We can probably all agree that while successful, this was perhaps a bit much, and it is good that such practices would be frowned upon today, though who knows? Perhaps today’s occasional conference rounds will look equally questionable in decades to come.
In the meantime, let’s come back to something that was mentioned earlier in this chapter, and a few other times before that: the whole ‘who’s up, who’s down’ business. After all, most MPs are in Westminster for a reason, and it isn’t just to represent their constituents.
NEW SHERIFF IN TOWN
The majority of MPs would like to be prime minister. They might know that it realistically will never happen, or only happen in 15 years and with a whole lot of luck; they probably wouldn’t admit it to anyone else, and they may well have come into Parliament thinking that they never wanted to be PM, but there they are. As a result, most things that happen in Westminster should be looked at through the prism of knowing that a lot of MPs probably think that they could do a better job than their leader. It’s not that they’re all spending their time plotting, just that they aren’t not plotting most of the time.
A lot of it isn’t active; sure, the occasional ‘wide-ranging interview’ (always a good sign) or impressive speech at a think tank can help, but most of it is about creating a network of people you like, who like you, and whom you can trust. How do you do this? It depends on the person – some will become a permanent fixture on the terrace, others will find themselves turning into an extremely helpful colleague, always willing to lend a hand to other MPs, and some will always make sure to have their lunch in Portcullis House, where anyone can join them for a chat. There is no one way to go about making friends in general, and preparing to run for the leadership of a party is similar. Still, you usually do have to be seen and heard as much as possible, and WhatsApp alone won’t cut it; friendships (and convenient partnerships) need a certain level of physicality to them.
‘The most surprising people would be very good friends with one another,’ says one former senior Labour staffer. ‘And those alliances, they’re important in leadership contests. I don’t think people actually vote according to their politics first. A lot of the time people vote on the basis of relationships.’
According to academic Tim Bale, ‘If you look at the leadership contests, you can see very, very clearly on a number of occasions that people have either won or failed to win the leaderships of our major political parties because they are not seen as good “people” people. In other words, they’re not seen to be people who could work a room, chat to anybody. And the obvious illustration is that Major won in 1990 because he was precisely that, he was sort of “Hail fellow, well met!” Very good with people. Very tactile. But it’s not just physical, it’s the ability to just talk about almost anything with people on a day-to-day basis and no doubt occasionally that does involve gossiping.’
Running for leader is, after all, a popularity contest of sorts: first, with your own MPs, then with your party’s members. Had this book been written a few years ago, it probably would have argued that an MP who rarely schmoozes in the tea rooms almost certainly does not stand a chance to ever lead their party, but both Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn proved to be amusingly timed exceptions. The former never showed any interest in socialising in Parliament, and the latter was part of such a fringe of his party that he rarely interacted with the mainstream. Though they are very different politicians, both their leadership campaigns were quite unique: May won by standing still as everyone else fell apart, and Corbyn benefited from a Labour Party in tatters and new voting rules which welcomed outsiders. At the time of writing, it would be impossible to say whether these were both one-time occurrences or turning points.
MP James Cleverly thinks it’s the former: ‘At some point in the future, there will be leadership campaigns for both major parties. And it will be very interesting to see whether we will revert to the more traditional method of personal contacts, whom do you know, whom have you spoken to, had a drink with, chatted with over the years, or whether the non-gossip is the new normal.
‘I suspect that we’ll revert to the normal, which is having a leadership team of people who have worked together – you see a side of people when they’re working, and that’s important. You need to know that. But also you get the measure of someone when a colleague’s going through a difficult time. It’s quite interesting to see which colleagues rally round, and which colleagues revel in it. And for a lot of people they would regard that as being just as important as seeing how good they are at making speeches, or what they do at the despatch box. And so I think that in the future we will revert to the more normal way of having a cloud of people who know you well.’
Given the sheer unpredictability of the past few years, this book is reluctant to unanimously make a prediction one way or the other, but Cleverly is probably right. In any case, something that still hasn’t changed is briefing and counter-briefing. If you are an MP who wants to run for leader and might well have a shot at it, it is not enough to tell your mates about it and bide your time; rumours about your suitability for the position need to become part of the background noise of Westminster as early as possible. Oh, and you should try and rubbish anyone else you know is planning to run too, but in a way that means it’s impossible to pin it back on you or make you look bad, obviously.
You can also kill your opponent with kindness: the politician that is touted as the next leader for the longest usually never ends up winning, and being seen as the frontrunner has traditionally been a poisoned chalice.
One former Labour adviser explains how this works: ‘Gordon’s people, when he wanted to run for the leadership, used to have this tactic that they didn’t talk down his opponents, they talked them up, which is quite an interesting strategy. Their view was that they had a problem, that it was Gordon who was the obvious person, but then other interesting people would knock around as the challenger, and all Gordon had to do was lose. And therefore what they would do is, when someone started to look like they might be in a position to be an outsider, they talked them up, because you have to go up before you have a fall. And they talked them right up, and then [found] some moment of crisis. And so, John Reid it happened to, Andy Burnham it happened to, Alan Milburn it happened to. I could go on.’
