Haven't You Heard

by Marie Le Conte

  What is interesting about these stories, besides the fact that they reveal that some people in Westminster actually do have some principles, is that the line between what is and isn’t acceptable to gossip about changes with the times. What is considered good gossip is intrinsically linked to the values of the people sharing it. Something seemingly irrelevant a few decades ago could now be huge, and vice versa. To look at this in a bit more depth, let’s take a detour via the good old days.

  CHANGING MORALS, CHANGING TIMES

  There are many reasons why someone might decide not to spread a rumour about something, and there is one we did not get into in the last chapter. What happens if a piece of information you were given simply isn’t interesting, or relevant? Like journalism and its ‘man bites dog’ rule, a bit of gossip only becomes that if it is about something out of the ordinary, or surprising. You wouldn’t run to your colleague if you saw your boss buying his lunch from Tesco, for example. Still, it’s worth trying to unpack this: why isn’t a piece of information interesting? That Tesco lunch image was purposely mundane to the extreme, but it does get a bit more complicated when we start straying from one’s meal deal options.

  For a start, who gets to decide what is and isn’t out of the ordinary? Societal values evolve with time, so what counts as peculiar enough to pique people’s interest isn’t set in stone. What you think of as an explosive story would perhaps not have mattered at all to your grandparents, and vice versa. The obvious example of this is people’s sexual orientation. Asked about the things that have changed the most since their early years in politics 30 years ago, one Conservative adviser-turned-peer said: ‘At the time, one of the common topics would be whether somebody was gay or not; that was more widely talked about than most things actually, who was gay.’ Former New Labour spad Lord Livermore brought it up as well, saying: ‘Back in the early days of the Labour government, quite a lot of politicians were outed by the media, and there was a big Sun headline, “Is Britain being run by a gay mafia?” because there were three Labour politicians outed.’

  Meanwhile, this is what a House of Commons member of staff had to add: ‘I don’t think any colleague joining now, a gay colleague, would think twice about that just being a thing that everyone knew about. I was very cautious in the nineties, and I think I was right to be in some respects, because in the division lobbies late at night, you’d hear references to “the buggers”, and sort of public school, 1955-type chat. And it was by no means only on one party.’

  This is all pretty bleak, but let’s come back to the example brought up by Lord Livermore. It all started in late 1998, when Welsh Secretary Ron Davies was robbed on Clapham Common one night. Clapham Common was then known as a cruising spot for men, and though no specific details came out about the alleged robbery at the time, the fact that it happened where and when it did and that Davies resigned from the Cabinet on the spot was enough for rumours to start swirling. A day later, former Conservative MP and out gay man Matthew Parris was interviewed by Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight, and said that Trade Secretary Peter Mandelson was ‘certainly’ gay. Paxman quickly moved on, and two days later, the BBC issued an internal memo telling its employees that ‘under no circumstances whatsoever should the allegation about the private life of Peter Mandelson be repeated or referred to in any broadcast’. This was a valiant effort by the BBC to put an end to the story, but it did not work.

  Under a week later, Agriculture Minister Nick Brown came out. Though it appeared spontaneous, his hand was forced by the News of the World, who were getting ready to out him whether he wanted it or not. The Sun then decided to pour some more petrol on the fire by publishing a splash entitled ‘TELL US THE TRUTH TONY – Are we being run by a gay mafia?’ Choice quotes from the editorial that followed include ‘the public has a right to know how many homosexuals occupy positions of high power’ and ‘there are widespread fears that MPs, even ministers, are beholden to others for reasons other than politics’. They even decided to kindly open a phone hotline for ‘ministers and MPs who are secretly homosexual’ and wished to come out with the help of the Sun.*

  Though the tabloids’ actions feel unquestionably outrageous today, the late nineties were a point where the wind was still just about turning on the question of homosexuality. Section 28 was still in place, and when the Guardian commissioned a poll to try and shut the Sun up, it found that 52% of people thought being openly gay was compatible with holding a Cabinet position; though 52% is a majority, it can hardly be called a landslide. The Graun’s conclusion was that ‘the days when it was assumed that the British public was overwhelmingly intolerant of homosexuals are over’. This was perhaps optimistic, as only two years earlier the British Social Attitudes survey had found that 55% of people thought that sexual relations between two adults of the same sex were ‘always wrong’, but change was in the air. A day after that Guardian poll, the Sun did a screeching U-turn and announced that it would no longer out gay politicians unless there was an overwhelming public interest reason to do so, and columnist Matthew Parris was sacked from the paper.

  These momentous few weeks didn’t put an end to rumours about people’s sexual orientation, but they do represent a turning point. Section 28 was eventually repealed in 2003, and attitudes towards gay and bisexual people have been slowly but steadily becoming more liberal with time. ‘I’m told that there are several MPs on Grindr now and nobody writes that story,’ says gay Labour MP Chris Bryant. ‘Attitudes around homosexuality have completely changed; since I was first involved in politics when I first stood for council in 1993, every element of the law has changed. I remember Chris Smith being out, being the only one, and now I don’t even know who’s gay. I had to ask somebody recently, who I’d been on three trips with, I had to say, “Are you gay?” I’m completely incompetent at being able to spot gays any more, which is really quite shocking. Maybe I’m just too old, but that’s good, it doesn’t matter. He’s just another MP, who happens to be a sponsor of LGBT Labour. Does that mean he’s gay? Maybe it means he’s gay.’

