Power Trip

by McBride, Damian

I went into the Labour Party press office at the conference centre that morning, full of No. 10 staffers, and there was silence. I tapped away at a computer, took a break to fetch a Diet Coke, and, on my return, found a copy of the Mail on Sunday left on my keyboard like a souvenir. I tossed it back in the pile of newspapers and carried on working. Half an hour later, I went out to take a call, and the paper was back on my keyboard when I returned. I continued working in silence.

  The people in that room – and many beyond – clearly thought that story was beyond the pale, but to my mind, if Cherie was going to be on the pitch, she could expect a few rough tackles, and she certainly gave as good as she got, as her orchestrated interventions at the 2005 and 2006 conferences showed.

  In 2006, coming off the back of the summer coup by Brownite supporters against Tony Blair and the uneasy truce that had resolved it, Gordon had a difficult speech to make at the conference trying simultaneously to plead for unity and reconciliation but also to remind people why he was still the right man to take over the following year when Tony would stand down.

  He executed it superbly and I bounded up the stairs to the press area in Manchester, ready for some pats on the back about how it had gone. Instead, there was a rush of hacks towards me, all with gleeful faces, asking me for my reaction to what Cherie had said. ‘What did she say?’ I said calmly. ‘She stormed out during Gordon’s speech and – as he was saying how great Tony was – she shouted out “Well, that’s a bloody lie.”’ I turned and walked back down the stairs.

  I went into Gordon’s ‘green room’ in the pop-up backstage area. He was drenched in sweat, necking a can of Coke, bear-hugging anyone who would have him, thrilled at how the speech had been received in the hall. He gave the usual ‘What are they saying?’ greeting when I came in, but this time delivered with a beaming smile, presumably expecting even his harshest media critics to be giving him grudging praise.

  I pointed that we should move away from the Labour officials and Treasury advisers milling around, in case he had a meltdown. He knew something was wrong. ‘What was it? What was it?’ he said, as if a line in the speech must have gone down badly. I waited, and then told him what Cherie had done. He faintly smiled that instinctive way you do when you hear awful news: scared, incredulous, willing it to be a joke.

  Then the rage boiled up from his chest. He suppressed a roar of anger, but slumped sideways into the makeshift wall with a force which made me worry it would collapse. ‘So that’s it now, that’s the only story,’ he said. ‘She’s killed us, she’s killed us.’ I had no doubt that by ‘us’, he meant not just himself, but everything the conference was supposed to symbolise about the party’s reconciliation.

  Later on, I said to him: ‘But look, people are saying this is outrageous, how’s Blair going to respond; he’s got to say something to put it all back together.’ With remarkable prescience, or just years of experience, Gordon said; ‘Naw, he’ll just tell some bloody joke, and dismiss it all. And it’ll all be “Good old Cherie”.’

  Sure enough, the next morning, Tony’s office called Sue Nye and informed her that Tony would indeed be making a jokey reference to the incident at the start of his speech, and Gordon should be ready to smile. He grinned on cue when Tony said: ‘At least I don’t have to worry about her running off with the bloke next door’, but I knew how he was feeling inside. The coverage of his speech had been more about Cherie’s reaction than the speech itself.

  That night, in Gordon’s suite in Manchester, we could hear the sounds of laughter, music, singing and popping champagne corks coming from the suite and balcony above where the Blairs and their staff had their rooms. We sat there in silence feeling utterly sick.

  With Tony gone and the decision whether to call a snap election in the balance, the 2007 conference was a break in the pattern but in 2008 it was back to normal, with the boot on the other foot: Gordon coming in under massive pressure with his Blairite rival – David Miliband – expected to throw down the gauntlet; Sarah Brown the one making a crucial intervention; and Gordon emerging unscathed.

  However, 2008 was also my last conference and the point I realised that the game was truly up for me as an adviser to Gordon. In some ways, I was at the peak of my abilities. I remember standing at the bar scanning the room at the Unison-sponsored disco at the Midland Hotel – always a riotous affair – and seeing from about 25 yards away that an extremely pretty girl was chatting to Ed Balls.

