It was going to be difficult to turn this round, but at least the message was simple. Gordon went away to phone Alistair, and Michael and I called our opposite numbers at the Treasury with two instructions, probably more subtly worded by Michael than the way I delivered mine:
‘First, you need to tell Decca to get out there and make clear he was talking about the world economy and that he was confident about Britain’s prospects, and tell her if she doesn’t, you’re going to have to dump on the whole story. Second, you need to get the transcript of the interview together to make clear he was quoted out of context.’
The Treasury press office immediately washed their hands of responsibility for the interview, and said it was all down to Alistair, Maggie and his political media adviser, who had assured them it would just be a personal profile. Spin-doctor’s Commandment No. 8, sub-clause (b): ‘… especially if Camilla, Decca or Petronella tell you it’s just a “personal profile”.’
A friend in the press office also tipped me off that when I saw the photos accompanying the interview, I would flip: Alistair posing on the beach with black storm clouds behind him, and dangling out of a small fishing boat in a fluorescent life-jacket as it washed up onto the rocks.
If that wasn’t bad enough, the point I knew beyond doubt that this was a total amateur-night shambles was when I was told that the Treasury couldn’t do a transcript of the interview because the only person who’d recorded it was Decca. That was when I exploded: ‘What the fuck are you guys doing? This is the Chancellor. The Chancellor! His words matter. Even if he’s making papier-mâché hats on fucking Blue Peter, you have someone there with a tape recorder. This is bloody basic!’
Nevertheless, despite the mutual acrimony, there was at least agreement from Gordon and Alistair, and at all levels of both teams, about what our response should be: that what Alistair was talking about – even if we couldn’t prove it – was the world economy. And that was the script Michael and I spent our Friday night, all day Saturday and all day Sunday delivering.
The idea that anyone was authorised by Gordon to do ‘background briefing’ against Alistair – or that anyone unleashed the attack dogs against him – is not only totally untrue, it wouldn’t have made any sense. Our one objective in terms of media and public perceptions was to show that Alistair had been misrepresented and that he and Gordon were in full agreement. You couldn’t say that to journalists but then add: by the way, Alistair’s really fucked up and he’s going to get the chop.
Now people might point out that I’ve freely admitted in this book to several other occasions when I did or said things without Gordon’s knowledge or approval, hence it’s not inconceivable I could have done some freelancing on this occasion too. But if Gordon gave me a script and a set of marching orders, I followed them to the letter. I didn’t add little private postscripts or give my own take.
That’s partly because I valued my job and my testicles, and wouldn’t have retained either for long if Gordon felt I was disobeying his instructions. But it’s also – and this is crucial – because no journalist cared what I personally thought. Take the dozen or so hacks who called or texted me for the first time in ten months on the evening of Alistair’s ‘Forces of Hell’ interview. While they wanted a comment then, I’d ceased to be of any value before that night because I was no longer the voice of Gordon Brown.
So when I was doing the old job, if I’d ever rung a journalist and said: ‘This is Gordon’s position … but, by the way, here’s what I personally think’ and said the complete opposite – ‘Alistair Darling needs to be sacked’ – not only would I have been failing to get the story Gordon wanted and incurring his wrath in the process, but the journalist concerned would have stopped regarding me as a reliable conduit for Gordon’s views.
In that forty-eight hours, I had journalists I regarded as trusted friends ringing me up and saying: ‘Come on, off the record, Gordon must accept this is a disaster – look at the BBC – it’s dreadful for you guys.’ And all I kept saying was, of course the news is going to be like that if they’re going to misrepresent the interview and say Alistair was talking about Britain, but he wasn’t. They would sigh, almost disappointed that I was maintaining what was effectively a lie.
So instead they’d do what all good journalists do, and keep phoning round every Brownite MP or former adviser until they found someone they could vaguely describe as ‘close to Gordon Brown’ to give them an anti-Darling quote; and in their copy, they would simply assert that the interview had caused dismay, irritation and anger in No. 10, all of which was both true and obvious.
