One former permanent secretary gives a good example of a seemingly trivial detail quickly becoming very relevant: ‘When New Labour came in in 1997, the civil service wasn’t good enough about who the characters around Tony Blair were. There’s a famous story, about Charlie Falconer, who was Blair’s right-hand person for much of the Blair years, and was his flatmate. It was obvious that Charlie Falconer was going to be a character, and Charlie Falconer was announced as a minister, and we couldn’t find his name in the MPs’ list, and they couldn’t find the name in the peers’ list, and they couldn’t spell his name, and who was this? A tribe that had taken a bit more trouble to work out who the incoming lot were would have known backwards that Tony Blair had a flatmate who was a really smart guy who was going to be in government, and that didn’t happen.’
A logical conclusion to all this should be that it is in the mutual interest of both civil servants and politicians to maintain a good (and gossipy) relationship. After all, most of them on either side come in unsure of what they are meant to do, they will be demonstrably better at their jobs if they are tapped into informal networks, and they have to spend a whole lot of time with each other, so getting along can only help.
It is, of course, not that easy. Though private offices can have a good relationship with their ministers, spads and PPSs, it can be harder for anyone else to gain access to the politicians, partly because the aforementioned can be fiercely protective of their bosses, but also because the civil service can have a smothering addiction to bureaucracy.
In his Ministers Reflect interview, Tim Loughton lamented the stilted nature of his department. ‘I have always worked in open-plan offices and so in [my] previous career in the City, if you had a problem that you needed to resolve, you would get in a lift and go and see the person responsible for it,’ he told the IfG. ‘That doesn’t happen in the Department for Education. So if you want to have a quick chat with somebody about a particular issue that has come up, then it has to be diarised, you have to organise a meeting, [and] you have to have private officials present. And this is complete nonsense. So I found myself just wandering around the building and saying, can we just have a chat about such and such. And people [reacted] like it was a state visit and would leap to attention. […] It was complete nonsense.’
Then there can be the lack of trust. Ministers wanting to get through revolutionary (or at least sweeping) reforms often fear that the civil service is secretly working against them, as they tend to favour the status quo. A lot of them will also be convinced that due to their roles and impartiality, civil servants can never fully understand Parliament. On the other side, civil servants can be exasperated by the party political whims of their ministers, and inability to work through proper policy-making. These hardly are the best foundations for durable and functioning professional relationships, and in the worst scenarios, personal fractures or lack of communication have led to policy disasters, and we will come back to this in the next part of this book.
In the meantime, let’s head away from Whitehall.
IN THEIR OWN WORLD
Political staff and lawmakers may come and go, but civil servants are forever, and so are library researchers. Employed by the House, the fine people at the Commons Library provide MPs and their offices with briefings and answers to any questions they may have. Somewhat disappointingly, even the most enthusiastic prodding failed to find any evidence of gossip-swapping in their quarters.
‘The first thing is physically you’re detached from the Palace,’ says one person who works there. ‘We work at Tothill Street so there’s a slight gap there, you don’t bump into people as much. But also because we’re seen as politically impartial, if there’s something that we hear or get wind of, we’ve got to keep quiet about it.’
(Boo.)
Still, the geographical element is interesting: while the library has a few people within the Palace, the majority of them are in a building across Parliament Square. The walk from one building to the other is under ten minutes long, but in Westminster terms, they might as well be down in Croydon. It is worth mentioning that they are an exception in SW1, in that their work focuses on the formal: either something happens and they’re required to explain why it happened, or something might be about to happen and their role is to explain what would go down if it were to happen.
What this requires is deep knowledge of Parliament and of certain policy areas, and much of it can be gained without needing those amorphous networks and casual chats. Though the nature of their job means that they do sometimes get pieces of information a few days before most, their working culture is apart from the rest of Westminster, and they will keep the titbits to themselves.
One group they do interact with, partly because some of their offices are adjacent, are the clerks, who are an altogether more entertaining bunch. ‘For them gossip’s more important,’ says a library researcher. ‘On the committee side the clerk is kind of the manager of this wayward football team, and they’ve got to know how their members are going to behave – if you go abroad, will they try and arrange dinner with 100 Ukrainians, that sort of stuff.
‘Do they have a bit of a drink problem? What are their proclivities? You’re responsible for them, and you’re taking them abroad, like a teacher taking a load of kids abroad; it’s a nightmare. And that sort of stuff can’t really be written down, so understanding from colleagues where the problems are going to be is very, very important.’
The clerks are an interesting tribe: they aren’t as withdrawn as their library colleagues, but they function more as a closed circle than most other groupings in Parliament. Though their work makes them a part of most areas of the House’s day-today business, the ones who work on select committees tend to be the ones who rely on informal information the most. After all, running a select committee effectively involves managing the opinions, interests, personalities and egos of around a dozen MPs from all parties, which is not an easy feat. There is, as ever, no one way to do it, so new clerks have to rely on their elders for much-needed advice.
