Haven't You Heard

by Marie Le Conte

  Deciding who goes up and who goes down is the job of the leader of a party, a few of their most trusted advisers, perhaps an MP or two, and the whips. They are all tremendously busy people who have a number of other things to be doing at any given time, so it is fair to say that they might not be able to take every single one of those questions into consideration when working on a reshuffle, especially given that there can be dozens of positions to fill or tinker with. There is also the undeniable fact that most politicians are unhealthily obsessed with the press and what the press makes of what they do, and that journalists themselves are also too busy to consider all those aspects when deciding whether to approve or disapprove a promotion or demotion.

  Here, a former senior Labour aide explains how this works in practice: ‘When leaders are doing reshuffles, they’re often thinking not about how the team’s going to work over two years, they’re thinking about how it’ll be perceived by the media. And their only gauge for how it’s going to be received by the media are the rumours that are knocking around beforehand. If it becomes a thing that Gordon Brown appointing James Purnell as welfare secretary would send a big message on youth and vibrancy on reforms, then suddenly that can become self-fulfilling. Everybody starts talking about someone getting a job before a reshuffle, and everyone suddenly expects it so much that if it doesn’t happen it becomes a statement in and of itself.’

  There is one slight problem with this way of doing things.*

  Where do journalists get their information from again? They get it from MPs and advisers, and occasionally from other journalists, who probably get their bits of information from other MPs and advisers. In short, when it comes to reshuffles, Westminster becomes one giant feedback loop. This could be moderately helpful if the information passed around was about, say, people’s policy agendas and whether they are or would be any good at running a department, but that is rarely the case. For MPs briefing journalists, their reasons normally relate to whether they’re friends with that MP and get along with them personally, are in the same faction as them, or share the same sort of ideological outputs. For journalists, it is usually a case of whether that MP is a good and useful lunch companion, if they promptly reply to texts and if they prove to be a good source when needed. As a result, what happens is that journalists might start dropping on Twitter and in columns that X is a bright, young rising star who could do with a government job, egged on by the MPs in whose interest it would be for that person to get a job, and when it comes to the actual reshuffles, the powers that be might look at X and think, Well, everyone seems to think X would do a great job, and we would look good giving them that job, so why not?

  To be clear, this isn’t the process through which every single minister is appointed, but it certainly plays its part, to the extent that very sharp minds might end up lingering on the backbenches as they aren’t necessarily clubbable, and more vacuous parliamentarians can quickly find their way to the Cabinet.

  ‘Whenever a journalist writes who’s going to go up and who’s going to go down, the ones they always want to go up are just basically the ones they like. Like they’re not actually any good at being ministers,’ says former Lib Dem spinner Sean Kemp. ‘There was a Lib Dem reshuffle where we got rid of Jeremy Brown and everyone said, “What in God’s name have you done now?” But the reason was because Jeremy was a terrible minister. He didn’t get anything done, he just spent all his time pontificating to journalists, and because he spent all his time pontificating to journalists he was a good source, and therefore he was tagged for promotion. And it happens where you get all these people and you don’t know how they continue going up, because in terms of being ministers and doing jobs and clearing out their box and stopping bad policies and pushing good policies, they might be rubbish. But because they’re good at this other bit, which is just being affable and turning up at the right think tank dinner …’

  This isn’t ideal. Still, the Westminster rumour mill can be good for one thing when it comes to reshuffles, and it is ensuring that even if someone got away with having done something reprehensible, they become significantly less likely to have a glittering career. There are exceptions, of course, and this wasn’t necessarily the case a few decades ago (more on that soon), but if you have a number of skeletons in your closet, people will know. The young staffer you bullied maybe didn’t go to the press, and the woman you sexually harassed might not have gone to the police, but this doesn’t mean that the incident disappeared without a trace.

  ‘There would be MPs that we would have to talk to No 10 about sometimes, if we were hearing stuff that maybe wasn’t the subject of a formal complaint but had the potential to be so, or you’d hear the stuff that people were saying locally about the MPs on their patch,’ explains one adviser who used to work for Labour HQ. ‘And that information was definitely used by No 10 when they were doing reshuffles and promotions. There would be MPs with big question marks who would not get a promotion they might otherwise get, because they were considered a risk.’

  This is usually where the whips can make themselves useful as well; they might not have as much power as they want people to think they do, but they certainly can warn their leadership team that a certain someone definitely should not be getting promoted. If there are rumours floating around a certain MP, it is their job to know about it and at least try to ascertain whether they are true or not, and with tangible enough proof that they could be turned into an embarrassing story for the government. This doesn’t always work, of course, as whips are only human and cannot possibly know about every single thing their MPs are up to, but it helps.

  The one thing that is better for whips than reshuffles, however, is whispers about one happening imminently. A party’s MPs are never as well behaved as in the week before a reshuffle is rumoured to be happening, which they are acutely aware of. It is not a trick that can be used repeatedly, so it must be deployed wisely, but whips have definitely been known to get the word out that the Prime Minister has started looking at their front bench and decided that some change is in order, even if it isn’t strictly speaking the case. Naughty whips.

