We roughly know what the differences are between gossip and news, but how about what separates a piece of gossip from a conspiracy theory? If you really think about it, they are quite similar. Let’s reuse that example of MPs from different parties who are all on the more centrist end of their sides’ politics having a very visible lunch together in Portcullis House. Say you’re a parliamentary aide who walked past that lunch, and decided to text a journalist you know about it. That journalist then writes a column mentioning it, and their conclusion is that the centrist party is one step closer to happening. They don’t necessarily have any extra information, they just know that these MPs are centrists, have been distancing themselves from their respective leaders recently, and they met socially in a place where they knew they would be seen. Concluding that they were plotting involved taking a bit of a leap, but it remains believable. If filed quickly, that column can definitely be good gossip.
What would be needed for it to turn into a conspiracy theory instead? Let’s take that story and add on to it then see what sticks. Say that there had been a story attacking the Labour Leader a few days before that lunch, clearly briefed out by some MPs. If someone were to tweet that the lunch proves that the story had been leaked by MPs who are about to jump ship anyway, some eyebrows would surely be raised. Or let’s say that the lunch wasn’t a group of MPs, but rather one centrist Labour MP and one centrist Conservative MP. If someone were to write a blog post about how that two-person lunch definitely proves that a new centrist party is about to be launched, they would not be taken very seriously. Now, let’s mix those two together; if someone were to claim that one lunch between a centrist Conservative MP and a centrist Labour MP is clear proof that the Labour MP was behind the media leak as that MP is about to launch a new centrist party, you would almost certainly be teased about the effectiveness of your tinfoil hat.
So what’s the difference between the two? Both gossip and conspiracy theories can involve noticing dots and creating a pattern with them. ‘Woman A and Man B were seen having drinks last night’ + ‘Man B arrived at work today wearing yesterday’s clothes’ = ‘Woman A and Man B are probably sleeping together’. There was a series of events and it is possible to draw a conclusion from them. That’s gossip. If Woman A happens to be an MP and Man B is a journalist, it is political gossip. If Man B then writes a glowing profile of Woman A without disclosing anything about the nature of their relationship, that’s news. If Man B’s publication once ran a piece attacking an MP who happens to be an opponent of Woman A’s and you conclude that the two events simply must be linked, it’s a conspiracy.
The line here is about the distance between the dots; if you’ve decided to create a narrative out of a few events, you need to make sure that it is not too far-fetched. Concluding that two people are sleeping together because they spent an evening cosied up to each other then jumped in the same cab is reasonable; taking those same facts and concluding that months before that night, the journalist personally influenced the editorial line of his newspaper to align itself with the ambitions of an MP isn’t. That does not mean that it definitely isn’t true; maybe that journalist really had been fancying that MP for a long time; maybe he really is influential in his organisation and maybe he isn’t one for media ethics, but that is a whole lot of maybes. There is no hard and fast rule on when assumptions become inherently problematic, but you can usually spot it when you see it.
Another dynamic can be previous knowledge of context. If you don’t know the whole story, it is easy to see something and get carried away, and if there is one place in this world with endless layers of informal context, it is Westminster. It can be that you know that the two MPs who had lunch happen to have a train line which starts in one of their constituencies and ends in the other’s, and they need to discuss future plans for it; and maybe our Man A and Woman B have known each other for years so were enjoying a catch-up drink, then took a taxi together because they’re neighbours. If you don’t have access to that background information, everything can quickly start to look suspicious. As a result (and once again), the nature of the information isn’t the only thing at play here; the person sharing that information is just as relevant.
This brings us to what might actually be the most important distinction between idle gossip and corrosive conspiracy theories: intent. Most conspiracy theorists have an inherent lack of trust in the establishment, and their attempts at joining dots come from a belief that things are being concealed from the public and are just hiding in plain sight, waiting to be uncovered. If you look at Westminster through that lens, anything can become suspicious; any friendship, any dinner, any group of people pictured talking together at a drinks reception. It is also a view that both assigns the personal, human side of politics too much credit and too little. On the one hand, a special adviser and a civil servant can never be just friends, and must be plotting something together if they are found to be friends on Facebook. On the other, simple proof of acquaintance can be used to imply wrongdoing: is it really a coincidence that a journalist went a bit easy on a minister during an interview given that his wife’s cousin is the politician’s partner? And so on.
Beyond the simple mindset, this way of thinking normally comes from having an interest in the political bubble but not being part of it. For a start, it would be near impossible for anyone to have access to all that informal knowledge if they aren’t physically in Westminster, and if there is something they want to double-check, they can’t quickly take a fellow bubble dweller out for coffee to confirm or shoot down their theory. Secondly, it is a lot easier to be given gossip and to turn it into factual evidence of sinister forces being at play when you’re not confronted with real, live humans who work in politics on a day-to-day basis. In the words of one No 10 civil servant (and many others): it’s always a cock-up, never a conspiracy. While it is perfectly possible for clever people to scheme and plot in SW1, most of them are not very good at it or, to be perfectly honest, very clever to start with.
