Everyone who has been to a few conferences will have a (first, second or third hand) story of something salacious that happened there. This is former MP Jerry Hayes’ favourite: ‘I won’t mention the names, but I was making a film for ITN and I was with the crew, and we were all a bit pissed. But there was a very prominent MP with a very prominent lobbyist. Both pissed, both trying to have a shag. And they were both sitting on the wall but they were both so pissed that they kept falling off. And we took some photos but we never did anything about it. I thought it was right to film it for posterity …’*
None of this is specific to political conferences, of course; novelist Colm Tóibín was once commissioned to write about a literature conference and remarked that ‘there was much coming and a certain amount of going’. If you put like-minded people in a closed environment for a few days and ply them with alcohol, don’t be surprised if they pop in and out of each other’s hotel rooms. What is different here is that the matters at hand are somewhat more serious – with all due respect to people who work in literature, their personal relationships might not have that great an influence on the way the country is run.
Conference might be a time for a party leader to try and show what their vision of the country is and for an opposition front bench to announce the policies they want to enact should they get into government, but it is about much more. Informal relationships matter in Westminster, and they can be created, mended and broken in those few days every year. This is why everyone still goes, despite not much ever really happening there; unless you are senior in your field, it will take a ton of effort and a fair bit of luck to establish a network of important people you can rely on. If you’re then given a space where you can merrily bump into a minister at a drinks reception and get their mobile number and the promise of a coffee, why would you miss it?
Still, this annual Westminster-on-Sea retreat does reinforce the uncomfortable closeness that defines the bubble. The line between professional and personal already is blurry, but when you’re shagging one another, whispering about who’s snogged whom and happily getting sloshed until the early hours together, it feels non-existent. It doesn’t matter that not everyone does it; most people will have calmed down by the time they reach their fourth or fifth conference season, but those links have already been established by then. What matters too is the general environment and that heightened feeling of all being in the same boat. We’ve already seen how this impacts the way politics is covered in the press, but there is still one missing piece in this boozy, messy jigsaw: lobbyists.
INTERESTED PARTIES
Could you, with a reasonable level of certainty, explain what a lobbyist does? There are a number of definitions online, all of which say broadly the same thing: the UK Public Affairs Council once defined it as ‘in a professional capacity, attempting to influence, or advising those who wish to influence, the UK Government, Parliament, the devolved legislatures or administrations, regional or local government or other public bodies on any matter within their competence’. This is fair enough, but does that tell us anything about what they wake up in the morning to do, what they do every day? How does one attempt to influence or advise those who wish to influence the government, Parliament, etc.? Like spinners, lobbyists have a reputation for being shadowy, powerful and lacking a moral compass, but that doesn’t clear up the minor matter of what it is they actually get paid to do, in concrete terms.
If you don’t have an answer to this, don’t worry, you’re not the only one. At least you can comfort yourself by realising that you’re not the former senior political operative who snapped up a head of public affairs job at a very respectable company, then had to text friends the week before they started to ask what their shiny new job actually entailed. But let’s take a step back for a second.
Say you’re someone like that person – you’ve been hired to be a lobbyist. Who hired you? It was either a company who wants you to be the in-house lobbyist of the firm, or an agency that specialises in public affairs which has a number of clients expecting them to do their lobbying for them (and paying them handsomely for the service). Though they share ways of working, the former isn’t as interesting, as it usually means that the person in question comes from a certain policy area background and doesn’t have as many plates to juggle. They also tend to have got involved because they care about that area of policy, as opposed to agency lobbyists who clearly enjoy the job itself and are more worth a closer look.*
So, what does an agency lobbyist do with their time? They talk. They talk to their clients, they talk to MPs, they talk to advisers, to civil servants, to journalists, sometimes, to policy wonks, to everyone who might be relevant. According to one of them, it involves ‘a lot of breakfasts with MPs, and sometimes a little quick coffee at Portcullis House, where you’re trying to do two or three in an afternoon. You pop in and you try to see how long you can secretly stay there for. Most of it is WhatsApp. Then going to events in the evening can have a massive impact – in the week I will have three or four in my diary. I think that’s half of it, who you see in the evening.’
What do they talk about? It depends. If one of their clients is someone who, say, makes sugary foods, they might employ a small army of lobbyists to find out if a sugar tax really is coming, and if so, to be made aware of exactly what it will be before it formally comes out, so the company has time to get ready; they will also expect their lobbyists to speak to all levels of policy-makers and try to convince them to shelve the plans, or if not to at least delay and/or tweak it. While this might sometimes be done for nefarious reasons, lobbyists’ conversations are normally quite technical and dull, and about explaining why a policy might harm a certain industry in an unexpected way, or why another policy should be brought in as it would help the businesses in question without harming anyone else.
