Power Trip

by McBride, Damian

  The journalist totally stitched us up, presenting it as Gordon’s surprise choice of the ‘favourite goal’ he’d ever seen, but even so, I should have seen that coming. There was hell to pay in Scotland over it and much piss-taking down south, too, that this was a sign of how desperate Gordon was to appeal to Middle England. I felt gutted, even more so because Gordon couldn’t exactly explain that his press adviser routinely signed off articles, quotes and recipes in his name without him seeing them.

  During the World Cup itself, I invited Peter Dobbie and Simon Walters from the Mail on Sunday to come in and do an interview with Gordon while he watched one of England’s matches. Given the beers being consumed during the match, the interview was a bit hairier than normal, with Simon at one stage asking Gordon whether he would have taken Britain to war in Iraq, and telling him three times that he didn’t believe him when he answered: ‘I supported Tony’s Blair’s decision.’ As Simon leant forward, saying: ‘I don’t believe you’ more loudly for a second and third time, Gordon was about to explode, but to Simon’s huge chagrin, Dobbie stepped in to move things on.

  The piece came out fine but, again, it caused lots of irritation on one side of the border and piss-taking on the other, and when it was shown to a focus group in a south-east marginal – the audience Gordon continually struggled with – they hated it, saying he came across as false and dishonest saying he supported England. And this was the problem: every time Gordon was told people thought he was lying about being pro-English, he felt obliged to go further trying to prove it.

  The nadir came in India the following January, when, after a great day with the Premier League promoting a new TV deal to screen Premiership matches in the sub-continent, Gordon told the travelling press that he would make it his personal mission to bring the World Cup back to England in 2018, persuading every country in the world he visited to get behind the bid.

  He wanted World Cup 2018 to be his equivalent of Blair’s London 2012 Olympics, but was also still hoping the Scottish FA could be persuaded to make it a joint bid. When Nick Robinson did a follow-up interview asking him who he would be supporting if the bid was successful, Gordon did the ‘clever’ answer he’d prepared if it was a joint bid: ‘I’ll be supporting the hosts!’ Nick said: ‘Even if they play Scotland?’ Gordon just smiled and said: ‘Scotland will do very well.’

  The whole thing was done in a jokey atmosphere in a park full of Indian kids playing football but hearing it I knew we had a massive problem, even if Gordon was oblivious. Nick made a beeline for the other journalists to tell them what had been said, as I got in the car with a smiling Gordon.

  We began the crawl through the early evening Mumbai traffic back to the hotel. Almost immediately, one of the other press officers rang and shouted down the phone: ‘We’ve got a major problem here. All the papers are very excited and they’re all ringing their Scottish desks to tell them the story.’ ‘OK, mate,’ I replied calmly, holding the phone as far away from Gordon as I could, ‘take it easy and keep me posted’, as if he was telling me the cricket score.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ Gordon said. ‘Nothing,’ I lied. ‘I heard someone say “problem” – what’s the problem?’ he said, getting slightly irate. I sighed. ‘OK, now don’t go mad, but we’re just going to need to do a bit of handling on your Nick Robinson interview ’cos of you saying you’d support the hosts in the World Cup. It’s fine but we’ll just need to clarify it a bit so it doesn’t sound like you’d support England over Scotland.’

  There was a terrible moment of silence before the storm. Now, in the cars Gordon usually used in London he could have raised the enormous file of papers he always carried above his head and crashed it down onto his lap or legs in an act of furious self-flagellation, occasionally resulting in them scattering over the floor in front of him. I hadn’t seen him do that particular manoeuvre many times, but that’s because I tended to avoid giving him bad news when travelling in cars.

  On this occasion, he raised the pile of papers and brought it crashing down, but because we were in a much smaller car, it whacked off the top of the passenger seat in front of him, almost taking the head off the armed Indian bodyguard sat there, and then scattered over the front seats like outsize confetti at a particularly ill-tempered wedding. Gordon simultaneously let fly a blood-curdling ‘FUUUCK!’

