by Wright, Ben;
Journalists need politicians and their advisers to give them stories. The politicians want their latest policy wheeze or effort at self-promotion to be noticed and covered by the media. The two tribes are locked in a prickly, often hostile, but mutually dependent tryst. It’s a symbiotic relationship that hinges on personal relationships and contacts, and one that is frequently oiled by alcohol.
It is important to separate the formal and informal channels of communication that generate much political news. For instance, twice-daily briefings are held for Westminster’s lobby correspondents by the Prime Minister’s official spokesperson. These on-the-record encounters are conducted by a politically neutral civil servant and are an opportunity for journalists to quiz Number 10 about the day’s political stories. An MP or minister might say something in Parliament that generates a headline. Other political stories emerge from select committee or National Audit Office reports and a great deal of political news is churned out by the government and political parties themselves – everything from new policy initiatives to pre-briefed speeches, the creation of a task force to the appointment of a ‘tsar’. There is a vast government communications machinery built to deliver all this, and legions of party press officers. Control and planning is at its heart. Downing Street directs what’s called the ‘grid’, the master plan of what stories from which government departments will be released in the weeks and months ahead.
But running alongside this formal operation is a ceaseless churn of chatter, briefing and off-the-record gossip between politicians, their advisers and journalists. It’s sifting this river every day that produces stories. Sometimes such conversations happen between an MP and journalist around the Members’ Lobby at the entrance to the House of Commons chamber. This is where Westminster reporters have traditionally tapped the views of MPs and ministers, the journalist standing sheepishly in the shadows trying to catch the eye of a passing punter. The coffee bars and atrium of Portcullis House, MPs’ modern office building, provide another popular place for politicians and journalists to talk. And of course a lot of business is now done by phone and text. But the pubs, bars and restaurants of Westminster are a crucial place for political trade.
I meet Damian McBride at the Mad Bishop & Bear pub in Paddington station. He has three hours to wait for his train, which gives us plenty of time to sample the beers and revisit his years as one of Gordon Brown’s closest lieutenants, beginning as a Civil Service press officer before slipping the leash and becoming a political adviser. McBride’s career imploded in 2009 after a leak of emails showing him prepared to smear leading Conservatives. Newspapers that had relied on his briefing and gossip for years formed a firing squad and he became a byword for everything squalid about politics.
Because I began my reporting career in Westminster just as the Labour government was beginning to crumble, I didn’t really know him. But the McBride I meet doesn’t bear much resemblance to the ‘Mad Dog’ of Westminster folklore. He is good company and it’s clear why hacks enjoyed a drink with him.
And alcohol drove everything he did. ‘I was a highly functioning alcoholic,’ he tells me. ‘It was the fuel that allowed me to do incredibly long hours.’ Because he could do most business by phone (whether rewriting Civil Service submissions, writing articles for Gordon Brown or briefing journalists), he could also do it from the pub. ‘It’s not like I’m in a factory assembling Sky digiboxes. I was regarded as a top performer in my job while being pretty pissed ninety-nine per cent of the time.’ McBride says he set out wanting to have the best press relations of anyone in Westminster and drink was the best lubricant for doing that. So where was business done?
‘The Westminster Arms was where I went with civil servants, but it’s a terrible place to drink with journalists. I found the best places to do proper trade were upstairs in the Two Chairmen, or other places you could be tucked away like the Sanctuary hotel bar. One journalist was so paranoid about being seen with me he insisted we would meet in Stringfellows. He didn’t seem remotely interested in the girls, to the extent that we were asked to leave.’ The drink greased the trade in information. Stories would be swapped for gossip about other government ministers or a degree of protection against reports that might harm Gordon Brown. ‘Terms of trust were formed over drink,’ McBride says.3 And his predecessor did the same.