Another one is the classic tactic of smearing your opponent, usually with a story about their personal life that makes them look questionable. If the story is true, then hand it to an unscrupulous journalist, sit back and enjoy the show. If it isn’t, or only might be, that’s not the end of the world – get your people (and it really must be your people and not you) to spread the rumour around, and it might well stick. After all, something doesn’t need to be known by the public at large to have an influence within SW1. Once someone’s image is tainted, things will never be the same for them: even if people aren’t certain that what they’ve heard is true, they often won’t risk hitching their wagon to the wrong person.
If you are hell-bent on destroying someone, there is also no limit to how low you can go; as an adviser who understandably did not want to be named explains: ‘If you say so-and-so is a sex pest, that may be true or that may be not, but it’s very difficult for the person affected to respond by saying: “I understand where that came from but it’s not true” – once you’re explaining you’re losing.’
Still, the grapevine can sometimes be benevolent, and if a rumour is put out about you, someone will eventually come to warn you that people are whispering behind your back. ‘If I heard that someone who would be running for leader had been involved in things with people underage, or something, my golden rule has always been to go to the person or someone I know close to them, and say something like, “You’re about to fly close to the light. I’ve heard this. If it is true, then maybe you should consider what you’re doing. If it’s not true, you should consider why this is being said about you,”’ says one former Conservative adviser.
As we’ve seen before, there i
s no simple solution to dispel myths floating around about you, regardless of whether they are true or not. A simple denial will make cynics think that, well, obviously you would say that if you’d done that and then tried to run for leader, and talking to the press to rebut a rumour rarely ends well. What you need is for people to trust you more than they trust whoever started or propagated the rumour. It isn’t an easy feat, but it is doable: after all, trust is one of the most important things in politics. If that fails, you can always attempt to find out who is trying to do you down and go to war with them, and hope that you come out on top. Briefing battles aren’t always edifying, but they can help you gain power you otherwise wouldn’t have.
‘A lot of MPs are quite malleable and quite like being told what to do, or like to make sure that they are in the herd,’ says one MP. ‘So I think there’s a lot of MPs that feed off gossip to make sure that they place themselves appropriately. So if there’s a big briefing war going on between two, and it’s clear that one is going to come out on top of this, people like to know that so they can move over to what they perceive is the right side.’
This is why a lot of defining moments in leadership contests or the days that lead up to them involve people moving very suddenly in one direction. The obvious example of this is the days that followed the death of Labour leader John Smith in the ’90s. Of Blair and Brown, it had until that point been broadly assumed that the latter would be the obvious leader, yet it took about 24 hours for the winds to change after his passing, and for the former to be accepted as the natural follow-up. This doesn’t mean that (all) MPs are sheep simply waiting for someone to point them in a direction and blindly follow them, it is simply not a good thing to be left out in the cold as an ambitious parliamentarian. If there is a leadership contest and you campaigned for the person who ended up losing, there is probably no point in you waiting by the phone around the time of the next reshuffle.
It can also not be enough to only vaguely support someone. If you want to get the right job, you must do your best to be as publicly and enthusiastically behind your preferred candidate, though be careful: push it too far and you’ll just come across as sycophantic. Still, the worst thing you can possibly be is duplicitous: in a world based on trust, turncoats are not looked upon kindly.
According to former MP Jerry Hayes, ‘One of the things that Tony Benn and Jim Callaghan did in the leadership election, which obviously Callaghan won, was to actually swap lists of people who said they supported them. And all those people, who pretended to Callaghan and vice versa, they never got jobs.’
This is because a party leader, more than perhaps anyone else in Westminster, needs to be able to truly trust their inner circle. The more power someone has in politics, the more secrets they have, need to know about, and have swirling around them, so it is not surprising that they need to have complete faith in those close to them. On which note: let’s pop our head around the door of 10 Downing Street and see what actually goes on there.
____________
* Well, there are a number of problems with this way of doing things, but this book isn’t pretending to try and solve every issue with policy-making in the United Kingdom, so let’s stick to what we know.
* Apparently, the author has never bothered waking up that early to find out for herself.
* It is unclear whether they did in fact write it down or if they merely remember thinking that they should.
* For reference, one of the author’s favourite conference shag stories is that of a married Conservative MP sleeping with an activist and asking that she calls him ‘Daddy’ during the act. She was happy with it and asked him to call her a whore. Flummoxed, he replied: ‘Ooh, erm, that’s really rather rude!’
* You might disagree with this assessment, and there is nothing wrong with that, but this is sadly not your book so there is nothing you can do about it.
