Here is a real-life example: the Ministry of Justice under Jack Straw submitted an item to Paul Brown one Wednesday in 2008 saying they’d be issuing a consultation paper a week on Tuesday on options for improved management of cemetery land; something Paul translated into the grid as ‘MoJ: Cemetery Management’. That was enough for Gavin Kelly and Dan Corry to raise their eyebrows and ask curiously: ‘What’s this about?’ Paul was told to get a copy of the consultation paper and dig out the Cabinet sub-committee meeting where it had been discussed for the next week’s meeting.
Next Friday, four days before the planned consultation, Paul was able to put a lot more detail in the ‘Upcoming Business’ paper about the proposal, at which point everyone in the room erupted. ‘Hold on a minute, one of the options is to dig up old graveyards in high-value areas, incinerate the bodies, and sell off the land?! Are you fucking kidding?! Get it out of the grid now, and tell Jack Straw’s office this consultation is not happening in any form at any time, full stop.’
And why is that example particularly relevant in the context of Steve Hilton’s complaints? Because a similar item labelled ‘Forest Management Consultation’ was allowed to slip through unnoticed and unchallenged by anyone in No. 10 in October 2010, leading to the great row and rural rebellion in 2011 over the planned ‘privatisation’ of England’s forests.
This was around the time Hilton and his policy team had stopped attending the grid meetings because of their animus with the Tory press team, which – when I think back to attending those grid meetings in Ed Miliband’s office in 2008 despite the froideur between us – seems rather childish and dysfunctional.
And if people in those positions are not prepared to suspend their own personal feelings for the one hour it takes every Friday to come together as a team and stop potential problems materialising, they are never going to be willing to do the infinitely more mind-numbing, energy-sapping and soul-destroying work that I had to do for hours each week on my own trying to neutralise and nullify problems that had already emerged.
On one day, it would be some obscure bit of legislation we were enacting with a consequence that no one could possibly have foreseen, let alone intended. On another day, it would be something a junior minister had said at what they thought was a private meeting that you prayed to God had been taken out of context.
These stories were the antithesis of the grid. They were the gloop: no planning, thought or preparation would have gone into any of them; they would always come along at the worst possible time; and – while having every capacity to do so – they were the last thing you would ever want dominating the news agenda.
If I was lucky, I’d be told about them by another Whitehall press office or by one of our own No. 10 policy advisers: they’d have spotted the potential problem themselves and we could sort out our response before anyone else did. If I was unlucky, the call would come from a journalist, meaning we had a story to kill; if I was having the day from hell, that’s because they’d been tipped off by the Tories, meaning we had a political row on our hands.
The keys to dealing with that kind of story were time and control – the more of both the better. If Ed Balls called up at 9 a.m. on a Monday and said a lawyer in his department had just realised their new safety legislation for children’s playgrounds was going to mean a ban on climbing frames in pub beer gardens, that was fine. If it was 3 p.m. on a Saturday with the Tories offering that same story round all the Sunday papers, we had a major problem.
Obviously the easy thing for me to have done over the years would have been to say: talk to the department, it’s their legislation; or what the minister said in that meeting is a matter for him. I could have ducked the responsibility, or at the very least passed it on to someone else. But I regarded dealing with these kind of stories and stopping them becoming ‘news’ as one of the most integral parts of my job, just as surely as trying to get one of Gordon’s speeches into the headlines.
But what made the gloop such hard work was that, precisely because the story could be about anything and come in any form, there was no set method or routine for killing it. All I could do was work backwards and ask myself: ‘What makes this the Mail on Sunday splash? What’s their headline?’ And then I’d focus simply on making that line untrue.
So if the Mail on Sunday rang me and said: ‘We understand that nurses who receive free cabs home after late shifts are in future going to be taxed on them as a benefit in kind’, I’d need to go back two or three rapid phone calls later and say:
‘Not true. We think some idiot from the revenue office near the Royal Free misinterpreted the guidance, so HMRC have told him he’s screwed up, and sent out fresh guidance to clarify the position, just in case anyone else makes the same mistake.’ ‘Well, when did they send out the guidance?’ ‘I’m not exactly sure, but definitely within the last fortnight.’
That would be a minor lie-without-lying. I wouldn’t be exactly sure at which second within the previous ten minutes an urgent email had gone out from HMRC to its revenue offices, but I was right to say it was within the last fortnight.
Those kinds of stories were relatively easy, albeit frantic. We could always say some daft action a department had taken had already been unpicked or that amendments had already been prepared to undo the unintended consequence of some legislation. Even if a newspaper still ran the story, it was unlikely to be the splash the next day.
More difficult were the stories based on unassailable facts: missed targets; rogue quotes; wasted money; leaked memos; letters that had never received a reply. Things that would just make the government, ministers or Gordon himself look like shit. Sometimes I’d just have to accept that the story was too good – by which I mean too bad – to get on top of, but it was rare that I’d accept defeat so easily.
More often, I’d say to the journalist, obviously provided I knew and trusted them: ‘Looks like a fair cop. Shame though, I had a little exclusive I thought you’d like for tomorrow, but if you’ve already got your splash, I’ll give someone else the other story.’ I wasn’t actually proposing a trade-off, but it would take a brave journalist not at least to ask what the other story was about, so they could weigh up what was better. So they usually would.
