Late into the evening, all the long-term Brown staffers who’d made the trip over to No. 10 gathered to watch the 10 o’clock news and have a drink.
There were handshakes and hugs, and a feeling of genuine pride and relief both that the day had gone so well and that we’d finally made it. Gordon was not for basking though, interrupting one minor burst of mutual congratulation to ask for all his documentation on the next day’s reshuffle and say: ‘Right, what time are you all in tomorrow? Can you be in for 6 or 6.30?’
Sue’s face beamed, savouring the moment: ‘Oh yes, Prime Minister.’ Gordon responded by returning some of the choicer heckles from earlier in the day.
It was a happy moment alright, but – looking back – it’s clear to me that we lost something that day. Some people have argued we lost our raison d’être; that Gordon had sought power for its own sake and didn’t know what to do once he had it, rather like the politician played by Robert Redford in The Candidate, winning the Senate race only to say: ‘What do we do now?’
There’s another argument that we lost control; that Gordon’s previous reliance on set-piece moments like the Budget, and the drawn-out decision-making that led up to them, was fundamentally unsuited to the fast-paced and usually random nature of events in No. 10. In the Treasury, he could afford to invest time and care into every speech he made because he made fewer of them, they were less varied and, most importantly, he had more time to spare.
I think there are elements of truth in both arguments, but they are nevertheless post-hoc explanations of the events that followed, and neither might stand up if Gordon had made the right decision in October 2007 and pressed ahead with his plans for a snap election.
For me, what we lost the day Gordon became the Prime Minister was something more fundamental, as apparent during the first months of the ‘Brown Bounce’ as it was in the doldrums that followed. We lost the Treasury. By which I mean that, in the Treasury, Gordon had his various ‘guys’ and ‘girls’ in every key position who knew how he worked and what he wanted; who knew when to refer issues to him or the Eds, and when to take decisions themselves.
These were relationships built up over a decade of long days and late nights working on Budgets, spending reviews and Mansion House speeches, or attending EU, IMF and World Bank summits. Gordon knew them by function if not by name, and he trusted them. Those perfunctory acknowledgements of staff as he passed them in the Treasury corridors may have been comical at times, but they helped make the organisation under Gordon a finely tuned machine.
The bulk of the staff Gordon took with him into No. 10 were political advisers – filling the gaps left by Blair’s outgoing team – with a broad mix of policy, communications and political responsibilities. By contrast, he took barely more than a handful of civil servants with him from the Treasury, waving goodbye to dozens of individuals with trusted experience and tested know-how, including all the key Treasury experts who shadowed departmental spending and policy.
When you saw the difference exceptional civil servants like Jon Cunliffe and Michael Ellam made to Gordon’s ability to function effectively in No. 10, you couldn’t help but think how much he could have done with a few more Cunliffes and Ellams making the journey with him. Not that there is any doubting the quality of the civil servants he inherited in No. 10, but what they lacked was that knowledge of his working methods, and what he lacked was the same level of trust and confidence in their judgement.
Gordon’s response was to lurch into micro-management; and the response of his new staff was to let him, assuming that was just the way he worked best. When practised every day, on every issue, that inevitably ate into Gordon’s time, energy and mood, as well as his capacity to see the big picture.
Take his preparation for just one potential topic at one session of Prime Minister’s Questions. In the Treasury, a civil servant could have said to him: ‘Here’s what you need to know … Here’s what you need to say’, and he would have written it down and had the confidence to trust them. In No. 10, he could hear exactly the same thing but then feel the need to ask a dozen more questions to gain that same confidence, filling his head with all kinds of unnecessary detail. It was hugely time-consuming and usually counter-productive.
As a side effect, it meant that people who were generally good at helping him cut through the nonsense and focus on the key messages – me included – avoided PMQs preparation like the plague. If you got trapped in there, it was half of Monday or Tuesday lost. It was a terrible use of time for the extremely talented individuals who were obliged to sit through the whole thing – Ian Austin, Patrick Loughran, Theo Bertram and James Bowler most of all – and I personally got in the habit of only showing my face fifteen minutes before I knew Gordon had another meeting scheduled.
I’m not suggesting Gordon either could or should have gutted the Treasury of its best officials; the civil service wouldn’t have allowed it. But if half the time he devoted to trying to persuade junior members of the Blair entourage to stay on in No. 10 had been spent negotiating the secondment of even a dozen more trusted Treasury civil servants into key No. 10 roles, he would have been better off. After all, if he’d recorded his 2009 YouTube message on expenses with Balshen behind the camera, she’d have laughed at him before the rest of the nation did and told him to do it again without the smiles. She might even have asked: why are we doing this on YouTube?
But if Gordon lost the Treasury on 27 June 2007, it’s also worth noting that the Treasury lost him, with equally significant consequences. Gone was its own sense of purpose, gone was its own rigid control of the Budget process, gone was the leadership and authority that Gordon and the Eds gave it, and – if I say so myself – gone was its control of the media.
THE ROLLERCOASTER
37
THE HACKS
If I ever caught a colleague who wasn’t supposed to speak to the press having a chinwag with a hack, I wouldn’t ask them what they’d been saying, I’d ask: ‘What terms were you speaking on?’
