SINK OR SWIM
If you have never worked in or around politics, there is one thing you need to know: Westminster is weird. It is a fundamentally weird place which makes people behave in a weird way and where events take a weird turn more often than not. Not everyone who works there is weird – though most are – but spending too much time there will undeniably make you weirder, whether you realise it or not.
For a start, conventions inside the Palace of Westminster are more than a little odd. A famous example is the fact that MPs cannot address each other directly in the chamber, so must make their points to the Speaker of the House of Commons. That is only the tip of the iceberg. In his book on the time he spent as an MP, Gyles Brandreth talks about a particularly puzzling encounter on his first day in 1992. He was welcomed to the Palace by Jeremy Hanley, a long-serving MP, who gave him a tour of the premises. Brandreth attempted to shake his hand, as anyone would, but Hanley declined: MPs, it turns out, do not shake hands with each other.
‘The origin of the handshake was physical proof that your hand did not conceal a weapon, that you came in friendship,’ he explains. As at the House of Commons we are all “Honourable Members”, we don’t need to prove our good intentions towards one another so between one another we don’t shake hands.’
Then there are the votes. Whenever MPs are required to go and vote on a bill or an amendment, the division bell will start ringing across the estate (and in nearby pubs and buildings), meaning that MPs have exactly eight minutes to get into the voting lobbies if they want to be counted. What this means in practice is that on days of important votes, parts of the Palace suddenly get invaded by parliamentarians sharply walking together and having seemingly come out of nowhere, flooding corridors like a stampede of buffaloes finally reaching a body of water.
As it is usually not known precisely when votes will happen, the dreaded bell gives Westminster life a peculiar rhythm, where meetings and drinks can be abandoned at a moment’s notice, and idle chats in corners of the building are interrupted by a cabinet minister sprinting past. The building itself also has an important part to play. In what feels like the clunkiest of metaphors, the Palace of Westminster is magnificent, intimidating and confusing, and taking a closer look at it means realising that it is falling apart. Working in Parliament involves being surrounded by grand statues and paintings, and spending most of your time in rooms of plush patterned carpets and matching opulent wallpapers. However, it also means barely noticing the mice any more, occasionally getting rained on indoors and being left with a handle in your fist when all you wanted was to open a door.*
On the other hand, staff working around the Palace look like they could have been plucked out of a historical novel, with their long-tailed coats, slick black tights, polished brogues and heavy jewellery hanging around their waists. Still, one of the first things you realise as you enter Westminster is that, for all its pompous formality, it is mostly a place where people talk. MPs constantly talk to each other and to journalists, who also talk to each other and to other people who work in politics, who in turn talk to each other and to MPs. There might be debates, set meetings, rigid events and official written correspondence, but most of what happens and matters is centred around quick coffees, swift pints and brief chats in corridors.
‘The thing about these little personal conversations is that there is so much formal stuff, you are absolutely assailed with formal information,’ says James Cleverly, a Conservative MP. ‘So formal invites, dear colleague letters, pamphlets, articles, op-eds, library briefings, there’s so much stuff that comes at you, it’s just not possible to absorb it all. And so you do gravitate towards stuff that comes with the endorsement of colleagues.’
Similarly, political journalists could technically fill a paper every day by reading every single press release that reaches their inbox, but the sheer number of them would mean that teams would need to be considerably bigger, and that these armies of hacks would do nothing but hit refresh on their keyboard every other second. Instead, much of the reporting on Westminster happens in person, and the job largely involves walking around, bumping into people and talking to them to try and figure out what the news of the day and week might be.
The issue with so much happening away from formal structures is, of course, that it is hard for someone new to grasp the nuances of these interactions, decide how to go about them and how to use them effectively. Regardless of which part of politics you are getting into, those crucial first few weeks often feel like standing in front of a spinning carousel, wondering when and how to jump in. It is not an unreasonable anxiety. Leap at the right moment and you will find yourself suddenly becoming one of the postcode’s rising stars, with all the social and professional privileges that come with it; miss your moment and you will fade into irrelevance before even having had your chance to shine.
Oh, and on top of it all, you will have to do this while managing an absurdly heavy workload. Or, in the words of 2017 intake MP Paul Masterton: ‘I basically spent the first few months running around screaming, “Aaaah! So busy!” and barely had the time to go to the toilet.’
NEW FRIENDS; NEW FOES
If Westminster is ruled by the informal, the logical conclusion is that few things matter more than who you know and what relationship you have with them. After all, (nearly) everyone there works endless hours, has a confusing and demanding job, and will need all the help they can get in order to get things done. And because it is a place largely populated by neurotic people too concerned with where they stand on the chessboard, who you hate and why you hate them is just as important. With everyone spending their formative weeks and months desperately trying to dig in their heels, feuds and alliances can happen very quickly, and crystallise even quicker – so who do you pick?