‘I think there’s no middle-ground with MPs,’ says academic Phil Cowley. ‘I’m sure this is wrong, I’m sure they are normally distributed, but it doesn’t feel like that. It feels like they’re either really clever, or you sit there and they’ve got this theory about this and you find yourself thinking, how did anybody ever select you? How did any selection committee think, that’s the one for us! That man or that woman is really going to put us on the map. Absolutely thick as pig shit, some of them.’
This combination of remarkably bright people and ones who were lucky to get an expensive education can certainly make for some interesting chains of events, but most aren’t inherently nefarious. After all, every workplace will have its own drama, and every workplace will probably look worse than it is if you only hear the worst or most intriguing bits of information about what goes on there. There is no reason why you would hear about them unless you worked there or had friends who did, though, which is why scandals in, say, the accounting world rarely make the headlines. It is also why political journalism is so important, and deciding what is a story and what isn’t is crucial; the job of reporters is to contextualise and explain everything that happens in a closed-up and confusing world. Stripped of those layers of context, loose bits of information can be spun in a million and one ways, most of them bad, and basically, all of them incorrect. Seen from the outside, it can feel unfair that some pieces of gossip simply stay within the bubble, but it probably is for the better. Of course, this has all become easier said than done.
The internet has democratised many things and information is one of them, especially when it is information that is scandalous or titillating. It doesn’t always matter if it is true or not; if it’s entertaining enough, or damaging enough and aimed at someone disliked by some online communities, it will get shared and shared and shared, and there is not much anyone can do to stop it. This is especially true when politics is particularly partisan and the country is divided, which is very much the case at the time of writing an
d, unless something dramatic and completely unforeseen happens in 2019, will remain so until further notice. Just like Blairites and Brownites used to leak the slightest bits of information to make the other camp look bad, supporters of the main parties or the main Brexit tribes will gleefully hold on to a seemingly frivolous piece of information and weaponise it. The problem is, of course, that a lot of this information will be bollocks, or have its meaning stretched so thin that it might as well be bollocks.
There can also be concerns about people’s privacy and their security; the Eye Spy MP Twitter account is a good example. Set up years ago (almost certainly by Paul Staines but he won’t formally confirm it), it aimed to tweet out overheard snippets of conversations between Westminster denizens, or note interesting-looking meetings and drinks. A lot of it was confined to the bubble, and revolved around sightings of puzzling combinations of people drinking at the Red Lion, or chatting in a corner of Portcullis House. Then technology evolved and suddenly people were able to take good-quality pictures on their smartphones and send them to the account in a second.
Nowadays, Eye Spy MP features pictures of MPs asleep on trains, having drinks in bars away from Westminster, or attending gigs. Some of it can be eyebrow-raising – why is a prominent frontbencher at the theatre instead of the chamber on the night of a big debate? – but most simply feel invasive. There has been some pushback recently, especially from female MPs – Lisa Nandy is one of them, and argues that, ‘Eye Spy MP feels problematic, because you do need spaces in here where people can have private conversations with each other without being afraid that it’s going to get out into the public domain. And I think there’s a question about public interest, and there’s also quite a serious question about people’s safety at the moment.’
After all, Labour MP Jo Cox was murdered in the street in broad daylight in 2016, countless MPs have been receiving dozens of death threats over the past few years, and fake news on social media remains a problem no one really knows how to solve. If you want to release private information about public figures for the sake of mischief, you also have a responsibility to make sure that information doesn’t end up harming those people. Your argument might be that if someone does something, then they are ultimately responsible for it if it does come out, but that doesn’t absolve you from much. There are reasons why some things remain secret; if you take it upon yourself to decide that they shouldn’t be, you become a character in that chain of events.
Once again, it is hard to predict where this might all be heading. The Westminster gossip ecosystem is a fragile one, and though it can live through changes in morals, personal conduct and ways of communicating, it is unclear what happens when the bubble starts disintegrating. Though the internet aimed to try and democratise SW1 and open it up to the rest of the country, it might well make it even more closed-up as a result.
‘I think people are much more scared of engaging personally with others in the 2015 and 2017 parliaments,’ says one former Conservative adviser. ‘The people who came in the 2010 parliament, we all came in and it was like a party. It was a great time. You were able to go out on the terrace and have drinks, and they were saying, “Oh yes, of course!” The later series of MPs who’ve come in are much more scared about their personal lives, and that’s partly because of the “WhatsApp-ification” of politics, and it’s also partly the “fake news-ification”. Guido was really scrappy pre-2010, it was sweet, and now there’s a litany of correspondents and then there’s all the contenders to the throne. Very few people put stuff into WhatsApp any more; they’re more reluctant to do anything.’
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* People who work in politics sure have a flair for the dramatic, huh?
