The gut instinct of even very experienced politicians like David Blunkett or Peter Mandelson is to issue statements as quickly as possible to try and kill a story, usually based just on their selective memory of events or conversations. But that rush to comment has led to many an eventual resignation, as their stories are seen to ‘unravel’ or as third parties feel morally obliged to contradict what they have said.
There was another factor in this case. I was later told that some of the Labour MPs being consulted – even at that stage – were asking serious questions about how the emails had been obtained. There was no doubting I’d have to resign, but if – as some of those MPs suspected – there were some Tory black ops at work, didn’t that need to be exposed and investigated at the same time? If not, what was stopping them doing the same trick again?
The word ‘hacking’ featured large in those conversations even then, and there was a thought that – if I was going to resign – the Labour Party or No. 10 should simultaneously call in the police to get to the bottom of how the emails had been obtained.
So I stood pacing round my flat, waiting for them to reach a conclusion, all the while broadcasters and newspapers calling and texting asking for quotes, interviews and updates. One senior journalist texted me three or four times in the course of the day with variations on: ‘Do NOT say a word to any other paper. We want an exclusive deal on your story before the election: 6 figures starting with a 2.’
Eventually, Gordon rang, very formal and businesslike: ‘OK, Damian, I need your word that you will tell me the truth. If the years we’ve worked together mean anything, I need your absolute word.’ ‘Yep, of course,’ I said solemnly, ‘I give you my word – I promise I’ll tell you the truth.’
‘Right, firstly, is there anyone else in No. 10 or in the government or in the Labour Party who is involved in these emails or this website? Anyone with any involvement at any level?’
‘No. Absolutely, definitely not. There was one meeting with some other party people where Derek mentioned starting a website, and there were other party people copied in on the emails, but no one has said anything or done anything on this besides me and Derek. I swear to you.’
‘OK, secondly, do you think that these emails might have been hacked? What’s the explanation for how someone has got hold of them?’
‘Right, there are only two ways these emails have got out: either someone who works with Derek and who has access to his computer has printed out several months of emails and leaked them to the Guido website, or someone else has got into his emails somehow and handed them over. He says it’s definitely not the first.’
‘OK, finally, what else is going to come out about you when they come for you over this? Are there other emails, or other things journalists know about you, or any scandal stuff you’ve been up to? And is there anything you’ve done where people will call for the police to be involved?’
‘Look, Gordon, I honestly don’t know what’ll come out and it’s possible some journalists will do the dirty on me about stories I did with them, but I know this is the worst thing that they could possibly get on me, so if you guys are wondering if the story is just going to get bigger and bigger, no it won’t, this is as big as it can get.’
I went on: ‘As for scandal stuff, any sex stuff will be old, there’s no drugs, and I haven’t had any dodgy freebies or money from anyone. And on the police, I never leaked any documents or got any information illegally, so there’s nothing on that score. The only thing is I had a really bad fight in Cardiff last month, so if someone recognises me and gets the CCTV, that might become an issue, but I doubt they will.’
There was silence. Under normal circumstances, I think the last bit of information might have got a reaction, but Gordon was past that now. ‘OK, Damian, I’ll ring you back.’
The conference calls began again and, at that point, I’d had enough. I left my Holloway flat via the underground car park – just in case anyone had tracked me down – and headed up to Southgate to watch Arsenal away at Wigan on TV. The game had just kicked off when the No. 10 switchboard called and asked if they could patch me in to a conference call.
The discussion had clearly been going on a while, and – though I didn’t hear anyone say anything bad – when the switchboard operator announced I was on the call, there was a sudden silence, as if everyone was wondering: ‘How long has he been on the call?’
Gordon spoke up, and began to conduct an incredibly polite and orderly kangaroo court hearing. Jeremy Heywood was asked to advise whether there had been a breach of the special adviser code, and said that there had been; Michael Dugher was asked to give a sense of how much the Sunday papers would be reporting and how big the story was (short answers: ‘Everything’ and ‘Massive’); and at each stage, others were asked to chip in their views.
It was a painfully drawn-out process, during which my friend Anthony Glackin came out to the beer garden and put a fresh pint of Fosters down for me. I pointed inside to the pub; he shook his head sorrowfully and made his fingers into a 01. He then pointed at my phone; I shook my head sorrowfully and drew a finger across my throat.
Michael Dugher finished his media summary on the call, and Gordon tried to offer some even-handed deliberations on where we were. I cut across him. I didn’t want him to have to say the words.
‘OK, Gordon, I think that’s enough. Look, we all know I have to resign, so that’s all there is to it. And I’m sorry to everyone that it’s come to this and I’m sorry to you, Gordon. And I know you guys are going to have to put the boot in over the next few days trying to explain how this has happened and how I’ve been totally out of control for the last six months, and I’m telling you I don’t mind that at all – I’m expecting it and it’s absolutely what you should do in the circumstances. So don’t hold back out of friendship; get your Doc Martens on, and give me a bloody good kicking.’
I said I’d write my resignation statement and send it to Dugher to issue, and that would be that.