  Rumours of an impending reshuffle are also vital for the civil service; after all, they are the ones who have to work with the ministers, and a political change at the top of their department can change everything. This is especially the case when they have teams they dislike, do not agree with or do not get along with. ‘Reshuffles is the thing they’re obsessed with,’ says journalist Chris Cook. ‘In the Department of Education, everything they did under Gove was wrapped up in Gove, and lots of it they thought was crackers. They pursued policies for years the department thought were completely nuts, and they thought it’d never work, and they’re still pretty open about this fact. I would get reams of text messages from the civil servants before every reshuffle. “Is it finally time? Are we going to get rid of him?” So in that case there were things that they were consciously trying to kick down the line, because they thought they might not have to do them completely if they could out-wait Gove. And Gove sort of knew this, so it became like a self-fulfilling problem.’

  This happens frequently, and is not entirely unreasonable from civil servants. If they spend a lot of time gossiping about who’s up, who’s down, who’s got the ear of No 10 and who’s pissed off the Treasury, it is partly because it is entertaining but also because it can have a direct influence on their job. After all, they are here to work on policies but can do little about the political aspect of them – whether they can go through Parliament, if they are a priority for Downing Street or will be put on the back burner – and that political side often defines just how far they can go. If, for example, a department’s Secretary of State is someone known for being close to No 10 and popular with the backbenches (a rare feat), the civil servants know that they can work on an ambitious policy agenda as it will almost certainly become a reality. If, on the other hand, a minister is getting increasingly known for their drunken antics and has been bonehe
aded in their conversations with the PM’s special advisers, and is therefore headed for the chop, civil servants know that that minister’s pet policy won’t see the light of the day anytime soon, so can dedicate as little time as possible to working on it.

  One former civil servant recalls: ‘I remember being asked at the MoJ years ago … There was a minister who basically wanted a particular policy and was pushing hard for it, and we just discounted what he said because it was clear that he was on the outs with No 10, because he’d screwed up, and so we weren’t really going to prioritise it. You don’t give a shit about them because if you did, you wouldn’t really be able to do your job, because you have to be aware of things colliding above your head.’

  Most of this has to be found out via informal means because not all of it will be in the public domain, and more junior civil servants tend to not have much access to the upper echelons of their department. There is a lot more to be said on the topic of policy-making, so much so that it deserves its own chapter, which will come later. In the meantime, let’s temporarily leave Westminster and go on a bit of an adventure. Where do you fancy going – Brighton? Manchester? Liverpool? Birmingham? Blackpool? Bournemouth?

  LADS ON TOUR

  If politics is odd at the best of times, conference season has to be one of the oddest bits of it. Every year, each party goes away somewhere for around three days and locks itself in a fancy hotel, along with a varying number of activists, lobbyists, staffers and journalists, and … well, predictable chaos ensues. While everyone will be there for different reasons, your typical conference day is usually: wake up early, work normal office hours, start drinking whenever it is officially socially acceptable to start drinking, keep on drinking until around 4:00am, go to bed, wake up three or four hours later, and repeat. This would be a recipe for wired neurosis and pointless drama for everyone, but given how weird most Westminster people are, conference season is often a time when everyone – to use the technical term – loses their mind.

  Before we get on to this, let’s go through the basics. Conference means different things for different parties: for the Liberal Democrats, it involves shaping most of their policy agenda; Labour also dedicate a lot of theirs to voting on what policies the party should adopt; the Conservatives, meanwhile, use more of an American format, where members are there but cannot vote on anything. Things also vary for small parties. What all conferences have is an absurd amount of speeches, from their main MPs, frontbenchers, mayors, councillors and so on. These take place every day in the main hall, and as a rule, the speeches are mostly as dull as dishwater. Then there are the fringe events: dozens and dozens of them, in rooms that can hold anything from 20 to over 100 people, and with debates on anything and everything, usually with panels including a selection of MPs, journalists, policy experts and campaigners. These run from 7:30am* to about 11:00pm. The ones organised around lunchtime tend to include gloriously free and offensively beige food (fish goujons somehow always feature), and any fringe event that starts after 5:30pm is expected to involve some free (cheap, warm, grim) wine. After 6:00pm, the drinks receptions start: some are strictly invitation only, others are only slightly selective, and a number of them are open to all pass-holders in the secure zone.

  Most of the genuinely fun (and most exclusive) parties start at 10:00pm or later, ensuring that the night feels like it lasts forever, and from roughly mid-afternoon, it is entirely possible to just give up on events and go have a drink in the conference hotel bar, where everyone will converge eventually. So, why do people go there? It is, after all, a tremendously expensive affair, as hotel prices jump right up on the dates and every drink in a mile radius costs about £12, and apart from the occasional surprise, not much happens there.

