Power Trip

by McBride, Damian

  Occasionally, I’d arrive at the Treasury in the morning knowing I’d done three hours’ work the previous night, but not remembering what I’d done. Sometimes I was pleasantly surprised; other times I’d go through my sent mail wincing as I read some excoriating rejection of a planned submission from one of the Customs’ teams, explaining in sarcastic detail exactly how shit it was, and then attaching an admittedly perfect re-drafted version that they should send instead.

  I didn’t have to send too many of those emails until I became as unpopular in parts of Customs as Katy Peters and John Pavel had been before me, even more so because I was seen as a turncoat. I was particularly despised by the Manchester-based team which administered alcohol duties, and – almost to spite them one year – I started asking questions about one of the perennial proposals that ministers were lobbied on before each Budget: small brewers’ relief.

  The proposal, which was to halve the duty rate on beer produced by the smallest breweries, had been around for more than two decades, in which time dozens of them had gone out of business and the monopoly of the major regional and national breweries over what was sold in pubs had increased. It had always been resisted by Customs and the Treasury because it was literally such small beer: why introduce complexity into the system just to hold back inevitable market forces?

  It didn’t help that the lead campaigners for the proposal, the Small Independent Brewers Association (SIBA), were a lovely bunch but so used to having the proposal rejected that they barely put up a fight any more, and could not hope to compete with the slick lobbyists representing the big companies within the industry, who were dead set against it.

  This became, without doubt, my finest hour as a civil servant. Working with SIBA and advising them on their campaigning tactics, I personally drove the measure through, encouraging Ten-Foot Timms to get behind it and persuading Ed Miliband, who referred to it as small brewers’ droop, at least to look the other way. Customs fought me at every stage, but come Budget Day 2002, Gordon was able to announce cheerily that the new relief would come in by the time of the World Cup.

  There was a bit of a backlash, rather proving the need for the reforms, as the papers searched Westminster for a single pub where punters could find a qualifying beer, but we rode that out and now the tide has turned. The number of breweries in the UK has risen from 400 to more than 1,000 and craft beer is thriving in every region of the country.

  Not that I ever sampled any myself. My choice of alcohol went largely unchanged as time went on – lager and white wine, usually at the same time – but my levels of consumption got ever worse, especially after I realised that my role as Gordon’s press adviser only really required me to be at the end of a phone to him and to the media, and that I was practically encouraged to take thirsty journos for the boozy lunches, long afternoons in the pub and late-night karaoke sessions that led to stronger relationships and the open sharing of intelligence.

  Gordon didn’t care if I wasn’t to be seen on Thursday or Friday afternoons as long as I could tell him what was going to lead the Sunday papers, and guarantee that it wouldn’t be him in the firing line. Similarly, he didn’t care if I spent foreign trips sampling the local cerveza with the travelling press entourage if it kept them happy and ensured they didn’t screw us over on the trip.

  The occasions when I couldn’t remember the previous night’s events became more frequent and more worrying. Even when I could remember what I’d done it was with a fair degree of embarrassment; I once tried to obtain entry to the Treasury at 2 a.m. and had a rambling row with the custodian who wouldn’t let me in, only for his supervisor to come down and tell me I was outside the Foreign Office.

  It took an almighty toll on my health and my personal life. I would almost certainly have lost Penny and Balshen – my only long-term girlfriends – anyway in the end, but spending most of my time in the pub certainly didn’t help. And yet, I can barely remember anyone in my entire time in the civil service or politics taking me to one side and telling me to take it easy.

  At the end of a September 2003 trip to the G7 meetings in Dubai, one of my first overseas trips as the Treasury’s head of communications, we all gathered at the end of the day in the recreation room at the British embassy to watch Arsenal’s Sunday visit to Old Trafford. The embassy can’t technically sell alcohol, so we had to buy tokens and then exchange them for cans of beer. Not having my spectacles, and not wanting to go back and forth to the counter all evening, I exchanged all my tokens for fifteen cans and sat on the floor in front of the big screen.

