It turned into a wild night: a mix of celebrities, athletes, politicians, journalists, businesspeople and officials all getting increasingly trashed and turning the place into an impromptu nightclub. At one stage, I was walking near the VIP area when Jackie Chan’s publicist grabbed me, pointed at the film star working his way towards Gordon in the corridor, and said: ‘Jackie wants to meet Mr Brown.’
Now I should point out that one of my constitutional roles working for Gordon – shared with Sue Nye, depending on the occasion – was to stand a foot behind him at all parties and scan the crowd. If someone was approaching him from right or left, or he was about to walk into them, I’d pinch the relevant elbow and whisper in his ear their name and any other crucial information. Often this would just be a reminder in case he knew the face but was struggling for the details, so, for example: ‘Cheryl Cole, Girls Aloud, recovering from malaria, don’t mention Ashley.’
Gordon would then greet them warmly and reference the other information, and especially with celebrities and journalists, they’d feel special and at ease with him right from the off. It didn’t always go to plan though. Once, he was approaching a group at a No. 10 lobby reception including Sumeet. Gordon had been interviewed by him two dozen times over the years, but he could never get his name right.
I said: ‘That’s our friend Sumeet ahead. SUH-MEET. He’s just come back from honeymoon, you sent a card and flowers to his wedding.’ ‘What’s the name?’ Gordon asked. ‘SUH-MEET. SUH-MEET,’ I said. I don’t know what went on in Gordon’s head in the next half a second, but he charged into the group and roared: ‘SHAMBO! Congratulations!’
Anyway, back in Beijing, I ran and grabbed Gordon’s right elbow and whispered in his ear: ‘Coming at you. Jackie Chan. Huge film star. Martial arts.’ Gordon rasped: ‘Crouching Tiger?’ ‘No, action comedies, Rush Hour.’ Gordon didn’t quite get it, and greeted Jackie as if he was Ang Lee. ‘Jackie, it is an honour to meet you. Your films are so important to us in Britain, and we have learned so much from you about your culture. When will you next be visiting us?’
It clearly did the trick. Jackie immediately said he wanted to sign up as the first volunteer for London 2012. I turned to his publicist and asked if there was anyone else he wanted to meet: Boris? Seb Coe? He replied: ‘David Beckham?’ I felt a little hypocritical given I was always angrily accusing other No. 10 colleagues of being ‘star-fuckers’ but going up to Becks in the VIP room, and saying: ‘David, would you like to meet Jackie Chan?’ was easily the coolest moment of my career.
Despite that temporary lapse in professionalism – and despite the lateness of the hour and the ocean of booze I’d consumed – I then had to commit the most calculated and professional of fouls. I got a tip that ITN were planning to run a story on that evening’s News at Ten – based on a call from a viewer – that the Tourist Board animation played at London House that night to promote the 2012 Olympics had included a fleeting glimpse of some modern-art portrait of Myra Hindley.
All I could think was this. When that story appeared at 5 a.m. Chinese time, the news desks on every paper and every other broadcaster back in Britain would wake up their extremely tired, possibly incapacitated member of our media entourage, and say: ‘Weren’t you at London House tonight? I need 500 words on this for second edition in the next half hour.’
I could just have alerted Boris’s people or the Games committee, but it wasn’t in their interests to have the story in any first editions, and they owed no responsibility to the No. 10 entourage. They’d have just thanked me, prepared a statement for ITN and left it there until 10 p.m. UK time.
I couldn’t let that happen. I checked whether No. 10 or DCMS had any involvement in the production or vetting of the animation and, once I’d established we didn’t, I quietly worked my way round each of our hacks, saying: ‘Sorry mate, you’ve got some work to do, but I’m saving you a job later.’ I explained the story, said it was for Boris’s people and the Games committee to explain and respond, but if they needed a No. 10 reaction, here you go.
As it turned out, even though it caused a mini-meltdown in London House that night, the fact that news desks back home were told the story early and knew everyone had it meant that no one went too big, and it fizzled out quite quickly. But our entourage were hugely grateful to me for the service, and – rightly or wrongly – that was all that mattered to me at the time.
