Haven't You Heard

by Marie Le Conte

One former senior civil servant who worked there for a few years disagrees. ‘In No 10, in one sense you have loads of information, you’re obviously dead in the centre of things, but sometimes people will be trying to withhold information from you, both the civil service and spads. It’s a mix of both having loads of information but then being distant as well. I mean, it’s a surreal place: the gossip just comes to you because you’re there, you’ll see stuff. You will see people, cabinet ministers chatting to one another, looking pissed off. All that stuff, it’s just there, you just have to look around. But then in other ways you’re in this weird bubble.’

  This is largely because of three things. The first is obvious and linked to the odd geographical constraints of Westminster. As former No-10-adviser-turned-peer Lord Wood explains, ‘If you work in Downing Street, you’re just cut off from the gossip that happens in Westminster; we heard about stuff from journalists. Once you’re away from Westminster, even just over the road, you don’t really have a sense of what’s going on.’

  The second is that in Westminster, information is power; knowing something makes you powerful, passing on that something can make you more powerful if it is the right person and the right time, and strategically withholding information can make you more powerful. The third is about accountability, the press, and the very nature of party politics. Here is Lord Wood again: ‘I used to work for the Leader of the Opposition and the Prime Minister and you find yourself responding to gossip much more than you should, partly because it’s such an incestuous world and everyone’s always gossiping about each other, and partly because it’s such a pressure cooker world and everyone is spending way too much time at work. If you’re a prime minister or a leader of the opposition, there’s an asymmetry which is that if someone does something stupid, or is accused of doing something stupid in government and you don’t react to it, you’ll be accused of negligence if you don’t take action.’

  Part of your job as a leader is being responsible for the actions and conduct of your MPs, which either means making sure questionable things do not happen or, more realistically, responding in the right way if questionable things do happen on your watch. In order to do this, you must be aware of as much as possible, and as early on as possible. As former No 10 spinner Sean Kemp puts it: ‘You’re just ringing people up, going, “Can you please tell us what you’re doing?” and then “Why on earth didn’t you tell us what you were doing?”’

  A good example of how this has become embedded in the fabric of British politics is Prime Minister’s Questions. Now happening every Wednesday at noon, the weekly set piece involves the PM going to the chamber to be questioned on one or several topics by the Leader of the Opposition, then by a selection of backbenchers picked from a ballot. It is famous for representing what some call the worst side of Westminster, and is often accused of trivialising important issues facing the country by turning them into a Punch & Judy show. Scratch the surface, however, and you’ll notice that PMQs is about a lot more than that.

  Take a step back for a second, and imagine you are the Prime Minister. It is Wednesday morning and you are about to be asked six questions by someone desperate to do your job. You do not know what the questions will be about, but you know you need to answer them well, as otherwise that person might get one step closer to getting your job. What is the most important thing you need? Information. What you need is to know everything that has happened on your watch in the past seven days, so you can know what to say if it is brought up. Sometimes, departments will merrily get in touch and own up to having screwed up at some point in the last week; most of the time they don’t. This is where the Research & Information Unit of Downing Street steps in. As Theo Bertram once explained in a piece, it was he and his team’s job to find out exactly what had happened, track down who was behind the blunder, and make them explain just how they were going to fix it before the Prime Minister stood at the despatch box at noon. Most weeks, some would try to pretend everything was fine, and sometimes they did trick the R&I team, but most of the time the culprits were caught.

  How? Because ‘information flows to us, like water to the sea. Even if you don’t give it to us, it will find its way to us. It always comes here. It belongs to us. […] We do not think any less of them for making a mistake. We admire them more for telling us what we need to know so quickly. Just tell us. But if you don’t, if you choose to dawdle, deceive or shift blame, then we will remember. We will add it to our repository of information. Because we are the people who own information. We collect it. We distribute it. When the right time comes, then we will be unfailingly polite, remarkably helpful, and we will share whatever information is requested about you, just in the right way, at just the right moment. You may never even know we did it, but we will fuck you up. Because this is what we do. We know what information is, how it flows towards power. We know when to collect it and when to give it out.’*

  Still, the point is, you might not see it when you groan at MPs shouting ‘Hear, hear’ in the chamber once a week, but PMQs mostly is a wide information-gathering exercise, aimed at centralising information in No 10.