Setting a small ultra-partisan minority aside, most people in Westminster will have a terrible realisation sooner rather than later: people are people. That is, an MP whose views you find abhorrent – or journalist whose work you detest – actually is a genuinely, sincerely, lovely and helpful human being. Or, on the other hand: that one politician whose work and persona you have always been impressed by (publicly or personally, depending on your job) turns out to be boring, a bastard or – worst of all – a boring bastard. This tension between personality and politics is one of the crucial axes of life in the bubble – and a theme that will keep cropping up in other chapters – because it leads to inner conflict in everyone there. Even if political people are odd (and they are) it is only human for someone feeling overwhelmed and lost to turn to people they get along with, as opposed to people they ideologically agree with.
Finding people who fulfil both criteria can happen, but the rest is shades of grey, especially as friendships will often be born out of chance or necessity, not sheer affinity. For Tory MP Bim Afolami, ‘It’s all a bit like a boarding school. At university people are at least pretending to be grown-up. Here, no one even pretends. It’s really childish. People fall out but make up.
‘You have to rub along with a bunch of people, most of whom outside of this place would never be your friend. But here, they can often be quite good friends. School people end up spending huge amounts of time with people who in their natural state they wouldn’t necessarily be best friends with. Westminster’s a bit akin to that.’
On the subject of school – where you went, who your contemporaries were and where you went to university after that – will usually determine what happens next. To misuse a line from TV series Desperate Housewives, insiders and outsiders are in such different leagues that they barely play the same sport. If you didn’t go to a famous private school then Oxford or Cambridge (or at least spent years in those social circles), chances are that you will feel wildly out of your depth when you arrive. It isn’t a question of intellect, simply that you probably won’t really know anyone, will be utterly baffled by some of the conventions and generally feel completely out of place. Networks will need to be built from the ground up,
and learning done through trial and error, even if you already have some experience in politics.
Kirsty Blackman, now an SNP MP, had been a councillor for eight years in Aberdeenshire before getting elected, but that experience wasn’t much help. ‘The council’s processes were much more transparent, there was much more clarity about what was going to happen next, and the processes that would be followed,’ she explains. ‘Here, this place basically runs on gossip – I think part of it is because of the lack of structures and the lack of transparency, and because of the lack of influence the usual channels can have.’
Basically, networks matter because nothing gets done without them. Even if your outsider status pleases you and you would rather stay out of the mess of it all, your career as an MP cannot be built on talent alone.
‘There’s a limit to how much you can opt out,’ says Chi Onwurah, who was elected in 2010. A black engineer from a working-class family in Newcastle, she doesn’t have much time for the personal psychodrama of Westminster. Still, she says, ‘One of the first things that MPs say to you is that you need to have your networks, you need to have your support, the people who will support you, whether you’re being trolled on social media, or when you’re standing for select committee, or whether you’ve got a bill or amendment you want to get through.’
If, however, you’re part of the privileged few (of whom there are a lot), the game will be a different one. You won’t necessarily feel intimidated by the amount of unspoken knowledge people assume you have, as you will almost certainly have it. Your networks will need to be expanded, but from a pre-existing base, and those who arrived in the bubble before you will be on hand to impart their wisdom. Chances are too that you will have the entitlement that usually comes with an expensive education, so impostor syndrome won’t be much of an issue. The flip side, of course, is that with pre-existing friends come pre-existing foes, and rivalries can run deep when everyone has known each other since before puberty. David Cameron and Boris Johnson are an obvious example: both went to Eton, where Boris shone and David did not, then to Oxford, where David got a first and Boris a mere 2:1. For most normal humans, the academic comparisons would have ended there; in this case, some would argue that they resulted in the Brexit vote.
While the background of journalists also plays a part in how well they do once they get dropped into SW1, their relationships often get messier from the outset. The line about journalism being printing things that someone somewhere doesn’t want printed might be trite but it is fundamentally correct, at least most of the time. The problems start when it becomes apparent that someone somewhere is also the one who holds the information in need of printing.
‘That’s the tension at the heart of journalism,’ says John Rentoul, a veteran political hack. ‘You have to be able to charm people, convince them that you’re worth talking to, and then they’ll tell you stuff that they don’t necessarily want to see in print. The whole process is antagonistic in the sense that you’re bound to be publishing stuff that people don’t want you to publish, and then they get cross with you. But on the other hand they’re not going to tell you stuff in the first place unless there’s some kind of relationship with trust.’
In a nutshell, your job is to befriend people who you will almost certainly betray at some point, but until you do, your relationship must be built on trust. Those people know that you will almost certainly betray them at some point, but some will accept your offer of friendship anyway, and probably try to shaft you before you shaft them. This isn’t as devious as it sounds: at the end of the day, journalists have to report on what MPs do and MPs want what they do to be reported on. That friction happens along the way is both understood and expected by most.
Some politicians have made their peace with the nature of that arrangement. In a guide to political journalism, former Guardian political editor Michael White recalled one instance of a particularly good-natured MP: ‘Gordon [Greig, then political editor of the Daily Mail] once forced a Tory minister’s resignation (unfairly, I thought), but the exminister was seen buying him a drink that evening. He liked him; nothing personal.’
