Now the editor of The Times diary, Patrick Kidd used to work at the HQ of the Conservative Party while they were in opposition. Here, he recalls one of his less-proud career moves as a young researcher: ‘Oh God, this will reflect so badly on me, but on one occasion there was a policy that was under consideration that was in my area which I thought was going to be vetoed by the Shadow Treasury, so I wanted to get it out. And so I went for a drink with our press officer and a journalist to the Marquis of Granby, and our press officer got completely pissed, so much so that she fell over. And so when there was an inquiry about how the story appeared in the papers, I’m afraid I did sort of say it wasn’t me but well, she was completely drunk, she may have inadvertently passed it to them. And I’d printed it out and given it to them. So there we are, she was pissed so that gave me my alibi.’
If this sounds bad to you, it is worth mentioning that Kidd hardly is an exception here; though the subtle blaming of the sloshed colleague perhaps wasn’t ideal, secretly passing on documents to journalists for more-or-less righteous reasons is often the rule and not the exception in SW1.
Leaking a bad idea before it can be formally briefed to journalists is also a well-known tactic, as it both allows you to put your own spin on why the idea is a bad one, and it can ensure that the idea is nipped in the bud. The way it normally goes is: a party, or group within a party, starts talking about something, said thing gets leaked to the press while still an idea, the party or group is forced to deny it as it is technically not something that is definitely happening at that point in time, and once that is done, it becomes very difficult for them to eventually announce the idea without it sounding like a big U-turn. The idea is dead, and everyone can move on. The opposite can work too, with an idea a person of a group thinks is good, but is obviously about to get shut down; if you can get it to a paper before that happens, it might not guarantee that the idea will not get killed, but it will certainly make it a bit less likely as once it’s out, you can start getting your people defending it on the record. It might not immediately change the minds of the powers that be, but you will have turned something that was dead on arrival into an idea publicly debated by your party.
All of this applies to people as well, obviously, as Westminster is largely dominated by MPs with various ambitions and people with power forever attempting to retain it. The science of talking someone up or ensuring someone remains down deserves its own chapter (and we will get it later) but before then, it is worth mentioning something crucial: just because a story looks positive, it does not mean that its intended effect wasn’t negative.
Take Lisa Nandy, for example. She has been the Labour MP for Wigan since 2010, and has been tipped for her party’s leadership more times than you could count. It started in around 2014 under Ed Miliband then came back up every other month, and she was eventually known as one of those people who would definitely jump at the opportunity, should there be a vacancy. The only issue is that two leadership contests have since passed, and she stood for neither. In fact, she insists that she has never seriously considered running, and that the rumours were circulated to ensure that she wouldn’t be trusted by her party leadership and colleagues:
‘One of the things about leadership ambition rumours is that they are often set in train in order to prevent that sense of team developing. It can set you up to threaten some of the people in here, and make it much harder to get things done. It can be really disruptive and undermining,’ she explains.
‘Rumours about me standing for leader sort of reached a peak in 2015, and then again in 2016, and I can honestly say that although I was approached by some people in 2014, it was never something that I treated as a serious prospect. I wasn’t planning to do it at the time, and in 2016, I denied it straight away, but it didn’t stop the rumour mill from going. In fact, if anything with those sorts of rumours, the more that you deny them, the more they spread. It can be a bit disconcerting, because you don’t often know why people are doing it, and deniability can be really difficult.’
This last point is crucial. There is an argument in saying that Westminster simply is a workplace, and gossip happens in any workplace, so it isn’t special in its reliance on rumours. One major difference between, say, an accounting firm in Swindon and the Palace of Westminster is that Sally from HR’s tryst with Bob from Accounts or Sarah’s plotting to take over the biggest account in the company are unlikely to get laid bare in a national newspaper. Rumours in politics can be just that, but once they get printed and become a story, they are suddenly a tangible piece of news to which people are expected to react.
Like the tale of Birt and his toenail clippings, a lot of stories are particularly potent because there is no real way to deny them beyond reasonable doubt. As Lisa Nandy inferred, simply saying ‘I don’t want to be leader’ to a journalist does not mean that they will take your statement at face value and conclude that you simply do not want to run for leader. Unless a story is based on a cache of documents, a recording of a conversation or something similar, it is hard to categorically deny it and be believed – once it’s out, it’s out.
There is also a slight issue of politicos often playing with fire when it comes to denials; while you cannot straightforwardly lie to a journalist who comes to you to check that a story they heard is correct, you do have plenty of room to try and make them less likely to publish anything. It is, in fact, the job of a good spinner to manage to deny a (true) story enough that it isn’t publishable without having technically lied to the reporter. There are a number of ways in which you can do this, and here is former Lib Dem spinner James McGrory with one of his favourite ones:
‘I used to say, “There’s a couple of things you’ve got wrong in there.” And they’d say, “Well, what do you mean?” And you’d reply, “Well, look. In its entirety what you’ve said is not right. I’m not going to help you do any more on this.” Could be the day of the week that they’ve put to you, could be something as fundamental as a person involved. Generally, if I’m using that though, they’ve probably got the central thing and you’re picking about, for example, “I’ve heard this was on Thursday” – it was actually midnight on Wednesday.’