  The other side of this is that because No 10 is at the centre of everything, an incredible amount of mostly useless information finds its way to the building. Some of it will be the fun but generally irrelevant shagging rumour, others will be nasty but low-level infighting between groups of MPs no one really cares about, and so on. While those are the sort of stories junior staffers and journalists are desperate to hear about in order to feel like they are in the thick of it, those with actual power usually have more important things to do than deal with the vast majority of gossip. There is also a bit of a motherly (or fatherly) feeling to it all, with people wanting to tell on their enemies to the grown-ups in charge so they can get them in trouble, and/or to look like the exemplary sibling. Oh, and there will always be people who simply adore gossip, and assume that everyone else loves it as much as they do so consider it their duty to tell everyone everything.

  This happened to Bertram when he worked in Labour’s No 10, and he was pursued by endless stories about a certain eccentric Liberal Democrat MP. ‘Lembit Opik was the subject of lots of pieces of gossip which were of no value to anyone,’ he says. ‘It was remarkable just how often the gossip that would come in from different corners would be about Lembit Opik, and we didn’t need more information, or any information, about Lembit Opik. I was at a reception in Downing Street when someone came up to me, who had nothing to do with politics, and said, “Oh yes, someone said I should talk to you about Lembit Opik.” I don’t want to, I don’t need to hear any of this.’

  Wood agrees with the (implied) point of the anecdote: ‘Good people around a senior politician filter a lot and don’t pass things on; a lot of the job is to not pass on the tittle-tattle because it could be wrong, it could be vindictive. There are all sorts of reasons why gossip gets passed around.’

  Another former Downing Street adviser concludes: ‘The senior politician will set the tone in terms of whether they’re interested in gossip loosely. I mean, both senior politicians I’ve worked with were very interested in gossip, and therefore people knew to collect it and share it in that environment. Every politician I’ve ever known is desperate to know exactly what’s going on, with whom, where, when and why.’

  This is also valid within No 10: just because there can be an us versus them mentality in 10 Downing Street does not mean that there aren’t power struggles, infighting and near-comical bouts of miscommunication in the building itself. After all, there are between 150 and 200 people working there at any given point, and a number of them will have differing agendas. Special advisers will occasionally try to get one over the civil servants (and vice versa), special advisers themselves usually have their internal cliques, people truly loyal to the PM and people there out of convenience or biding their time won’t always see eye to eye, etc. There is also a reasonably clear hierarchy within No 10: just because you can brag to people outside
of it that you’re impossibly important due to where you work, everyone in the building will know it if you really are just the tea boy. And on top of everything else, most workplaces in Westminster are chaotic and dysfunctional, and there is no reason why Downing Street wouldn’t be the same.

  ‘In No 10, though, you’re right in the centre of things and everything’s on a need-to-know basis. There’s not some meeting that everyone goes to where they say, “This is all the stuff that’s going on …,” and you can find out quite big shit randomly,’ says Greg Beales, who used to work for Gordon Brown. Though a senior adviser to the PM, he found out the hard way that being important does not always mean that people will tell you things. ‘After the 2010 election, I didn’t even know that we were considering negotiating a deal with the Lib Dems, until day two when I got phoned and asked if I could go into No 10 to work on a possible coalition. I was up at my mum and dad’s, just for a few days off, see what happens on the news, and then I get a phone call saying, “Oh yeah, we’re all in.” “I thought we were voted out?” “But no, we’re all in, we’re working on this thing, so can you come and have a look at this agreement?” So I drove back into No 10. And it was pretty much dead by the time I got there.’

