Power Trip

by McBride, Damian

  That was, incidentally, the first time I discovered that I was known in the lobby by the nickname ‘Mad Dog’ or just ‘Dog’ for short. There are lots of lobby nicknames that aren’t usually said directly to the person who owns them, and that was one. Michael Ellam’s nickname was ‘The Sheik’, as in Sheik El-lam, which fitted his Omar Sharif-style personality quite well.

  Superficially, what the Redwood and mag-lev incidents had in common is that we were far better at using the internet and doing basic research than the Tories, but it was deeper than that – there was a basic lack of care and competence within the Tory operation. They were a haphazard bunch.

  Take the then shadow Cabinet minister for Culture, Hugo Swire. He’d appeared at some arts reception and wondered aloud whether it might not be time to allow the national museums and galleries to start charging for admission, a throwaway thought that was given a favourable mention in the diary column of the Sunday Times’ culture section.

  If you read that column regularly, you’ll know it almost always contains some political titbit, so part of my Sunday papers routine was checking it to see if any of our ministers had said anything daft. I saw the Hugo Swire reference and squirreled it away until the following weekend, at which point the Mail on Sunday splashed it, and – to my amazement – Swire didn’t just have to apologise but was sorrowfully sacked by his close friend Cameron two weeks later.

  Obviously what Swire had said was ill judged and lackadaisical, but – again – I wondered why no one on the Tory side was doing the equivalent of my job, reading all the key bits of all the key papers and getting on top of stories like that, in that case getting it corrected and killed before someone like me could exploit it.

  There were a few key journalists I could always rely on as good, objective and honest barometers of where we were politically, and – at that time – they were absolutely clear with me: you Brown guys are the only show in town, the only professional operation we deal with; the other lot are not even playing the same game, let alone in the same league.

  That was before Andy Coulson. The Tory operation improved beyond all recognition once he was brought in to be their Head of Communications. He may not have had much of a head for politics or policy, not at first anyway, but he had an eye for a story and an ear for trouble, and the Tories immediately became a much tighter and more aggressive ship.

  People may look back in future years and see Coulson’s appointment as a mistake, but the context is key. At that stage, the Tory operation was a shambles; we were giving Cameron and Osborne the runaround, and they needed to do something about it – otherwise their leadership was going to go down as just another dismal, failed experiment in the long years of Tory opposition.

  So if they decided to take a big risk, cut a few corners and omit to ask a few questions when hiring Coulson, that is the reason why. It certainly made sense at the time.

  27

  LEAKS AND LEAKERS

  There is an art to leaking.

  Not the kind of leaking where you go to a private meeting with twenty-five other people and tell a journalist afterwards what everyone said. That kind of leaking is for the worst kind of shysters, many of them Cabinet or shadow Cabinet ministers, and – after that first time I got my hands dirty at the 2004 spin-doctors’ summit – I barely did a single other story of that nature.

  In fact, once my reputation as a leaker was well established, I pretty much stopped attending any non-essential meetings, because if anything did leak out of them, it was odds-on I would get the blame. In fact, it probably made it more likely something would leak because my presence gave people cover. For that reason, I never attended a single Cabinet meeting.

  No, the art to leaking is knowing where to look – or who to tap up – to discover information, making a calculated decision about which bits of that information could be made public without causing any blowback, how it should be presented to avoid it looking like a leak, and then finally deploying it – to use the magic phrase beloved of Westminster journalists – with ‘no fingerprints’.

  Essentially, the entire process of briefing the Budget or PBR is an exercise in that art, including the various bits of skulduggery carried out in the preceding fortnight to try and cause diversions and keep the Budget announcements dry until a few days beforehand. But those were only two events during the year; there were an awful lot of weeks and months to fill between them.

  So how did it work in practice? Sitting in my office in the Treasury, I’d scroll through the skeletal version of ‘the grid’ circulated each week by No. 10, an Outlook weekly calendar-style document which would simply outline on two landscape sheets of A4 – in as little detail as possible – the main upcoming announcements for the next fortnight: ‘Johnson, DoH – Liver Disease’ and so on, with the main story of each day highlighted in bold at the top of each column.

  The purpose of this being circulated was so departments could avoid their announcements clashing, either in terms of timing or messaging. You didn’t want Alan Johnson unveiling a hard-hitting campaign on liver disease on the same day Tessa Jowell was announcing the pilot schemes for 24-hour pubs. It was also a control mechanism from Downing Street: a way of saying that if your minister’s speech or announcement wasn’t registered in the grid they shouldn’t be making it.

  Sometimes, these little snippets in the grid would be enough for me to make a story. If I was able to tell a Sunday hack that the Department of Health was planning something on liver disease next Thursday, that might be enough for them to call up some weary press officer planning to assault their own liver late on a Friday, and say:

  ‘Hi, I’ve had a briefing about this liver disease story for next week, which is all fine – we’re probably going to splash it – and I’ve got some good quotes from one of your guys and the BMA, but the one thing I didn’t check is which of your ministers is fronting it up – is it Alan Johnson or one of the juniors? Ah, OK. And the only other thing is the stats they gave me already seem to be in the public domain; are there no fresh stats coming out on the day? Ah, OK. Let me get that down. Thanks very much.’