‘Because our institution is so small as clerks, there is a culture of knowledge-sharing between us,’ says one. ‘There’s a really good culture of knowledge-sharing. I think also because one of our main roles is to work with MPs, we spend a lot of time, both designated in terms of training how to deal with MPs, but also with impromptu chats about how to deal with a difficult situation.’
Another was a bit less diplomatic: ‘There’s a kind of survival mechanism element to gossip. We have to be very discreet and confidential about members – there’s stuff I would tell my partner and probably just about no one else outside. But there is a kind of golden circle within clerks that if I tell them X about Y member of my committee, gossip that I’ve heard, I absolutely know that that won’t go any further. I don’t even have to say it, it’s just part of the culture, and that’s actually quite a release valve. Because you know, members can be pretty demanding sometimes, and bastards to deal with, sometimes.
‘Not all the time, by a long way, but sometimes. And actually, to be able to say to your friends, “Oh you know what that sod X did today?” It’s a way of not going completely bonkers. It’s also directly useful for our job: if you find out someone’s a pisshead on a visit, you calibrate your expectations. If you know that you have a meeting after lunch, and X is not going to be coming up with the best questions ever, then maybe you try to get the meeting before lunch, or you try to make sure with the chair that X doesn’t get the key questions.’
The relationship between clerks and MPs can also become a close one: the chair of one committee is known for occasionally hosting parties at their house to which his committee’s clerks are invited, and if both sides have been in Parliament for many years, close friendships can easily develop.
Because clerks have to be impartial on everything they do, those links are more likely to be based on personalities than politics. This doesn’t mean that clerks won’t have their personal opinion, of
course, but as discussed in the first chapter, the nicest people often aren’t the ones you’d expect. In the words of a senior clerk: ‘It’s a bit weird here, isn’t it? You sometimes get people whose views you find absolutely abhorrent, but who are lovely to deal with, and the opposite – people whose voting record, you know, if I was an MP would probably match 100%, who are complete arseholes. There’s just no correlation. We all respond to humans, don’t we?’
Still, it is part of their job to help anyone who comes to them, and they have to juggle many different agendas, especially as they climb through the ranks. Contrary to most party political people, clerks can end up working for either House for decades and decades, and once they reach the top, their networks will cut across every layer of British politics.
Sir David Beamish was one of those; he retired in 2017, after joining the Lords in 1974. In over 40 years there, he went from a common garden clerk to Clerk of the Parliaments, the chief clerk in the House of Lords, in 2011.*
‘At a senior level at least we have quite a good network, really,’ he explains, then listing ‘senior staff in a range of categories in both houses’, some civil servants, MPs, ‘key office holders’ (whips, party leaders, special advisers), peers (‘the party leaders in the House of Lords and the cross-benchers have a convener’), journalists (‘I was more useful to them than them to me, but it was always interesting to talk to them’), and other clerks.
Still, a fundamental difference between, say, Beamish and most of the people listed above is that senior clerks are trusted to keep secrets. While it is a given that civil servants’, MPs’ and journalists’ networks can (and often will be) porous, the world of clerks is one that is closed-off, and that is just the way it is.
As one of them puts it, ‘The institution of clerks has existed for the last 700 years or something ridiculous. And there’s been a long learning process throughout that, and so we’ve kind of reached the zenith of that for our generation at least, which is this is how you should act, this is the way you should go about it.’
There is one last group that feels worth mentioning, and is similar to the clerks in the sense that while they see and hear a lot, they are considerably more likely to only spread information between themselves: politicians’ protection officers. Because they are such a closed circle, it is basically impossible to get them to talk (though if you are part of it and up for a chat, there’s always the second edition).
Still, Private Eye deputy editor and veteran hack Francis Wheen had one good anecdote on the topic, and it would be a shame to let it go to waste:
‘They have a Christmas party every year, for the Special Branch protection people, and they invite along the people they protect. Salman Rushdie went along one year and took his friend Matthew [former Labour politician Lord Evans], who was a publisher and used to run Faber. And Matthew was quite interested in the selection of people you get at this event; there’s Enoch Powell and very elderly politicians, forgotten people who were Defence Secretary in the late seventies, Roy Mason and various other forgotten figures of yesteryear, and Tom King, who was a minister under Mrs Thatcher, and I think John Major possibly, from down in the West Country. He was Northern Ireland Secretary, among other things, which was why he had this lifelong protection.
‘[Former Conservative cabinet minister] Tom King was talking to Matthew and to one of these Special Branch people, the guy who had been running his Special Branch protection for the previous few years. He was about to retire and Tom King said, “So, you’re about to retire. Perhaps it would be interesting to know all the different people that you’ve protected over the years, what you make of it all.” He said, “Well, I know who the worst person was, that was you.” Tom had a farm down in the West Country, and he used these police protection people as sort of unpaid farm hands.