  My antennae started twitching. I wasn’t worried about how pretty the girl was. After all, Yvette was nearby and Ed’s not that sort of bloke. I was just worried about how relaxed a mood he might be in, what she might be asking and what he might be saying. Sure enough, as I got closer, I recognised the girl as one of the best undercover reporters in political journalism, with a number of high-profile scalps to her name then and since.

  I approached the pair and said to the hack cheerily: ‘How are you? Where’s your secret camera?’ Ed looked at her, looked at me, and remembered an urgent appointment on the other side of the room. Given we’d never met, she shook my hand and said with a smile: ‘Just doing my job.’ ‘So am I,’ I replied. I’d willingly bet not a single other Labour person at that conference would have known that journalist’s name, never mind what she looked like, and none of them would have regarded it as their job to prop up the bar at a disco scanning the room for signs of trouble.

  But, at the same time, my reputation was going before me by then. On the night of Gordon’s conference speech – at another reception – Nick Robinson revealed to me that Newsnight was going to be reporting that Ruth Kelly and Geoff Hoon were both resigning from the Cabinet in dissatisfaction at Gordon’s leadership.

  That news not only had the obvious ability to overshadow Gordon’s speech, but would – if true – trigger immediate talk of a coup. Simultaneous resignations don’t happen by accident. I leapt into crisis mode and, working with Sue Nye, established that Geoff was definitely not resigning, and that Ruth had told Gordon she was going some weeks previously but had agreed to wait until after conference for it to be announced, something Gordon had bizarrely failed to tell us.

  It appeared Ruth had let that slip to the wrong person at a dinner that evening, word had got to Newsnight and they were planning to run it alongside the Geoff Hoon rumour. Neither we nor Ruth’s people were in a position to deny she was going, so the only thing possible was to confirm it but explain the background and make clear it was with Gordon’s blessing.

  As Newsnight was going on air, I called every political editor of every newspaper, explained the situation, and said whatever Newsnight reported was bollocks. I then went back to our office in the Radisson hotel, worked out a press statement with Ruth’s press adviser, Julie Crowley, and phoned it round all the political editors, who were now hastily updating their second editions.

  Around 2.30 a.m., I got a call from a friendly journalist, who told me there was an atmosphere brewing among the hacks in the Midland Hotel bar. There was some briefing from the Newsnight team that we’d ‘got at’ Ruth and Geoff to spike their story, and people were now wondering whether this in fact had been – and might still become – an attempted coup.

  I grabbed Julie and said: ‘Come on, let’s go and kill this before it gets out of hand.’ We headed over to the Midland and, with my first pint for several hours in hand, I went carefully through the events of the night, took the hacks through the press statement, fielded their questions and got Julie willingly to confirm it was all correct. By the end of it all, the journos were disappointed that the story had been strangled, but at least satisfied they’d heard the truth.

  Over the next couple of days, the story began to circulate that Ruth had been bounced into resigning after I’d given the lobby a ‘3 a.m. briefing’ saying she was going; the timing of the briefing said with raised eyebrows to suggest I’d revealed the news after a long night on the booze, even though I’d been as close as I ever got to stone-cold sober. The briefing even obtained the name ‘
Peronigate’ after the Telegraph’s excellent Iain Martin wrote a fictional parody of the event.

  The whole controversy was obviously bollocks, made all the more annoying by the fact no one could provide any sensible explanation for why I would want to bounce Ruth into resigning and thereby create a massive storm before the round of interviews Gordon was going to do the following morning. People might have disagreed with how I did my job, but I took umbrage at them implying I was shit at it.

  The fact was, by that stage in my career people could believe just about anything they heard about me, and I’d become a name and a face that was known and despised by Labour people I’d never met. On the last day of that 2008 conference, I walked into the bar at the Radisson, where four middle-aged men in suits were sat in a row on barstools. I didn’t recognise them, and don’t know to this day whether they were union officials, obscure Labour MPs or someone else entirely.

