Power Trip

by McBride, Damian

  Right at the outset of that scandal, the widely liked and admired General Secretary of the Labour Party, Peter Watt, fell on his sword – albeit with some encouraging pats on the back from colleagues – but the resignation of one person taking ‘full responsibility’ just leads to a media frenzy for the next. Scandals need scalps, and one is never enough.

  Incidentally, I once saw how this works in practice. I’d stayed on after Treasury Questions in April 2004 to watch Home Office minister Beverley Hughes deliver her resignation statement, admitting she’d inadvertently misled Parliament by saying she hadn’t been warned about bogus eastern European visa applications. Home Secretary David Blunkett sat next to her almost in tears, but at least they both must have thought that was the end of the matter.

  Not a chance. As we exited the press gallery, I watched the political lobby gather in a tight circle outside, like commandoes planning how to take the next building. ‘Right, Bev’s done. We all going for Blunkett?’ A collective ‘Yep.’ ‘What are the angles?’ They worked out the various vulnerabilities in Blunkett’s position, split between them the jobs of checking them out and then dispersed to get on with it. It was both impressive and frightening to witness. They didn’t get Blunkett then but he remained under fire, and they got him on another visa mishap, coupled with a sex scandal, a few months later.

  In contrast to that row, and as always in these kind of moments, we retreated to establish the facts on David Abrahams before saying anything, and then Gordon made clear within No. 10 and the party that only I would speak to the press about the story, just to make sure we stuck to one clear account and narrative, and had no contradictions or mixed messages.

  For what seemed like the whole week, I stalked around one of the large empty offices at the Horse Guards end of Downing Street, mobile phone in one hand, iron poker from the fireplace in the other, dealing with hundreds of press calls on the issue and punctuating my briefings with ever more elaborate swishes and thrusts.

  I was in my element, but the truly hard part of the week was experiencing up close the reality of a group of people from Gordon downwards determined not to be dragged down by the scandal, and full of mutual suspicion and mistrust.

  Whereas I regarded it as my job to kill the story as quickly as possible and ensure there were no more scalps, because those were my orders from Gordon, many others feared that all I cared about was protecting him and – as much as possible – trying to shift the blame onto those who were in charge when Abrahams was first recruited in 2003.

  So one minute I’d agree with Lord Triesman, former chair of the Labour Party and shortly about to become chair of the FA, that I’d return the calls that had been made to him by The Times and Daily Mail. The next minute, one of his friends would call and say that under no circumstances was I to speak on Triesman’s behalf, and that I’d be sued if I tried to implicate him.

  It was a tough time, and the worst of it was that – as everyone was frantically protecting themselves – poor Peter Watt was left at home with a newborn child with no one calling to check how he was getting on or what he was going to do next. From those kinds of omissions, personal resentments grow, and Peter went on to deliver a stinging account of his time with Labour before the election.

  We finally made it to Christmas, battered, exhausted and almost terminally damaged by the events of the previous three months, a period cruelly crystallised in the House of Commons by Vince Cable when he talked of Gordon’s transformation in the public mind from Stalin to Mr Bean.

  But, in that period, I also saw Gordon’s private transformation from a man who blamed himself for the election debacle to a man who felt everyone around him was letting him down, even his most loyal and longest-serving staff. We were used to hearing him shouting: ‘I need new people!’ when he was exasperated or angry, but now he was saying it soberly and seriously.

  And it was a massive mistake. However bad things were over that three months, it at least built a real camaraderie among the Downing Street staff – old Blair civil servants and former Treasury staff alike – fuelled by long days under the same cosh, a rich vein of gallows humour and huge Friday night drinking sessions. Someone like Katie Martin, a shrewd communications strategist who arrived the week after the election decision, only knew that bad period, and yet by Christmas felt both fiercely committed to Gordon and fully bonded with the rest of No. 10.