  I was absorbed in the game in my usual terrified way, drinking at a ridiculous pace and oblivious to what a big crowd had gathered behind me, including Gordon, the Eds and Treasury Permanent Secretary Gus O’Donnell, a Man United fanatic. When United were awarded a last-minute penalty and a chance to win the game, I sat in silence, necking the last of my cans as Gus shouted happily: ‘That’s justice! That’s justice!’

  I pictured in my mind that as soon as Ruud Van Nistelrooy scored the penalty, I would walk out calmly, go some distance, find a palm tree and beat the shit out of it. Except he missed. To which my reaction was to jump up and yell at the screen: ‘Have that you fucking arsehole! You cheating wanker!’ Then, turning to the bar: ‘There’s your fucking justice, Gus, there’s your fucking justice!’ It was only at that point I realised quite how many children were in the room, as well as the ambassador and his family. Gordon and Gus looked horrified; Ed Balls rather amused.

  Even when – as a special adviser – I had a one-sided physical altercation with a civil servant in front of half the Treasury staff at a quiz night, and Gordon was told to speak to me about it, he addressed it bashfully in terms of me having a bad temper, not being a bad drunk.

  That was at least in part because alcohol is so much an aspect of the culture of Westminster and Whitehall that – while I was seen as a big drinker – I wasn’t seen as totally beyond the norm. When Freddie Flintoff famously pissed in the flowerbeds at the No. 10 reception for the 2005 Ashes victors, the reaction of many hardened Westminster drinkers was: ‘Sounds a bit tame.’ And there were lots of journalists, politicians and civil servants who were seen as infinitely worse than me.

  The glass windows in the Treasury’s atrium still carry the facial imprint of a journalist who tried to walk through one after a particularly heavy night at the Exchequer’s expense; the same journalist who I rang one day to ask why he hadn’t printed the fantastic scoop – now too late – that I’d given him at lunch two days previously. He had absolutely no memory of it.

  When, in 2009, I got a job in my old school, where spending long afternoons in the pub and drifting in at lunchtime was simply impossible, my own behaviour had to change and part of getting a grip of my life after leaving Downing Street was doing that: I gave up drinking at home, never drank during the working day, cut it out entirely at least a couple of nights a week and almost never – I stress almost – got so drunk I didn’t know what I was doing. I even managed to give up booze entirely for forty-six days during Lent 2012.

  It’s no exaggeration to say that making those changes would have been impossible – certainly for someone with my lack of resistance – if I’d still been trapped in that Westminster culture: lunch – booze; afternoon reception – booze; meeting a journalist – booze; 5 p.m. – traditional post-work booze even though it wasn’t post-work; late night in the office or the House of Commons – booze; and always a nightcap or two at home.

  And that was in a normal week. The summer and Christmas party season was on a different level entirely, with journalists staggering between one party and another, and the politicians, government departments or media outlets hosting each party buying far more booze than was necessary and feeling obliged to finish it all off themselves.

  When it came to chucking-out time at Downing Street parties, it was my job to make sure all the guests actually left. It didn’t matter how many glasses of wine they’d had, no journalist could walk p
ast a desk covered in confidential papers and not get tempted to take a look. On occasion though, I had the opposite role, standing at the exit holding back furious mobs of civil servants and journalists trying to make last orders at the Red Lion on the grounds that Newsnight were still broadcasting live outside and half of them couldn’t stand up.

  The Westminster I experienced was truly the binge-drinking capital of Britain and they still had the cheek to chastise others. But if there’s one man who always resisted, one politician who exemplified dipso-discipline, it was Gordon. He was quite capable of nursing the same glass of wine for two hours at a Downing Street reception. For him, those occasions were work, and he never touched a drop when there was still work to do in the day.