When the call ended, Gordon rang back immediately from his mobile, not going through the switchboard. He’d clearly had the words in his head all day, saying how sorry he was, and that it was this bloody problem with email – ‘you treat it like you’re having a conversation in the pub, but it’s not, it’s there in black and white’, then he started to talk about everything I’d done for him over the years, and how I’d looked out for Sarah and the boys, and how hard I’d worked, and…
I cut him off. ‘I know,’ I said. ‘It’s OK, Gordon, you don’t need to say it. It’s been an honour. You’re a great, great man, and I’m proud to have worked for you.’
He gave the usual self-deprecating guffaw I heard whenever anyone praised him.
‘No, really,’ I sighed. ‘It’s been an honour, and I’ve enjoyed every minute – well, most of them – and I’m just sorry it’s ended like this. But listen to me, the last piece of press advice I’ll ever give you. That’s it now. Don’t call me again. Don’t email me. The first question you’ll be asked in every interview for the next fortnight is when you last spoke to me and your answer needs to be: “When I accepted his resignation”.’
He said admonishingly: ‘I can still speak to you!’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘you can’t. And I won’t answer the phone, because it’s important for me as well as you that we can both tell the truth on this.’
I told him goodbye, and he still said: ‘I’ll talk to you later on.’ A couple of days later, he called and left a voicemail saying he was checking I was OK, and sorry about all the coverage, and ‘I hope your mother and Balshen are well’, and telling me to ring him back. I texted Sarah and said I wasn’t going to ring him back and that she needed to tell him off.
I think that did the trick, and that was the last contact we had until he left Downing Street, aside from a card and book at Christmas 2009, smuggled surreptitiously to me via Balshen.
Back in the beer garden in Southgate, I got a text message from Jeremy Heywood: ‘Whatever else has
happened, it is to your great credit that you helped Gordon reach the only possible decision in these circumstances.’
By this stage, after instructing No. 10 to give me a kicking, taking a hard line with Gordon on phone calls and receiving that text from Jeremy, I was feeling quite the model professional.
And then Sue called.
Sue, the real model professional, who always sat next to Gordon shaking her head as I came running down the platform at Euston just as the train pulled away; always rolled her eyes when I arrived late for a press breakfast at party conference still wearing last night’s clothes; and always intervened when necessary and told me that – no matter how good I was at breaking bad news to Gordon – now was definitely not the time.
‘Hallo you,’ she said with a breaking voice, ‘I just wanted to tell you that I’m really sorry, and it’s been a real…’ I’d never seen or heard Sue cry before, and when she broke down, I began to go myself for the first time that day. I just said: ‘I know, I know. Me too. But don’t start me off.’
‘OK,’ she said, ‘but just take care. Remember you’ve still got Balshen, and you’ve got a lot of people who care about you, so don’t go crazy; it’ll all be alright in the end.’
I got off the phone, ignored the mounting pile of text messages in my inbox, and hammered out my resignation statement in about two minutes, something you should never do. It was a rather angry and defensive little howl of protest, which I can’t bear to read now, especially as it includes a typo and the awful cliché about ‘advisers becoming the story’.
I fired it off to Michael Dugher and went back inside the pub. Anthony and his brother Damien looked at me, and I said: ‘There we go – all done.’
Damien replied: ‘Theo’s scored. Van Persie’s on. And it’s your round … if you can afford one.’
51
BACK TO THE BEGINNING
After the game, Damien and I went back to his local and were joined by Balshen and her friend Yon. Balshen had clearly been crying all afternoon, but kept up a determined smile and maintained that things were going to be OK, even while tears were streaming down her face. I’d just about coped with Sue crying but I couldn’t cope with Balshen, and it was the first time I cried myself.
I spent that night at Damien’s and spent most of the next day going with Balshen and Yon from pub to pub, avoiding the ones with papers on the bar or Sky News on the TV. We all fell asleep in the living room in Balshen’s flat in Southgate, a rare night when I didn’t want to watch the paper reviews.
In the morning, Balshen called in a panic from her car after dropping Yon back home: ‘There’s a camera outside! I think it’s ITN.’ As she drove round the back of the flats, her door buzzer started ringing incessantly. I crept to the window and could see a photographer, a cameraman and a female journalist with a microphone standing outside. I got ready in a flash and made my escape via the downstairs neighbours’ window and Balshen’s car boot.
I ended up spending seven nights under seven different roofs, and – at a time I was being vilified for everything from my failure to return Jackie Ashley’s phone calls to epitomising the ‘karaoke culture’ of Gordon’s inner circle – I devoted every remaining shred of my professional pride to avoiding the cameras searching for me across north London.
After years of advising other people in that situation, there was no way I was going to be the guy with cameras and microphones thrust in his face by hacks seeking a quote or provoking an angry reaction; it wouldn’t be me running down the street being chased by the pack.
There were crews camped outside our old family home in Finchley for a week, where my mum would have been staying if she’d not gone to France, and there were what looked like one van and two cars’ worth of journalists parked round the clock in the street outside my Holloway flat, between the two entrances.