  As Bryant points out, behaviour and expectations in the bubble have changed because the world that surrounds it has changed as well. In fact, a study conducted by Gabriele Magni and Andrew Reynolds shows that in the general election of 2015, a candidate being gay had no impact whatsoever on how they fared compared to their straight counterparts – well, zero percentage points plus or minus half a percentage point. This changes the dynamics of political coverage entirely. If tabloids could once justify their outing of gay politicians by saying that the public deserved to know and act in consequence, the fact is that nowadays, when the public knows, its behaviour no longer changes. When there was once a (morally dubious but nonetheless existing) public interest angle to the outing of MPs, there is no longer one. At a personal level too, the currency of knowing that someone is gay and not out is no longer as valuable as it used to be; it is not something that will destroy the career of an MP, they will not feel pressured to resign if it comes out, and the only person left looking bad will be the person who shared the story in the first place.

  This is the best example of something no longer being a story worth sharing because people’s attitudes have changed, but there are also cases where a change in social attitudes turn previously dull stories into ones people avidly share, or amusing stories into dark ones. Booze is the obvious one: one of the biggest changes in the House of Commons over the past few decades has been the amount of alcohol consumed by the people working in it. According to a long-term Commons employee, ‘When I joined over 20 years ago, I mean it was fun, don’t get me wrong. I’d be a lying, hypocritical toad if I said it wasn’t fun. But you’d see people absolutely pissed; if you went in Strangers’ at four o’clock you’d see them absolutely pissed, and the suspicion was that one or two had had a good breakfast as well. It’s not like that now; we can probably both reel off half a dozen names of members who at any given moment of the day probably won’t be sober, but had this been the nineti
es, you probably could have done that with 60.’

  This is not an exaggeration; any book written from or about Westminster in the 20th century practically reeks of old port and ale. In Order, Order!, Ben Wright tells one eyebrow-raising story about Horace King, who was Speaker from 1965 to 1971: ‘Horace came in at 9:25pm, and he had two goes at getting up into his chair and the second time he fell to the right across the Clerks’ Table with his wig 45 degrees to the left and Bob Mellish (the Government Chief Whip) called out, “You’re a disgrace, Horace, and I’ll have you out of that chair within three months.” Horace turned round so abruptly that his wig was then 45 degrees out the other way, and he gave a brilliant riposte: “How can you get me out of the chair, Bob, when I can’t get myself into it?”’

  In the MPs’ defence, they weren’t a sozzled oasis surrounded by dry land, the journalists drank just as much as they did, and did so until quite recently. Now more responsible when it comes to alcohol, senior hack Rob Hutton recalls his first days on Fleet Street: ‘I came into journalism in the late nineties; I was quite interested in production, so I went and did a shift at the Herald, and the night editor said I could come and sit behind him. This was 1998, and his thing was he would lay out a story and go to the pub. Have a half, come back, lay out another story. Go to the pub, have another half. Because I was young and arrogant, I refused to drink halves, so I was having a pint each time, and they more or less had to pour me into a taxi at the end of the night. The next day, talking to one of my lecturers about it, whose husband worked at the paper, she said, “How was it?” and I said, “Well, it was really interesting, but to be honest, I don’t think I can drink that much every night.”’

  There are enough stories of inebriety in the Palace of Westminster to fill a whole other book, but for the sake of brevity, we can end it here, as the point has probably been well proven already. In any case, things have changed and you are now more likely to be asked to pick between still and sparkling than red or white if sitting down for a lunch. What this means in practice is that excessive drinking is now a story in itself. Back in the days when most people would drink too much and do silly things too often, the bar was very high when it came to properly good boozy gossip. With less drinking, more responsibility and sterner social attitudes towards casual drinking in the world at large, the nature of those stories has now changed. Firstly, it is a lot rarer for someone to do something properly hilarious or shocking in public while inebriated, so news of mistakes like these tend to travel around faster. Secondly, the tone has changed; everyone is allowed the occasional drunken antics, but if you’re seen to have one pint too many one night a week too many, the whispers will probably be about concerns for your mental health and your suitability for a career in high office.

  While the most hedonistic among us might argue that this is a loss of fun, it probably is good that having a serious alcohol problem while running this country (or covering the people who do) now makes you a rare exception, thus worthy of people talking behind your back. This change in dynamics has also been observed elsewhere, in an area often connected to excessive drinking: sexual harassment. Once again, personal shifts in the bubble have been mirroring wider changes in society at large; after all, #MeToo originally started in Hollywood and took a number of weeks to make its way to Westminster. Though the whisper network has always existed to an extent, the arrival of many more women in SW1 and the growing feminist movement has meant that handsy men are no longer talked about in the same way.

  ‘It was treated a bit too flippantly, even by the women,’ says one female former Labour adviser. ‘I’m sure it could upset people, but generally people didn’t go, “That guy’s always trying to shag researchers,” and the like. That would be said as a light-hearted thing rather than in a massive condemnatory way.’