If relationships and trust between the Brown and Darling teams were already fairly strained before that day, they were pretty much broken thereafter. And the truth is I didn’t always help things.
At one point, when my ‘exiles’ team from No. 10 won the Treasury quiz, I took the microphone and – to vociferous boos – said: ‘Well, you’ve really fucked it all up since we left.’ Just before the 2008 Pre-Budget Report, I sent the old Treasury Head of Communications, Steve Field, a text saying: ‘Steve, for God’s sake tell that clueless prick J-C you don’t piss away your only good story three days early’, full knowing that J-C Gray had inherited Steve’s phone number and would get the message himself.
But I was resentful myself of the way that – almost overnight – I began to be ignored by Alistair, Maggie and their kids when we’d pass in the corridors in Downing Street. On a professional level, I would tear my hair out at the way my opposite numbers would publicly exacerbate our problems.
I was walking to Arsenal one day in autumn 2008, when one of the hacks – a mischievous soul – called me in a state of hilarity. He said: ‘I’m sorry to laugh ’cos you’re going to hate this, but I had a massive hole on page 2 for tomorrow, so I gave Alistair’s people a call and said: “I’m getting more noises about the reshuffle”; they said “Is that from No. 10?” and I just went “Hmmm – possibly”; and they’ve gone bloody bananas. I’ve got all these quotes about how Alistair won’t be the fall guy for Gordon’s failures, and it’s Ed Balls this and Ed Balls that, it’s fantastic stuff! We might end up splashing it!’
Hilarious indeed. I naturally declined to do a No. 10 source response and he cheerily said he didn’t expect I would, but then concluded: ‘Just to be serious though, Damian, Darling does need to go. I’m serious, because the entire lobby thinks that operation is now a joke. And you can’t have the Treasury being regarded as a joke. And what I’ve just done there, I mean that’s fish in a barrel stuff.’ ‘OK, I’m off to the football.’ He laughed again: ‘I know, I know, I’m not asking for a response, I’m just telling you.’
The reality was he was exactly right. I knew the Treasury and I knew Treasury communications, and I’d worked in both successfully. I could tell when it was all working well and when it was an absolute shambles, and I still had huge numbers of friends on the inside confirming my impression that the latter was now the norm. All the sense of grip, purpose and professionalism that had been there under Gordon and the Eds had disappeared.
Gordon recognised it too, which was why he was running the whole response to the financial crisis from inside No. 10 and why he was desperate to find some way of getting Ed Balls to take charge at the Treasury. Balls himself was resolute: he wouldn’t even discuss the economy with Gordon unless it was in an open way with Alistair at the table, which just increased Gordon’s frustration.
He also repeatedly turned down Gordon’s entreaties to come to No. 10 in a ‘First Secretary of State’ capacity, the role that Peter Mandelson ended up in from June 2009, because he saw it for what it was: an attempt to get him running the economy by the back door, which he wasn’t prepared to do.
The only way Gordon could put Balls in charge was to make him Chancellor, and that was exactly the bullet he planned to bite in his 2009 reshuffle, which he imagined coming off the back of a successful G20 summit and a boost in the polls. In that scenario, Ed would have a year to get
the Treasury back in shape and deliver a successful pre-election Budget.
But then there was the debacle of my exit, followed by the expenses scandal, terrible local and European election results, the abortive Purnell coup, and the concessions that Gordon had to make to Harriet and others as the price of staying in post. So Alistair survived.
Miraculously, even after I’d left, Alistair’s policy decisions, speeches and Budget statements continued to get hideous media coverage, and his poll ratings as Chancellor remained dire. So, laughably, his people started blaming other No. 10 figures for his continuing problems, or alleging that I was still pulling strings behind the scenes.