‘What?’ they’d invariably reply, at least the first time.
‘Well, you know. Was it in your own name or as a source? Was it “on the record” or “off the record”? Was it “not for use” or just “no fingerprints”? Was it “on background” or just “operational”? Was it “you can’t act on this” or just “you didn’t get this from me”? You know, which of those?’
‘Um, I don’t know, it was just, a chat? What does that count as?’
I’d roll my eyes, put my arm round their shoulders – some with a tighter grip than others – and explain that if they didn’t know the difference, they had no business speaking to the media, which funnily enough, they didn’t anyway, so please don’t do it again, otherwise I’ll have to tell Gordon.
Some of them would get wise and the next time I’d catch them, they’d say confidently: ‘Ah, that was entirely “not for use”.’ ‘Blimey,’ I’d respond, ‘that sounds big – what were you telling them?’
The main purpose of those tactics was not just to control what messages and information came out from Gordon’s team to the press, but to persuade everyone else in the operation that there was a reason we exerted that kind of control: these were dangerous characters, these journalists, and if you didn’t know exactly what you were doing, you could come a cropper.
In some ways, I was too successful at those scare tactics for my own good. In the small and close-knit Treasury team, I contributed to the speech-writing, the policy development and the political strategising. But as part of a quite large team of advisers in No. 10, I found myself increasingly confined just to dealing with the media. When my colleagues introduced me to strangers at parties or receptions, they’d always say by rote: ‘This is Damian. He looks after the hacks.’
Indeed, ‘How are the hacks? What’s the mood?’ went from just being one of Gordon’s catchphrases to being the default greeting from everyone in the Brown operation to me – whether it was on an overseas trip, a regional visit,
at party conference, after a questions session in Parliament, on the day of a Gordon speech, or just when I was passing them in the No. 10 corridors.
So, compared to the Treasury, I felt a much-diminished figure in No. 10 in terms of my responsibilities, and could only really get involved in the work everyone else was doing through my influence over Gordon.
Sometimes, if I saw a bunch of Gordon’s strategic policy thinkers and civil servants going off to a meeting room, almost out of spite I’d get hold of their agenda, wander in and see Gordon while it was going on, get him to take five decisions and – by the time all the policy wonks scurried happily back to their desks filled with a sense of purpose – there would be an email from me in their inboxes saying: ‘I had a quick chat with Gordon. This is what he wants…’
Obviously, if I’d wanted to, I could have engaged more with my other colleagues, shared my instincts about Gordon’s preferences and worked with them for the collective good, but – and I do curse myself in retrospect for this – I had that terrible combination of laziness and impatience which meant that I resented any time spent in a meeting room which could be spent on the phone to, or in the pub with, a journalist doing what I regarded as my proper and more important job.
So I allowed myself to be pigeon-holed as the guy who looked after the hacks.
I should stress that this went far beyond the skulduggery I got up to with journalists in terms of leaking stories and information in order to kill more damaging stories, or gather media intelligence, or stymie Gordon’s rivals. What it included were all sorts of other help that I provided openly and in good conscience. It could be anything, depending on the journalist involved, and it could be any time of day or night, usually starting with the Standard:
6 a.m.: ‘Hi matey, that line the Today programme are running out of Brussels? We like it but we can’t get any detail and Miliband’s people are in the air, so if you want to do us a quick 250 words from Gordon, that would probably be our splash. We’d need it by 10 a.m. though? Thanks, grand.’
9 a.m.: ‘Dog! Quick favour. I’m talking at some PR industry lunch today, and I’ve just noticed there’s a table full of Centrica and all that crowd, and another table full of bloody green charities, so can you just talk me through where we are on energy policy and the environment and all that?’
Noon: ‘Hi mate, the editor’s got a bunch of our shareholders in this afternoon and he’s asked me to be there. They’re bound to ask me what the plan is on the banks, so can you just give me some bullets in an email in shareholder-speak on where we are with everything?’
3 p.m.: ‘Now then, I’ve got to do a two-page write through on the week from hell, mainly on donations, so I just need whatever colour you can give me plus some analysis about where it all goes. Have you got half an hour now, or shall we do a pint this evening?’
6 p.m.: ‘Hiya, listen, nightmare day. Everyone’s off apart from me, I’ve got a cracking interview with Foxy that I’m still writing up, so I haven’t looked at Gordon’s transparency bollocks yet. Can you just do me a 600-word summary with the key quotes and what it all means? By half-six?’
9 p.m.: ‘Are you still in the office? Do me a huge favour. I’ve got this work experience girl with me and I’ve taken her to the Red Lion giving it the big ’un about all the history, and no bugger’s in here. So can you come over for a pint and do the whole Downing Street bit? Cheers, I’ll owe you one.’
Midnight: ‘Hi Damian, are you still out? The Guardian did well for you on that transparency stuff, eh? I’m not sure we even got it in. Actually, no, we got a few paras at the bottom of the donations story. Now, the reason I’m calling is: have you seen this line in the Express about Gordon and the McCanns – the desk just asked me to check it. That’s bollocks, is it? OK, I’ll stand them down.’
