Haven't You Heard

by Marie Le Conte

  Though these are concerns every journalist has to be conscious of, lines tend to be even blurrier for political hacks. For a start, they live in a professional environment that is deeply informal: while going for a number of pints with an MP every other week feels perfectly normal, this would be the exception rather than the rule for other newsroom desks. There is also the bubble effect, of course, which means both that everyone will physically see everyone else all the time, and that over the years, it becomes easier to identify more with your fellow Westminster denizens than with the world at large.

  Then there is the small matter of politics being something no one would willingly start reporting on unless they were truly obsessed with it. While one can be a business reporter without being a City fanatic, it would seem near impossible for someone to develop a career as a lobby reporter without living and breathing the stuff. Oh, and politics itself is different to other beats, in that no one could produce frequent scoops without having those close relationships, as most of what happens is firmly behind closed doors. Freedom of Information requests and forensic studies of MPs’ expenses can bring in some stories, but most Westminster reporting has to come from people telling you what they saw or heard, and they will not do it to someone they do not know.

  Politico’s Jack Blanchard has this to say on the topic: ‘There’s definitely an issue; as a journalist to get the stories you have to get close to the MPs, otherwise they won’t tell you, and the public will never know about them. But then there comes a point where this person becomes quite a close contact, might even become a friend; do you want to start writing antagonistic stories about them? There isn’t a simple answer as to whether you do or not, but I am certain that there are stories that don’t see the light of day because the journalist that knows about them either likes the MP too much, or feels that they need the trust of the MP too much to write them.’

  For some, this is certain proof of sinister conspiracies and an elite class more concerned with protecting one another than serving the public. The truth is altogether more mundane: try as hard as you might – and most lobby journalists really do try – there’s no escaping from basic human nature.

  Still, it can have an unquestionably problematic effect on the nature of political coverage. An example that was mentioned (unprompted) multiple times during interviews for this book was the non-resignation of then-Labour minister Tessa Jowell.

  In 2006, Jowell’s husband David Mills was investigated for money laundering and alleged fraud in Italy, from the time he worked as a lawyer for the former prime minister of Italy Silvio Berlusconi. Jowell, meanwhile, was Culture Secretary at the time and was investigated on whether she knew about the £344,000 ‘gift’ her husband had received from one of his clients. She was cleared, the couple announced that they had separated, and Jowell kept her job.

  Jason Beattie, who is now the head of politics at the Daily Mirror, says of the case: ‘I think Tessa Jowell’s a really interesting example, a politician who should have resigned because of her business affairs, and the reason she survived is she’s extraordinarily good with journalists. Journalists loved her. And she always answered their calls, she was always polite. And I always got the feeling that just before we actually dipped the ink in acid we all held back and just went, no, we like Tessa. And it may explain why she survived and Blunkett didn’t and Mandelson didn’t. Because actually, she was very decent to us.’*

  While this might seem shocking, it merely comes back to the point made by the clerk a few pages ago: once you become a part of Westminster, the sort of person you are can matter far more than the nature of your policies or, in this case, your actions. It is, after all, hard to overstate how much of the relationship between MPs and journalists is based on social interactions. Stilted meetings organised to discuss a specific area can and do happen, but most business is conducted in the Portcullis House atrium, restaurants and pubs.

  This closeness is also needed for journalists to be effective, even if it can occasionally have adverse effects on reporting. Interestingly, Conservative MP James Cleverly is the person who explains it best:

  ‘Having a personal relationship with journalists is quite important. If all political journalists populated their columns with formal press releases, then arguably you can say, “Well, how are you adding value?” Because we can just get the press release, come to the news desk, we can rewrite it, fact-check it, critique it, print it and save ourselves a whole lot of money without having all these political correspondents and editors.

  ‘I think there is a legitimate argument to say that those journalists are adding value by also being able to inject into those news pieces what the thinking behind it is, what the mood music is like, whether this is playing badly.

  ‘If someone is not saying anything, is that because they haven’t seen that policy announcement? They don’t care about that policy announcement? That they are positive about it but think it might be unpopular with their constituents? If they’re negative about it, do they think it might go down badly with the whips? Even the reason why people aren’t talking about something is important, and if they are talking about it, then why they choose this particular topic rather than some other topic.

  ‘Those are the kind of valuable insights you can’t get just by a dispassionate see-it-report-it type of relationship. And this business has a lot of spin. There are facts, and then there’s the desire to make sure these facts are interpreted in a particular way. And if journalists are hearing something on the grapevine, they’ll want to know how credible that source is. And the credibility of source is something you build over time.’

  This last part is something every political journalist has experienced: you’re quite junior, you get an MP to start talking to you, you take them out for lunch, then suddenly they start sending you morsels of information and you think, this is it! You’ve made it! But you quickly realise that there is a reason why this MP took the trouble to befriend you, a junior journalist, and it is that senior journalists do not give them the time of the day because their intelligence is so unreliable, because they are known for blabbing away to journalists so no one tells them anything any more.