  This was known in Westminster as ‘busting the grid’, code for using an overly revealing headline in the grid to decipher an upcoming announcement. But usually it needed a bit more work than that, especially when the headline just said something like: ‘Reid: Counter-Terrorism’ in bold.

  That’s where I earned my corn. If it was a department where I had one of my network of ‘contacts’, junior civil servants who I’d befriended in pubs over the years, I’d bump into them on their regular Friday drink, and tap them up to see what was coming out next week. But as I became a bit better known around Whitehall, it became increasingly difficult to have those conversations unnoticed.

  So I’d do the more difficult thing. Because I had access to the Chancellor’s office email system – not his personal email, but the official one used for receiving submissions and correspondence – I’d hunt through the folders for Cabinet papers or minutes of Cabinet meetings, and look for a proposal or discussion that might correspond to the upcoming announcement. This could take hours, but I’d usually crack it eventually.

  Now came the crucial stage. A reckless or lazy spin-doctor might just print off the relevant document, or copy and paste the key passage, and pass that on to a journalist. That was the sort of thing that brought about leak enquiries, sackings and – in the worst cases – prosecutions, because most of those documents would be marked either ‘Restricted’, ‘Confidential’ or ‘Secret’, the direct leaking of which would have put me in breach of the Official Secrets Act.

  So, instead, I’d read the document on screen, absorb all the information and then write it out for myself in entirely different language, as though it was a press briefing. And that was what it would become. I’d sit down with a journalist, or call them up, and talk them through the story as though I was briefing a Budget measure or one of Gordon’s speeches.

  And – no matter how potentially
controversial the story was – I’d brief it in an entirely positive way so that, when it appeared in print, it looked like it had been officially briefed by a minister or spin-doctor from the relevant department. That meant also taking out of the briefing anything that I’d seen in the documents that was obviously damaging to that department, or which undermined their announcement, for example if Tessa’s officials were warning her of police concerns over the 24-hour pub pilot schemes.

  For the same reasons, I’d also ban the journalist from using the word ‘leak’ anywhere in the story so that it didn’t look unplanned. And that was it. The story would emerge in one paper or another, or – so it looked like a proper briefing operation – in two or three on the same day. The department would be confused and hold little internal inquests to see who’d briefed it, or who’d had lunch with a particular journalist that week, but they’d eventually just shrug.

  Of course, sometimes there was a bit more mischief to the art. If I could simultaneously give a good story to a journalist and destabilise one of Gordon’s internal rivals or critics, that was all the better.

  For several weeks in succession in 2005 when Charles Clarke was Home Secretary and a declared opponent of Gordon’s succession to the premiership, I orchestrated what looked like a briefing war between Charles and Tony Blair’s anti-social behaviour guru, Louise Casey; each of them in turn appearing to goad the other by making some new announcement on the subject through the Sunday papers, or appearing to claim advance credit for something the other was planning to announce.

  There was already plenty of ill-feeling between them, but the Sunday briefings made it both public and self-fulfilling, contributing to Tony Blair’s sacking of Charles in May 2006. At a drink with Charles’s press team after the reshuffle, they were bitter about Louise’s role in undermining their boss and oblivious enough of my own role that they happily supplied details of how Tony Blair had been in tears when he told Charles the news, a bit of colour I obviously then briefed to the papers.

  So if that’s how the leaking of other department’s announcements or proposals used to work in my Treasury days, let me try and explain the more difficult question: why I did it, besides the pleasure of creating a little weekend mayhem for Charles Clarke or John Reid.

  It came down to this. For years, Gordon had – hands down – the best intelligence operation on the press of any politician in Westminster, in terms of knowing what different media outlets were planning, thinking or writing before it happened. Other politicians had particularly good connections with certain newspapers or broadcasters, but no one had Gordon’s breadth or depth of reach. Much of this he delivered himself through his own strong relationships with editors and proprietors, and much of it was delivered by the Eds through their relationships with key columnists.

  But in terms of Gordon’s relationship with the actual journalists writing the stories, or with harder-to-reach newspapers like the Telegraph, Sunday Times or Mail on Sunday, that was entirely delivered by the likes of me. And, while Gordon and Ed might have thought I cultivated my contacts just by putting in the hours in the pub, none of that would have mattered if I wasn’t also putting in the hours at my computer getting stories for those journalists.

  Those relationships are ultimately about the business of selling newspapers. You can be as friendly as you want with a journalist, but – as I discovered myself when my phone stopped ringing in April 2009 – if you haven’t got anything useful to trade, then you can’t expect a journalist to invest their time or their bar tab in you, let alone share information that you’ll find useful.

  Gordon never understood that and I never tried to explain it. He’d sometimes say to me: ‘How did you get this stuff?’ after I’d tell him some crucial piece of intelligence about what the Tories were planning, obtained in return for a good splash, and I’d just say: ‘Don’t ask.’