I got several calls from broadcasters and snappers telling me that, by making such a good job of evading them, I was just creating even more competition among the hacks to get the first pictures or the first doorstep or street confrontation. Some of them urged me to see sense and do one controlled interview in an environment of my choosing, after which they said the competition and pressure would dissipate.
Others were much more helpful. One good friend who worked for a broadcaster told me to call from a landline. When I did, they said: ‘Keep your mobile phone off. Some of the other lot are paying contacts at the phone companies to track your signal. If you switch your phone on, do it five minutes before you get on the Underground so all your text messages come through, reply to them all on the Tube and send them all when you get above ground, then switch your phone off again. Whatever you do, don’t just sit in the same place sending texts and making calls.’
They also told me the name of a particular ‘friend’ who was reporting anything they heard about my whereabouts to a TV producer, and they told me not to go back to a pub in Barnet whose landlord had clocked me and called in the sighting; suddenly it made sense that he’d tried to keep me behind for one on the house for good luck when I went to leave.
I could have tried to go abroad, but that kind of thing is a story in itself, and – when I wasn’t indoors – I much preferred hiding in plain sight in the pubs and streets of north London, especially once I’d had the advice about my mobile phone. I had a lot to think about in terms of what I was going to do next, and I did most of that thinking in pubs along the Holloway Road: Phibbers, The George, The Hercules and The Quays all have a place in my heart for the sanctuary they provided that week.
In those first few days, I can’t honestly say I was depressed or despondent. It just felt like I was watching something happening to someone else. The bloke on the TV or on the front of the newspapers didn’t feel like me, and I hardly read or watched any of the coverage, except when either an old colleague or a journalist would text me and say something like: ‘Have you seen that utter pile of shit in The Independent? What the fuck does that idiot know?’
The trouble was that meant I only read the worst things I could possibly read that week. Not that there were many good things being written – although The Observer’s Gaby Hinsliff and the FT’s James Blitz both wrote more balanced pieces. What I mean is I only read things that were guaranteed to wind me up: columnists who had literally never spoken to me reporting what I was like to deal with or what kind of character I was.
And it did hurt that the vast majority of political editors and reporters who did know me well stayed entirely silent. Some argued that told its own tale – ‘I was asked to write some devastating account of what you were like, but I refused,’ one said proudly, ‘and obviously they weren’t interested in me writing the opposite.’ But others were more honest; one said the atmosphere on his paper was like the French Revolutionary Tribunals. He’d sit there listening to colleagues who’d never met me offering their denunciations, and he said he had to go along with it or risk being condemned himself.
The feelings of depression and despondency only really kicked in once the first post-scandal opinion poll was published in The Guardian, showing the boost Gordon had received in their poll conducted after the G20 summit had been wiped out. To see those poll numbers; to see Gordon and the rest of the party having to deal every day with the fallout from my emails; and to see Derek forced to resign from Labour List having done nothing wrong himself; it was only then that I started waking up every morning with that sick feeling coming over me as reality took over.
Worst of all was to see Ed Balls dragged through the mud simply by association with me thanks to some total garbage briefed anonymously by one of my ex-colleagues to Isabel Oakeshott of the Sunday Times. She was incredibly detailed about the background of the whistleblower, to the extent that – if everything she’d said was accurate – I worked out there was only one person it could possibly be, someone I regarded as a close friend.
I couldn’t believe it was them, or maybe just didn’t want to, but I had to remind myself that what they were doing
wasn’t driven out of any disloyalty towards me, but out of a simple impulse to taint Ed Balls with my brush. It was another reminder that some people around Gordon had been fighting the next Labour leadership election since October 2007.
I never felt suicidal. I couldn’t make things even worse for my mum or for Balshen by making them go through that as well, and – bizarrely – when I did have some drunken self-destructive thoughts while watching buses and trucks crash past on the Holloway Road, I remember the voice in my head saying: ‘Yeah, but that would just keep the story going a while longer.’
I felt much better the following week when an old No. 10 colleague called to tell me that at a focus group the Labour Party had conducted the previous night most people had barely registered the scandal, and those who did thought I’d just been caught out doing what all spin-doctors did. He also said one of the polls in tomorrow’s papers showed no change in Labour’s ratings from after the G20.
By the time the expenses scandal had started to rear its head – doing genuine, lasting damage to Labour’s poll ratings – the caravan had well and truly moved on, and when I was finally ‘found’ by a snapper walking to Arsenal one afternoon in May, he couldn’t even sell the pictures.
And that was itself a hard thing to deal with. My decade at the heart of the Treasury and No. 10 had come to an end, as had my fortnight in the eye of the storm, and now there was just a big silent void.
I told myself what a blessing it was not to have to set my alarm for 5.59 a.m. every morning and go through the nervous torture of the pips introducing the Today programme, but I’d still wake up in a panic anyway and have to force myself not to switch them on.
I’d get to lunchtime, and switch my mobile phone off and on again to check it was working: how could it be that I hadn’t had a single phone call or text all day? I’d call Balshen in the afternoon to make evening plans, and she’d say incredulously: ‘Oh my God, are you not watching the news?’, and I’d have to admit that I wasn’t and had no idea why she was so busy.
Power Trip Page 42