  Despite his own discipline, Gordon showed tremendous tolerance of me missing morning meetings or flights to Brussels; falling over or dropping glasses at receptions; and even the odd occasion when he’d come into my office late at night and ignore the eight empty cans of lager on the desk. But that was always because I retained the ability to talk to him coherently and authoritatively about what was in tomorrow’s papers and what our line should be, no matter how pissed I was.

  Except once. I’d just returned from a rare long weekend away in Riga in September 2006 for my friend Anthony Glackin’s stag do. We drank for about thirty-six hours straight through the Saturday, the plane home and then through Arsenal’s 1–0 away win on Sunday at Old Trafford. Gordon called at the end and said through his usual gritted teeth whenever Arsenal won, especially against Manchester United: ‘Well done to your team.’

  He then asked me what was going to be in the papers. I barely even knew what day it was. I rambled incoherently, staggering around the beer garden of the Orange Tree pub in Southgate, eventually becoming absorbed with how newspapers were printed and shouting: ‘It’s words. It’s words. Just words. Written in ink. It’s just ink, Gordon.’ My friends from the stag do were sitting on the wall of the pub listening and killing themselves laughing.

  ‘Mm-hmm, I see,’ he said, then gently: ‘And, erm, what will be in the Telegraph?’ At this point, I think he put me on speakerphone, and – for the benefit of whoever was listening – kept up the conversation for a full ten minutes, working his way through every paper, letting me dig myself ever deeper into the hole. He concluded: ‘Well, thank you, Damian. Get back to your … ah … celebrations.’ When I’d recovered slightly that evening, I had Ed Balls on the phone, not to chastise me, but just to say: ‘Are you mad? Why did you answer the phone?’

  The next time I was in the Orange Tree beer garden on the phone to Gordon I was stone-cold sober, on the day I resigned, two-and-a-half years later. And I only wish I had drink as an excuse.

  10

  MEETING THE MOTHER

  The only downside of driving through your own relatively obscure Budget measures, is that you then have to drive your own, relatively obscure legislation through Parliament.

  I always tell people that – if they want to get a real flavour of parliamentary business – they should go to hearings of the Finance Bill committee, where the legislation which enacts the Budget measures is debated and voted on. The rooms where committee business is held are like a flatter, miniaturised version of the House of Commons.

  The government and opposition sit ranged against each other, ministers and shadow ministers on their respective front benches. The chair of the committee sits – like the Speaker – in the neutral centre in front of them. The civil servants and special advisers sit to the right of the chair. The public and other interested parties sit at the back. And the press lurk around, often just sitting outside.

  What separates it from the House of Commons is that you’re close enough to see the sausages being made: ministers desperately filling time while they wait for a note to be passed down telling them what to say next; MPs listening to a frontbench colleague and exchanging little smirks and remarks wondering how the dimwit got promoted above them; and civil servants bearing the unmistakeable expression of ‘Bollocks, we were hoping no one would ask that’ on their faces.

  Of course there is all the same formality and procedure that takes place in the main chamber, but done with a bit more good humour. On a particularly hot July day, sun beating in through the lead-latticed windows, one of the committee chairs said he would allow the members present to remove their top garments, greeted with a collective removal of suit jackets by the mostly male MPs but a gale of laughter from the largely female group of Treasury ministers, all wearing dresses.

  The informality in those committees could go too far on occasion. I’ll always admire the current Speaker, John Bercow – the most feared and forensic legislative scrutineer – for the look of utter outrage on his face when his fellow Tory MP, Nicholas St Aubyn, replied to Dawn Primarolo’s introduction of legislation enacting some European directive by complaining about the lack of resistance to such measures, saying that – on the contrary – ‘the Honourable Lady seems just to lie back and think of Brussels’. The glare from Bercow made him apologise.

  Each minister is responsible for different Finance Bill clauses, and for responding to any proposed amendments to those clauses. They come to the committee room armed with a huge file containing introductory speeches for each clause, a large file of Q&A material and – hopefully in their head – a wealth of background knowledge from all the submissions and briefings they’ve had.