  In those circumstances, bringing in a whole cast of people with no experience inside government as our supposed saviours was always going to be counter-productive, as some would struggle to find their feet in an atmosphere of rolling crisis management while the existing team of civil servants and special advisers, hitherto loyal and dedicated, were made to feel like chopped liver. For Gordon, it risked half his staff not knowing what they were supposed to be doing and the other half losing their motivation to do it.

  Nevertheless, Gordon was determined to have some new toys for Christmas, and January saw numerous comings and a few notable goings among the No. 10 staff. Most importantly, Tom Scholar – an exceptional civil servant dealt the rawest of deals – went back to the Treasury and was replaced as chief of staff by Stephen Carter, an external PR man recommended by Brunswick’s Alan Parker.

  Carter was a nice guy, clever and confident, with an excellent background in corporate communications. His main problems were that he didn’t have the slightest clue what job he’d been brought in to do and, whatever job it was, it wasn’t one he was qualified for. In terms of managing the fragile and sensitive network of personal and political relationships within No. 10, he was like Frank Bruno performing brain surgery in his boxing gloves.

  I got an early and somewhat formative taste of his people skills when he called me into his office, said he had huge respect for how I worked, didn’t want to interfere in any way and looked forward to working with me. Well that was good, I thought. The same afternoon, I got a call from a lobby hack saying: ‘I’m not sure how to tell you this, but that guy Carter’s just offered me your job.’

  Hmmm. It’s a sign of how vulnerable we Gordon ‘lifers’ felt by then that my instinct wasn’t to go to war with Carter over that because, if it was true that he was trying to replace me or offering other people my job, he might well be doing so at Gordon’s instigation. I just did my best for a few weeks to look as indispensable as possible: splashing papers with positive stories; bringing in top-quality media intelligence; even turning up on time for trains.

  Reassuringly, I wasn’t the only one having problems with Carter. Despite, I’m sure, being told by everyone that he needed to try and get on the good side of Sue Nye, Carter said the one thing almost guaranteed to do the opposite, telling Sue he understood her role as being ‘Gordon’s sort of “office wife”’. What Gordon’s actual wife would think of that, let alone Sue’s husband, he didn’t say.

  Carter’s reaction to those teething problems with the existing staff was to insist on bringing in lots more new people, who’d owe their jobs to him. In fairness, some of those who joined around that period – the likes of David Muir, Richard Lloyd, Mark Flanagan and Nicola Burdett – were excellent additions in specific areas like political strategy, digital communications or broadcast media, but for every one of those, there were others with ill-defined roles who just made No. 10 even more dysfunctional and poorly managed than it had been before.

  Carter also began bypassing all the normal channels for getting things done, instead doing everything himself. I was walking past his office one day when I saw a very junior lobby hack coming out, so junior that I didn’t even have to worry about him being offered my job. I asked Carter what he’d been doing there, and he explained that the guy had written a story making a passing reference to him which wasn’t quite accurate, so he thought he’d get him in for a chat and tell him he should always call before mentioning him in a story again.

  I didn’t know quite where to start explaining to Carter why that was a ridiculous use of his time, so I just rather tersely said t
hat we all got lots of stuff written about us, but what mattered was what they wrote about Gordon. I said if he wanted to spend his time talking to journalists, it would be better if he did some positive briefing to senior political editors and columnists.

  He took umbrage at being chastened and that was the die cast between us. Stories began popping up in PR Week, not a magazine I spent too much time worrying about myself, giving inside accounts of tensions inside No. 10, with very detailed guides to who was doing what and managing who, and a common theme that the ‘old guard’ were being sidelined in favour of Carter and his new hires.

  I put up with a few weeks of that, then started returning fire through the newspapers with stories about Carter’s taxi bills or the wages of his PA and so on. It was the sort of stupid, destructive, internecine warfare played out in public that either the No. 10 chief of staff or the press adviser should have stopped immediately, except, in this case, we were the ones doing the fighting or were at least the leaders of our respective ‘old’ and ‘new’ factions.