  The driver swerved the car in panic, while the bodyguard faced the existential dilemma of dealing with an attack on the car from the VIP he was meant to be protecting. Gordon was oblivious to the fact that we now had a very nervous driver and a very confused bodyguard with a gun at his side, and continued his rant, having quickly decided that I was to blame.

  ‘This is all your fault! Why have you done this to me? I’m too tired to do all these interviews. You’ve made me do too much.’ ‘Oh come off it,’ I replied. This was no time to be angrier than Gordon, not with the bodyguard still looking for someone to shoot. ‘Anyway, it’s done now,’ I said, ‘let’s just get back and deal with it.’ It was an achingly slow journey back to the hotel, Gordon staring out of the window in complete silence, the bodyguard handing back pages of A4 paper in little batches, and me thanking him and apologising profusely every time.

  I told our press officer that as soon as the hacks got back to the hotel Gordon would come and speak to them and explain what he’d meant. When he did so, it was the most propitiative I’d ever seen Gordon before the press. Nevertheless, they all still wrote the story and it splashed all the Scottish tabloids, just a few weeks before the elections up there.

  We tried to make up for that in Brazil a couple of years later when Gordon met the great football star Socrates. We’d agreed in advance that the pair would make headlines by agreeing that the goal scored by David Narey to put Scotland 1–0 up against Brazil in their 1982 World Cup game was a fine goal, and not, as it had infamously been described by the Tartan Army’s hate figure Jimmy Hill, a ‘toe-poke’.

  Socrates’s previously fluent English appeared to fail him when the cameras began to roll, and as Gordon asked him to agree that Scotland’s strike was not down to ‘luck’, Socrates thought he was arguing that Scotland had been unlucky to lose the match 4–1. He looked bewildered, and insisted defensively that they could have won by much more.

  After watching Gordon come a cropper so regularly on his specialist subject of Scottish football, the last thing I ever thought I’d do was let him loose on a story about cricket, a faraway sport about which he knows nothing. But we were back in India in January 2008, my final-day story had fallen through and I’d already used all my back-pocket items; I was forced to improvise.

  Some spin-doctors might have conjured up an apology for the Amritsar massacre, or a new policy on visas for Indian students, but I was not such a man. The Indian cricket team had just beaten the Aussies in Perth to end their record-equalling run of consecutive Test wins and I sold Gordon on the idea that he should propose reviving the tradition whereby Commonwealth cricketers – such as Sachin Tendulkar – could be nominated for knighthoods, like Sir Don Bradman or Sir Gary Sobers.

  I say that I ‘sold’ Gordon on the idea. More accurately, I told him that I’d already briefed it, it had gone down pretty well and I’d written him a briefing note on the subject which he should read in case any of the hacks asked about it.

  Gordon looked a bit baffled when I was telling him this and didn’t seem much the wiser when he sat down to give a press conference to a few hundred local journalists alongside the Indian Prime Minister. At the last minute, too late to warn Gordon, I discovered that my civil service counterparts from the Foreign Office and No. 10 had briefed the cricket story to the Indian press, who were both excited and divided about it.

  In all the time I did the job, I was rarely more nervous than waiting for the Q&A to begin. But Gordon had my briefing note. Surely he’d read my briefing note. The first question came: ‘Chancellor Brown, we are very interested in your idea to give knighthoods to Commonwealth cricketers, can you explain h
ow this will work in practice?’ My heart was in my throat, as Gordon adopted his trademark rictus grin and fished into his suit pocket for my note.

  To my immense relief, he was magnificent, hailing India’s triumph in Perth, tickling the crowd with some barbs about the Aussies, and then – I could feel my stomach tighten – singling out for praise, with a glance down at my note, ‘Sa. Chin. Ten. Dul. Kar.’, each syllable carefully enunciated as though he was counting to five in Ancient Greek.

  ‘A magnificent cricketer,’ he continued. ‘One of the greatest … one of the greatest…’ Please say ‘batsman’, please say ‘batsman’, whatever you do, don’t say ‘bowler’, I thought, mentally preparing my lines about Gordon’s appreciation for Sachin’s under-rated off-spin if he went the wrong way.