This isn’t to say that everything is reversible: sometimes, as a journalist, you will have to write things that mean putting an end to a professional relationship. Then, it becomes a numbers game. This is how Jim Pickard, the Financial Times’ chief political correspondent, thinks about it:
‘You’ve got 650 MPs, nearly a thousand Lords, you’ve got aides for them, you’ve got all the departments, all the NGOs … you should be able to have a balance where you’ll talk to 500 people, but that leaves 3,000 that you can potentially burn without even feeling bad. And you can burn some of the 500 quite happily as well – if you need to, and if they deserve it.’
One issue, of course, is that those 500 people should be burnt across the span of your career – betray one person too many in your first few years as a reporter and you won’t find yourself with many sources left. Words travel, and if a journalist starts being seen as untrustworthy, most will think twice before speaking to them. In any case, those contacts do need to be made sharpish: most MPs will only develop a close working relationship with a few journalists, and only a few MPs are truly worth having a close working relationship with. It is a bit like a game of musical chairs: once everyone sits down, you do not want to end up with the politician who everyone knows is out of the loop.
Speaking of which …
WHITE NOISE / ON TOP OF THE WORLD
… What makes people get along? Friendships and working relationships can be started for all sorts of reasons, but any social bond cannot be maintained on intent alone, and even the nerdiest of political anoraks cannot talk about policy and nothing else. This is where gossip comes in.
Well, you can call it gossip, rumours or hearsay: a less snappy way to describe it would be ‘informal conversations about things which may be true (or might not), and which at least one of the parties involved in the conversation probably shouldn’t know about at that point in time’. Or, you know, tittle-tattle.
These conversations can idly happen as a warm-up before serious discussions, as a way to relax after having had those discussions, around a pint or a lunch, or as you bump into someone down a corridor. There are many reasons why they occur and why they are so important, and we will get to them in due course, but you are still in the shoes of someone who has just arrived in Westminster, so let’s pace ourselves.
One of the most striking things about entering the bubble is the sheer amount of information that reaches you nearly immediately. You thought you knew how politics worked? You didn’t. Being physically around and knowing a handful of people will gain you access to an avalanche of titbits and anecdotes.
Those stories won’t necessarily be juicy, or fascinating – most will be inconsequential, but won’t feel like that at the time. There’s a piece of information that will never make it to the public – about a row between MPs, a cock-up at the launch of a project, a politician having had one too many – but you know about it. The curtain has been raised, you’re in the thick of it.*
Beyond the sheer volume of information lies another shift: it isn’t simply about what you hear, but how that information relates to you. While Westminster gossip will be fun to anyone with an interest in politics, it will only ever feel distant if you aren’t a part of that particular circus. Like reading about Rihanna’s alleged new boyfriend, album or both, it mostly is an amusing story to passively read about.
Once you join SW1, this changes: in an environment that is incestuous and closed off from the real world, stories take on a new significance. One former Conservative aide puts it well:
‘If I went home to Manchester and I told someone who wasn’t very interested in politics but who knew who Michael Gove was a story about [Gove], to them I would be talking about a personality. I mean, I’ve never met him, but I would consider him to be no more than one or two steps removed from me – it’s basically social gossip of this we
ird bubble-sphere. It would be the same if I landed in some Welsh village and everyone knew what someone had done the night before. And I’d think, that’s really weird, how does everyone know? But it’s just that everyone knows each other.’
One peer agrees: ‘When you’re outside politics you’re thinking everybody are like gods – thinking, Oh, they’re famous people. And then when you’re inside politics, you know that it’s not like that at all, and that anybody can join any of the political parties and pretty much meet anybody within that party. Quite frankly, pay your £25 a year to the Conservative Party and you’d meet everyone.’
As a staffer, this can feel overwhelming: most have barely reached their mid-twenties when they come in, and suddenly they get the keys to a world where having a mischievous chat with an MP isn’t out of the ordinary. There might be a reasonably well-defined hierarchy in Westminster, but information doesn’t always respect those boundaries.
As former Labour aide Theo Bertram points out, just because you’re the most junior person in the room doesn’t mean that you do not get to hear what is said in that room. Having a low-level job can also have its upsides, as you’ll get access to intel no one else gets.
‘An example would be the person responsible for booking hotel rooms and assigning hotel rooms to cabinet ministers and special advisers at a party conference,’ he explains. ‘That person is a relatively junior staffer, but the information that they have access to, that we might have an extra because these two people it turns out don’t need separate rooms, or so-and-so is insisting that this room should be next to their room, that is quite interesting.
‘One of the buzzes about Westminster is that sense of being inside that club of gossip that everyone can belong to. There are the stories that you read in the newspapers or on Twitter, and then there’s another level of stories inside the club of what people are willing to tell you when they’re pissed.’
Haven't You Heard Page 2