Power Trip

by McBride, Damian

Nevertheless, at the point Osborne made his speech, I was confident I could turn it into a tale about panicky Tories making it up as they went along. After all, it was on my specialist subject and the sums didn’t come close to adding up. But the hacks writing the story out of Blackpool had Tory spin-doctors and the cheers of the conference hall in their ears, and I literally couldn’t get a hearing. The Labour press officer we had up there – the excellent Iain Bundred – said it was hopeless.

  I am absolutely certain that if Osborne had made that announcement in the Tory manifesto during the heat of an election campaign or indeed in a Budget speech, it would have unravelled, because those type of announcements tend to come under greater scrutiny and be reported with a greater sense of detachment. It reinforces why it was a mistake not to call the election before conference season.

  The fifth major mistake came the next morning when Gordon flew to Iraq. The idea that it was an attempt to distract attention from the Tory conference was nonsense, but there was an element of calculation: he wouldn’t have been allowed to travel there during the election purdah period and if he didn’t get out beforehand, there was a risk of it becoming an issue during the election campaign that he still hadn’t visited the troops since becoming PM.

  We just didn’t see the backlash coming. The Tories wheeled out John Major to complain about the ‘cynical timing’, and a story that should have been covered by the journalists travelling with Gordon to Iraq became another story reported out of Blackpool, with predictable results.

  After Gordon’s return from Iraq and the success of the Tory conference, the mood in the inner circle had discernibly shifted, along with the polls. Advisers and MPs who’d previously been urging him to go for it had started to play devil’s advocate more convincingly and, to cover their backs, Gordon’s pollsters were also more frequently pointing out worst-case scenarios about drastic reductions in Labour’s majority.

  It didn’t help that – without doubt – some of the MPs and advisers who had Gordon’s ear were clearly thinking about their own futures and shifting their positions accordingly, either because their seats were quite marginal or because they were too associated with Gordon to survive a change of leader if he was forced to resign.

  One of Gordon’s greatest strengths was identifying when people were ‘in it for themselves’ and judging their advice on that basis. It may sound self-centred, but his rationale was simple and fair: his staff and allies would rise or fall with him, so any ambitions they had should simply be invested in his. I first heard him use the expression back in 2003, reacting to a Guardian interview where Douglas Alexander had painted himself as neither Brownite nor Blairite. And I heard it many times thereafter.

  But that week, Gordon was giving too much credit to an awful lot of subjective advice, which was the sixth mistake. Inappropriate as it would have been, he should have asked the likes of Michael Ellam what they thought, or listened more to long-serving advisers and friends like Bob Shrum and Sue Nye who he knew only had his interests at heart. He could have listened to me tell him that every journalist I spoke to was convinced we should go for it. And he certainly should have listened more to Ed Balls.

  Ed was the one resolute voice throughout that wobbly week saying Gordon should definitely go for it. With the exception of Tom Watson, he was the only person who consistently argued that Labour could increase its lead over the course of a campaign, insisting that we’d wipe the floor with Cameron and Osborne. ‘These guys are amateurs. They’ve never fought a general election – they don’t know what it takes. We’ll just say: “Are you really going to trust this pair of jokers to run the country?”’

  But by Friday 5 October, with Balls away in Yorkshire, the inner circle gathered in Alastair Campbell’s old office, a thick net curtain shielding us from the cameras outside No. 10. We heard Deborah Mattinson present the latest, unchanged polls from marginal constituencies, and sat waiting for Gordon to announce the inevitable.

  You’d have forgiven him for lashing out at those who’d urged him along at every stage and were now counselling caution, but he just seemed stoical. Finally he said: ‘Right, well, does anyone have anything else they want to say?’, like the lawyer of a condemned man hoping someone in the courtroom will produce an alibi. Everyone looked at the floor.