If there’s one thing I learned over the years, it’s that strong press advisers with good media intelligence were blamed for a lot of stuff they hadn’t done. And it was weak press advisers with no media intelligence who did the blaming. If a minister read negative coverage and asked their adviser where it was coming from, they would obviously never admit they had no clue and no control, let alone tell the minister that the media just didn’t rate them; not when it was easier to assert as a fact: ‘It’s that bastard McBride trying to do you in.’
Don’t get me wrong. In some cases, with some ministers, they’d be right. But in Alistair’s case, it became a self-inflicted and self-fulfilling obsession.
At some point, I believe he or his people must have realised that the only time he didn’t get negative coverage was when the story was about him being under pressure, undermined and attacked, and everyone being after his job; even better if it was an interview where he said all that himself. Then at the very least he got some sympathy for his plight and admiration for his resilience.
I lost count from 2008 onwards of the number of MPs and hacks who said to me: ‘Well, Alistair says the proof you were briefing against him was that Andy Porter had that “sixty years” story in the Telegraph on the same day as The Guardian, and did it in the most negative way possible.’ I used to wonder how he could possibly be so clueless, but it would have suited his supporters’ political agenda to assert that victim status, and to claim that all the terrible headlines that followed his Decca interview were somehow my fault.
So, in February 2010, while I felt a little irritated to be falsely accused of briefing against him, and a little angry when Sky cameras turned up the next day outside my mum’s house and a Sun reporter appeared at the Finchley Catholic High school gate asking kids whether I taught them, at least I’d stopped feeling confused about why Alistair felt the need to drag me through the mud again, instead of talking about – I dunno – how the economy was on the mend.
He didn’t care what impact generating those headlines had on Gordon and the government, let alone me. All he seemed to care about, to me, was his own reputation and image, which by that stage was well established as ‘poor Alistair, who had to put up with so much, and hadn’t got the credit he deserved for his role in resolving the financial crisis’.
Spare me.
46
THE DAVID MILIBAND CONUNDRUM
Given he was at a pretty low ebb when we broke for the summer in 2008, Gordon was in a remarkably good and positive mood for the first week of his fortnight in Suffolk.
In fact, when Andrew Rawnsley’s book The End of the Party emerged two years later, quoting an anonymous source saying Gordon had ‘hated every minute’ of his time near the seaside resort of Southwold and couldn’t wait to get back to Scotland, it was the one bit of definitive proof that – with no disrespect to Andrew – at least one of his key sources was wilfully making things up.
Gordon loved the house Sarah had chosen – owned by photographer Dave Hogan, whose portraits of celebrities were on every wall – and it was perfect for the kids to run around, for entertaining guests and for Gordon to go jogging with his new personal trainer, Millie.
As usual, I went down there for a few days – staying in a village a few miles down the road – just in case we had any initial problems with the local press or paparazzi. Shriti Vadera was also down and the days followed a nice pattern, where Gordon would exhaust himself playing with the kids or doing his workouts, and then sit outdoors in the early evening to shoot the breeze with me and Shriti.
Well, it was Gordon’s version of shooting the breeze: quite involved discussions about political, economic and media strategy with him taking notes, but with a glass of wine in hand and the occasional diversion to talk about football or the latest book he’d devoured.
Gordon also kept returning to one of his favourite pursuits: fantasy reshuffles. He would never talk about who to get rid of, but loved talking about the ex-Cabinet ministers he could bring back, and the possible recruitment of non-politicians, particularly from the celebrity world.
Over time, I learned not to take all of these discussions seriously, but occasionally, I’d realise Gordon was genuinely intent on trying to get the likes of Alan Sugar, Fiona Phillips, Simon Cowell or Lorraine Kelly to take on government roles. He finally succeeded with Lord Sugar, but could never persuade Fiona or Lorraine to take the title Baroness. I’m not sure he ever asked Simon Cowell.
But the name he mentioned more than any others that week was Peter Mandelson. ‘What would you think?’ he’d ask with a big grin, not interested in what I personally thought, but in what the press would make of it. And I told him repeatedly: they would absolutely love it.