  But, as I entered the bar, the first one said to the others: ‘Oh, look who it is.’ As I walked past him, he called me the worst word in the English language. So did the second, the third and the fourth. What got me was not just the abuse from people I didn’t know, or the embarrassed and shocked looks from other drinkers, but the fact I just had to ignore it and pretend I hadn’t heard, or maybe that I didn’t care.

  A few days later, I told Sue I genuinely wanted out; I was done; I just didn’t want to do this any more; I felt totally burnt out. After five years I’d got to the stage where every morning felt like the exhausted hangover after four days of conference. With no Ed Balls to throw water over me.

  32

  THE FAMILY GUY

  People might think of someone like Gordon Brown as being totally driven by politics and power; that – if he was in a film – he’d leave a broken-down bus of orphans by the side of a volcano to make a lunchtime brush-by with Bill Clinton.

  But as driven he was, when I knew him, nothing mattered more to Gordon than his family, both the one he grew up with in North Queensferry and the one he started there with Sarah. He constantly put his family before politics and, while that’s a thing that every politician should be able to say, the truth is very few can. Certainly not many who were as senior as Gordon for so long.

  I was with Gordon at an EU finance ministers’ summit at a hotel in The Hague in autumn 2004 when he got a call from his brother to tell him that his elderly mother – who had been ailing – was in a worsening condition, and that it was best they all planned to be in Scotland that coming week. Gordon slumped against an alcove in the reception area, staring out of the window lost in his grief.

  At that moment, Nicolas Sarkozy – then the almost fully risen star of French politics – came bounding into the reception area from his morning run, followed by a scrum of cameras, security guards and officials. He approached his beloved friend Gordon and started joking that tomorrow they would have to go running together, or have a game of tennis, because he and Gordon were ‘great men’ who had to be in training for the challenges to come.

  The French press loved it, and I would bet that 99 per cent of politicians in the world – given the cameras, the badinage and the warmth from the French president-in-waiting – would have swallowed whatever they were feeling, leapt up and responded in kind. Instead, Gordon just sat there, head inclined, and waved Sarkozy away with a few half-nods and smiles.

  His beloved mother, Elizabeth, died a week later.

  That moment came back to me in 2007 on the night of Gordon’s first party conference speech as Prime Minister, with speculation growing that he was preparing to call a snap election. We’d received word that the Times splash the next day would accuse Gordon of plagiarising many of the lines in his speech from American politicians, in particular John Kerry, an occupational hazard when both men were using Bob Shrum as a speech consultant. It was the angriest state that I’d seen Gordon in, and the only time I ever saw him angry in the presence of Sarah.

  I think, under any circumstances, that story would have driven him wild, because it was a basic challenge to his integrity, always something he found impossible to absorb. But this story went further by accusing him of plagiarising the line that his parents had given him his ‘moral compass’.

  That was a line Gordon had first conceived and written for the eulogy given by his elder brother John at his father’s funeral in 1998. If you felt as strongly about your family as Gordon did, and you’d been accused of plagiarising the most important line you wrote for the eulogy at your father’s funeral, you might have hit the roof the way he did.

  There were only three of us with Gordon in the room at that moment: me, Sue and Sarah, and we could do nothing but stand in silence watching him sat hunched in his chair, punching the desk in a powerless rage, almost grief-stricken about the insult to his family, barely caring about the Labour Party conference, his upcoming decision on whether to call an election or anything else at all.

  It told me something that Gordon was willing to be so angry in front of Sarah on that occasion but never on others. She and the boys were always an instant pacifier of his moods, as were his two brothers and usually the two Eds. But there was no point in disguising from Sarah how angry that Times story made him, because she knew exactly how he was feeling – this was about family.

  After Gordon and Sarah had lost their first child, Jennifer, in 2002, the subsequent joy of Sarah discovering she was pregnant or going into labour with their sons John and Fraser was always tinged with worry about whether everything would be OK, and that was the case in July 2006 when I flew up to Edinburgh to handle the media for the birth of Fraser. But everything went like clockwork: I announced to the Press Association that Sarah was in hospital, got the doctor to make a statement about the successful delivery, and then organised the photo-call for Gordon and Sarah’s departure with the newborn baby.

