The West Wing was broadcast in the UK from September 2000 until August 2006, and the gripping battles it depicted between principle and pragmatism have helped fuel a worship of American politics in today’s Westminster which is neither very healthy nor particularly accurate, alongside similarly romanticised notions of the Roosevelt and Kennedy administrations, and the idolatry of the Lyndon Johnson portrayed by his biographer Robert Caro.
It follows that nothing tends to bring modern British politicians to their knees like an encounter with the US President, in a way that would make the young Monica Lewinsky blush. I’d like to argue that Gordon Brown was different, but the best I can ultimately say is that the record was mixed.
At his first meeting with George W. Bush – a Camp David summit at the end of July 2007 – Gordon very deliberately set out to maintain a respectful tone but a suitable distance, to show the British public watching back home that this marked the end of the cosy deference of the Blair years.
Camp David itself is an astonishing place, a vast area of woodland in Maryland which looks and feels every bit the military base that it is, right down to the army-style canteen area for staff and the hundreds of camouflaged guards eerily dotted in random positions around the woods, standing stock still alongside the trees for hours at a time.
Gordon arrived by helicopter on the Camp David lawn, determined to be as formal as possible in his opening encounter with Bush. Easier said than done. Bush put him in an open-sided golf buggy to drive him up to the lodge, and decided to do a few ‘playful’ circles on the lawn, vaguely aiming towards the waiting press.
As the buggy leant heavily towards the passenger side on one circuit, I could tell from Gordon’s fixed grin and very tight grip of the vehicle’s rigging that he was hanging on for dear life. As bad photo-opportunities go, falling out of a golf cart on your first official visit to the President would rank pretty high, and my heart was in my mouth until they sped off out of sight.
The talks behind closed doors were friendly enough, and Stewart Wood and Michael Ellam came out to give me some colour from the evening meal. I would concentrate on giving that stuff to the hacks the next day while Michael would stick to officially briefing the contents of the meeting.
The next morning, I did my colour briefing at the entrance to an enormous aircraft hangar alongside the lawn where the British press entourage were sheltering from the sun, waiting for the press conference to begin. I talked them through the exchange of gifts, some of the lighter parts of the conversation and the full menu.
Every summit needs a name that sums up its character. Blair’s first with Bush at Camp David became the Colgate Summit, after Bush revealed they used the same toothpaste. It summed up the way that Blair had translated his famously warm relationship with Bill Clinton into an immediate rapport with Bush; a sign of things to come.
The British hacks were hoping there would be something from my colour that would work as a name for the summit, and – without looking like I was pointing too hard – I lingered over the words ‘Roast Beef’ from the menu, and there was a general murmuring of content. It was perfect: robust, unfussy and distinctively British.
Gordon stuck to task at the press conference. Bush addressed him as Gordon; Gordon addressed him as ‘Mister President’. When Bush went for bonhomie and personal praise, Gordon stuck to talking about what they’d discussed and agreed. All in all, the ‘Roast Beef Summit’ couldn’t have gone better, and we knew we’d done our job when the only criticism in the UK press was from those diehards who thought Blair’s closeness to Bush was a good thing for Britain.
Our next encounter in Washington in April 2008 was with prospective presidents, when the two Democratic rivals, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and their Republican challenger-in-waiting, John McCain, came to the UK ambassador’s residence for one-to-one meetings with Gordon, partly because of his unofficial role as world authority on the emerging financial crisis. Saying ‘I’ve been discussing these issues with Prime Minister Brown’ was useful ballast for a candidate when asked about their credentials as a leader on the economy.
However, Gordon was pre-occupied with the brewing row in the UK over the imminent abolition of the 10p tax rate, and on the day of the three meetings we got word from the UK that Angela Smith, a Labour MP, was planning to resign her junior position as an aide to Yvette Cooper in protest. We were left with the incongruous spectacle of Gordon having to spend time in Washington on the phone to London trying to persuade an MP he barely knew not to resign, while one of the prospective next leaders of the free world sat in an ante-room waiting for him to finish.
Perhaps because of his irritation and anger over that nonsense, Gordon was again in a very businesslike mood when he met the three candidates, and there was no obeisance on his part, even with the two Democrat stars. His snap verdicts after the meetings were fascinating:
‘McCain – very ideological. He sees everything in military terms. You talk about the economy, and he starts talking about the threat of China, and he means “threat”.
‘Obama – bit light. I don’t think he really gets what’s happening with the economy; talking about how we need to reform for the future and all this stuff, he doesn’t get how serious things are now.
‘Hillary – so sharp, unbelievably sharp, probably more than Bill. Totally understands what the risks are if we don’t get all this stuff sorted, said she’d support whatever we had to do.’
When Obama visited London three months later, having beaten Hillary for the Democrat nomination, Gordon was stunned by the transformation. After their private talks about the economy and foreign policy in No. 10, Gordon came out saying: ‘He’s done some bloody homework, that guy; he’s on top of it all now, totally gets what’s happening. He’s really impressive, really impressive.’