It was incredible even to hear Gordon say Peter’s name in a pleasant tone. Before that year, his reaction to almost any unexpected bad coverage or political criticism would be to narrow his eyes and say ominously and angrily: ‘Mandelson’.
It didn’t matter how irrational this was; if anything, the more impossible it was that Peter had anything to do with a story, the more it smacked to Gordon of his cunning handiwork. The only surprise when HMRC lost the child benefit disks was that he didn’t accuse Peter of stealing them. If he was brought back to Gordon’s Cabinet, I knew it would be a truly sensational tale, like Captain Ahab going swimming with Moby Dick.
Enjoyable as those evenings were, I wanted a bit of a break myself, so I spent Tuesday 29 July having a wander round the pubs of Lowestoft, watching The Dark Knight at the cinema, and generally feeling like it was one of the better days of that year. Always a dangerous thought.
In fact, no sooner had I marvelled that my phone had barely rung all afternoon, than I got a call from a lobby journalist tipping me off that The Guardian seemed quite excited about an article by David Miliband they were carrying the following day. ‘Thanks very much,’ I said, and called up one of Miliband’s aides.
‘Is this article anything we need to worry about?’ I asked. ‘One of the hacks seems to think it’s causing a bit of excitement.’ ‘I don’t know why they think that,’ they said. ‘It’s very positive about everything; all about how we’ll win the next election – just attacks the Tories really; there’s no problem at all. We sent it to Jonathan Ashworth earlier and he didn’t have any comments.’
If Jonathan, who was holding the fort in Downing Street, was fine with it, then that was good enough for me. He had a nose for trouble like Lassie’s. I didn’t even bother telling Gordon about it on the basis it was no reason to disturb his evening.
My phone started to ring again around 9 p.m. when the article appeared on the Guardian website. Of itself, it looked relatively innocuous, but – as ever with David’s articles – the treachery was between the lines: criticism of ‘exaggerated claims of success’ at a time when Gordon was under fire for hailing the end of boom and bust; demands for a ‘radical new phase’ for Labour, and for the party to offer ‘real change, not just in policy, but the way we do politics’.
It was always an oddity of these things that he seemed to have no desire in communicating his meaning plainly to the public or even to most Guardian readers, the vast majority of whom would, I assume, have been a little annoyed if told that those lines were designed to be understood by the Westminster cognoscenti, not by the likes of them. There was something o
f the art-house auteur about him.
Rather more blatantly, the article set out all the ways Labour should oppose David Cameron, but omitted any mention of Gordon Brown. And if there was any doubt how the whole exercise was meant to be perceived, The Guardian’s very heavy splash story accompanying the article removed them.
Still, I couldn’t work out why Jonathan had cleared the article and not warned anyone. The answer came through: he hadn’t and didn’t know what I was talking about. And if that was deliberate misinformation, I could understand why. It was early enough when I’d called Miliband’s people that if we’d demanded to see a copy of the article at that stage, we could have insisted on changes being made, which would have made him look weak and defeated the whole object of writing it.
In the morning, there were a series of hasty conference calls, including with Gordon, to decide how we were going to respond. Usually there was a pretty clear consensus about these things, but on this occasion the advice was split. Douglas in particular was insistent we should be relaxed, and say we agreed with every word David had written and had no quarrel with how he’d written it.
Knowing what I knew about the way the article had been briefed, I thought that was impossible naivety from Douglas and I mean impossible. By contrast, Ed Balls was adamant that we all knew what David was up to, as did every Labour MP, and there was no point kidding ourselves; the only question was a tactical one about how to respond.
Gordon himself was as equivocal as the advice he was getting, saying things like ‘Don’t go too heavy’, which suggested a relaxed response, but then ‘Put him in a position where he’s got to come out and clarify what he meant’, which suggested ramping the pressure up a bit. Ultimately, the marching orders weren’t clear, and when told that some backbench MPs were already on the rampage against David, he just sighed that there was nothing we could do about that.
Power Trip Page 37