* What an acronym soup.
* This is another topic for another time, but it is worth pointing out that had Newton blabbed before Major got to No 10, it seems almost certain that he never would have made it to Downing Street as a result. Just because you aren’t saying anything doesn’t mean that your actions don’t have consequences. Then again, maybe Newton knew this, and did not want to have the responsibility of a seismic political change resting on his shoulders.
* This is why starting out in SW1 can be especially hard when you’re a journalist; more than sharing gossip, people would much rather trade it, but in order to receive information, you must have information to offer yourself – it’s tricky.
* You will be surprised to hear that not much came out of that.
* As a side note, “Mother of Parliaments” means England, so the tagline makes no sense, but each to their own.
* Hold that thought – we’ll come back to it shortly.
THE POLITICAL AND THE PERSONAL
What would happen if gossip disappeared from politics? It is unlikely to ever happen, and this isn’t a sci-fi book, but it is worth thinking about it for a second. What would happen? There would be no bars in the Palace of Westminster and the pubs of SW1 would be full of American tourists realising they don’t actually enjoy ale. MPs would work on constituency matters and legislation then occasionally have good-natured, internal debates about policies. Journalists would watch the House of Commons and the House of Lords and receive press releases and have the occasional phone call with someone to double-check something. Parliamentary aides and special advisers would be hired based on the relevance of their CV and the quality of their job interviews. Everyone would come into Westminster to work in the morning and leave in the evening to spend time with their non-political loved ones.
That still would not be enough, would it? Whips’ offices would either have to not exist or do their jobs by politely trying to convince their MPs of the merit of their leadership’s policies. Civil servants would be able to have meetings with their ministers at short notice about any aspect of their work. Anyone who went to university with anyone else would have to be told not to bring their friendship into SW1, and only discuss work-related issues if they are to meet in SW1. It would not be allowed for anyone to become romantically or sexually linked to others they might work with at some point. Most of Parliament would probably be open to the public. Every discussion between, say, a journalist and an MP or a civil servant and a special adviser should be logged. Ad nauseam.
With all of this in place, it seems reasonable to assume that gossip would no longer play a part in Westminster. Still, two questions arise. The first one is: would the country be run better that way? There have always been arguments in favour of professionalising politics further, and as the past chapters have hopefully shown, the informal tends to gain importance when formal structures aren’t working well enough, or at all. It would also be fair to say that gossip, rumours and idle chats aren’t a reliable science, and it is surprising just how often things do not fall apart in corners of the political scene. But can it really change? The dozen hypothetical rules above are drastic and unrealistic, but more importantly, why would anyone want to work in a place like that one? There will always be bright wonks and big minds with large hearts who think they can change the world, but they aren’t a majority. Even they might not want to hang around for long if all the personal is stripped clean from their professional lives. After all, politics isn’t like any other area of work; the hours are painfully long, the jobs can be frustrating, most of the public hates you, there is no stability and you can get spat out of it at any moment, and none of this would change with the aforementioned rules. If you would still want to work in politics in these conditions, you are either lying to yourself or so intent on having power that you probably shouldn’t be working in politics.
On top of this, people working in Westminster need to spend a lot of time around each other. Good Parliamentary assistants pretty much spend all their time with their MPs, and so do special advisers with their ministers. MPs sit most of their working days in the chamber together and whatever happens, a competent reporter is one who spends their days doing just that: reporting. If the nature of the people you spend so much time with matters so littl
e to you that you won’t ever take it into account, you are in a small minority. Though everyone can technically work with everyone else, being able to develop good relationships with people will usually mean that the pair of you will become more efficient. This is not controversial, and is true of the country at large. Removing any possibility of this will alienate people from their jobs, which is not something we want if that job involves being in charge of the country. Still, where there are friendships, there are feuds, there are unrequited and mutual crushes, drinking, sex, drama, enemies – the whole, messy spectrum of human relationships – and where there is all of that, there will be gossip and that gossip will become important at one point or another.
This brings us to our second question: what does it tell us that the only way to surgically extract the influence of gossip on politics would be to change it in a way that would be so thorough and so revolutionary that it will never happen? Informal conversations and relationships gain weight in policy-making and everything around it when and where formal processes fail, but maybe that’s not a bad thing. Maybe formal processes could never take care of everything anyway, and if they could, it is far from certain that they would do a better job than what we have now. In fact, Lord Norton thinks that the way of working we have now has distinct upsides: ‘You find something out by being in the chamber, by being in committee, but it’s complemented by what you hear talking to colleagues. What happens in the chamber at committee could be a culmination of what you’ve already heard, or at least what you’ve heard feeds into it and shapes your views, so it’d be difficult to isolate official behaviour from the rest of what goes on in the Palace. And you can argue that we’d be much worse off if we didn’t have that informal form of exchange. In a way it would strengthen the executive, because it’d have more of a monopoly of information that’s provided to members.’
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