In this context, it is easy to see why journalists won’t take anything but a factual, tangible denial as proof that something definitely didn’t happen. Or, in the words of a former Labour spad: ‘One of the funny things about politics is that unlike in other walks of life, because people can be asked about a rumour; once a rumour’s in print, it becomes something you either have to agree with or deny. Or rather if you can’t deny it then it becomes accepted. Sometimes if you do deny it, it still becomes accepted.’
These aren’t the only dynamics to keep in mind when dealing with a rogue rumour flying around. A lot of the time, a piece of gossip can live and die within Westminster, simply passed around until everyone gets bored, and might make an appearance in a diary column but not much else. This is the best possible scenario, apart from the one in which gossip isn’t shared at all. The one issue is that it is not obvious which pieces of gossip will disappear quietly of their own accord, and which ones will eventually turn into big embarrassing stories. This is even more of a concern when the said piece of information is either totally false or has a kernel of truth to it but has been blown out of all proportion. If this happens, what should you do? If you let it thrive, people might assume that it has to be true, otherwise you would have denied it already; if you put your foot down and loudly deny it, you might make it considerably bigger than it was ever going to be.
Ask a spinner what they make of this conundrum and they will tell you that while neither is ideal, a version of the former tends to be preferable. ‘I’ve had conversations with MPs where I’ve had to say to them no, you can’t,’ says Lib Dem Ben Rathe. ‘Where they’ve said, “I want to respond to this.” And you say, “No, you can’t respond to this. We’ll respond to this, but you need to stay out of this because if you respond to it then it’s a bigger story
, because you’re then on the record and you’re giving it more credence than it’s worth.” And that’s quite a difficult conversation to have, because when you’re dealing with allegations that can be difficult for people. If you’re talking about sexual relationships, or if you’re talking about things that would be embarrassing to those people in terms of their personal life, it’s quite difficult to say to them, “No, I need you to not talk about this.” Or more accurately, I need you to trust us to do our job and not be involved with it, because they feel personally invested. It’s really difficult for them to say, “Oh yeah, okay, I’ll let you, 20-something press officer, deal with this thing that could potentially alter my career.” But if you were to rebut every rumour or thing that you heard you’d spend your entire life chasing shadows.’
Conveniently, you do not have to take Ben’s word for it: history has provided us with a perfect example of how trying to make things better will often just make them worse. In fact, have you heard the story of Peter Mandelson and the guacamole? It has been more or less everywhere, and everyone with a keen interest in politics will probably have heard it at one point or another. In case you haven’t, it goes like this:
When Peter Mandelson was out campaigning in the north of England one time, he decided to stop by a chip shop. As a middle-class man who had spent his formative years in north London, he was keen to prove his effortless man-of-the-people credentials. Anyway, he goes into the chippy, orders some fish and chips and glances at the mushy peas before adding, ‘And could I get some of that guacamole as well?’ That’s it, that’s the story – it might not have been roaringly funny, but it is amusing and symptomatic of an era when New Labour would just ship out poncey posh boys to working-class northern seats and that was that. The anecdote has been doing the rounds for over two decades, and is just part of the canon of Westminster gossip.
There is one small problem with it, though: it’s not true. Or at least, it is true but Peter Mandelson was not the mushy peas offender. In fact, the anecdote is in writing in a book published in 1997, Andy McSmith’s Faces of Labour. This is what it says, in a chapter about the Knowsley North by-election of 1986:
‘Working from a disused office in what had been the industrial quarter of Kirby before recession had reduced it to a brick-strewn wasteland, their only source of food was a chippy nearby in a small row of shops where the shutters stayed up all day as a precaution against vandals. It was so very different from the home life of Shelley Keeling, daughter of a wealthy East Coast American businessman, who was completing her studies by spending a year working in the parliamentary office of Jack Straw, who was in Knowsley North as the candidate’s political adviser. One day, a party researcher named Julian Eccles invited her to the chippy to taste the local fare. Sunk into the counter was a large metal dish containing something green and viscous. “That looks delicious; is it avocado?” she enquired. It was mushy peas.’
Suddenly, the story loses some of its charm: it is no longer about an enigmatic and divisive senior figure in the Labour Party, and Americans can be forgiven for not having heard of the British delicacy that is mushy peas. So what happened? If you ask Westminster denizens who have been around for a while, some of them will say that the (false) story came from Neil Kinnock himself, the former Labour leader. When he gave a speech at Mandelson’s leaving do in 1990, he told the story but replacing Shelley with Peter. There is another layer to this, however – why would Kinnock have voluntarily told a random false story at the alleged protagonist’s bash? Maybe it’s because he’d recently read it in the paper.