Charlie Whelan was Gordon Brown’s ebullient spokesman until 1999, when he resigned after details of Peter Mandelson’s mortgage arrangements were leaked. Whelan was notorious for conducting business in the pubs of Westminster. On a Friday evening in the autumn of 1997, he was overheard briefing journalists in the Red Lion that Britain would not be joining the European Single Currency in that parliament.
It was a defining moment of Tony Blair’s first government. Gordon Brown, in an interview for the following day’s Times, had hardened up the ‘wait and see’ approach on the euro. The bald headline said joining was off the agenda. Whelan, white wine spritzer in hand, guided hacks from other newspapers towards the true meaning of the Chancellor’s words. In other words, the spin. Whelan’s conversations were overheard by two Liberal Democrat press officers. They told the Press Association and the BBC about the briefing in the boozer and the fuse was lit.
But at the time one crucial detail was missing. Charlie Whelan was not just briefing the press that Britain wouldn’t be joining the euro, he was informing the Prime Minister too. That evening Tony Blair was at Chequers, tipped off that his Chancellor had given an interview but clueless about what he’d said. Blair couldn’t reach Gordon Brown or his own spokesman Alastair Campbell. Desperate to discover what was being briefed to the newspapers, Blair called Whelan, who answered his mobile phone in the Red Lion pub.
‘I stepped outside,’ says Whelan. ‘And Blair said, “What’s going on about not joining the euro?” He said we had to kill the story. I told him it’s too late. It’s already gone in.’4
This wasn’t a minor policy. It was the single biggest political and economic decision the government would take. Tony Blair was much keener on joining the euro than his Chancellor, but this drink-assisted farce was an important moment in snuffing the idea out. It was a massive moment in history decided in a pub. It also symbolised the dysfunctional chaos that reigned between Tony Blair’s Downing Street and Gordon Brown’s Treasury for a decade.
‘If I drank like that today I’d be dead,’ Charlie Whelan told me. But he learned how to booze from years working for the Amalgamated Engineering and Electrical Union, the forerunner of Unite. The industrial correspondents were some of Fleet Street’s hardest drinkers. Geoffrey Goodman, the most distinguished reporter of Britain’s turbulent industrial relations in the decades after the war, said drink was used to fish for stories. ‘You’d talk to your trade union leader and instinctively knew you weren’t going to get the story until the guy had had enough to drink. That was regular practice. You’d lace them with drink. We had to school ourselves to withstand the physical damage it was doing us,’ Goodman told me in his north London living room not long before he died at the age of ninety-one. The tribe of industry and labour correspondents has faded away, their beat dismantled along with government-owned industries and coal mines.
But Charlie Whelan carried on their tradition of industrial drinking. He had a habit of dreaming up policy ideas with journalists in the bars of Westminster. Shortly before the 1997 general election, Whelan briefed journalists over drinks that a Labour government would sell the Tote, the state-owned bookmaker. Robin Cook, later Foreign Secretary, racing fan and former tipster for the Herald newspaper, was furious and said the Tote would never be sold. But two years later the new Labour government announced that the Tote would be privatised after all. The sell-off didn’t happen until 2011, fourteen years after Charlie Whelan set the hare running in a pub.
Another idea inspired by booze would reduce the Queen to tears. There’s a special pressure on Sunday newspaper journalists to come up with a scoop. They have a week to traipse the corridors of
Westminster and squeeze their contacts for a tale that will make waves and kick-start the week’s news agenda. The royal yacht supposedly ruled the waves, but 1997 was a time of cool Britannia, not old Britannia, and the Treasury was keen to cut the £11 million a year cost of keeping the Queen’s boat afloat. So when the Chancellor’s spin doctor was drinking with a couple of Sunday newspaper journalists soon after the general election, they agreed to splash on Britannia being scrapped. ‘We dreamed up the idea that doing in the royal yacht would be a good idea, a good story. That was dreamed up over a few drinks at the bar,’ claims Whelan.5 Like many Sunday newspaper stories it was a kite-flyer, a way of gauging reaction to a policy plan before formally announcing it. And within months the Queen was standing on the dock at Portsmouth naval base watching her beloved ship being decommissioned. She loved Britannia and was seen to weep during the ceremony. The Queen’s yacht was sunk because of a story inspired by booze.