That was where things could get murky. If I had an exceptionally strong and revelatory new policy announcement, then briefing that was an option – but it was also a bit of a waste.
More usually, if there was a really shitty story that I knew was due to become public soon – a Freedom of Information release, some bad statistics, a damning report – I would take the view that this was the best time to get it out, if it helped obscure some bit of gloop in the process. It was what you might call burying bad, unplanned news under worse news that we were prepared for.
Obviously I wouldn’t just dish up that alternative story in full; I’d provide a rough outline and say: ‘If you think that would definitely be the splash instead of your story, I’ll give you all the details.’
And say what you like about media ethics, what exactly is the hack meant to do in that situation? Turn down a better, more damaging story than the one they’ve got? Maybe take both stories, hold one back, and splash them both? Or split the front page and do a ‘Government in chaos’ headline? Or even, my goodness, expose the No. 10 adviser shamelessly trying to manipulate the press?
Well, take your pick, but in the real world, any journalist worth their salt would just say: ‘Nice doing business with you’, and go off and tell their editor they had two belting exclusives for tomorrow’s paper, the first of which is guaranteed to dominate the morning news agenda.
I’d estimate that I spent at least a hundred days within 2008 engaged in that desperate effort to keep the gloop out of the newspapers, or at least get it off the front pages, and on the vast majority of occasions, I succeeded. But it was the oddest form of ‘success’ to experience.
Doing the job I did for as long as I did, I engaged in huge numbers of thankless tasks: cleaning up Gordon
’s hotel rooms after he left them in case the cleaner was an aspiring journalist; spending hours briefing ungrateful, arrogant or air-headed ministers about what to say on Question Time or Any Questions?; and taking what Ian Austin described as ‘no votes’ phone calls from members of the Foreign Press Association for an overseas paper, as in: ‘Why do you bother, mate? There are no votes in it.’
But right at the top of the list of thankless tasks were those long days and evenings spent simply stopping stories from appearing in the newspaper. I’d sometimes leave No. 10 after midnight – too late to get a drink, too late for the Tube – and walk down to Victoria to buy the next day’s papers.
I’d flick through the one I’d been dealing with all day, turn every news page until I got to the lifestyle or the business section, and know I’d achieved my objective: I’d achieved nothing. I’d sometimes have spent eight or nine hours that day calling and emailing, threatening and cajoling, permanently damaging relationships with other departments, flogging my guts out just to ensure nothing happened and no one noticed.
On other occasions, where I’d dealt with something entirely myself, I’d stand at Victoria and realise that only the journalist and I would ever know what I’d done and how hard I’d worked to kill his or her story, and they were the last person who would thank me. I’d sit on the night bus back to Finchley, feeling sorry for myself, unappreciated, isolated and a little distraught at the idea I could be doing exactly the same thing tomorrow. And the next day. And all weekend.
I’d go on the Saturday night press call, where advisers from all over Whitehall would be told what was on the front pages of the Sunday papers and be told by me and others what their ministers should say if asked questions about them the next day. The No. 10 press officer on overnight duty would read out the headlines on each splash, and I’d feel like shouting: ‘Do you know what that almost was?’ when we’d get to a paper whose gloopy story I’d spiked. But I was never one for revealing my methods.
Instead, at all those times I just used to remind myself what my dad would shout in those churches: ‘Only God can see! Just for the glory of God!’ Not that I was fool enough to believe God gave a damn about what appeared on the front of the Express. He’s more of a Telegraph man.
But my dad’s words were a reminder to me why I really did what I did, and why I kept coming back to do it again every day, and why I never, ever slacked off or left the responsibility to someone else. It was what I’d dedicated and subsumed my life to every day of every week for the last five years: just making sure Gordon was protected and defended at all times.
My morning equivalent was waking at 5.59 a.m. every weekday, always with a feeling of sheer terror as the pips introducing the Today programme came on and I waited to hear the first news bulletins. If we’d briefed a story and it hadn’t made it on, I knew Gordon would call and go wild, demanding to know why I’d failed. But far worse were the mornings when we hadn’t briefed anything, and the sickness in my stomach was just a fear of the unknown: what if I’d failed to stop a bad story appearing; what if I’d let Gordon down?
Did he appreciate it? Did he even know? Those were never questions I asked myself because frankly they didn’t matter. I wasn’t doing the job to be thanked or praised. I wasn’t doing it – as my mum taught me – for a ribboned coat or a season’s fame. I wasn’t doing it for myself.
I was doing it out of devotion, out of loyalty and out of some degree of love; and I not only wanted to destroy his enemies, I also came to despise any of his so-called friends who were in it for themselves rather than for him.
45
THE FORCES OF HELL
23 February 2010 – I’d been almost a year out of Downing Street, almost eight months into my job working for Finchley Catholic High School and had almost entirely disappeared out of public consciousness. I was killing time in the Tally Ho pub in North Finchley before my usual Thursday evening quiz in Whetstone, when I looked up at the TV, saw my face on Sky News, and thought: ‘Ah bollocks, what’s happened now?’