  Still, if you are the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister in a coalition or the Leader of the Opposition, you are usually aware of decisions this big. As mentioned earlier, the smaller stuff is what becomes interesting. Say you’re a political adviser who is close to their leader, how do you decide what to pass on? If you’re good at your job, there are problems you and your colleagues can deal with without having to trouble your boss, who probably has bigger things on their mind. Equally, and even if it is something that can be dealt with without them, at what point do you decide that they need to be aware of it in case they’re asked? All of this depends on the leader you have, and on everything else. Some party leaders just love a good gossip (Ed Miliband’s name came up more than once in that context during interviews for this book), others do not, and most are in between. What they do all have in common is that they are people: immensely busy and stressed people, but people nonetheless.

  The hours they work are too long; they can’t just go to their local pub at the end of a long day to unwind, and a lot of what they might want to whinge about are things that categorically cannot be whinged about publicly or to friends they do not fully trust, and those are few and far between. What this means is that sometimes, a PM, DPM or LOTO (Leader of the Opposition)* will just want to have a normal chat. It doesn’t need to be about rumours they must absolutely know about, plots they should be aware of, or anything that would truly influence the way they run the country and/or their party. Most people enjoy having a bit of a gossip once in a while, and senior politicians aren’t any different. James McGrory had a lot to say on this:

  ‘Part of my job as Nick Clegg’s spokesman was to be with him a lot. You got a lot of long car journeys, train journeys, boring meetings. Partly what makes you good at your job is that you know what he thinks, because you’ve spent so much time with him. There’s very little Nick Clegg ever said where I thought, “I’ve not heard this before.” We’d speak at six in the morning, speaking until midnight, I’d be with him 14 hours, 16 hours a day.

  ‘You’ve got to understand, they’re human. People forget. I mean, people really do forget. These people are human beings, they’re normal people, they’ve got a family and a wife and a job, and other interests outside of politics, and so sometimes he’ll want to be properly, “What are we doing, what are we saying, what are we doing on this?” Sometimes he’ll want you to be fucking honest with him. That was shit, this is shit, no, we’re not saying that, no. Be critical, give him a bollocking, have an argument. Sometimes he’ll want you to shut the fuck up. That is also what you should know. You might have two and a half hours in front of you in the car. He’s knackered, or he’s got stuff on his mind, or he’s doing other shit. Shut the fuck up. Your input is not needed there.

  ‘But do you know what, sometimes he’ll want to talk about his kids. He’ll want to say they were playing football yesterday, or they did this, or Miriam and I went to a really nice restaurant, or we’re thinking of going on holiday. Like any normal person would say, “You know, we’re thinking of going on holiday to Asturias this year. We’re really excited because we think we’ve found this …” Just like a fucking normal person would if you were having a drink with them. They spend so much of their time wrestling with really big issues, having really intense conversations. Sometimes taking really big decisions about whether you’re going to commit troops to a war. There’s so much of their lives absorbed with really quite heavy stuff that will weigh on you, and some of it will really weigh on you. And then sometimes, they just want to have a bit of a chat with you as another human being about stuff. As well as being then my boss, and certainly my political hero, and the greatest man I’ve ever met, he was also my friend, and sometimes you wanted to say, “I heard so-and-so was sleeping with so-and-so in the office,” or you know, “I heard that so-and-so got really drunk at the X party,” or “So-and-so lost his temper with …” It’s going to affect them zero politically, this is not intel. This is pure gossip. Whether two of the team are having a fling in the office, it’s not going to affect his political decision in any way, shape or form. Nor how he deals with them. But we all do it, we all need a bit of entertainment.’