Upcoming bills tend to be set pieces, but this doesn’t mean that lobbyists have nothing to do the rest of the time; most people in charge of big companies need (or feel that they need) to be aware of what is going on behind the scenes in Westminster at any given point. Because they are busy running their businesses, they rely on their public affairs team to not only keep track of what is going more generally, but also have a good understanding of who’s up, who’s down, which relationships are important and which groupings of MPs are worth keeping an eye on. After all, British politics works in weird and mysterious ways, and unless you’re constantly knee-deep in it, a lot of it will seem opaque to you. This last part is crucial for agencies, and what they rely on to stay in business.
According to Gareth Morgan, the director of lobbying firm Cavendish Communications, ‘You need to project a type of image to stop people nicking your clients, to put it bluntly. So you’re always trying to win a client, you’re always trying to keep hold of a client, there’s always someone else trying to nick your client. And one of the things that you use can be gossip, in the sense that I’m paying x thousand a month for this advice; what we’re all doing, pretty much all what we do, boils down to the same stuff. There’s no one out there in public affairs who’s doing something no one else has ever thought of or ever done. Meetings, dinners, events, whatever. So how you make yourself distinct is the key, and gossip is definitely part of that. So I would say that at the core of agency that’s kind of a massive deal, and I think what lots of people don’t realise when they’re not in it, is how much you’re constantly fighting to stay in business.’
Another senior lobbyist agreed: ‘It actually differentiates us from our competitors, if we can get a heads-up about something which counts as gossip from someone who shouldn’t be telling you something. Or, “Just so you know …” So if you can pre-empt something and get in before the others, it shows your worth, and it shows that kind of side to your contacts. We go, “Well, actually, I’ve just seen here …” and half the time, clients love it; they find it the most interesting stuff. You’ll sit there and you’ll update them on policies and things. It never gets as far as who’
s shagging whom, but it’s definitely which bit’s fallen out with which bit, and who’s fallen out with so-and-so, or why are they in trouble? And that’s a thing that clients like. They feel that kind of salacious stuff which they get on the side is what they really enjoy. They love it if you took a quick note saying, “By the way, just so you know, I heard this today.” It adds that colour – otherwise we’d just talk about policy, and it’s really boring.’
In this respect, lobbyists are quite similar to both journalists and civil servants, as they use gossip to make otherwise dull conversations more interesting, and to be as good at their job as possible. Like Whitehall and its obsession with knowing which minister is heading for the Cabinet and which one is about to receive a one-way ticket to the backbenches, having that level of informal understanding of Parliament is crucial for them.*
An example of this could be, say, being hired to lobby for a tax cut for businesses in a certain industry; not a huge one, but one that those businesses could do with. If you’ve been employed to make it happen by the next Budget, how do you do it? Trying to make the backbenches of the governing party all rise up and grumble at once would be ideal, but hard to do. Instead, what you might do is target a few MPs, go talk to them, and explain properly to them how that tax cut would be good for your industry, and either good or neutral for their constituents, yadda, yadda. How do you pick those MPs? You need to make sure that even if they agree with that tax cut, they won’t have a door slammed in their face if they try to go and talk to the Treasury themselves. As a result, what you need to know is: whether those MPs are liked by their colleagues, so they can then do your work for you and talk to their fellow MPs, whether they’re seen as influential or on the way up, for similar reasons, what faction they’re in and what relationship that faction has to the Chancellor, so whether the Chancellor would be amenable to the requests of someone from their own faction or from a faction they’re trying to appease, and what their personal relationship is with the Chancellor, so whether it is good, bad, or non-existent.
How do you find out all this? It probably won’t come as a surprise to you by now: ‘The substantial stuff of who’s well regarded and all that, you can get that type of stuff after a little while from profiles journalists write,’ says Gareth Morgan. ‘You can definitely Google intel and, say, put it altogether and then to a client who doesn’t read those sources you can say, “Look at this amazing insight.” Whereas true gossip of having sat down with the spads for lunch and found something out that probably they let you know for a reason but most other people have no clue about it … gossip that will put you ahead of columnists sometimes; that’s when you know you’re on to a really rich seam. So I think when you’re at the stage where you’re reading stuff by whomever, and you’re thinking no, I knew that, I knew that, I knew that, then you know you’re in the right kind of place.’
After all, public affairs agencies are paid more than enough by their clients, and if they just wanted someone to read the week’s columns and diaries and take some notes, they could just hire a few interns. Instead, what they buy is mostly contacts; as we’ve seen ad nauseam, people are considerably more likely to only share their best gossip with those they see as friends, or at least good acquaintances. At least when it comes to journalists, MPs and advisers can have a good reason to want to talk to you even if you’re not personally close, but with lobbyists, it is harder. As Morgan pointed out, you might get the occasional morsel if someone really wants something to find its way into the public domain, but without those informal relationships, you won’t go very far.