After I was sacked the following year, Boris wrote an excoriating article in the Telegraph about the night he came face to face with Brown’s attack dog, suggesting that it had been one of the No. 10 staff who’d spotted the Myra Hindley portrait, and that I’d done my best to wind it up with the press simply because London now had a Tory mayor and my ‘relentless, brutal, tribal viciousness’ dictated that I should try and destroy a great night for Britain.
Over my career, I was guilty of many moments of relentless, brutal, tribal viciousness, but I don’t think that night really qualified. I was just trying to stop the Telegraph’s Rosa Prince and all the other journalists in our group getting woken up at 5 a.m. A few months after Boris’s article, I wrote to him asking if he’d attend an event at Finchley Catholic High School, and I took the opportunity to apologise for the London House incident but explain a bit of the context. He wrote a very nice letter back, saying he accepted my explanation and that it was all water under the bridge.
The London House incident would have been a sour note on which to leave one of my favourite foreign visits – even if I didn’t see a single moment of the Olympic sport myself – but before we left Beijing, I came across the pile of letters that had been prepared for Gordon to sign officially congratulating the medal winners on behalf of the country. They were all identical: the only changes from one to another were their names, their events and the colour of their medals.
I imagined being one of the athletes opening their letter and being quite pleased, thinking it was a nice thing to hang over the toilet back home, but then literally comparing notes with their colleagues on the journey home and seeing that no thought had gone into them at all – they’d just been mail-merged from a spreadsheet and signed without a glance. By the end of the flight, I’m sure half of them would have been used as paper aeroplanes.
I sat down and spent several hours re-writing all seventy letters, personalising them with details of the great rivals beaten, adversity overcome, proud families back home, anything I could find that actually tried to sum up what they’d achieved and for whom. I then sat with Gordon next to me, talked him through every letter and he either signed them or told me to make changes on screen, especially where he’d watched the medal won himself in the stadia or on TV.
We reached the end but I asked Gordon if he also remembered the girl he’d been excited about who wouldn’t settle for silver and crashed her bike trying for the gold. ‘The BMX girl!’ he said excitedly, ‘Sharon? Sheila? Shona?’ ‘Shanaze,’ I told him – not a name Gordon was ever going to find easy. ‘Well, you’re only supposed to write to the medal-winners, but I think you should write to her too.’
He did and that became our seventy-first letter. A couple of years later, Shanaze Reade said in a newspaper interview that one of the things that persuaded her not to quit the sport after her Beijing heartbreak, but come back and compete again, was getting a letter from Gordon Brown after the event praising her courage and saying her determination to win and refusal to accept second place made her his personal hero of the Games.
That’s how I choose to remember Beijing.
35
BECOMING THE LEADER
Way back, during Christmas 2002, I was talking to a young shining star in Customs, Rebecca Hall, about life in the Treasury. She asked me whether it was frustrating working with Gordon, given he must be bored stiff of being Chancellor and was so obviously desperate to be Prime Minister.
Even though the extent of my relationship with Gordon at that stage was limited to our great corridor conversations: ‘Betting Guy. How are the
horses?’, I wanted to impress her, so I advanced the theory that his burning ambition when he came into politics was less to be Prime Minister than to be leader of the Labour Party. Obviously one might follow the other, or the two might go together, but you can only have one burning ambition.
I don’t know why I said that, or even whether I actually thought it, but when we formally embarked on planning the leadership campaign and everyone was treating it as a bit of a boring formality to go through, I remember getting myself stirred up for it by saying: ‘Come on, this is big, this is about his life’s work.’
By early 2007, there were only a few remaining possibilities for where the challenge for the leadership might come from, if it came at all, and Gordon had been genuinely pleased and heartened by a conversation at No. 10 where Tony openly went through the list of all his potential leadership rivals, dismissing every one of them as either not ready or not up to it.