  In a nutshell: gossip is a vital part of life in politics because it informs a lot of decisions, changes the behaviour of those in power and can alter the course of history, but it is also something that people who are overwhelmed with stress and responsibilities can use to remember that they’re human. Politicians aren’t machines, and politicians on the verge of a nervous breakdown aren’t going to govern to the best of their abilities, so allowing them to have this release valve is crucial. That being said, we’re here to show that gossip is more than just that in Westminster, even when it comes to lawmaking. Let’s leave Downing Street for now, through the door and past the barriers, and go back down to Whitehall.

  WHY ARE WE HERE?

  We’ve talked about parties and factions in Parliament, whips tasked with getting votes through the Commons and MPs rebelling for reasons ranging from the genuine to the petty. We know that bills can live and die in the Palace of Westminster for reasons not always linked to the effect they will have on the real world, but what happens before that? There can be an assumption that civil servants in their government departments are the grownups in the room, less likely to let personal reasons influence their work, but that’s not really the case.

  For a start, a lot of their job relies on how they work with the ministerial team and special advisers, who can come and go unexpectedly. A productive working relationship in other areas of life tends to rely on at least a degree of stability, but that is not a luxury government departments have. Ministers get reshuffled and usually take their advisers with them, and restless civil servants aren’t expected to spend decades on end in the same building. What is also required to make things go as smoothly as possible is good communication which (try not to collapse in shock) is not exactly an area Westminster is good at. Private offices can be fiercely protective of their ministers, which is an issue when other civil servants are meant to have an in-depth understanding of what that minister wants to get done during their time in that department. Mix those two together and you will find that trust becomes hard to come by, which complicates matters further.

  ‘Knowing how much juice the given minister has is very helpful in knowing what kind of agenda you can work on, but you do see senior civil servants who take that to the next level, and try and use the perception of gossip about ministers to try and influence what ministers do,’ says a former permanent secretary. ‘So if you were a director or a director-general, a somewhat high-ranking but not absolute top-ranking civil servant, it’s very difficult for you to say, “This is a bad idea, Minister, I disagree with what you’re doing.” But
I have seen fascinating examples where I’ll have a civil servant come to me and say, “I think you should know, I’m hearing rumblings that people are unhappy with this that the minister is doing.” And you know, sometimes frankly, it’s total bullshit, and is it maybe because you don’t want to do it? And you don’t have the guts to tell the minister that. It’s a bit like a medieval court in that respect.’

  Elsewhere in departments, more junior civil servants have been known to be so confused about what ministers want them to do that they carefully read every interview their political boss gives to the national and trade press, then attempt to reverse-engineer the policies they assume they want. As with every space where important information is lacking, that gap then tends to be filled with received wisdom, whispers and half-certainties, with predictable results.

  ‘The grapevine would create weird impressions about what politicians wanted,’ explains one former Labour adviser. ‘I did loads of work on healthcare infections, and trying to get hospitals clean, and early on in that work you would get all these weird rumours about what the Secretary of State, who was Patricia Hewitt initially, and what the Prime Minister wanted to do and not do and what they were looking for. So you’d be trying to build up your ‘what works’ approach, but you’d do it within these weird parameters of what the politicians thought about stuff. And what they thought about stuff was totally hearsay, because nobody ever got this written down. It was hearsay, and then over time what we found was that a lot of these rumours about what the politicians would or wouldn’t accept turned out to be completely half-baked rumour mill-type stuff.

  ‘For example, I remember there was a really strong thing that Blair and Patricia Hewitt wouldn’t accept any cleaning contracts being moved back into hospitals’ control after they’d been moved out under PFI, so the policy thing was, we can do all this, but you can’t touch these cleaning contracts because that’s not their personal agenda. So for about six to nine months no one went anywhere near these contracts for that reason, and in the end there was some meeting and we just brought it up and said of course we can do more here, but we’d have to do something about these PFI contracts. And Blair was saying, “Yeah. Yeah yeah.” And we responded, “Right. Okay. We haven’t really done anything on this,” to which he replied, “Why aren’t we doing something?” So I had to say that we would do something.’