When well-meaning souls argue about the dangers of the revolving doors of Westminster, they do have a point: it can be concerning to watch so many people work in politics, learn every which way it works behind the scenes, then go sell that knowledge to private companies. On the other hand, a lot of people leaving their political jobs don’t really have a lot of choices, career-wise: if you were born and bred on Whitehall and suddenly find yourself out of work in your thirties or forties, there aren’t many areas your expertise is useful in. Most jobs in SW1 are nebulous at best, and though there will always be transferable skills, chances are that you aren’t great at managing people, have no idea how a normal office is meant to function and have a near-physical need to stay close to the action. Luckily, there are agencies who will welcome you with open arms, if your contact book is good enough, and will let you keep floating around your old stomping grounds for a reasonable amount of money.
‘The revolving door between public affairs and government is insane,’ says lobbyist Andy Williams. ‘Mainly government then public affairs, but occasionally the other way around. So the narrative historically has been that you go into government, and it’s a dutiful thing and it’s because you care, and then you want to go and sell your soul, but it’s really not as straightforward as that at all. Public affairs is not that well paid; don’t get me wrong, it’s good money, but it’s not amazing. It’s not as if I’m prepared to sacrifice all of my life and principles for this incredible salary. I think there are a lot of people who go into public affairs because actually they’re interested in politics and they realise that if you end up with the right client, you can make quite a significant difference to certain policy areas.’
This is very much a lobbyist’s view of lobbying so must be taken with a pinch of salt, but there is some truth to it; some of the shadier companies and agencies will pay their public affairs teams very handsomely for the services they provide, but others won’t, and there’s not much these people can do anyway. After all, most of those who end up taking a lobbying gig were working or at least campaigning for a political party in their Westminster life, which means that any job that would require them to be completely neutral is pretty much out of bounds. In public affairs, however, being a party member is seen as a definite positive: after all, where better to make friends than in a place where (more or less) everyone is fighting for the same cause, or at least fighting each other over which faction is best placed to advance the said cause?
‘My best contacts are people I met when I was young and on the piss,’ says Morgan. ‘I think the best PA people are current political people as well. So, for instance, my politics is Labour, and I will have people who will give me intel because they trust me as we’re trying to chuff someone else in the Labour Party together, so that kind of internecine factional stuff is sometimes the best route to get in that trust. So I can get stuff from that person they would never ever give me by taking them out for lunch, meeting them at a think tank event. In the industry you’re always saying to your people, “I need you to be a political member and I need you to be campaigning, and I need you to get in that office during the election period.” You know, the trenches with the guys, and afterwards they’ll say, “Okay, I’ll take the call off this guy.”’
In short, a good lobbyist needs to be one who is entirely part of the Westminster ecosystem; ideally a member of a party, but at the very least going to the drinks receptions, occasionally popping by the terrace and the Red Lion and so on. Most of these interactions will be purely informal and involve general chats about whatever people are whispering about at that point in time, as opposed to straightforward discussions about what that lobbyist is working on. One good example of this is conference season. While it might feel obvious that everyone there is attending in order to do their jobs, trying to collar MPs and going in dry with a chat about policy will rarely work.
As one lobbyist explains: ‘Some of my clients are really shit. They won’t understand the subtlety of it, will go in aggressively to MPs at conference and say, “Why haven’t you changed this bit of regulation?” And they’ll say, “What do you mean, why haven’t I changed it? It’s not much to do with me, and I would try but
Instead, a savvy public affairs operation at
conference involves one thing: alcohol. All lobbyists might not be as well paid as they’d like you to think, but what most of them have in common is a rather generous expenses account. Their bosses know that good chats don’t come cheaply, and nowhere is this truer than in a conference bar where the cheapest pint will cost you about £7. Some lobbyists have been known to swan from one conversation to another, politely buying rounds for whoever needs them; others just stand by the bar and merrily offer to pay for punters’ drinks. These expense accounts are a known part of the scenery, and it is not infrequent to see other Westminster denizens actively seek the nearest lobbyist when their drink is starting to look dangerously empty. This might sound a tad unethical but in most cases, these free drinks won’t ever lead to any effective lobbying on behalf of someone’s client. If anything, some cynical young lobbyists have been known to provide drinks to their friends all night, expense the lot, then explain to their boss that they were busy making very important work contacts, which is only really true if you squint.
Oh, and at least things have changed in the past few decades. Here, former MP Jerry Hayes recalls one particular instance of rather brazen lobbying: ‘I remember the good, or the bad days, whichever way you look at it, of public affairs. Ian Greer was a very, very old friend, and he once pulled off the most amazing coup. Couldn’t do it today because it would be regarded as vaguely corrupt, which I suppose it was. Tories had promised that we’d privatise British Airways. Nothing happened. Sir John King, who was the chairman of British Airways, did not get it. So Ian Greer bussed 132 Tory MPs to the Savoy for the most delightful, expensive, drunken lunch you could possibly imagine. John King gets up and says, “I’m glad you enjoyed your lunch, blah blah blah. Don’t forget your manifesto commitment.” Within three weeks, a bill was presented before Parliament for the privatisation of British Airways.’
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