  Finally, Bob Shrum spoke up. He’d been in what we used to call Gordon’s dusty bin since the Times’ accusations of plagiarism in Gordon’s conference speech, so it took a lot of guts to say what he said: ‘Well, if the worst comes to the worst, and you only get three more years, there’s a lot you can do in three years. Jack Kennedy only had three years.’ Gordon didn’t look up, walked out of the room and didn’t look back. And that was that.

  The last mistake didn’t contribute to Gordon’s decision, but it certainly exacerbated the impact and every single bit of the blame lies with me. If it was possible to make an already disastrous news story even worse, my media handling of the announcement on Saturday 6 October delivered.

  The basic plan was for Andrew Marr to come in on Saturday afternoon and pre-record an interview, so Gordon could explain his decision and try and look relaxed about it. Nobody else in the BBC would know this was happening, but extracts would be released to all broadcasters for the Saturday early evening news. People have argued we should have done a full press conference, or a round of TV interviews with every broadcast political editor, but those were destabilising for Gordon at the best of times. In this situation it could easily have led to a public meltdown.

  The timing of this plan was a huge problem for the Sunday papers, every one of which was doing a minimum of four pages of coverage on the impending election decision, with expensive polls and ‘Should he, shouldn’t he?’ columns. The announcement on the Saturday was going to come as a complete surprise to them, and if it stayed that way until the mid-evening news, it would have meant whole pages or sections having to be pulped, columns having to be re-written and so on.

  I believed – and still do – that the long-term damage that would have done to our relationship with the Sundays would have been huge, and it was my top priority that Saturday to prevent them turning implacably hostile to Gordon. Why? Because whenever anyone asked me: which is the most important paper for you – meaning is it The Sun or the Mail? – I always answered ‘the Sundays’.

  The Sundays have the resources, the quality of journalists and columnists, the size of readership and the competitive impulse to kill any politician they decide to target. Plus fifty weeks of the year, you can usually guarantee that the best Sunday splash will be the top story across all the broadcast media. I always knew it would be too debilitating to spend every weekend fighting that kind of fire. That’s why – quite frankly – I always did my best, partly through my leaking activities, to make sure at least one or two Sunday papers had a belter of a splash that was nothing to do with us.

  So, on the Saturday morning, I tipped off the political editors of all the Sundays that an announcement was coming, on the understanding that this went no further than their editor, news editor and lead columnist so they could reshape their pages, coverage and columns. In general, senior journalists tend to respect those kind of heavily conditional tip-offs – no matter how explosive the information – for the obvious reason that they want the same consideration again next time round.

  Given those same political editors had to explain at great length in their pages how and why the decision had been taken, I also did what I always did best, giving them ‘the colour’: who was in the room when; who said what; which room we were in; what Gordon had for breakfast.

  That gave me the licence to spin the line that Gordon’s mood had been moving against an election for some time, even before the Tory conference. I recast the desultory devil’s advocate lines I’d heard at Chequers as serious and influential concerns: Douglas was worried about disenfranchised students; Ed Miliband was worried about people having to vote in the dark.

  Both with the tip-offs and that colour, I
was doing all I could to turn a terrible story to our advantage, in that – even though the coverage would be awful – the Sunday papers would be grateful for our professionalism and courtesy, and that would be good for long-term relations.

  As far as I understand it, and rather disappointingly, one of the Sundays tipped off the Tory press team, they tipped off all the broadcasters, and thus exploded the mother of all shit-storms. Andrew Marr arrived to do his secret, exclusive interview with every camera in London outside No. 10 filming him going in, and Adam Boulton, Nick Robinson and others reporting what Gordon was about to tell him.

  It created a sense of utter chaos, shambles and farce around the announcement, and ensured the broadcast coverage was as bad as it could possibly have been, presented by political editors visibly incandescent that Gordon hadn’t done interviews with them. I walked into the room where Gordon was getting ready for Marr, and Douglas didn’t even bother to stop his rant about how dreadfully I was handling things, all in the name of helping my ‘mates on the Sundays’.

  And yes, that was why. And yes, it was a disaster. But I will always maintain that I was right to make those Sunday relationships my priority that day. I don’t think Gordon would have had any chance of surviving until 2010 if the Sundays had come after him hard every week after that.