  I’d see he was a little more suspicious when a potentially bad newspaper story about the Treasury that we’d been fighting all day was suddenly relegated to the inside pages in favour of a front-page splash about an upcoming government white paper. Then he knew not to ask.

  And did those ends justify the means? Well, Charles Clarke and others would disagree, but they weren’t my concern. Keeping Gordon in No. 11 and getting him into No. 10 was my job, from where – in my mind – he could do what was best for Labour and the country.

  And I always asked myself: what would the alternative be if I wasn’t doing this; if I wasn’t putting in the effort and taking the risks necessary to maintain those relationships; if the Sunday papers had to find another political story to splash rather than the one I was giving them, possibly one about Gordon or the Treasury?

  I got to see what that alternative looked like immediately after my sacking in 2009, when the revelations about MPs’ expenses emerged in the Telegraph. It was a disastrous story for all MPs, but particularly for Labour, given that incumbents are held accountable for the system, and especially for Gordon, given what was widely perceived as his slow and inept response to the outcry.

  That was in large part because he was not only taken completely by surprise by the revelations, but also thrown into a total tailspin in the crucial first twenty-four hours by the Telegraph’s decision to focus the first splash on his domestic cleaning bills. He spent more time worrying about how to defend his own integrity than about how to respond to the issue as a whole. David Cameron, by contrast, seemed remarkably well prepared for the emergence of the story, and calm and decisive in his response.

  A while afterwards, I spoke to a senior figure in the Telegraph group, who said simply: ‘The expenses scandal would not have damaged Labour as badly if you’d still been doing your job.’ I took it as a compliment, meaning I would have handled the reaction better, but he shook his head. ‘That’s true. But what I mean is: if you’d still been there, we wouldn’t have surprised you with it and we wouldn’t have made Gordon the first splash. It would have been a breach of trust and a breach of our relationship, and we wouldn’t have done that.’

  Exactly the same thing was said to me by a senior journalist at The Sun after their decision to declare their support for the Tories on the same evening as Gordon’s party conference speech later that year. ‘It wouldn’t have changed the outcome,’ he said, ‘but you being there would have changed the entire process, and probably the timing.’

  So is leaking against your own government justified? I would strongly argue that done in the way I did it, it never did much harm, and it certainly did Gordon a lot of good. Which raises what I’m about to say to even greater heights of hypocrisy: me leaking against every other department was fine, but anyone leaking against the Treasury was asking to be put against a wall and shot.

  Gordon’s Treasury was almost immune to unplanned leaks, a remarkable record given the length of time he was there. That was in part due to our policy that unless a quote or a briefing came from the Head of Communications, the media special adviser, Gordon or the two Eds, it did not represent the view of the Treasury. All journalists knew we would quite happily dump all over a story if it hadn’t come from one of those individuals, even if there was some truth in it.

  Our leak-proof reputation was also due – and I admit full responsibility and a fair degree of shame for this – to my Admiral Byng approach to leaks, named after the head of Britain’s fleet at Minorca, executed for allowing the island to fall to the French, but primarily – as Voltaire said – ‘pour encourager les autres’.

  If anything did appear in the papers that was not from one of our approved parties, I would instantly name a culprit – usually a junior special adviser who’d once been seen speaking to a journalist – and order them to be cut out of meetings and removed from the circulation list for emails until the matter was resolved.

  Usually, I was right, but it was the confident assertion and awareness of their guilt throughout the Treasury that mattered, not the actual truth. The effect was simply to put the fear of God into every official
and adviser about doing any leaking, and it had the desired deterrent effect. As for the occasional Admiral Byngs, if they were guilty, they never did it again. And if they weren’t, they’d usually recover fairly quickly.

  When Gordon moved into No. 10, that discipline proved hard to maintain. There were too many separate sources of expertise and authority – and too many people with existing relationships with journalists – to insist that only me, Gordon and his official spokesman Michael Ellam could be considered reliable sources of a ‘No. 10’ quote or briefing. What’s more, while no Labour MP in the old days would have dreamed of describing themselves to a journalist as a ‘source close to the Treasury’, because that suggests some economic remit, selling themselves as a ‘source close to No. 10’ was much easier.

  My approach to leaking had to change as well once we moved next door. I couldn’t bust our own grid, or leak an announcement from another department that we’d deliberately scheduled to get maximum media coverage. But I could still leak some of the small stuff, inconsequential if it had been formally announced to Parliament, but attractive as an exclusive for one paper.

  And the big difference in No. 10 compared to the Treasury is the sheer volume of other things that you get to hear about that are nothing to do with government or any planned departmental announcements, from the Church of England to the England football team, which – carefully done, as always – could be worked up into tradable commodities for the press.

  Ultimately, if splashing a paper or getting to the top of the Today programme gave me a wonderful rush, doing it through a leak added something illicit and dangerous into the drug, and it became an addiction – one I found very tough to give up. When the coalition took over, I found a few of those old junior civil servants I’d befriended getting in touch to say how awful it was having to work for the Tories, and you’ll never believe what they’re planning to announce next week…