None of this felt like a relief from the burdens of the job or a release from my responsibilities. I just felt totally lost and a little abandoned. In that context, I’ve never forgotten the Westminster people who – just like my oldest school friends and the group I went to Arsenal with – stayed constantly in touch, checking I was OK and asking if I wanted to meet up for a drink.
Colleagues like Robbie Browse, Dawn Goring, Katie Martin, Nicola Burdett, Jo Dipple, Stewart Wood, Jonathan Ashworth and Katie Myler; journalist contacts like Vincent Moss, Paddy Hennessy, Andy Porter, Kay Burley, Sumeet Desai, Gloria De Piero, Clare Nasir and Simon Walters; plus the odd, brave MP like Ian Austin and Tom Watson – in those few weeks, they went from being colleagues because of my job to being friends for life.
And despite the severe flak he’d taken over his association with me, both the reality and the myths spread by his enemies, Ed Balls would always grab the phone when I was talking to Balshen to ask how I was and what I was up to.
Obviously I wouldn’t wish those weeks on anyone, but finding out who my friends really were was one of the few benefits of the experience. And they all asked the same thing: has Gordon been in touch? When I told them he was under strict orders from me not to call, they would just look hurt at the whole situation. Gloria once asked: ‘Is he not worried about you?’ Then after a pause: ‘Actually, are you not worried about him? What’s he going to do without you?’
In truth, I was now having recurring anxiety dreams about Gordon screwing up in public with me unable to stop it: one in particular where I was locked in a sound booth at party conference watching Gordon walk out to give his speech in a full set of medieval armour. When he inevitably fell over onto his front and couldn’t get up, I’d wake up sweating, screaming: ‘Help him, for fuck’s sake, help him!’
I needed to move on, and I needed to find a new job, easier said than done when The Times’ Danny Finkelstein had recently described me as ‘the most unemployable man in Britain’.
But the very first day I picked up The Guardian and turned to the jobs pages, the first vacancy I saw was for a non-teaching post at my old school, Finchley Catholic High. I wrote to my former deputy headteacher, Kevin Hoare – now the head – applying for the job, but I gave him a get-out clause by writing: ‘I realise that recruiting me is not something that could be done lightly at this time, and I would understand completely if it was not considered appropriate.’
Nobody told Kevin Hoare or his imminent successor – another former pupil of the school – Seamus McKenna what to do. When I went to be interviewed by them and the head of governors, Jane Inzani, they told me that they believed both in forgiveness and redemption and also in looking out for their own; and if I was prepared to work hard, they were prepared to give me a fresh start.
I started that August, working on building business links for the school, and when the teachers started to return after the summer holidays, I was pleased to recognise some faces who’d taught me when I’d joined them twenty years previously. My old physics teacher, John Shutler, gave me a giant bear-hug when he first saw me, and said: ‘We’ll look after you now, old boy.’
On the first full day of school, a teachers’ inset day, I was due to introduce myself formally to all the staff, but as I walked into the hall, there was shouting behind me, drawing the attention of all the teachers sat there. I turned round and a swarthy man in a baseball cap, who I later discovered was Paul Staines, rushed up and handed me a lawyer’s letter, ‘courtesy of Nadine Dorries’.
The letter was initiating defamation proceedings about one of the stories in the Red Rag emails, and I was still absorbing the contents and thinking through the implications in a highly rattled state when I was called up to the front to introduce myself. Never a confident public speaker at the best of times, I ended up with my voice and hands shaking like a leaf, and felt humiliated in front of my new colleagues. That was a very low point in a bad year.
I talked the Dorries letter over with my lawyer brothers, and they were pretty clear that – in terms of the defamation – I didn’t have a leg to stand on and could have to pay serious damages. My only argument was about the process of who or what had caused the offending email to be made public.
I hadn’t got too panicked about my financial situation since leaving Downing Street, but this was different. Although it was reported I’d been on a six-figure salary in No. 10, I was actually one of the lowest-paid special advisers. I’d frozen my pay in real terms since going to the political side in 2005, and I was on the lowest rung of the senior civil service pay scale before that.
Because I’d been guilty of gross misconduct, I hadn’t been entitled to any severance pay or a notice period, and beyond being paid for the work I’d done in April, the only thing the Cabinet Office were prepared to offer was some compensation for holiday that I’d not taken.
‘How many days’ leave have you got saved up?’ I was asked by one of their HR people after I’d left. ‘136,’ I said. She laughed. ‘I’m not kidding,’ I said. ‘I’ve taken one full week off in the last eight years; aside from that it’s just been the odd day here and there.’ ‘But you weren’t allowed to carry all that leave forward,’ she said soberly. ‘Yeah, I know,’ I replied, ‘I was just saying.’ In the end, they agreed to pay me for twenty days’ untaken leave.
That money, plus what I had saved up in the bank and with some help from my mum and brothers, had got me through the four months I’d been unemployed. The new job at Finchley Catholic High had come at just the right time, but – on that salary – there was no way I could also afford a large libel bill.