  Gossip about male MPs being handsy was still being shared around, but it was treated as salacious or vaguely interesting as opposed to straightforwardly damning. This has, in a way, gone in the opposite direction of stories about gay politicians; while an MP putting his hand on the arse of a young aide would not have made the front pages even a few years ago, it can now be frontpage news, which in turns makes that piece of information more valuable. Knowing something embarrassing about someone is one thing, knowing something that you know could end their career is another.

  Moral values have also evolved on the topic: at the time of writing, an international conversation is still ongoing about what behaviours are supposedly ‘just banter’ and what are unforgivable. As a result, the way people whisper about these things is bound to keep evolving. Take MPs cheating on their spouses and shagging younger women, for example. Until not that long ago, a lot of the judgement would fall on the latter, who were assumed to have tempted the older politician/thrown themselves at them/pretended to be older/delete as appropriate. Even in supposedly consensual relationships, there is now a growing understanding that different situations can give different meanings to the notion of consent. If a woman said yes to an encounter because she felt that she was not in a position to say no without potentially risking the rest of her career, did she really say yes at all? Shades of grey are being looked at in a different way, and lines between what is acceptable, questionable and wrong are being renegotiated. The natural conclusion of this is that the way these instances are talked about is changing as well, and as it is still changing, it seems futile to try and predict where it might end up.

  Still, if we are going to talk about what people don’t talk about and how that may evolve with time, there is one person we now need to bring in. Given that this is a book about gossip and politics, his absence has probably been noticeable already; if anything, talking about gossip and politics in Britain without mentioning him would be futile. Given that the elephant really has been in the room this entire time, let’s turn to him now.

  THE BONFIRE OF VANITIES

  Paul Staines is Guido Fawkes, and Paul Staines fundamentally isn’t that interesting. He is Irish, middle-aged, right-wing, and he hates all politicians so he decided to start a political gossip blog in 2004. It was, and is, about ‘tittle-tattle, gossip and rumours about Westminster’s Mother of Parliaments.* Written from the perspective of the only man to enter Parliament with honest intentions. The intention being to blow it up with gunpowder.’ Many profiles have been written about Paul Staines, the enigmatic libertarian figure who drips cynicism and longs to unleash chaos on SW1, and they are easy to find online if you would like to know more about him as a person. If you don’t, we can just move on and talk about what really matters: Guido Fawkes.

  Guido Fawkes is petty, vindictive, mean, sexist, biased and shameless. Over the past 15 years, it has been the home of gutter stories that no one else would have published, the lowest of blows, hints at rumours the writers knew not to be true, and items so far from the public interest that calling them ‘journalism’ would be an offence to all journalists, alive or dead.

  It has also been impeccably briefed, terrifyingly well informed and, more importantly, intoxicatingly fun. Its continued existence and power in Westminster is incredibly telling and reveals the fundamental hypocrisy at the heart of British politics. Over 80 people were interviewed for this book, most were asked to talk about Guido, and nearly every single one of them either refused to talk about it on the record, or at all. Part of it was fear, as Guido relishes a feud and has been known to hit back harder if hit first. Mostly, though, this refusal to engage with the topic seemed to come from a place of uneasiness. It is all fine and good for the majority of people in Westminster to decry the effect the website has had on the bubble – the phrase ‘the Guidoisation of politics’ was used more than once – but it is undeniable that it never would have become what it is today if it hadn’t had a helping hand from everyone else.

  Paul Staines fundamentally isn’t that interesting because he is just one man, and the string of mischief-makers he has hired throughout the years to help him in his quest (mostly) haven’t been remarkabl
e either. Just as it takes a village to raise a child, Westminster as a whole is responsible for the rise of Guido Fawkes. After all, you can only report on things people tell you; without sources, there is nothing to be written about. Instead, what Staines did was to provide a space where people could go as low as they wanted. Had they collectively decided that undignified mud-slinging was below them all, Guido Fawkes would have come and gone. It hasn’t.

  According to one person who used to work there, ‘All sides speak to Guido, all sides brief Guido. Remainers brief Guido. People in Labour brief Guido.’ According to another, ‘It would be fair to say that at times Guido has been briefed by MPs from almost every party, including the SNP – when it suits them.’ Though they could perfectly be saying that to make themselves sound more important than they were, it is undeniable that Guido carries stories about every corner of Westminster, which wouldn’t be possible if the people at those meetings and in those rooms and WhatsApp groups weren’t up for leaking what they know. The website might have a more natural home on the right of the Conservative Party, but its tentacles reach everywhere else as well.

  This is partly because it was the first of its kind: a publication from the bubble, for the bubble. Private Eye, Popbitch and the diary columns might enjoy stirring up drama for the sake of it, but they do need to remain aware of the fact that their readers are what matters; if people outside the postcode couldn’t care less about a niche but amusing piece of gossip, then there is usually no point in them publishing it. Guido, on the other hand, prides itself on being the insider’s insider; it doesn’t matter if only a few hundred people care about a story, as long as it’s the right few hundred people.