for the jugular and retorted: ‘If you mean that Alan Turing couldn’t get a knighthood because he was a homosexual, and still shouldn’t because that was the judgement at the time, then is that really your best argument?’ Point conceded.
They argued: ‘We only have a set number of honours to award each year; if you want to give some to dead people, you’re going to have to exclude deserving living people.’ ‘Cobblers,’ I argued, ‘it’s not difficult – make it a new, special category, set aside about ten to twenty extra honours per year, and choose the most deserving posthumous candidates each time.’ Point conceded.
They argued: ‘To whom is Her Majesty supposed to make the award?’ ‘Are you kidding?’ I asked them. ‘You already make awards to half the recipients of the Victoria Cross without them physically receiving it.’ Point conceded.
Finally, they argued: ‘How far back are we supposed to go? Do you want to propose that Boudicca is made a Dame?’ ‘Again, let’s not be daft,’ I said, ‘but if you want a cut-off point, let’s go back to 1917 when the current honours system came into being.’ Point conceded.
I thought I had them beaten. The old-fashioned ding-dong of debate reminded me of the old Treasury tax policy days, and my torment at the idea of losing the argument was giving way to excitement at winning it. However, they had one trump card left to play.
‘All this is a nonsense anyway,’ they said. ‘Receiving a knighthood is simply the conferral of membership of the Order of the Bath. It’s like a club. You cease to be a member when you die and you can’t make dead people members. For that reason, Her Majesty doesn’t want to do it and if the Prime Minister feels so strongly about it, he will need to take it up with her personally.’
I’m not sure the Palace officials or the Cabinet Office ever consulted the Queen, but it was a reasonable bluff. They knew there was no way Gordon was going to raise this with her if there was the slightest chance she would respond that the whole thing was a ‘nonsense’. Gordon apologised to me, but said that was the end of it.
The one positive outcome was that the HET succeeded not in getting the existing honours system changed, but in winning agreement to the creation of a special new medal for the ‘Heroes of the Holocaust’, which has been duly awarded to several individuals since, most of them posthumously.
But the whole episode left a bitter taste in my mouth. Lots of people will doubtless say that the Prime Minister, civil servants, special advisers and the Palace should have better things to do than bestowing knighthoods on dead people, and others will say it’s another example of how the whole honours system is a discredited anachronism.
However, I just think back to John Butterly and Dawn Goring, and the pride both they and their families took in the MBEs they received, not for themselves but for what it meant to their families. I cannot see why – in certain circumstances – that pride should not be enjoyed as a consolation by the families of those who have lost loved ones, and long to see their achievements remembered and recognised by the country.
There’s another reason it mattered to me, and not just because I’m such a sore loser. It was the strongest civil service rearguard action I witnessed in thirteen years in government. And there was something about it which smacked of the Establishment, which had fought hard to wrest control of the honours system off the Tony Blairs and Alastair Campbells, saying to their successors: ‘Hands off, this belongs to us now; these are our knighthoods, we decide where they go.’
There was an interesting postscript to this when a campaign was launched in 2013 to have Jimmy Savile stripped of his knighthood following the revelations that came after his death. It struck me that if Savile or anyone else is ever posthumously stripped of their knighthood, it will knock a bloody great hole in the one supposedly incontrovertible argument that ‘membership of the club’ ceases to exist after death.
I haven’t given up just yet.
24
‘THE EVIL THAT MEN DO’
By the time the 2005 general election was approaching and still a civil servant, I was nevertheless committed to the Labour Party and Gordon in a way that many other officials in the Treasury were beginning to find frankly unpalatable.
The final straw, for Gus O’Donnell in particular, was my handling of the Treasury’s release of documents relating to the 1992 ‘Black Wednesday’ debacle, when Britain’s messy exit from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism cost the country billions and did irreparable damage to John Major’s Conservative government.
The documents had been requested under the Freedom of Information Act by the Financial Times, and – when I read through them for the first time – I could see how explosive they would be, not because of any one revelation, but because the chaos they revealed and the timing of their publication would play straight into Labour’s election rhetoric that the Tories could never be trusted on the economy again.
Given they were papers relating to a previous administration, Gordon was not supposed to have any knowledge about their contents, or any influence over the handling of their publication, but – while I was careful not to speak to him directly about it – I got word to him through Ian Austin, and just reassured Ian that I knew the significance of the papers and would handle them appropriately.
The original timing of the release was delayed, largely as a result of ongoing discussions within the Treasury about the need to protect the identities of civil servants named in the papers and obscure some of the processes involved in money market interventions and the way Britain gathered intelligence about the plans of other European finance ministries.
I became concerned that the longer the delay continued, the more likely the papers would have to be held back until after the election under the rather obscure rules governing what can and cannot be released during the ‘purdah’ period, when departments are barred from making significant ann
ouncements.
Because Sir John Major and the former Chancellor Norman Lamont were also being consulted on the publication, it was quite easy for me to conflate the two things, and get splash stories published in The Times and the FT saying there was a mystery over the delay and ‘fears’ that the two Tory grandees were trying to stall publication. I thought that would guarantee the civil servants wouldn’t be able to hold things up any longer.
That’s how it proved, but all hell broke loose in the meantime as a result of the stories. Sir John went bananas, issuing formal denials and calling for official apologies. When one Sunday paper suggested to me there were suspicions Alastair Campbell was orchestrating the whole thing, I gave them enough rope to run the story as a splash, and Sir John took the bait, going on broadcast news again to accuse Labour and Campbell of pre-election dirty tricks and ensuring the row ran for another couple of days.
By that stage, we were ready to publish the papers on the Treasury website and there was such huge anticipation that most newspapers automatically splashed them, with big inside spreads and commentary. They received a bit of help from me, as I’d gone through the hundreds of pages with a fine-tooth comb in advance and was able to point the journalists to all the best bits – by which I mean the most damaging bits for the Tories.
I was feeling pleased with myself, but the row about dirty tricks still rumbled on. I told Ian Austin I was worried my skulduggery had all got out of hand and asked whether anyone in the Labour Party was pissed off. While warning me to be careful, he concluded: ‘But mate, honestly, we’ve just had a week’s worth of coverage about the worst moment in Tory Party history and you think people might be pissed off?!’
Given the Alastair Campbell red herring that was around, I thought my role might have gone undetected, but Gus O’Donnell, Sir John’s press secretary at the time of Black Wednesday, wasn’t going to be fooled. I was told later that he shook his head dolefully when discussing my ‘disgraceful’ behaviour, and told a colleague I was ‘the evil that men do’.