  Back to square one it is, but over time, you will develop better links with better MPs, and learn that the information flow has to go both ways for the relationship to work. This is perhaps one of the oddest discoveries when becoming a political hack. While you probably assumed that your job would mostly involve getting people to gossip to you about things they have seen and heard, there is in fact nearly as much information going the other way.

  ‘It’s very transactional,’ says Jason Beattie. ‘So you will give information in return for information. In government, for example, the ministers get siloed in their departments, so they’re actually quite out of touch. They’re looking for information, what’s going on, because they just don’t know, and they find it frustrating.’

  The ministers can certainly turn to their spads/PPS/private secretary/circle/et cetera where appropriate, but these people will only ever have their own networks to rely on, and probably won’t be able to get the full picture on most things. Journalists, on the other hand (and in theory), have to go out of their way to remain in touch with people from all parties at all levels and if they want to do their job properly and get as many stories as possible.

  In practice, some hacks will always be closer to some factions than others and have their favourite sources, but the point still stands: if you work in politics and want to know what the chatter is about, ask the media. There are, however, two issues with this way of working. The first brings yet another ethical dilemma to journalists, as sharing gossip is one thing but becoming part of the political process is another entirely, and the line between the two can be thin.

  Let’s take the example of the potential new centrist party* again. Say you’re the political editor of a television channel and you start hearing rumours that a group of Labour and Conservative MPs are about to leave their res
pective parties and launch a new movement together. This could well be the scoop of the year, but rumours are what they are, and cannot be printed as such. So, what do you do? Identifying the MPs would be a good start; asking them out for a quick coffee and prodding them on their immediate future would be the obvious second step.

  So you’re sitting there with Adrian Hullingsworth, a centrist MP openly unhappy with the leadership of the Conservative Party and who might well lose the marginal seat of South Shropshire North West and The Milling at the next election anyway. You tell him what you’ve heard, and ask him if it’s true. Now, there is a chance that he actually is plotting, but let’s say he is not – let’s even go further and assume that Adrian, having been too busy with the all-party parliamentary group for Tanzanian zebras, had not even been aware that plotting was taking place. You, a journalist, have just informed him of it and whatever he does next, be it warn the leadership in an uncharacteristic show of loyalty (and/or desperate move to finally get on the front bench), or tell his colleagues that there’s a new show in town and convince them to join it, will be on you.

  Now Adrian’s move might not change anything in the long run, but it might also turn into the centrist party actually coming into existence, or the two party leaders realising what’s happening and removing the whip from the MPs involved. You will then be expected to report on this massive story, knowing that it wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t tried to corroborate a piece of gossip days earlier.

  This is of course an extreme scenario – and would have been less ethically fraught had it turned out that our friend Hullingsworth really was plotting – but journalists can still play an unwilling role in how something plays out in smaller ways. As that drinks reception at the beginning of the chapter showed, the importance of gossip is not just based on the content of a conversation between two or more people, it can also be about the fact that the conversation happened at all. In fairness, this also happens in other areas of life: if you’re told by one colleague that Linda from HR and James from Accounts are having an affair, you might brush it off as a vague rumour. If several people mention to you at lunch that swear to God they’ve been told that James and Linda are having it off with each other, you will become more inclined to believe it is true. There is no rational reason for it to be the case; after all, maybe all your colleagues heard it from the same person. Still, the fact that it has become the talk of the town will make it feel like it is more likely to be true.

  When asked about her view on all this, Labour MP Lisa Nandy said: ‘It’s all very cosy, and I thought it might be, but even more so than I realised, particularly the relationship between politicians and journalists […] I definitely think it’s a two-way street – well, it’s more like a sort of circle which becomes very circular and very self-reinforcing. One of the big problems with the way that this place works and politics generally works is groupthink, and you do often get received wisdom that becomes received wisdom because maybe you heard it from a Tory MP, and you’ve repeated it to me, and then I repeat it to Jo Swinson when I bump into her, then she repeats it to Chuka [Umunna]. And you can suddenly find that everybody shares a set of beliefs that actually, out there in the country, don’t hold true at all. And the extent to which journalists are integrated into that, I think, is quite problematic.’

  Nandy is absolutely right, but solving this would be easier said than done: if journalists had to stop chatting away with MPs, there are a lot of stories they could not cover. Their lives would become considerably more tedious as well; if your job were to only involve talking to serious people about serious things, up to 13 hours a day, there wouldn’t be much competition to join the lobby. There is also the fact that relationships cannot be built on mutual interest alone, and MPs are fickle things with fragile egos: though deep down they must know that what journalists are after is information, a number of them would rather pretend it is a chummy relationship that just so happens to include the occasional useful bit of gossip.