Obama himself was full of confidence, and exuded a natural charm and warmth that melted everyone he met. I don’t know whether US presidents are trained to do this, but he did something that Clinton and Bush had both done before when walking around Downing Street.
All three were used to seeing people peeping out of office doors as they passed, hoping to catch a glimpse of the big guest without breaching the careful stage-management of these visits. Obama, like Clinton and Bush before him, made a point whenever he saw an office door crack open of stopping a little theatrically and saying: ‘Hold on a second, who’s hiding in there?’ before going in to say hallo to the star-struck civil servant, shake hands and pose for photos.
But there was another transformation too on that visit: Obama’s staff – previously friendly and eager to build relationships with their No. 10 counterparts – now had their eyes on the future. They’d pretty much written off Gordon, and were now focused on building a relationship with Cameron and stealing a march on presidential rival John McCain by showing that Obama could work equally well with the Republicans’ supposed allies in the Tory Party.
When that happens, if you’re the British Prime Minister, you need to take it on the chin, and wait for the inevitable moment when the American President or candidate who was riding high suddenly needs all the support he can get, or until world events take a turn and you become important to them again. If you do the opposite – try and force the relationship, or look upset or angry that you’re being given the brush-off – then you risk only making things worse.
Gordon unfortunately fell into the latter category, and – bar the success of Obama’s visit to the G20 summit in London – their encounters from 2008 onwards looked rather undignified from the point of view of the UK press, culminating in Gordon’s humiliating efforts to secure a one-on-one meeting in New York in September 2009.
When Obama won the presidency in November 2008, Gordon and his staff went to great lengths to persuade the Tate Gallery that George Frederic Watts’s famous 1886 painting Hope, which had inspired Obama’s second book and one of his most famous speeches, should be loaned to the White House for the duration of his presidency as a gift from B
ritain.
It would have been a fantastic gesture and a great story, but the response came back from the White House that the gift would go down badly. They wanted to get away from the ‘Hope thing’ and show Obama was down to the hard business of working to resolve the financial crisis. Plus the book title The Audacity of Hope was lifted from a sermon by Pastor Jeremiah Wright, inspired by the painting, and they weren’t keen to remind people of Obama’s closeness to the controversial pastor.
Undeterred, Gordon tried again on his March 2009 visit to Washington: he presented Obama with a pen-holder carved from the ancient timbers of HMS Gannet – a nineteenth-century antislavery ship; a nod to the famous Oval Office desk, made from the wood of HMS Resolute, presented by Britain to America to commemorate the ship’s role in fostering good relations between the two countries.
It was hard to see what could possibly go wrong with that gift, until we saw what Obama had got for Gordon in return: a collection of twenty-five DVDs, all great films without question, but definitely a present with something of the Christmas Eve run to the petrol station about it. Bits of the British press lapped up Gordon’s apparent humiliation, although the American media and talk shows took the new White House to task for being bad hosts. It was certainly not the finest hour for their wonderfully named assistant chief of protocol, Randy Baumgardner.
Either way, it arguably did us a favour; when Obama attended the G20 summit a few weeks later, he and his team went out of their way to be warm and helpful.
Personally, I had three crucial roles in relation to that summit. The first was staying as far away from it as possible, given that – following the October 2008 reshuffle – I was supposed to be keeping a low profile and wasn’t to be seen mingling with the media at major events.
The second was negotiating with Jamie Oliver and his vast army of ‘people’ about the Downing Street dinner that would be served for the G20 leaders during the summit. I’d had the idea of inviting Jamie’s apprentices to cook the meal – in keeping with the summit focus on jobs – and Gordon’s broadcast adviser Nicola Burdett and I were trusted to make sure that all ran smoothly.
That’s ‘trusted’ in the modern sense, as in the rest of No. 10 making clear that: ‘It’s your idea, you deliver it; if anything goes wrong, it’s your fault.’ As it was, everything went perfectly, we got great coverage out of it and Jamie’s people were even accommodating when I very gently asked them to change the dessert on the menu from ‘rhubarb crumble’ on the grounds that I didn’t want the G20 being labelled the ‘Rhubarb Summit’. They did Bakewell tart instead.
My third job, and one I genuinely relished, was taking over the media management for Sarah Brown’s engagements with Michelle Obama, particularly a joint visit to a Maggie’s Cancer Care centre for mums and kids affected by cancer.
Sarah couldn’t get any official support from the No. 10 press office on the grounds that she had no official government function and all the media special advisers were busy supporting Gordon, so she ended up relying on me and Balshen, who took leave from her job working for Ed Balls to help out on a voluntary basis. I hadn’t worked with Balshen for two years by that stage, and I missed our double act on visits and events, so it made it all the more enjoyable.
The best compliment I could pay Michelle Obama is that there was no difference between her when the cameras were on and when they weren’t: she was one of the most personable, friendly, empathetic and downright funny characters I came across in my career, and spread smiles and happiness throughout every room she walked into, and to every mum and child she met.
But the person I admired most that day was Sarah. Over the years, I’d come to know her as a deeply intelligent, cerebral, private person with a simply ferocious passion for the causes and people close to her heart, most of all her family.