After again consulting with my brothers, I wrote back to Dorries’s lawyer, setting out the best argument I could muster in my defence – that I wasn’t responsible for the emails becoming public. I offered to settle Dorries’s claim, though my circumstances meant I could only offer to pay her a small amount in compensation for what had happened. Much to my relief, my offer was accepted.
With that out of the way, I settled down into the imagined anonymity of life at the school, although with several hundred students swapping gossip at the start of term, it wasn’t long before word got around about who I was and what I’d done. For the most part, that just meant that when I walked down corridors during lesson changeovers, there would be the occasional shout of ‘Gordon Brown!’ behind me; always enough to cause a great tide of hilarity.
When I started teaching the odd citizenship class to lower school students, and a bit of politics and debating to the sixth-formers, the jokes and questioning became a bit more subtle.
When a group eventually got round to why I’d been sacked, knowing the answer full well but wanting to hear it from me, my standard response was to ask them all to think of the worst message or text they’d sent over the last thirteen days, and how they’d feel if their parents saw it. That always got a big ‘Ooooh!’ and a series of wincing reactions.
I’d then say: ‘So imagine what it was like when people saw the worst email I’d written in thirteen years. Of course I got sacked.’ Once, a smart lad at the back of the class, said: ‘Yeah, sir, but not having a go, we’re like fourteen. Aren’t you supposed to know better than that?’ All I could do was laugh, and say: ‘Yep, you’re absolutely right, and remember you said that when you’re older.’
I loved my time back at Finchley. I became fast friends with several of the teachers, and my long days in the office with Miss McHugh and long nights in the pub with Mr Salbstein, Miss McCall and Miss McMahon, were some of the happiest of my life. I also found my quiz soulmates in the head of governors, Jane, her husband Pete and their friends the Walshes, and our team became feared all over Finchley. When I’d occasionally run outside to take a call, they’d ask amusedly whether it had been Gordon or Ed on the phone, but they didn’t particularly care about the answer.
Sadly, that whole period also coincided with things coming to an end with Balshen. She’d stuck with me through everything and had always stayed br
ight and confident about our future, but frankly, I couldn’t hack it with her still being on the inside and me now on the outside. She’d want to talk about the excitement of her day or her week working for Ed Balls or on Ken Livingstone’s mayoral campaign; I wanted to hear about anything but. And if she took an interest in what I was doing at the school, I took it as condescension. In short, I was behaving like a tosser. She deserved – and now has – much better than that.
In 2011, Finchley – like every other school – was having to make savings and I was given the choice between training as a full-time teacher there or looking for a new job elsewhere. Much as I enjoyed my spells of teaching, the idea of doing what my colleagues did day-in, day-out was impossible to contemplate.
I’d never known a group of such hard-working people, all requiring such a massive range of skills, many of them deployed outside the classroom, from keeping order in a yard of 300 boys playing football in their lunchtimes to doing ‘diagnostic marking’ of sixty essays on the Weimar Republic in their evenings. Michael Gove wouldn’t last five minutes, and I wouldn’t have lasted five days.
So, I picked up The Guardian again and, once more, the first job I saw on the first page was as Head of Media for CAFOD, the official Catholic aid and development agency. I wrote them a letter similar to the one I’d sent Kevin Hoare, and I got a similar response through the interview process and subsequent discussions. They weren’t going to exclude me based on my past because that would go against every bit of their ethos, and if I was the right person for the job, that was all that mattered.
CAFOD’s a great place. It reminds me a lot of Gordon’s Treasury in that every person and every team knows the big objectives we’re trying to achieve, and knows specifically how they’re contributing to them. There’s also a real spirit of camaraderie and a genuine sense that an achievement by any bit of the organisation is an achievement by us all, similar to a Gordon Budget.
But it also has a lot of advantages over the Treasury, and over life in government generally: people’s ability to get a job at CAFOD, get ahead and make an impact isn’t determined by their educational background or working hours or even by their religious beliefs; it just comes down to their abilities, their values and their personality.
There’s an instinctive urge at CAFOD to work in collaboration with other charities which is alien to the partisan, territorial world of Westminster. And there’s a constant focus on building for the long term and tackling root problems – whether in CAFOD’s anti-poverty programmes or its advocacy work – that is all too often missing from a political system which simply works one Budget, one reshuffle and one election to the next.
Just as at Finchley Catholic High, I’ve met people in this walk of life where – when I see how intelligent and insightful and passionate they are – I say: ‘You should think about working in politics.’ And, unfortunately for all of us, from the very best and most brilliant of them, the response is: ‘What would be the point?’ ‘Well,’ I say, ‘you could change the way it’s done. You could be the one to make a difference.’ And they respond with a sympathetic smile and the mildest hint of sarcasm: ‘What, like you did?’
They’ve got a point.
52
POLITICS, GORDON AND ME
Our political system is set up to expose human frailties, even the ones you never knew you had.
It’s the cut-throat competition to be selected, elected and promoted, and the macho bear-pit of parliamentary debate; it’s the booze-fuelled largesse and late nights of Westminster, and the ever-growing distance from the people that put you there; it’s the worship of money, praise and favour, and the desperate kowtowing to those – including the media – who dispense them; it’s the short-term motives behind most decision-making, and the partisan impulse to disagree for disagreement’s sake.