  ‘Perhaps the greatest batsman of all time.’ Phew! And hurray Gordon! The assembled crowd of guests and journalists cooed with approval, albeit with some anti-colonial murmuring when he went on to propose that it would be right for Sachin to be recognised through the British honours system.

  The press conference ended, and I was feeling very chuffed with my work until the press liaison officer from the British embassy took me firmly by the arm, escorted me to a huge group of Indian journalists and said dryly: ‘Mr McBride will answer all of your questions about Sir Sachin.’

  I’d done briefings after Budgets and Gordon’s conference speeches, but this was by far the largest I’d ever conducted. It went well enough though, even when one particularly animated correspondent who quite liked the idea said: ‘But after the way they have behaved over the years, does Mr Brown really think any Australian deserves a knighthood? These are not gentlemen, they are bastards.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said – on a roll by now – ‘but Mr Brown might argue: would any true cricket fan in India disagree with a knighthood being granted to Mr Richie Benaud?’ There was a great sigh of approval. I felt like the other Socrates.

  The questioner replied: ‘I have to say, we had no idea that Mr Brown was such a cricket buff.’

  31

  CONFERENCE

  What must be recognised above all about modern party conferences is that the vast majority of people spend the three or four days in Manchester, Brighton or Blackpool alternating between extreme excitement or abject stupor fuelled by drink, lack of sleep and occasional sex. The atmosphere is like an 18–30 holiday in Spain with the odd speech thrown in.

  It seems strange that some of the most politically significant moments of recent years could have occurred in that atmosphere, but occasionally we’re all capable of taking life-changing decisions when very drunk or tired. Anyone who’s proposed marriage, had an affair or punched a best friend during a wedding weekend would know the feeling.

  Now, of course, most of the senior politicians at these events are too busy and disciplined to get themselves under the influence of booze, sleepless nights or the horn, but they can only function as effectively as the team around them, and if that team are off their heads, inevitably that tends to weaken the boss.

  By contrast, a team that can embrace all the temptations and privations of conference but still function effectively will find it the best possible place to win friends and influence people. It will come as no surprise that I took to that task like a dipsomaniac duck to a pond of piña colada.

  In fact, it was a lot like the rest of my life – drinking all day but still doing loads of work, staying up far too late and getting up far too early. The difference at conference was that everyone was acting the same. I felt like the naked rambler stumbling into Cap d’Agde. The problem was that – in my excitement at everyone joining in – I’d then indulge even more, always last to go to bed in hotels which would happily serve you until dawn.

  At my first, in Brighton 2005, the only two people left standing in the early hours were me and one of Charles Clarke’s press advisers. I hate to admit this but, after one hotel bar closed, we were reduced to picking up other people’s discarded pints and drinking those instead. It was eventually and very gently suggested to us by a police officer that we might consider heading to bed. When we got back to the main hotel, the bar still looked quite lively so we went in there for another.

  Gloria De Piero, still then at GMTV, sidled up and – as kindly as she could – explained the reason it looked busy was that all the morning broadcasters were setting up for their set-piece interviews with Tony Blair, who would be coming down in five minutes. ‘I think you two standing at the bar with pints isn’t quite the backdrop he’s hoping for.’

  Manchester was always the worst for drink, just because – besides the lively nightlife outside – the bars at the two main hotels, the Midland and the Radisson, were cavernous and perfect for late-night, large-scale singing sessions. This made for the occasional morning to forget, but one I never will.

  Sue Nye had the unenviable job on conference mornings of facilitating the several breakfast meetings Gordon would have booked in his room with newspaper editors, union leaders and Labour-supporting celebrities. Breakfast was always the best time for these meetings with both Gordon and the suite immaculately scrubbed – before he suffered from the ravages of a day at the laptop, and the suite became littered with discarded print-outs and Kit-Kat wrappers.