  There was one final mistake that weekend, but not of consequence to anyone but me.

  The Sunday headlines were predictably brutal and while all their huge ‘write-throughs’ included my colour, they also had very hard anonymous quotes from ‘insiders’ attacking the pollsters, Douglas and, to a lesser extent, Ed Miliband for changing their mind about the election. There was an uncomfortable proximity between those quotes and my ‘No. 10 source’ quotes about what Douglas, Ed and others had said at Chequers, but I wasn’t too worried.

  Gordon called to ask how I thought the story was developing for Monday. He sounded totally disconsolate, but – as always on big days like that – he gave me my marching orders in terms of briefing:

  ‘The one thing we have to do is make sure we don’t fall apart ourselves. Some of the stuff in the papers today – these guys all blaming each other – we can’t have that. Make clear I’m the only one to blame; I take full responsibility. Keep saying that. Don’t let the papers make it civil war. You’re the only one that should be speaking to them. Tell the papers that; you’re the only one with authority to speak.’

  I had not the slightest indication from Gordon that he thought I was to blame for any of the briefing. You might argue he was being subtle about it, but Gordon didn’t do subtle.

  As I was walking down to Arsenal that afternoon, I took calls from two journalists. I started delivering my script, but they came back with phrases like: ‘Are you saying anything yourself?’ ‘There’s a lot of flak coming your way’ and ‘People are sticking the boot into you quite hard’. It took me a while to realise ‘you’ didn’t mean Gordon, which was how I usually heard it; they actually meant me. ‘Me?’ I kept saying. ‘Me? What have I done?’

  One of them told me openly that the briefing against me was coming from Paul Sinclair, Douglas’s acolyte, who informally looked after Gordon’s interests with the Scottish press. ‘He’s given us off-the-record quotes accusing you of briefing against people, but saying you’re the biggest one to blame, all the media speculation was your fault, you fucked up the announcement yesterday.’

  Feeling angry and reeling a bit, when Ed Miliband called I started ranting at him about how ridiculous it was that I was being accused of briefing against people.

  ‘But where’s all the briefing coming from, Damian?’ he said. ‘They’ve got all these details of the meetings we had; that must have come from you.’ ‘Of course that stuff’s from me,’ I said, ‘that’s just the colour – that’s harmless, but that’s not the same as these lines blaming Douglas and you for the whole thing.’ ‘Well, where’s all that coming from, Damian?’

  ‘I don’t know where it’s coming from, but of course it’s not from me – you know I wouldn’t brief against you.’ ‘I don’t believe you, Damian,’ he said, something in his voice and tone reminding me of Hal the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, ‘I think you’re lying.’ ‘Ed, for God’s sake, don’t say that. I’d never brief against you.’ ‘That’s the trouble, I don’t believe that’s true.’

  Despite being known to bend the truth occasionally, I’ve always hated being wrongly accused of lying, so I came back aggressively: ‘Hey! You can’t say that, Ed. I’m not going to have that.’ ‘I can’t help it, I think you’re a liar.’ ‘If you keep saying that, you know we’re finished, I’m not having that.’ ‘I don’t care, Damian, I think we are finished.’

  The call ended. I was totally stunned. Eight years of working together, four years of real friendship, all destroyed in two minutes, and over something that wasn’t true. And my mistake? I didn’t care enough to do anything about it; I didn’t care enough to complain.

  I should have gone to Gordon and demanded that he vouch for me, remonstrate with Paul Sinclair and tell Ed Miliband to apologise. I should have said if he didn’t, I’d quit. Instead, I just thought: ‘Sod ’em. Idiots. They can say what they like.’ That reaction just reinforced the impression I was guilty and set me down a dangerous path where I didn’t care when I got the blame for things I hadn’t done. Occasionally, if it was a good story, I actually revelled in it.