To be more precise, maybe he had read it in a political column in The People roughly a month earlier; a column that mentioned mushy peas and Mandelson in the same breath. A column written by Peter Mandelson, trying to explain that the story was false. Neil Kinnock did not reply to interview requests for this book so we will never know why he decided to make that joke in his speech, but we can probably guess that he was trying to rib the man he had by then known and worked with for years. So there you go – Peter Mandelson, the Prince of Darkness himself, presumably thought that publicly denying a silly anecdote that had been doing the rounds would put it to bed, thus making sure that it would live on for years to come instead. You win some, you lose some.
After all, the bet he made was quite a risky one: of all the bits of rumours and interesting stories that do the rounds in Westminster, few of them ever do make it to the papers and into the public consciousness. It can sometimes feel like everything that happens in politics eventually gets found out and if not leaked, at least discussed in newsrooms, but that really isn’t the case. Asking people whose job it is to prevent secrets from going out produces a range of answers, but they all agree that some confidential stuff does manage to remain just that.
‘In terms of the “gossip”, I would say less than 10% of it actually gets out there,’ says Conservative MP Greg Hands. ‘I’m not trying to encourage you, but there’s a whole goldmine out there you’ve barely mined. Also in government, everybody’s terribly excited about leaked documents – the government produces an enormous number of documents on a day-to-day basis, and the number of documents that is actually leaked is minuscule. Only a small part of it leaks, but because there’s now so much product out there, it creates the impression that the place leaks like a sieve.’
According to James McGrory, ‘No more than about 25%. I remember someone in the lobby saying to me after I’d been doing it for about two years and I was pushing some shit story as sometimes you are, “You must see ten fucking splashes a day.” And I said, “Come on, that’s ridiculous, we haven’t got that, there’s not that many things going on.” And he came back, “You know, if you just sat and thought about it.” Because who’s shagging who is the best stuff, but if you think of all the disagreements that you’ve been witness to in meetings, via email … There are people being quite catty with each other, vehemently disagreeing. That would walk onto a splash. “Huge row blows …” So there’s two categories of gossip that don’t make it in, I think, and that bit that I’ve just described of internal disagreement, it’s probably less than 2%. And I know that sounds ridiculous given the papers are always full of internal rows, but actually it’s how politics is. It’s people having genuinely quite big debates about stuff. Clever, informed, passionate people, at the top of their profession, having genuine disagreements about important stuff. Politics is not a vicar’s tea party, there are robust discussions. I’ve seen candidates swear at each other, lose their temper, get really upset about stuff, because they care. And in a good operation, almost none of that makes it to the papers.’
Meanwhile, one No 10 aide had this to say: ‘I would suggest that although 10% gets out, around 30 or 40% is known by the media, but you have to stack it up,’ which rings true. Finally, Miranda Green might just be the one who put it best: ‘I was a journalist and then I worked for the Lib Dems and then I came back to journalism, and it is slightly spooky, once you’ve been on the other side, behind the curtain: it’s quite spooky how much nobody ever knows.’
This was true of her time in politics in the ’90s and is certainly true of politics now, but it wouldn’t be possible to get a rounded view of the leaks of Westminster (both managed and accidental) without looking at the one thing that has revolutionised the way secrets travel around SW1: technology.
ONLINE AND UPWARDS
All the interviews with MPs conducted for this book were done in person, over lunch, drinks or coffee, and most of them were interrupted every other minute by the interviewee’s phone lighting up. The notification occasionally turned out to be an email, but the overwhelming majority of them were from WhatsApp. The response was generally a glance at the screen, a resigned or annoyed sigh, and a return to the conversation. ‘I don’t know how many WhatsApp groups I am in, but it is more than is necessary,’ said MP Paul Masterton after receiving one such notification. ‘Most of them are muted, they’re so annoying.’ Other MPs, meanwhile, estimated that t
hey were in around a dozen WhatsApp groups, sometimes even more.
As a matter of fact, it would be hard to overstate just how important the messaging app has become to MPs and the people around them. There are WhatsApp groups of intakes, WhatsApp groups for female MPs of certain parties, WhatsApp groups for plotting, WhatsApp groups for discussing certain TV shows (yes, really), WhatsApp groups to coordinate around a policy, and so on. MPs talk to each other and to journalists on WhatsApp, the latter who in turn talk to each other on WhatsApp, ad nauseam.
This isn’t surprising: the app allows you to easily have private conversations with one or several people, groups are easy to set up even for people who don’t spend their days online, and the encryption on both sides can ensure that chats have a certain level of privacy. Westminster is also a place where most of what happens comes from people talking to each other, preferably in a place where others can’t overhear what is being said, so real-time online chats were always going to be a revolutionising force in politics.
‘MPs are all on WhatsApp,’ says journalist John Rentoul. ‘It mechanises it; it makes it completely instant. In the old days you had to phone MPs on landlines, try and find out where they were, it just took forever, whereas now it’s all instantaneous. And a lot of MPs would rather give you a comment on a DM or WhatsApp than actually speak to you, because they can actually fashion the words and control it much more.’
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