  The minister introduces the clause, explains why it is vital for Britain’s good; a host of opposition MPs stand up and explain why it is total tosh and threatens our very future; a few government MPs say what they were told to say beforehand; then the minister replies to all their points and asks for a vote. Naturally, the committee’s membership is weighted to ensure the government gets every clause through, although more troublesome are the votes on small amendments proposed by MPs which the government feels obliged to oppose, no matter how reasonable they are.

  If the civil servant responsible for the clause has done their advance preparation well, their role in the committee room is simply to dig out from the file the prepared answers to each question or counter-argument they’ve anticipated and quickly scribble answers to those they haven’t, then pass these forward to the minister via one of the backbench MPs, all in the correct order, so he or she can respond to each point that has been made in turn.

  Of course it isn’t always that simple, largely depending on which ministers you have in front of you. Take Paul Boateng. He was a great Treasury minister to work for: he’d invariably accept his officials’ advice as long as he thought they knew their stuff; and the cocktail parties he threw in his office were legendary, Paul mixing the margaritas himself, which usually ended up all fourteen parts tequila.

  He also had a great knack for making every trade association that visited him in the Treasury feel as though he was their champion: ‘I TOO enjoy a pint of scrumpy as my first of the day’ to the National Association of Cider Makers; ‘There is NOTHING I enjoy more than a game of Housey-Housey’ to the Bingo Association, all such proclamations made in his magnificent stentorian voice. But he did have a habit of becoming distracted from his task.

  When Paul was appointed the first black Cabinet minister in 2002, Ian Austin explained to him that the key to his success as Chief Secretary to the Treasury was to disappear for a month, get his head in the books, and then defy his flamboyant reputation in his first media appearance by doing a serious and heavyweight interview with the Financial Times. Two weeks later, Ian was sitting in his office when he saw Paul pop up live on Sky News being presented with a birthday cake on the House of Commons terrace by Uri Geller and Michael Jackson. It wasn’t exactly what Ian had in mind.

  The expectation was that all Treasury ministers – Gordon excluded – would be on the front bench of the committee, or at least nearby, every session, in case one of their clauses came up sooner than expected. One morning, I found myself supporting Dawn in the civil servants’ chairs on a host of VAT measures, whe
n – whether because the opposition were all hungover or they were up to some mischief – several clauses we expected would take hours to get through passed without debate, and we were rapidly approaching some of Paul’s clauses on environmental taxes.

  ‘Where is Paul?’ mouthed Dawn to me. I shrugged my shoulders. She thought I meant what did you say, so opened her mouth slightly wider: ‘Where. The. Fuck. Is. Paul?’ I was having my own kittens about where the officials responsible for the clauses were and before either of us could find out, the chair of the committee announced that we had now come to whatever nonsense subsidy for sandals had been introduced by our environmental tax team that year. We traditional tax policy team types didn’t always get on with our green brethren in the neighbouring office.

  Dawn and I had to wing it, by which I mean that I tore out the legalistic ‘Explanatory Note’ from the Finance Bill and handed that down so Dawn had something – anything – to read out in order to introduce the clause.

  Having no detailed Q&A to draw on and knowing nothing about the subject, I did my best to scribble suitably bland, vaguely coherent answers to the dozens of questions from MPs and kept handing them down to Dawn to read out. By the end, she was reading them out as fast as I could write them, with anguished glances to her left for each next one and elongated pauses between every word. From the Tory benches John Bercow was killing himself laughing at the spectacle. I have never worked harder in my life, and I wrung my right hand afterwards as exhausted as the Fisher King’s fluffer.

  When Paul Boateng finally came rushing onto the bench and the Treasury’s Swampy Brigade rushed in to the civil service chairs to relieve me, Dawn and I simultaneously mouthed to them both: ‘Where the fuck have you been?’ and Bercow laughed even harder. But look at the Hansard record, and you’d never know the chaos.