If David Miliband or Alan Johnson stood, they would be viable candidates, but David was playing it too cautious as always and Alan appeared happy to settle for a shot at the deputy job. There would inevitably be a candidate from the left, unless Gordon bought them off with commitments on union rights and Trident, which he wasn’t prepared to do.
There was also the prospect of a wrecking-ball effort from one of Gordon’s critics, a Charles Clarke or Frank Field presenting their candidacy as an opportunity to ask him tough questions. But if they made that their offer, we’d just say they were doing the Tories’ work for them, and they’d never get enough nominations to get on the ballot.
And then there was John Reid.
Edinburgh Gordon and Glasgow John went way back, and could hardly have been more different characters. When they were both in the Commons in the late 1980s, Reid was drinking heavily and drawing flak for his occasional fighting and carousing, while Gordon was also busy every night, but largely in the business of firing out parliamentary questions and press releases as shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury.
Reid stopped drinking in 1994 and became a heavyweight politician, but Gordon never saw him much differently from their first encounters and I daresay Reid continued to look at Gordon the same way too. As Reid rose up the ranks, the enmity grew unabated; in parallel, the personal rivalry grew between me and my counterpart in Reid’s office, a Labour special adviser named Steve Bates.
Bates was a class act with a superb eye for a story, respected by the hacks and feared by his Tory opposite numbers. He is one of those (along with Tony McNulty) with a legitimate claim to have invented the phrase ‘Hug a Hoodie’ to characterise David Cameron’s infamous 2005 speech about thugs needing love. He certainly fed it to the News of the World – among others – for their splash headline, which enabled the myth to take hold that Andy Coulson had come up with it.
But Bates was also ambitious for his boss, and that meant attacking Gordon. Even by my standards, he went too far one week when I was told by a contact on the Andrew Marr programme that Bates had fed them suggested questions to ask Gordon. It was customary if your minister’s opposition shadow was on Marr to provide an attack briefing to the programme, but I’d never heard of anyone pro-actively doing it to a minister on their own side.
As we got closer to the leadership election, those MPs closest to Reid were clearly taking soundings about levels of support for him among the backbenchers, donors and party members, and Bates organised lunches and dinners to do likewise with groups of journalists, at least one or two of whom at every event could be relied on to feed back to me every word that had been said.
Those ‘soundings’ climaxed in a dinner at the London Marriott Hotel at County Hall attended by a large group of Westminster’s most influential journalists and columnists, each in turn offering their opinion about Gordon’s candidacy and John’s chances of challenging him.
I decided, carefully and tentatively, to unearth from my black book some of the stories I’d gathered over the years about Reid’s escapades from the 1980s and early 1990s. After all, the stories about his past were going to come thick and fast if he had a chance of becoming Prime Minister, so I figured that I’d see whether he and Bates were ready for that level of scrutiny.
Coincidence or not, no sooner had the first call been made by the first newspaper following the first story I’d given out, than Reid announced he would be resigning as Home Secretary when Tony stepped down, with accompanying briefing that this was the end of his career in front-line politics.
I got a call from a journalist friendly with Reid and Bates. He discussed the news with me, then said: ‘So you can call off the dogs now.’ I asked what he meant. ‘You know what I mean; there’s no need to go for him now.’ I said I had no idea what he was talking about.
The field was now clear for Gordon, although we still had to staff, launch and run a leadership campaign: all a chance for some easy media coverage; some much-needed outreach to Labour MPs, members and party staff; some further opportunities to ‘sell’ Gordon to the public; and inevitably some disastrous PR screw-ups.
One of our priorities was to introduce people to a bit more of Gordon’s back-story: the fact he still lived in the ordinary town where he grew up; went to a fairly ordinary school; faced massive adversity with his eye injury and long-term hospitalisation as a youngster; and was inspired in his politics by the social justice preached by his father and the poverty he saw as a boy. The subtle message: he’s not like that posh bastard Cameron, you know.
We did some excellent paper and broadcast profile pieces up in North Queensferry, the best of them with Nick Robinson for the BBC Ten O’Clock News, only ruined by the fact that, when Nick alluded off camera to his own awful accident as a youngster, Gordon pretty brusquely changed the subject, as if openly rejecting the opportunity to bond with a guy he’d written off as a ‘bloody Tory’ long ago.