  Three years later, Steve Richards’s biography of Gordon came out, repeating the accusation that I’d briefed against Douglas and Ed that weekend, with one source ludicrously claiming that they caught me in the act and I told them I was acting on instructions from Ed Balls. If I’d had any reputation to protect by that stage, I’d have sued, but as it was, I just sighed.

  To my surprise, I was called up by a Labour MP on that day who I’d not heard from in years – not someone who’d been prominently involved in the election discussions – who said: ‘I know you’re getting it in the neck again for all that briefing, and I just want to say sorry; it was me who did Douglas in – it was just payback for 2006 – and I’m sorry you got the blame.’

  I called a friend who was working on Ed Miliband’s leadership campaign at the time and told him the conversation I’d just had, without naming the MP. If I was somehow hoping that would lead to a reconciliation, or at least some closure, I was disappointed. My friend came back and rather sadly said that – when he’d told Ed the story – he’d just shrugged and said: ‘Oh well.’

  The reality was I don’t think Ed or Douglas particularly cared whether I was guilty or not. I was just an Admiral Byng: a convenient person to blame to create the perception that they’d been wronged by someone close to Gordon and Ed Balls, allowing them to get some distance from the sinking ship in No. 10 and some victim status with Labour MPs. And it worked.

  Meanwhile, poor Gordon was left to despair that the whole sorry litany of mistakes had not only devastated his credibility with the media and MPs and wrecked his hard-won reputation as a man of strategic genius and iron resolve, but had ripped apart his close-knit circle of advisers.

  But over the many months he had to reflect on those mistakes before the start of the financial crisis, he must have learned something. When every other world leader was not just wobbling but panicking about what to do, it was Gordon who brought all his old strategic genius and iron resolve to bear in preventing total meltdown. If he’d gone for the election in 2007 and been forced to resign afterwards, he wouldn’t have even been there.

  So perhaps it wasn’t such a mistake after all.

  42

  NEW PEOPLE

  There was a strange atmosphere in No. 10 in the immediate aftermath of the election decision: the staff were almost determinedly cheerful, like Christmas Day on a hospital ward; and Gordon – typically when he blamed himself for something – was quiet, sheepish and sweet to everyone.

  It was only over the coming weeks that the gloom really set in, as we endured what I would describe as the most
appalling run of bad luck, but what the media, the opposition parties and those good old ‘told you so’ Blairites simply revelled in as evidence that Gordon’s government had become the most incompetent in history.

  My mantra during that period was: ‘Let’s just get to Christmas.’ If we could keep our heads down and make it to the seasonal firebreak, Gordon could disappear for a fortnight, come back refreshed and our narrative would be: ‘New Year, Fresh Start.’ But it seemed like Christmas would never come, and every new week was worse than the last.

  We had the report into the fiasco of Scotland’s May elections with Douglas Alexander under pressure to resign, his sister Wendy – leader of the Scottish Labour Party – also under pressure over dodgy donations, and likewise Peter Hain. We had Anthony Seldon’s book on Tony Blair’s last six years in office, which depicted Gordon and the Eds in a dismal light and quoted Blair saying they made him feel like an abused wife.

  We had a further leak of foot-and-mouth from the Pirbright laboratory, the ongoing crisis over Northern Rock, a Commons defeat over detention of terror suspects and the rumbling row over Gordon’s use of the phrase ‘British jobs for British workers’ back at Labour’s party conference.

  We had retired chiefs of the armed forces making a coordinated assault on Gordon for supposedly breaking the ‘military covenant’, and Gordon shooting himself squarely in the foot by again being seen to prevaricate and over-calculate about whether to attend the signing ceremony for the Lisbon Treaty, something which made the normally unflappable Michael Ellam tear his hair out.

  Worst of all for me were, first, the loss by HMRC of two discs containing the entire child benefit database – how could my old department do that to us? And second, the revelation in the Mail on Sunday that eccentric businessman David Abrahams had unlawfully used a ‘jobbing builder’, a lollipop lady, his solicitor and his personal assistant as proxies for donations to the Labour Party, including more than £100,000 since Gordon had become PM.