  Sue also had the even more unenviable job of making sure that the various people who needed to sit in on these meetings were up and ready to do so, marching along the corridor and banging on doors like a holiday rep, shouting: ‘Twenty minutes ’til Eddie Izzard’ or ‘Tina Weaver’s waiting downstairs’.

  One such morning in Manchester, she couldn’t get any answer out of me and I wasn’t answering my mobile. She asked Gary, one of Gordon’s special protection officers, to let her into my room to check if I was even there. I was. Spread-eagled naked on the bed – fortunately face down – having come in about two hours beforehand, stripped and collapsed.

  Sue walked straight out, and asked Gary if he could give me a shake and wake me up. As I was told afterwards, he took a look, came out, shook his head and said: ‘That’, pointing into the room, ‘is not in my job description.’ Sue ran down the corridor to the suite Ed Balls was sharing with Yvette, and told him he was the only person available to help.

  At this point, given there was quite a bit of noise outside, I became vaguely conscious. When I felt Ed grasping me by the shoulders, shouting quite loudly and giving me a good shake, I became about a quarter awake, but unfortunately – in my addled and still drunk state – my mind interpreted what was happening as some amorous play-wrestling from a female bedmate.

  I started to roll over and try and pull ‘her’ onto me with a winsome ‘C’mere’, at which point Ed sharply lurched away from the bed with a loud ‘Good grief!’ As I fully woke up, it was difficult to work out what was happening. I could see my bedroom door was open, apparently with several people whispering outside; I could hear the bath-water running, with lots of irritated swearing coming from the bathroom; and I was stark naked with my clothes in front of the bed.

  As I sat up, Ed emerged from the bathroom with a face like thunder and hurled a binful of cold water over me, shouted: ‘Now for fuck’s sake, get up!’, and stormed out. When I was sat in on Gordon’s breakfast with Patience Wheatcroft ten minutes later, my mind wasn’t quite on the job.

  There was another reason that I was a natural for the demands of conference in that era, because – to the extent that every one of them repeated the same Blair–Brown drama as formulaically and ritualistically as a WWF wrestling contest – I played my same part each year (Fat Baddie No. 3) with gusto and conviction, always managing to convince the audience that this time the outcome might be different.

  It never was. Each year, we’d come in with Tony under pressure, probably assisted by some unhelpful splashes from me in the Sunday papers; Gordon would make an ecstatically received speech appealing to Labour’s soul and adding to the pressure; and Tony would then deliver an even better-received speech dashing Gordon’s hopes and putting him ba
ck in his box. And on some occasions we’d have the added drama of an ‘intervention’ from Cherie.

  Brighton 2005 played out exactly like that and started with Cherie’s intervention. The famous BBC TV news producer Paul Lambert (aka Gobby) shouted to Cherie as she was exiting a hotel doorway: ‘Is this your last conference?’ Cherie beamed back and said: ‘There’ll be lots more to come, darling.’ It was a wonderful, spontaneous moment to launch the conference. Although perhaps it wasn’t. I’ve never confirmed it but I was told by a BBC contact that they’d done several takes to get it right.

  Many people, including her husband, think that Cherie should always have been hors de combat when it came to the Blair– Brown wars; that for a journalist or a political opponent to have a go at her was just a cowardly means of going after Tony Blair.

  I never saw it like that because I never saw Cherie as a mere ‘politician’s spouse’, any more so than Hillary Clinton was to Bill. I think, more than anyone who’s ever been in her position in British politics, and all credit to her for this, Cherie was a player; a more ardent, active and indeed aggressive promoter of Tony’s agenda and ambitions than even I was of Gordon’s. When those two things conflicted, that made her fair game as far as I was concerned.

  So I didn’t have much compunction about the splash in the Mail on Sunday that 2005 weekend, saying that Customs had pursued Cherie over unpaid VAT and customs duty on pearls she’d brought back from China, which made her look simultaneously filthy rich, out of touch and a tax-dodger. The original story, written the previous fortnight, hadn’t been briefed by me, but I’d given the paper some assistance with this follow-up about the Customs investigation.