At every stage, the system offers a new politician temptations to sin and shows them that their colleagues who succumb are all too often those who succeed. It encourages vanity, duplicity, greed, hypocrisy and cruelty. It rewards those whose instincts are reactionary and ruthless. It preys on those with addictive personalities, whether it’s alcohol or attention they crave.
For every MP like Stephen Timms and Vernon Coaker, who manage to experience all that and remain utterly grounded, moral and principled, there are many more who – whether straight away or worn down over time – go in the other direction.
And for someone like me, entering that world already suffering from a well-developed dark side, I was sucked in like a concubine at a Roman orgy and just as inevitably spat out once I’d exhausted myself.
The worst of it was that I had enough of a split personality, and an equally well-developed sense of Catholic guilt, that I could occasionally see what was happening to me, and be aware what I was doing to others, but never had the will-power to stop it.
One story illustrates that above all others. Just after the summer in 2008, Ivan Lewis – then a junior minister at the Department of Health – made an unhelpful intervention on tax policy, and I doled out the usual mild rebuke that we gave to any non-Treasury minister who spoke out about tax, telling the papers as a No. 10 source that Ivan should concentrate on his day job or he might soon find himself without one.
That would have been that, but I then received a surprising message from Ivan – via a mutual contact – telling me that he wasn’t scared of my bullying and, if I tried those tactics again, I’d find that he could give just as good in return.
Hearing that, any professionalism I had, any sense of what was best for Gordon or the Labour Party or the country, any concept of right and wrong, all disappeared out of my head. As far as I was concerned, Ivan had slapped me across the cheek with a silk white glove, and he was going to get an iron fist in his face in return.
The following weekend, the News of the World duly splashed a story about his supposed pestering of a young civil servant who used to work in his private office. It was so obviously a hatchet job from me that many MPs and commentators immediately called it as such and it was one of the major factors that led to me being forced to step away from my press briefing role after the October reshuffle.
But at the time I didn’t care. Ivan had challenged me on a personal level and, as far as I was concerned, I’d proved exactly why that was a bad idea. Even when a colleague told me Sue Nye had reflected sadly afterwards that I could sometimes be very cruel, my only reaction was to wonder why she felt any sympathy for Ivan.
A few days later though, I picked up a copy of the News of the World and, for the first time, looked closely at the picture they’d used of the former civil servant. She’d obviously been surprised by a snapper on her doorstep and was turning round with a slightly bewildered expression.
It dawned on me that – in among all the other unconscionable elements of my behaviour that week – at no point had I stopped to think: ‘What about her?’ Having been through this ordeal once, losing her job and friends as a result, she and her family had now been forced not just to see it dredged up all over again but put up in lights for everyone to gawp at. And all just so I could show Ivan I could piss higher up the wall than him.
I sat there staring at the picture and talking to myself: ‘What’s happened to you? What kind of person have you become?’
A few weeks later, when I was trying to engineer my exit from No. 10 after the October reshuffle, a representative from England’s 2018 World Cup bid came to see me in Downing Street. They were recruiting for a Head of Communications and his opening gambit when trying to persuade me to apply for the job was: ‘I’m told you’re a total bastard. And we need a total bastard.’
That was my moment of clarity. I walked away from that meeting, realising that all the excuses I normally made to myself for the way I did my job had ceased to apply. Doing in Ivan Lewis and dragging that poor girl through the wringer again wasn’t necessary to keep any journalists onside, or to protect Gordon, or promote his interests. The 2018 guy had called it right. It was ju
st me being a bastard: a cruel, vindictive, thoughtless bastard.
I should have walked away that day and never come back. Or, if I’d had the gumption, I could have accepted that my new back-room role gave me a chance to go back to my policy-making roots and start actively participating in some of those Downing Street strategy meetings I used to despise.
To my eternal regret, I did neither. Instead, I did what I always did: shrugged and carried on, becoming more and more depressed and detached, and losing all sense of judgement. It had taken me thirteen years in government, six of them in a high-profile and intense role, and just two in the cauldron of No. 10, but I was finally finished; just an accident waiting to happen, which of course it duly did.
When I was feeling sorry for myself, I’d tell myself it was all the pressures of the job. I’d think that if I’d taken more holidays, if I’d had the time to get married and start a family, if I hadn’t been on call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week for six years – and not just ‘on call’ but receiving calls at weddings, funerals, birthdays, Christmas lunches and Arsenal matches – maybe things would have been different.
But I knew that excuse wouldn’t wash, not even in my own mind. That was because I worked for a man who faced all the temptations and pressures of politics, who worked harder than anyone else, who faced ordeals and opprobrium that most of us can’t imagine, and did it all for eighteen years in the sharpest spotlight, and never once let it finish him off.
Obviously Gordon had bad days, nights and sometimes weeks, and suffered the inability to enjoy good news for more than a minute before fulminating about the bad news that would undoubtedly follow. But for all the occasional gloom and frequent glowering, he had the remarkable ability that – no matter how bad things were – he always had a plan, a big new idea, a way to bounce back.
Power Trip Page 43