  And once these things start, they get a life of their own. It becomes the topic of gossip when junior No. 10 staffers meet junior lobby hacks in the pub, and stories start to appear which neither ‘side’ is responsible for, but which exacerbate the tensions between them.

  By right of seniority, and Gordon’s decision to go down the ‘new people’ route, Carter should have won the battle but eventually Gordon himself had started to tire of his Christmas toys. The nadir came in June 2008, when the long-rumbling row over Wendy Alexander accepting an unlawful donation (of just £950) from a Jersey-based businessman came back to the fore, after a Scottish parliamentary committee censured her.

  I was in Gordon’s office, which adjoined the Cabinet room, with him and Wendy’s brother Douglas as they discussed how to handle the issue. It was far from clear whether Wendy would or should have to resign over some minor criticism over a small mistake in relation to a tiny donation, but the bigger concern was that she and Gordon had made entirely contradictory statements about the timing of a referendum on Scottish independence, and there was a danger of both issues rumbling on unresolved over the summer if she stayed in post.

  Anyone who blanched at the idea of Ed Miliband taking on his brother for the Labour leadership would have actually fainted if they’d heard Douglas dispassionately advising Gordon that his sister had to quit to avoid further damage, but make clear it was just about the donation, nothing to do with the referendum. If I was sometimes cold blooded about how I did my job, I had nothing on Douglas that day.

  In that tense atmosphere, Carter came in and handed Gordon a print-out of what he described as ‘where I’ve got to with Wendy on letters’. Gordon scanned the pages with a rapidly furrowing brow, as it dawned on him that Carter had been engaged by email in a protracted and difficult negotiation with Wendy about what she was and wasn’t prepared to write in any resignation letter.

  As potential stories go, a leaked email from Gordon’s chief of staff telling the head of the Scottish Labour Party how to explain her decision to resign is pretty high up on the splashometer, and there was enough ill-feeling at Wendy’s end that such a leak was a distinct possibility. Gordon erupted: ‘BY EMAIL?! BY EMAIL?! ARE YOU MAD?! WHO TOLD YOU TO DO THIS?!’ If a nuclear bomb had gone off across the street at the same time, we wouldn’t have heard it.

  Carter tried to calm him down, but Gordon just told him to get out. It was very, very rare for Gordon to shout directly at the subject of his anger, and I saw it as a pretty clear sign that he was sick of Carter and knew he’d made a mistake by hiring him.

  But the fault didn’t lie with Carter. He was the right man for all sorts of jobs – just not that one, not with that boss and definitely not at that time.

  And on reflection, throughout this entire period we were missing the real problem. No amount of people, old or new, could ever be an adequate substitute for the two Eds in terms of enabling Gordon to function effectively, Ed Balls in particular, and giving him advice that he would trust.

  There were times working for Gordon when you could allow yourself to think – given this was one of the most powerful people in Britain and he was asking your opinion – that you were in some way a person of influence. That illusion was inevitably shattered each time he’d listen to everything you had to offer, stare at you sullenly for a moment or two, then say: ‘Get me Ed Balls.’

  Even after the Eds left the Treasury in 2004 and 2005, they were always around the place, and there was no sense of Gordon having to cope without them. But once they were Cabinet ministers with their own departments to run after 2007, they didn’t have the time to spend sitting in Gordon’s office working through issues, speeches and strategy, let alone the time to manage the way that No. 10 operated, or take decisions and sign things off in Gordon’s name.

  I was prepared to do that myself when it came to media issues, but I was one of the exceptions, and – when we reverted to relying exclusively on Gordon’s decision-making – we ended up with a bottleneck around everything from policy issues to diary management, which neither Stephen Carter nor anyone else was capable of resolving.

  If the experiment with ‘new people’ proved a rather time-consuming and attention-distracting dud, it also had a damaging, long-term effect in terms of our communications. For the first time in sixteen years since becoming shadow Chancellor, Gordon had lost control over who was authorised to speak to the press on his behalf.