3 a.m.: ‘Morning, sorry if I’ve woken you up. I’m doing the overnight at Millbank, and the bloody news desk – having told us they didn’t want a bulletins piece on the transparency speech – they’ve seen the Guardian splash and decided they do. So can you just talk me through it quickly?’
That cycle would begin all over again the following day, alongside which I’d be fitting in my own pro-active briefing of stories, my extra-curricular skulduggery, and discharging the odd one-off requests for Gordon to record messages for leaving parties, or sign framed cartoons for auctions, or say hallo when someone’s kid was shown round Downing Street that afternoon.
Part of the reason most of those round-the-clock requests continued to come to me over the years was because I never passed them on and always dealt with them immediately. I prided myself that if a journalist rang up and said: ‘You’re probably going to need some time on this one, but I need a summary of where you guys stand on the Severn Barrage’, they’d get it right there and then.
Michael Ellam and I could have had a decent arm wrestle about which of us knew more than the other about the background and policy on every conceivable issue, but certainly no one else in the whole of government would have come close, and that made us invaluable not just to give a briefing to the minister going on Question Time each week, but to the dozen hacks filing stories each day.
The other reason those requests came to me was because, at its simplest level, I understood what the hacks needed. The one going to brief shareholders would get six factual bullet points, including external criticism of what we were doing, rather than a eulogy to our plan. The one wanting an objective, spin-free 600-word digest of the news lines from a speech would get exactly that and nothing more, something they could simply copy and paste into their story if they wished.
Just as I operated on the basis that Gordon’s overseas trips were organised for the benefit of the hacks who were accompanying us, and by extension the British public who saw and read their reports, I regarded my function in No. 10 simply as providing the hacks with a service, and imagined myself to be the person ‘embedded’ in No. 10 on their behalf.
To that extent, I regarded the journalists I worked with every day as akin to colleagues, even when they were giving Gordon and the government an enormous kicking. And like any colleagues, the more we got to know each other, the more those relationships extended outside of work. I attended stag-dos, weddings, Arsenal matches, Bruce Springsteen concerts, karaoke sessions, double dates, birthday parties and Christmas lunches with journalists, and why the hell not? That was our spare time and, as far as I was concerned, it only ever made it easier for us both to do our jobs.
Now, I’m conscious this is exactly the kind of thing which – in many people’s minds – confirms the diabolical picture painted by Peter Oborne and others of a political class that has become far too close to its media counterparts over recent years, and a generation of political hacks practising what Oborne calls ‘client journalism’, where access to the information held by government is exchanged in return for positive coverage. What hope in that world for the fearless, independent investigative journalist seeking simply to report and sometimes expose the truth?
To which my considered response would be: ‘Cobblers.’
If that model held true, then the coverage Gordon received over the years would have been correlated to the strength of his relationship with different newspaper editors and proprietors, and mine with different political journalists. Yet many of those relationships stayed entirely constant – Gordon’s with Paul Dacre, or mine with George Pascoe-Watson, for example – even as the coverage in the Daily Mail and The Sun shifted considerably.
What newspapers and individual journalists wrote about Gordon was – by and large – only correlated to the standing of the economy, his standing within the Labour Party and his standing with the public, and in his last years in government, all three. If I was doing my job well, I could affect the tone, balance and prominence of that coverage, but I couldn’t dictate its overall thrust, and I certainly couldn’t ensure that it would be positive.
The only thing I could dictate and ensure was that – as long as I was doin
g my job in the way I did it – we would always maintain a sensible, grown-up and businesslike relationship with the press, where Gordon could continue to get an objective hearing, no matter how bad things were, and where the press would not actively look to screw us over unless we totally deserved it.
As for the idea that the closeness that developed between members of the press and members of the political class stopped the former doing their job and representing their readers effectively, that is again not borne out by the evidence. Rebekah Wade’s attendance at a Chequers ‘pyjama party’ didn’t stop The Sun leading its political coverage the very next day with an excoriating attack on Gordon for pressing on with ratification of the Lisbon Treaty, written by George Pascoe-Watson.
And as I found out only too well, all the services provided, favours exchanged and personal relationships built up with political journalists over the years didn’t stop them sticking the boot into me as hard as I deserved in the days after I was sacked. In fact, I’ll always admire the resolute professionalism of the Sunday hack who called me up that Saturday and said:
‘First thing, are you OK? Good. Second thing, am I mentioned in any of the emails you sent to Draper as a source of any stories? Good, well in that case, the third thing is don’t read my paper tomorrow ’cos I’ve got to knock sixty shades of shit out of you. And final thing, do you want to meet up for a pint next week?’
And that what it was about. With a handful of exceptions who became genuine friends, the journalists I dealt with were just businesspeople. I ceased to be of any value or significance to them the day I was no longer in a position to service their needs or trade anything with them. But in my view, that was far better than being one of the hundreds of other spin-doctors for Labour and the Tories alike, who lived a much quieter life but were never of any value or significance at all.
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