  For MPs, it depends: if you’re on the front bench, you are expected to be there, either to give a speech or to generally support your leader. If you’re a new MP or one with clear ambitions, it can’t hurt to show your face, talk to activists, and generally be seen to engage with the party faithful. Other MPs tend to avoid the event altogether. Labour and Lib Dem members can go there if they want to help shape their party’s policies, and it never hurts to be able to freely mingle with MPs you normally only ever see on telly. Lobbyists, think tank wonks and charity bods know that in order to be heard, they’d better be there, whether they want to or not. Journalists, meanwhile, are there because where politicians go they follow, even though it can be toughest for them as they can go to up to six conferences one week after the other every September and October.

  The one problem for them is that, to put it bluntly, not much happens at conference. The speeches tend to be mind-numbingly boring and unless you have an army of reporters you need your team to get lucky and happen to be at the one fringe event where a moderately well-known MP says something daft or offensive; and at the end of the day, you are stuck in a place the size of a shoebox with every other political journalist in the land, so getting a genuinely exclusive scoop isn’t easy. This means that on top of being sleep-deprived and hungover, journalists tend to be a tad grumpy at conferences, and grumpy hacks are dangerous ones.

  ‘I mean, it’s just the worst way to govern a country I can imagine,’ says former Lib Dem spinner Sean Kemp. ‘At party conference everyone who has a speech has to announce a policy, because otherwise the journalists basically go, “We will blow up your conference.” So you rush around, go shit, we need like ten policies that we can launch in this conference, most of which are going to get no coverage because we’re launching another nine policies, but if we don’t do it everyone throws their toys out of the pram. So many terrible policies are launched by governments at party conferences just because otherwise they won’t have anything to do at the four o’clock briefing.’

  Annoying as it might be for the people in charge of coming up with those useless policies, they remain the best way to try and distract journalists long enough that they don’t shift their focus on to more embarrassing matters. In case the previous hint was too subtle: people get sloshed at conference. Not everyone does, but a lot of people really do get leathered, battered, trashed, hammered, whatever you want to call it. The combination of bad free food, near-unlimited free alcohol and absolutely endless awkward conversations with near strangers means that even people who usually are the type to have a half pint or two then call it a day will get merrily sozzled. This means that every year, at the very least one senior politician will be spotted being so drunk that they can barely stand, a number of MPs will walk into morning meetings very obviously looking like they’ve just thrown up, and so on. Luckily, hacks get just as drunk as the rest of them, so what happens at conference can often stay there. As one former lobby hack recalls, ‘I remember getting a really good story from a senior MP at 4am and thinking, Oh my God I’m so drunk, I’ve got to write this down because I’ll forget it in the morning.’*

  Another thing that happens when you shove a lot of very drunk, tired and neurotic people together for a few days is that they tend to revert to their teenage selves a bit. What doesn’t help is the fact that there is a clear hierarchy of parties and drinks receptions wherever you go, and most chats after 6:00pm are along the lines of: ‘Which party are you going to tonight?’ / ‘Well, I got invited to X and I think I’m someone’s +1 for Y and I’m NFI from Z’ / ‘Oh! I’ve got a +1 for Z so you can come with me but could you try and get me in to X?’ / ‘Oh, I wish but I’m already using my +1 for X for the person who’s bringing me to Y, sorry!’ – ad nauseam. Politics is a popularity contest for people who are desperate to be liked, and somehow these people once decided that a good way to do work and have fun was to recreate the social structures of a particularly venomous high school.

  This might all seem a bit (very?) silly from the outside, but people are people and they can’t help it. Westminster denizens who are on their millionth conference season can usually appear more reasonable about these things, but fear of missing out is a powerful force, especially when you’ve slept
for seven hours in total in the past three days. After all, it’s not entirely irrational to think that you absolutely must go to party Y, as it could be the one where, say, two MPs start having a fight, or that Secretary of State you’ve desperately been trying to talk to or establish contact with has had enough glasses of bubbles to be friendlier than usual.

  If power in politics is about whom you know, it doesn’t feel that unreasonable for people to tie themselves in knots when denied access to the room where it happens. Not that those parties are actually fun: a conference party always involves fairly bad booze, way too many people in one room (or worse, not quite enough people in one room), people desperately trying to go and talk to some people and those people desperately trying to avoid the people who want to talk to them. It’s no wonder you have to be drunk to get through it, really.

  Still, all that free alcohol has some consequences, and there is a reason why the event has been nicknamed ‘Love Island for Nerds’ more than once. People shag at party conferences; they have consequence-free shags, shags they regret in the morning, they cheat on the partners they’ve left at home, heartily snog whoever is game at 3am, then desperately try to avoid the people they snogged the day after. Not everyone shags, of course, but there is enough shagging going on to keep everyone entertained. There is the story of the woman who was handed the key to a Tory delegate’s hotel room even though she’d never asked for it, and who later that night handed the key to another delegate trying to get in her pants and telling him that it was her hotel room. There is the peer who decided to have as much fun as possible at conference so spent most of it on Grindr. Then there are the countless temporary couples caught snogging in lifts because they couldn’t wait to be in private to get started, the MPs very kindly making themselves available to activists after hours, and many, many others.