The pubs around Westminster are a particularly important source for the political reporters who work outside the closed world of the lobby system. It’s here the new kids on the blogosphere quarry for trade. I meet Harry Cole for a pint at the Marquis of Granby. The sharp-witted, floppy-fringed young journalist is now the Sun’s Westminster correspondent but made his name as news editor at the Guido Fawkes website, the obsessively followed online bulletin board of Westminster gossip and rumours. It’s contemptuous of politicians and Parliament, right-wing, acerbic, salacious and powerful. When Damian McBride was caught smearing Tory MPs, it was Guido Fawkes that obtained the incriminating emails.
The Guido bloggers have not been allowed passes to Parliament and are disdainful of the lobby. For that reason, much of the gossip that appears on Guido Fawkes is mopped up in Westminster’s pubs. ‘Most of my sources are behind-the-scenes people,’ says Cole, who I talked to before he joined the Sun. ‘They’re the minister’s bag carrier. They’re the disgruntled staffer who’s had a shit day and will slag off their boss. And that more often than not happens in pubs over pints.’
Thursday nights are usually best because MPs have gone home and the researchers, staffers and special advisers are out getting drunk. Cole would sometimes put his bank card behind the bar, an investment that was more than recouped in stories. ‘After six pints someone’s more likely to tell you something than after one pint or sober.’ Drink, says Cole, helps build a bond that works both ways. It helps uncork the story, but the source receives some protection too.
‘They’ll slip us a few things, buy us a few drinks to remain on good terms. But obviously if a story’s good enough a bottle of wine isn’t going to save your neck,’ he grins. Harry Cole has the same negotiation with his sources as any political journalist. It might be on the record, off the record or on background – the murkiest of the three. But if something’s overheard in a pub he’s not beholden by any rules and the blog is where it will end up. There have been Cabinet rows Guido Fawkes reported first that emerged only because people closely involved were drunk. ‘The row happened and they were ranting about it. They’ve been drunk and given me the details or a quote. That wouldn’t have happened if they weren’t drunk. Everyone’s a consummate professional until they can barely stand up.’
If he’s meeting a researcher or special adviser with a document to leak, Cole reveals that the rendezvous is usually a quieter pub off the beaten track, like the Two Chairmen. ‘Without booze my job would be joyless and a lot harder,’ confirms Cole, who tells me the true mark of a Westminster drinker is a white wine spritzer. ‘If you have to start putting soda water in you’re probably drinking way too much.’6
Looking back on it all now, Damian McBride regrets the damage the drink did to his health and personal relations. ‘I would never have been able to get my own drinking to some sort of sensible control if I’d stayed in Westminster. I’m a good drinker but it’s a terrible thing to happen to anyone. Policemen in the 1970s and 1980s would probably say the same thing. If you’re a lawyer doing your briefs or a teacher doing their marking you couldn’t drink like this. The aggression, the arguments … alcohol is a lubricant in the wheel. It’s not a million miles from the football terraces. It’s a macho pissing contest.
‘It’s one of the reasons I never want to go back to politics,’ he says, leaving to catch his train to Cardiff, where he’s due to take part in a BBC Radio 4 discussion on when it’s acceptable to lie.7
The Political Lunch
It’s one o’clock in a Westminster restaurant. A political correspondent and a government minister are examining their menus. The hack hopes his guest will pick the moderately priced two-course set special; the minister rather fancies the veal cutlet Milanese. A waiter asks if they’ve chosen some wine. After a bit of ‘will we/won’t we’ they settle on two glasses of viognier. The bill will be picked up by the journalist, whose expenses are not what they were.
