Power Trip

by McBride, Damian

  Just say no, kids, just say no.

  28

  THE ART OF OVERSEAS TRIPS

  The closer Gordon got to becoming Prime Minister, the more varied his overseas travel became as he sought to obtain first-hand experience of different countries and continents, and establish relationships with their leaders. And those major overseas trips meant taking with us giant entourages of political broadcast, print and wire journalists.

  Before getting into some of those specific trips, it’s worth explaining how these things work. Not that we started out as experts; it was not something any of Brown’s team had experience of doing before, bar Sue Nye, and her experiences hadn’t been entirely happy ones: she accompanied Labour leader Neil Kinnock to Washington in 1986 when he was snubbed by President Reagan, and to Zimbabwe in 1988 when he was held captive in a hut with a dozen travelling journalists while armed soldiers trained AK-47 rifles at them and Neil tried to lead choruses of ‘We Shall Overcome’.

  As Sue often observed, the key to a successful trip is all in the preparation. On the logistics side, that was about ensuring the schedule was varied and interesting – with lots of nice photo-opportunities – and that all the travel and accommodation arrangements were simple and smooth. Gordon had outstanding logistics and events managers working for him in the Treasury and No. 10, including masters of calm Helen Etheridge, Jo Dipple and Rachel Kinnock (Neil’s daughter), and their colleagues Barbara Burke and Lisa Perrin.

  But best of the lot was a fiery young lady from the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, Ms Balshen Izzet. She was everything the Treasury wasn’t but won over everyone instantly, from Sue Nye to the security guards. The first time I met her, I was mesmerised, and I had the luck of the Irish when we started a secret romance on St Patrick’s Day, 2006.

  The great strength of Balshen and her colleagues was that they were always thinking not just about Gordon, but about the media entourage. If Gordon was going to get a police motorcade on arrival in a country, would the press bus be allowed in it? Did the schedule allow sufficient filing time for the evening news and next day’s papers? And, above all, what was the backup plan if internet access was down at the hotel?

  Lots of the irritations that build up between the media entourage and a minister’s team on a foreign trip can easily be anticipated and dealt with in advance just by thinking through all those simple questions. The fact they did that allowed me to concentrate on what I did best: coming up with the schedule of stories for the trip.

  I had a strict set of rules for how we did this: I needed a good story for the morning we flew out so all the hacks were in a buoyant mood by the time we got on the plane; I needed one strong story for each day of the trip and two belters in my ‘back pocket’ in case something went wrong; and finally, I needed one decent domestic story – often a bit of grid-busting skulduggery – that I could dispense on the final day or on the flight back as a parting gift to the travelling hacks, just so they felt as looked after and catered for as possible.

  When planning those stories, it wasn’t enough simply to know that – on Day 3 – Gordon would make a speech and hope that would do the trick; I had to know in advance what the two or three lines of announcements would be in the speech that would be capable of splashing a paper, getting a page lead or going to the top of the Today programme, and if there weren’t any, I’d tell Gordon he needed to re-write it.

  We also had to think out in advance the sequencing between broadcasters, overnight newspapers and newswires. The broadcasters needed a story for their morning bulletins and a different or at least much-advanced story for the evening and night-time news; the newspapers needed a story that would under no circumstances be ‘out’ back in the UK before 10 p.m. – otherwise they could just as well have sat at home and filed it without the expense of the trip; and the newswires just wanted to put things out as soon as they heard about them.

  Having to manage all that while constantly keeping in mind the time difference between the UK and whichever country we were in was – let me be frank – bloody hard work. If we also had the Evening Standard on our trip, needing a fresh line for mid-morning, my head would nearly explode.

  The only way it could really work was by negotiating with all the various parties and agreeing what information would emerge at what points, and the only way we could have that negotiation was because of the lobby system, the self-policing ordinance which says that political journalists who belong to the Westminster lobby do not screw you or each other over by breaking agreements on the timing, content or attribution of their copy.