‘When it was the harvesting season, when the pigs were giving birth, they would all get raked in to do basically farm labouring jobs, and it turned out that he was by far the most unpopular person they’d ever protected. They all compared notes among themselves, and he said, “I have spoken to my colleagues about this, we have taken a vote, and you are definitely the most unpleasant person we’ve all guarded over the years.” This is very revealing, that only the protection officers would have realised quite how awful Tom King was.’
GOD’S WAITING ROOM
Since we’re now in the business of asides, let’s go back to the House of Lords; we’ve talked about the place already, but we should probably mention the people too. To be clear, there isn’t a tremendous amount to say; a number of peers were interviewed for this book, all of different ages, experiences and parties, but they agreed on one thing: gossip plays an altogether less important role in their corner of Westminster.
According to one young Labour peer, ‘It’s much less gossipy here because it’s much less sociable; it’s quite solitary. It doesn’t have the camaraderie of the Commons. I think one of the things that defines the Commons is intake groups, the election you came in; those people tend to form quite close friendships, but we don’t have that. Obviously the nature of gossip is to be up to date with what’s going on, and you wouldn’t describe the House of Lords ever as being particularly up to date. Also, gossip really matters in politics because of power, and there’s no real power in the Lords; there’s also much less ambition in the Lords. People obviously in the Commons are deeply ambitious, want to get on. Most people in the Lords are at the end of their careers. There’s nothing to compete for or to be ambitious about. So once you take away that competitive edge, it’s almost like, why bother? Life’s too short. Why bother being nasty? It’s a much nicer place. When someone new comes to the Commons people immediately think they could be a threat, they could get the job I want etc., whereas in the Lords, if someone new arrives, you’re thinking, Oh, that’s nice! Someone new to sit with. There’s no “What are you competing for?”’
A former leader of the House of Lords agreed, and had this to say on her chamber: ‘For most people who are peers, it’s not their main place of occupation or their main focus in life, it’s part of something else, so therefore their engagement with issues is much less consistent than if you are an MP. There are some people within the House of Lords for whom the political aspect of it is what they enjoy and what motivates them, but it’s not the same for most peers. So therefore that currency that exists in the Commons is not quite the same in the House of Lords.
‘As far as the relationship between the Commons and the Lords and their view of the way in which they interact with us, partly because in the Commons, they’ve got enough on their plate worrying about their own challenges and their own ebb and flow of stuff, they would not pay as much attention as they might, but also we only really became of interest when we were a problem. They’re quite happy to ignore us until they have to.’
Finally, one former Lords staffer remarked that peers were altogether less spicy: ‘You know, they’ve all had their affairs and they’re all pretty settled now. So affairs and stuff rarely happen, and when they do, it’s always a bit like, “Woo! They’re a bit of a goer! Who knew they still had it in them?”’
So, in conclusion: not much goes on in the House of Lords that is of relevance to the topic of this book. Still, this lack of relevance is interesting, and says something about the Lords’ green-benched counterparts. An argument that keeps cropping up in these quotes is that there is little power in the Lords, so there is less need for whispers and rumours. What we get from this is that there are a lot of whispers and rumours in the Commons because there is so much power to be had there, and we will come back to that in a few chapters. In fact, our lordships will be popping up once in a while to remind us that they exist, as they do in the real world, but we can leave them to it for now.
FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS
Where to even start on the relationship between politicians and the media, and the role it plays in Westminster? Maybe this anecdote from an MP will do:
‘I went to so
me drinks in Parliament a few months ago, and between walking in and getting to the bar at the other end, no fewer than four journalists stopped me and said, “So what’s all this about, a new centrist party I hear you’re involved with?” And I said, “Well, I’m not involved, but what have you heard because no one’s telling me anything?” And I was so concerned that by the time I’d got to the end of the room four different people had mentioned it, that I thought, God, is there something about to launch that I haven’t heard? So I spent the rest of the evening going round the room saying, “What have you heard about this new centrist party?”’*
Most MPs and hacks have jobs that will be made more efficient if they manage to relentlessly stay in the loop, and personalities that mean that they probably would do so even if they didn’t have to. The trick, of course, is that the latter is employed to hold the former to account, but wouldn’t be able to do it without fraternising with them.
This is an ethical dilemma faced by most reporters: in order to cover a beat, you need to properly know the people involved, be able to use them as sources and retain a level of access to the industry or area of society. To do all this, you have to develop good professional relationships with those people, as well as a level of mutual trust. However, getting too close can be an issue. If you are close to the people you’re meant to scrutinise, it might influence your work, both consciously if, say, you’re tempted not to write a hit job on someone you really like, or subconsciously as you can be less likely to think something is a story if you happen to be friends with the person it’s about.
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