* ‘Why Do So Many People Who Decided To Work In Politics Seemingly Have Little Interest In Policy’, and other questions this book is not long enough to address.
PART 5
POWER
‘Look at him – last year he took two women up to his hotel room for a threesome; this year he’d be lucky to get a handjob – but I guess that’s politics.’
– Overheard at the Labour conference
IN THE EYE OF THE STORM
By the time you walk into No 10, either as the Prime Minister or someone who works for them, you probably do have an idea of what you’re doing. Well, maybe you do. After all, you’ve either been an MP for years and years or an adviser or civil servant who has been knocking around Whitehall for a while, so you are broadly aware of how politics really works. Downing Street is a different beast, though, especially if you arrive there as a party just leaving opposition. Running a general election is life-consuming, you’re never truly sure you’re going to win, and you are so busy in the last few weeks before the big day that you won’t really have the time to pop by No 10 to measure the curtains. There is also no buffer between the results and the beginning of your term, as is the case in some other countries; if you’re in, you have to hit the ground running.
This leads to everything being, well, a bit of a mess. Take Peter Hyman, for example: he made his mark on Westminster as Tony Blair’s head of strategic communication between 2001 and 2003, having originally started as a parliamentary researcher in the mid-90s, and was never technically told he had a job in Downing Street in 1997. Speaking to Ben Yong and Robert Hazell for their book on special advisers, he explained: ‘I was not formally offered a job in No 10. As polling day got closer, I started to think about the future, but like others in the office never dared raise the issue with Tony in case it looked presumptuous. Now I assumed I had a job because I was told there would be an introduction to No 10 first thing in the morning.’ And that was that: someone told him to turn up one day, and he left six years later.
Hyman’s case was by no means an exception; even today, a lot of people walk into senior Westminster jobs without a proper process. ‘Politics is a distinctly unmodernised institution; lots of things in politics haven’t really changed for hundreds or tens of years,’ says Will Tanner, who used to be a Home Office special adviser then was the deputy head of the PM’s policy unit in No 10 under Theresa May. ‘It’s not a particularly professionalised industry – in politics I never really had a formal interview. […] Politics is fundamentally about trust. It doesn’t matter whether you’re good in politics; if you’re trustworthy, you are far better.’
This is not limited to No 10. While in the rest of the world, people at least vaguely attempt to look like job offers must be in some way linked to the quality of a job application or the competency of someone at an interview, politics has little time for such pretences. An amusing example of this comes from Damian McBride’s memoirs, where he recalls the day when he interviewed to become the head of communications of the Treasury after spending several years as a floating civil servant.
‘Gordon looked down my CV silently, occasionally muttering a word from it, as if trying to work up some enthusiasm either for me or the process: “Customs”; “V-A-T” (each letter spat out with contempt); “Riots?”; and then finally, as he read my “personal interests”, he came alive: “Celtic? You support Celtic? How can you support Celtic?” He seemed genuinely affronted. “Where were you in ’94, eh? I bet you didn’t do any singing that day,” alluding to Raith Rovers’ famous League Cup final victory over my dad’s team. “Yeah,” I said, “but it was at lbrox,” the home ground of Glasgow Rangers, “and they did deliberately flood the pitch so we couldn’t play our football.”
‘“That’s a bloody lie!” he yelled at me, then – turning to the sofa of rather confused Englishmen – “These bloody Celtic fans, they can’t take losing. Always the same. You got beaten fair and square. Fair and square!” My CV was now scrunched in his hand. At this point, I was more worried about escaping alive than getting the job, but we ended up going back and forth for half an ho
ur, swapping stories and jokes about Scottish football. “When can you start?” he concluded, with a beaming smile.’
Would he have got the post if his CV hadn’t been good enough? Probably not. Would he have got the post, then risen to become one of Brown’s closest aides if he’d not had that Scottish football connection? Probably not.
This lack of formality isn’t inherently problematic; each Downing Street administration is unique, and there would be little point in issuing one-size-fits-all guidelines. How No 10 operates depends on the Prime Minister, their party, the size of that party’s majority, how united or divided that party is, and so on. It is also an odd place. On the one hand, it is at the centre of everything: 10 Downing Street has tentacles reaching across Whitehall and into the Palace of Westminster, and needs to be aware of as much as possible in order to function well. On the other, it can feel cut off from the rest of the world.
‘Most departments are about policy, but No 10 is about politics,’ says Will Tanner. ‘No 10 is basically managing different individuals in different places to get them to do the things that you want them to do. So when I was in the Home Office I spent basically 95% of my time dealing with problems in the immigration system; things that affect real people’s lives. In No 10 it’s the other way around: 95% of the time is managing Westminster and not dealing with things that affect people’s lives.’
Still, he argues that ‘in No 10 you just generally know much, much more about what’s going on. Departments are naturally siloed and you have a very fragmented picture about what other bits of government are doing and when they might be doing them.’
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