If the two haven’t met for lunch before, the ritual resembles a bizarre blind date. They probe common ground, sketch out their families and share holiday plans. But at some point during the starter, conversation swerves sharply onto politics. Pop into any pukka Westminster restaurant between Monday and Thursday when Parliament’s sitting and you’ll see dozens of these assignations. Colleagues from the same newspaper and ministers from the same government will be having hushed conversations with each other at different tables in the same restaurant. They’re trading gossip. Discussing the future. Sharing secrets and disparaging rivals. The politician may be suggesting a story. The journalist will certainly be fishing for one. But, like mating rabbits, these are quick encounters. And there’s no fidelity here. A politician lunched a few months ago may be sitting at a neighbouring table with a journalist from a rival newspaper doing it all again. A polite nod of acknowledgment is enough.
The political lunch is a cherished feature of Westminster life. It is a chance to eat fine food with prominent politicians at the company’s expense. Alan Watkins, the shrewd veteran of Fleet Street’s El Vino wine bar, lunched politicians for more than fifty years. As a young reporter he learnt the principles of lunching from Sunday Express editor John Junor. ‘One was always to order from the table d’hôte menu, because that would shame one’s guest into doing likewise, so saving the company money. Another of Junor’s principles of lunching was to have no truck with vintages or wine waiters but to order the house wine, red or white but on no account rose.’8
But politicians have always been eager to eat and drink at the expense of the Fourth Estate. The story is told of three journalists clubbing together to entertain Roy Jenkins in the early 1980s. ‘When we got the bill it was £105, which in 1980 was impressive. Then a week or two later, we took Denis Healey out, and when we got the bill it was £115. One of us mentioned the comparison to him, which was terribly infra dig. But Denis didn’t mind at all, and we heard later from one of the research assistants that he’d gone along the Shadow Cabinet corridor banging on doors and shouting, “I’m more expensive to lunch than Jenkins!”’9
Jenkins was a legend in his own lunchtime. Few politicians since have matched his reputation, although some continue the tradition. Political journalist Peter Oborne remembers taking the former Labour Paymaster General, Geoffrey Robinson, out for lunch at the Savoy Grill in 1998. ‘We had several bottles of wine. I thought I could just about get it through on expenses. I went off to the loo, came back, and Geoffrey had bought a bottle of wine that cost about £350. I said “Geoffrey, I can’t possibly pay for that!” It’s obviously why he bought it. He said “You can’t buy a bottle of decent red wine at a London restaurant these days for less than £400.”’10
The political lunch is not a discreet affair. In fact journalists enjoy the kudos of parading their date. As the Mirror’s Kevin Maguire puts it, ‘never under-estimate the willingness of journalists to show off their contacts and be seen in public with a minister. It’s appalling and it’s showy but it goes on.’11 This means it is fairly easy to guess the source of a story in the following day’s paper
or the identity of an unnamed Cabinet minister in a columnist’s Sunday feature if you’ve seen the journalist in conspiratorial conversation at Indian restaurant the Cinnamon Club. And now everyone can play this game through social media, as @eyespymp logs the sightings of MPs – at lunch, buying coffee, chaining up their bicycles, enjoying free hospitality at the football, waiting for a train. Many contributors are the researchers and bag carriers who mill around Westminster and the tone is predictably mocking, a reflection of the disdain felt towards politicians by the public, rivalled only by their loathing of estate agents and bankers.
This is not a new phenomenon. A Gallup survey from 1944 found half of people thought politicians were in it for themselves or their party. Polls show that around 80 per cent of people do not trust politicians to tell the truth, a figure almost exactly the same as it was thirty years ago. But the elaborate fiddling of allowances exposed by the expenses scandal of 2009 unleashed a renewed rage against politicians. The receiptless claims seemed to symbolise what many voters view as the self-serving vacuity of modern politics, and condemnation was savage. The scandal’s legacy continues to contaminate public life. But here in our Westminster restaurant politicians are still dined with respectful deference by journalists hungry for a story. And it’s the journalist who pays, on expenses.