The ‘Breaking News’ banner whooshed up on the bottom of the screen: ‘Darling says “Forces of Hell were unleashed” on him in August 2008.’ Of all the abusive responses that filled my mind at that point, I’m glad to say the one that won out was from the old media professional still beating away inside me:
‘Will Alistair ever do ONE fucking interview where he says something positive about the Labour Party or the economy, or does he set out to create bad headlines every single time?’
I wrote that out as a text message to send to a few old colleagues and trusted journalists, stared at it for a bit, sank what remained of my pint, let the rage die down and pressed delete. I might have been learning very slowly, but at least I was learning.
I had a wry smile as my phone started to fill up with texts and voicemails from a huge number of journalists I’d not heard from since the week I’d been sacked, as well as the smaller number who’d kept in touch. I resisted the urge to spend the evening re-acquainting myself with the strangers and instead just sat there thinking. What is it with Alistair? Why does he always do this?
As far as I was concerned, he was either catastrophically inept or misguided when it came to his public interventions in – as opposed to his private relationships with – the press; or he was just totally out for himself and didn’t care about the impact on the government as a whole.
Alistair said later he just told the truth as he saw it, and felt that was the best course. His supporters were obviously expecting the public to appreciate him for it – not that it ever appeared to do him much good when it came to his poll ratings as Chancellor.
Before 2008, I had always got on well with Alistair and his family. I stayed at their home a couple of times in Edinburgh, including the night before Robin Cook’s funeral. I offered his eldest son work experience in the Treasury. I sat up watching TV with his wife, Maggie, who generously agreed to switch over from Newsnight Scotland so I could watch NYPD Blue.
And when Gordon decided to make Alistair his Chancellor, I drafted and doled out the press briefing which said it was important the markets knew there was no going back to the years of chopping and changing chancellors every few years, and that – as the ultimate ‘safe pair of hands’ – people could have confidence that Alistair would stay in post until the next election.
I was no enemy of Alistair’s and in his early months in post, I bent over backwards trying to help his special advisers, talking them through how to brief the Budget and feeding them all the best attack lines we had saved up for use on George Osborne.
When Osborne gave a hideously bad interview to The Guardian’s Decca Aitkenhead in September 2007, I was straight onto Alistair’s office, pointing out the worst lines and suggesting how they could use them in Treasury Questions. I can distinctly recall saying gleefully: ‘They must be bloody mad giving an interview to Decca Aitkenhead – what did they think was going to happen?!’
Among my many commandments of being a press adviser, one of the higher placed was: ‘Thou shalt under no circumstances do an interview with Camilla Long, Decca Aitkenhead or Petronella Wyatt.’ They’re all excellent journalists; it’s just that no good has ever come of a politician doing an interview with any of them.
Roll forward to the end of August 2008. We’d just returned from the success of the Beijing Olympics and the political season was about to begin in earnest. I’d had a good Friday afternoon doing my rounds of the Sunday hacks, and began my evening routine phoning the daily political editors to see whether there was anything cooking in the tomorrow’s papers. Andy Porter from the Telegraph sounded brisk. That was never a good sign.
‘Yeah, there is something I need to check. Were you guys all on board with this interview Alistair’s done with The Guardian?’ I tried not to sound too disturbed. ‘Erm, not sure which one you mean? Who’s it with?’ ‘It’s in the magazine, he’s done it from his holiday in Scotland … with Decca Aitkenhead.’ A small nuclear bomb went off
in my head. ‘But I assume you guys must have OK’d it because it’s quite heavy on the economy, you know, “the economic situation is the worst for sixty years”. ‘Does he mean the world economic situation or Britain’s?’ I asked. ‘He doesn’t say,’ said Andy. ‘And is that the top line?’ ‘Yeah, “Britain in grip of worst economic crisis in sixty years, admits Darling”.’ ‘Splash?’ ‘What do you think?’
Whatever the truth about the economic situation, this was a massive crisis. Gordon was busy telling the press, the markets and the public that the world was facing a major financial crisis, but because of our historically low debt levels and the early and decisive action we were taking to maintain liquidity and confidence, we were better able to withstand the global recession than other countries and better prepared than we had been in previous generations.
That was the script that even the most junior minister knew to deliver, let alone the Chancellor. Andy asked if we wanted to comment, and I said no. I asked him if everyone had it, and he said that it was just in the Telegraph and The Guardian.
I phoned Michael Ellam, then Gordon. Michael was incredulous but phlegmatic. Gordon was equally incredulous, but rather less than phlegmatic. Nevertheless, both were clear there was only one course of action: we had to agree a joint line with the Treasury that there was no split between our position and theirs.
The key was to explain that Alistair had been misquoted and misinterpreted. He meant that the world economy was facing its most serious crisis in sixty years – no one disputed that – but what The Guardian hadn’t reported was his clear view, often expressed, that the action we were able to take in Britain, because of our stability; our low levels of debt, inflation and unemployment; and our decision to stay out of the euro, was going to protect the country from the worst damage seen in previous recessions.
Power Trip Page 36