  In order to develop such a chummy relationship, talking like normal people and about things normal people would talk about is a necessity. This normally involves an amusing and slightly awkward wide-ranging discussion, where both parties try to find some mutual interests and/or common ground.

  ‘I’ve been really barrel-scraping. I once brought up that I was Catholic to a senior politician,’ says one reporter. ‘That’s part of the point of the drinking stuff – to think about it formally. You’re trying to create the idea in their heads that you don’t just use them, that there’s something else there, and that you’d talk to them if they lost their job.’

  Jim Pickard from the Financial Times, has another way of looking at it: ‘If journalists are meeting politicians and they’re sitting down for two hours at some white tablecloth restaurant, you can’t expect to only talk about the policy of the department that they happen to be working in or shadowing. So part of it’s just the kind of normal social easing of conversation which would otherwise be incredibly dull, but it also plays a role just in terms of people’s assessment of politics. There’s not always any reason or logic to who rises to the top, right? There are loads of talented people on the backbenches and loads of duds on the front benches. So how do we take the view that one person is talented enough to be in the Cabinet? How do we decide that another person isn’t?’

  Getting to properly know them and talk to them about things beyond their brief is a good start. More broadly, another thing to take into account is that the relationship between the two sides is perhaps more equal than it would seem from the outside. While it is journalists’ jobs to chase stories and people, what happens in the political press has a tremendous amount of influence on how politics actually plays out, which creates an interesting dynamic. While junior hacks know not to even try and befriend senior cabinet ministers, for example, junior MPs are just as star-struck by senior journalists.

  ‘There’s sort of a pecking order of journalists, as there is a pecking order for MPs,’ explains former minister Greg Hands. ‘And being seen to be matey with whomever is perceived to be the top of the pecking order, someone like Laura Kuenssberg, for example, or Tim Shipman can be useful.’*

  There are also MPs who like to be chased and ones who are more than happy to do the chasing themselves. Politicians, after all, enjoy feeling important and being seen to inform the press as someone who is in the thick of it can please the ego. Only elected in 2017, Paul Masterton remains baffled by ‘some MPs who are absolute desperate rent-a-quotes, who are actively seeking out journalists to give their two pence to, whether the journalist wants it or not’.

  A former Labour special adviser, on the other hand, was always amused by MPs’ keenness to interact with hacks: ‘Politicians love – absolutely love – seeing their anonymised quotes,’ he said. ‘I used to get texts and emails saying, “See that anonymous quote today, page four of the Guardian? That was me!” They love it, they want to be Oscar Wilde, they love the fact that they’re going to have the damning rhetoric.’

  Though journalists interact with MPs a lot, they also regularly chat with special advisers, political advisers (the charmingly nicknamed ‘PAds’ who work for the opposition front bench), civil servants and the occasional clerk and parliamentary aide. The dynamics there are different, because they are less straightforward: MPs are public-facing figures, thus fair game, and it is the job of journalists to write about all the good and bad things they do.

  Everyone else in Westminster, however, usually remains unnamed and behind the scenes, and there is a whole spectrum on how much they are expected to interact with the press. While some spads are essentially hired to chat to hacks and nothing else, most clerks and junior civil servants are taught from the cradle onwards to avoid the media like the plague. That doesn’t always stop them, of course, but for them, making contact with journalists has to be more of a conscious choice, with potential consequences.

  Just like MPs, they can also let their ego get the better o
f them, which is something journalists have been known to exploit. ‘Officials go out with journalists and are absolutely determined to show that they’re in the know about things, so they will give the journalist a bit of an inside story because that shows that they’re an important person who knows about things,’ explains Jill Rutter.

  ‘One of my big things when I was the Treasury press secretary was just trying to find out who’d told what to which journalist. Because when all the papers got on to it that all the Treasury officials were middle-aged or older men, they hired quite a lot of youngish women as their correspondents. And these guys would go out to lunch with them and it’d be, you know, Caroline to Terry, “So tell me what’s in the forecast, Terry?” And Terry would just spiel around about what was in the forecast. And I used to say, “Look, just because she’s a 20- to 30-something woman with lovely hair, does not mean she’s not a competent journalist. So please do not just try and impress these people. Please do not go out for lunch with them if you can’t shut up.”’

  Still, this exchange of confidential information is the bedrock of the relationship; you simply need to figure out what you can and can’t babble about.

  ‘No one gives you any training on these things [but] I just had a rule,’ says one former Conservative spad. ‘You’ve got to feed the fish. It’s about having enough information on people who don’t matter to you – you’ve always got to have some things to pepper your conversation with so you don’t have to talk about anything that matters to you, which is where the gossip is keeping the train going. I would know to go in prepped, and always have enough to talk about.’*

  This conveniently brings us to something you probably knew was coming. If you take a group of neurotic and ambitious people, lock them all in a bubble 12 hours a day, expect them to go drinking together or at least spend a lot of time around each other, what can you possibly get …?