  The rigid discipline of the Treasury was long gone. Even his ability to instruct No. 10 and the party that only I was allowed to speak about the Abrahams donations was a thing of the past. As soon as we had the proliferation of No. 10 and Downing Street sources that were quoted during the ‘old’ versus ‘new’ briefing wars, there could be no restoration of that control.

  That’s partly because once a lazy or unethical journalist knows you’ve lost that control, they don’t need too much encouragement simply to make up a quote to support their story, or at least get a quote from somewhere or someone and give it a ‘No. 10 source’ attribution. That will sound shocking to many people, including the majority of journalists, but I knew it happened because, in my Treasury days, I frequently read stories by certain hacks where my own quotes had been re-imagined as coming from No. 10 or the Home Office or even Buckingham Palace.

  The only way to prevent that is by being able to assert with confidence – as we did in the Treasury – that if a quote wasn’t from Gordon, one of the Eds, the Head of Communications or the political press adviser, then it was made up. Once we were in No. 10, and that list of people grew to double figures, it became open season.

  43

  THURSDAY NIGHT LIES

  People forget that Gordon Brown had some very successful election nights as Prime Minister.

  Well, one. When we were riding high after Gordon’s takeover, we won the Sedgefield by-election triggered by Tony Blair’s resignation as an MP, but – more surprisingly – we romped home in Ealing Southall, a seat that both the Liberal Democrats and Tories had been confident of taking from Labour before the Brown bounce kicked in, with the Tories especially appalled to get only a 0.9 per cent increase in their vote share compared to the 2005 election.

  What made it doubly sweet was that they had chosen to alter the ballot papers for their candidate to say ‘David Cameron’s Conservatives’, thus making his personal brand the basis of their appeal. What made it sweeter still was that it was the most high-profile chance we’d had to show the power of the Brown machine against the Tories, and we monstered them.

  Our campaign chief, Tom Watson, had secured a photo of the Tory candidate, Tony Lit, posing with Tony Blair at a Labour Party fundraiser just over a month previously, along with a copy of the cheque he’d signed to the party that night. Tom had the photo in his back pocket for weeks, but – no matter what problems we faced during the campaign – he resisted the temptation to use it too early.

  He reminded me of a Victorian sergeant-major, his
men nervously leaning their rifles on bloody sandbags as the enemy attacked, saying calmly: ‘Wait for them, lads … Wait for them!’ When he finally said ‘Fire!’, the Sunday before the vote, I managed to get the photo onto almost every broadsheet front page and on page 2 of every tabloid.

  That said, given later events, it’s interesting to note that Tom and I almost fell out over the distribution of the photo, since he thought it should be an exclusive for the News of the World. It’s also interesting that I was so paranoid at that stage about doing party political business even from the stand-alone computer in No. 10 that I sneaked into the Treasury with my old pass to email the photo round to the Sunday newspapers from one of their many stand-alone terminals.

  Watching the Sedgefield and Ealing Southall results announced late on 19 July 2007 was as good as elections ever got for us, and every Thursday election or by-election night after that was a fearsome test of the spirits, not just because of the results but because of the inevitable panic, dark moods and mischief they triggered among Labour MPs and ministers.

  I spent the 2008 local elections, an utter disaster as Labour slipped to third place with a national vote share of 24 per cent, in Labour’s HQ at Victoria Street. My job was to give briefings and lines to the succession of ministers and MPs trooping off as cannon fodder for the live election night broadcasts. Their first question was always: ‘How bad is it?’ You could tell a lot from their reactions when told. Those loyal to Gordon said: ‘Fucking hell.’ Those who weren’t just raised their eyebrows and sighed.

  Harriet Harman chaired a succession of hourly conference calls with regional organisers from around the country, her customary grimace growing ever more pained. Each new forecast of a council in the heartlands where Labour was going to lose control was greeted with gasps by the room like a roll call of the dead: ‘Oh, Oldham! Agh, Wolverhampton! Hartlepool? Surely not Hartlepool!’