We also did a Sunday Andrew Marr special from Gordon’s old school; a great interview but no one noticed because between me setting up the shot and going back into the impromptu control booth Gordon’s trousers had ridden so far up his legs, he looked like he was wearing Gieves & Hawkes Bermuda shorts. The exposure of his ivory white shins proved rather distracting for audiences.
After that, we always had strict instructions for Gordon that he had to check his shoelaces were done up, his socks were pulled up and his trouser bottoms were pulled down before any cameras started rolling.
A few days later, I was waiting for him to arrive by car to open a new school in Sheffield, and he emerged from the back seat having followed all these instructions both rigorously and vigorously, except between yanking down his trouser bottoms and yanking up his socks, he’d managed to pull one sock over the trouser leg almost up to his knee, creating a rather splendid one-legged knickerbocker effect.
Jo Dipple, his political events chief, came out of the car on the other side, and made a very weary and wobbly beeline for me, while an oblivious Gordon greeted the head teacher, head boy and head girl. ‘What the fuck is that?’ I said to Jo. She just shook her head with the dead-eyed look of someone who’d spent three hours in a car with Gordon in a bad mood.
We waited until the cameras had stopped shooting before I alerted Gordon about the sock. ‘Did anyone see?’ he asked, a little sheepishly. ‘I think they were all looking at your face,’ I lied. The day wasn’t over. At the end, Gordon had to cut open a huge balloon net to launch the new school, and approached the task a little gingerly given the high winds.
As he cut the tape, the netting broke loose and wrapped around his arms and head. I was faced with the horrifying spectacle of Gordon struggling manically to free himself, becoming more entangled in the net and the trapped balloons as he thrashed around, while dozens of beaming children yelped and cheered. Eventually, Gordon broke free, almost falling over in the process.
Amazingly, the video footage wasn’t that bad, with Gordon’s struggles obscured by the balloons, but when I approached the stills photographer he was chuckling to himself looking at his
shots. They were as bad as possible. Jo had been looking after the snapper and, while equally horrified, she couldn’t help burst out laughing as we looked at each fresh picture of Gordon’s contortions.
Eventually, the snapper said to Jo: ‘You know what, you’ve been great today, and you got him to do everything I asked; plus I’ve already got the sock picture. So I won’t send out the worst ones.’ Jo gave me a look which said: ‘See, I might not have seen the sock, but I still know what I’m doing.’ Indeed she did.
Unfortunately, Jo wasn’t in charge a few days later when Gordon’s campaign was formally launched in London. His socks, trousers and shoelaces were immaculate, and there wasn’t a balloon in sight, but somehow he managed to end up with half his face obscured by one of the autocue screens for the duration of the speech.
And yet it seemed the more of these kind of mistakes happened and the more Gordon looked unpolished and unmanicured, the more the public seemed to warm to him and to the contrast with the glitz and smoothness of Tony Blair and David Cameron.
It was an entirely different story when it came to his efforts, or I should say the efforts foisted on him by some of his more focus-group- and poll-driven advisers, to broaden his appeal beyond the mainstream political news pages and broadcasts to some of their ‘softer’ target media, including women’s magazines, rather than doing the kind of ‘laddish’ things I’d been getting him to do – things he was very good and natural at – like talking about sport.
This was what came to be known publicly as ‘Project Volvo’, although frankly if anyone had used the words ‘Project Anything’ around me concerning Gordon, I’d have told them to stick it up ‘Project Arse’. I didn’t tend to go to those meetings, or any of those geared around polls or focus groups.
Frankly, there was always a very large divide between those of Gordon’s advisers who went on gut instinct about the way he came across and just wanted him to do things he was comfortable with and be his natural self (the bits fit for public consumption at any rate), and those continually warning him that he faced an image problem which was eventually going to cost him votes, particularly with women and especially in the affluent south east, and urging him to present himself in a different way, use softer language, smile more and so on.
Power Trip Page 27