That day in April with Michelle, it was her town, her husband’s summit, Maggie’s was her charity – one she’d been patron of for years – and the visit was for the benefit of her national press. But she had the class, grace and humility to know that Michelle was the star in that situation, and the good media sense just to allow Michelle to shine without trying to force herself into every camera shot.
And, of course, that’s what she always did for Gordon. He was always the star and, whatever she did to support him, it was always to enhance his story, not become the story herself.
She was no less fiercely loyal to Gordon than Cherie was to Tony; the difference was that while Sarah was happy to express that loyalty privately – including giving Gus O’Donnell the cold shoulder after the help she suspected he’d given some of Gordon’s hatchet job biographers – Cherie was never happy unless her loyalty was expressed publicly, with her face the one all over the papers, rather than Tony’s.
I remember one of my first encounters with Sarah, years ago on an overnight trip, when she asked me to help unload the car. On the way down, she mentioned a recent Evening Standard article about the key people around Gordon. I’d briefed the article and – rather naively – when the journalist had said: ‘And of course, I’ll put you in there’, I was pleased to let them.
Sarah said: ‘I love those pieces, because it’s always interesting who’s mentioned and who’s not.’ She let it hang, then said: ‘And you can tell it wasn’t a press person who’s briefed it because you and Ian Austin are mentioned, and you’d never mention yourselves.’ It was her subtle way of saying: ‘Remember who you work for and why you’re here; it’s not for yourself.’
When she was sworn at by Matthew Freud for failing to deliver Gordon for a photo-stunt with Blair and Murdoch at Davos, and when she saw media people constantly staring at her tummy amid rumours she might be pregnant again, she never screamed and told them all to bugger off the way most of us would want to do. She just shrugged and got on with it, because that was the life, and what mattered to her was whatever was best for Gordon and her boys.
It was little wonder that when the Tories came into No. 10, they asked for access to her emails, diary and contact book in order to study what they called ‘best practice’ for setting up Samantha Cameron’s private office. They were refused permission, but it was a telling fact about what kind of ‘first lady’ they envisaged that Mrs Cameron would be.
But Sarah will always be a tough act to follow, precisely because, just like Michelle Obama, with her it was never an act.
40
MAGGIE AND ME
I was born and raised in Margaret Thatcher’s Finchley constituency. My closest cousins were born and raised in her hometown of Grantham. As a young boy, I thought all towns somehow claimed Mrs Thatcher as their own. That was before I visited Glasgow and Derry.
At eleven years old, I went with my mum to see Cliff Richard perform at the 1986 centenary celebrations of St Paul’s Methodist Church in Finchley, with Maggie delivering a thank-you speech. As we waited to make our exit afterwards and Maggie worked the crowd, she tried to glad-hand my mum. Barbara McBride, Latin teacher sine pari and local stalwart of the National Union of Teachers, simply ignored her. Maggie bent down and shook my hand instead. After she’d passed, to my eternal shame, I said to my mum: ‘She’s got children too, you know.’
Maggie was always a divisive figure in our house. At the 1983 election, my dad – a volatile character at the best of times – tried to stop my mum leaving the house to vote Labour, convinced as he was that only Maggie stood between us and Russian enslavement courtesy of Michael Foot and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Four years later, by contrast, he was in the street telling the frail old woman who lived opposite – Mrs Webster – that if she went with the Tory activist offering to drive her to the polling station, he would never collect her pension again and it would serve her right if she starved to death.
When I joined Finchley Catholic High School as a fifteen-year-old, anti-Thatcher feeling ran high, not so much because of the poll tax but because of a particularly bitter year of murders in Northern Ireland triggered by the killings on Gibral
tar, for which she was – rightly or wrongly – blamed. This was in a school where the semi-organised violence of the St Patrick’s Day’s ‘Ireland versus the Rest of the World’ games made my football matches at Cambridge look like croquet.
When it was announced that Maggie would be coming to open our new technology block that year, our popular Irish deputy headmaster, Kevin Hoare, addressed all the boys and told them that – while he understood the strength of feeling – we had a responsibility to the school to behave in a civil and dignified manner. The message was taken on board, but nevertheless a dozen boys from across the school were locked up for the afternoon because they were considered too incorrigible or militant to be trusted. I was distraught not to be one of them, as were some of the teachers.
Incidentally, nothing in my Nationalist upbringing prepared me for the confusion I experienced in July 2007 when Gordon made his first trip to Stormont as Prime Minister, and I encountered first the thoroughly lovely Reverend Ian Paisley – introducing himself to all Gordon’s officials as he waited for his meeting and greeting me like a lost brother when I told him my dad was from Donegal; and then Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams – who turned up ten minutes late and ignored me and everyone else in the waiting room, all part of their refusal to acknowledge our right to be there.
It was a confusing month all round. In those early weeks, when Gordon was winning plaudits for his style of government, we deliberately invited comparisons with Maggie’s tough leadership, Stakhanovite work ethic and un-showy presentational style, and, to my slight surprise, the press lapped it up, not least because of the contrast with Cameron and Osborne presenting themselves as the rightful ‘heirs to Blair’.
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