  The only drama that week came when I got back to London, and Sue called to tell me I was being investigated by the Treasury for sexual harassment. ‘What?’ I yelled. ‘Who of?’ The answer was Balshen … who I’d been secretly dating for four months.

  A press office colleague had supposedly just happened to see on Balshen’s phone a rather clucky text message from me about the new baby, thought it inappropriate and took it to the HR department.

  Rather than just asking Balshen or me about it, they alerted the new Treasury Head of Communications, Chris Martin, who alerted the new Permanent Secretary, Nick Macpherson, who alerted Sue Nye, who had the common sense to ring me. Within an hour, our secret relationship of four months was common knowledge across the Treasury. Poor Balshen was mortified, but it at least brought us closer together in mutual irritation at some of the idiots and busybodies we worked with.

  As for Fraser, the whole of the Treasury fell in love with him when Gordon and Sarah brought him around; a small wee fellow, but with huge dark eyes and a lovely curious expression. Four months after he was born, my mobile rang in the late afternoon: The Sun’s George Pascoe-Watson, an immaculate gentleman and professional in all things.

  ‘Hi there,’ he said. ‘Bit of a sad one, mate, but the Scottish desk have had a phone-in saying that Fraser is being treated for cerebral palsy. Which is obviously devastating, but we’ve got to look into it, so that’s why I’m calling. Obviously, if it is true, we will do this any way we can that’s acceptable to Gordon and Sarah; the last thing we want is to cause any unnecessary upset.’

  ‘OK,’ I replied, ‘well, if it’s true that’s honestly the first I’ve heard of it, so let me check it out.’

  As I walked down the corridor, my phone beeped from George: ‘Sorry, not cerebral palsy – cystic fibrosis.’ Whatever this was, it wasn’t just someone having a punt. Incidentally, it’s worth saying that nowadays the reaction of any spin-doctor to that call would probably be to say there’s no public interest in this information and to seek an immediate injunction against its publication, but those tactics were largely unknown back in 2006 and it never entered my mind or anyone else’s as an op
tion.

  The 2006 Pre-Budget Report was only a week away, so Gordon was in a planning session with the Eds, Ian and others. I asked Sue for a word and, as soon as I said it was about Fraser, she put her finger over her lips and ushered me back down to my office. ‘Barely anyone knows,’ she said, ‘all those private meetings we’ve been putting in Gordon’s diary are for Great Ormond Street. That’s why he’s been so distracted.’

  She went back to the office and broke up the meeting. Gordon, the Eds and Ian all piled down the corridor into my office. Gordon’s expression was a strange mix of thunderous anger and deep sadness, and he spoke very softly. ‘Are we sure that they know?’ ‘Well, it’s one fact, isn’t it?’ I replied. ‘That’s the story.’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘the story is “Gordon and Sarah: more heartbreak”; “Another tragedy”; and it’s not fair – it’s not a heartbreak, it’s not a bloody tragedy, there’s nothing wrong with Fraser; he’s as healthy as any other boy, he’ll just need to look after himself when he’s older, he’ll just need to exercise and keep his lungs clear. He’ll be fitter than any of us!’

  The room was silent. ‘What do you want me to do?’ I asked. ‘Well, I’ll tell you one thing,’ he said, anger beginning to mount, ‘I’m not having my son – my son’s health! – treated as some exclusive bloody story for a newspaper. Sarah and I will put out a statement now, and say this is the diagnosis, but there’s nothing wrong with Fraser and we couldn’t be happier.’

  I looked around the room for support, but the looks I got back were of the ‘You’re on your own here’ variety. ‘Gordon, I know what you’re saying and I agree, but we can’t really do that, otherwise next time there’s anything like this, The Sun won’t even bother checking with us; they’ll just run the story. And they’ll say that’s fair enough ’cos we can’t be trusted not to do a spoiler.’

  ‘A spoiler?’ he screamed. ‘This is my family! I don’t give a fuck about The Sun! I’m not having my family used as newspaper exclusives. We put out a statement; that’s the end of it.’