  And I was bound by those agreements too. If The Independent or Evening Standard chose not to send someone on a trip, but their political editor called me to ask for a ‘fill’ – that is a quick briefing on what was happening – it didn’t matter how close I was to them or how helpful I wanted to be, I just had to make my excuses and tell them there wasn’t much to report. The travelling press would have strung me up by my BlackBerry charger if a newspaper which hadn’t ‘sent’ ever had the same overnight story as all the others that had.

  I’d try and establish a shop-steward for the trip – the most senior or respected journalist there – and do my negotiations through them, so anyone who broke any agreements would face their avuncular disapproval. The difficulty would come when one of the broadcasters or newspapers would send a non-lobby journalist to cover the trip, or – worse still – leave it to their country correspondent. To protect my schedule of stories, I usually had no option but to shut them out, sometimes literally.

  Gordon once had to conduct a briefing in Beijing for the travelling lobby to a backdrop of muffled shouting and swearing as I held the doors closed at the back of the room to stop the BBC’s business correspondent, Nils Blythe – later spokesman for the Bank of England – from gaining entry.

  Of course, it didn’t always work. There would be misunderstandings or occasional mischief by particular journalists, and the schedule would have to go out of the window. That is where my back-pocket stories would come in: I’d take aside either the broadcasters or the papers – whichever party had been screwed – and say: ‘Sorry that happened, but here’s an alternative.’

  For example, on his pre-G20 trip to South America in 2009, Gordon found himself announcing that he would back reform of the laws on royal succession to allow first-born girls and heirs married to Catholics to ascend the throne. It had nothing to do with the trip, but it was a cracking story, and it got us out of a hole with the broadcasters, whose night-time news line had been bust.

  On other occasions, my approach to ‘creating’ a story was slightly more dubious. In November 2005, we were set to fly to Israel the night before the House of Commons was voting on the detention of terror suspects for 42 days without charge, with Tony Blair facing the prospect of the legislation being defeated by Labour rebels voting with the Tories and Liberal Democrats.

  There were growing whispers from ‘sources close to No. 10’ that, by going to Israel, Gordon was deliberately contriving to miss a vote that was unpopular with Labour MPs, but we hoped to get around that criticism by persuading either George Osborne or Vince Cable to ‘pair’ with him – agreeing not to vote themselves so as to cancel out the impact of Gordon being missing, a courtesy that opposite numbers will occasionally extend to each other if there is a good enough reason.

  As we sat in the VIP holding suite at Heathrow, with the press already on board the flight, word came through that neither Osborne or Cable would play ball, and that the Labour whips and No. 10 were insisting that this meant Gordon would have to stay behind for the vote. Quite aside from this being a pain for Gordon, it was a potential nightmare for my management of the press entourage.

  With no Gordon, there would be no opportunity for a good chat with the hacks on the plane or the ‘Day 1’ story he would brief during that chat. Instead, we’d have a bunch of cheesed-off journalists wasting a day in Tel Aviv while all the action went on back in London.

 
So, instead, I persuaded Gordon and Sue that we should fly out, wait until we landed, and only then ‘discover’ the instruction from the whips’ office. That way we’d be able to do the chat on the plane, give the hacks an Israel story to write and – as a bonus – ensure that they could report the drama of Brown being summoned back to London for the cliff-edge vote.

  We executed it perfectly, right down to me being quoted in several papers saying: ‘Guys, I think we may have a bit of a problem. It looks like Gordon has to go back home’ after our flight landed, and briefing the sequence of messages left by the whips while we’d been airborne. Sure, it cost the taxpayer an extra return flight for Gordon, and his presence made no difference to the outcome of the vote, but the hacks were happy and that was all I cared about.

  There was another complicating feature of those overseas press entourages: the Sunday papers. Unless it was very obviously in their timeframe, the Sundays wouldn’t usually send anyone on the trip, but if one or two Sunday hacks had persuaded their bosses to let them go, the pressure on them to deliver at least a strong page 2 lead for the weekend was massive.

  On one trip to India in early 2008, we had two Sunday hacks with us, and I reassured them that I had a great line for them: Gordon was going to come out hard for Ken Livingstone, his former bitter enemy, who was standing for re-election as Labour’s Mayor of London. It may not sound much, but in the politics of the day it was deemed significant, and they both seemed happy with the story.

  As Gordon began his exclusive briefing, reading out the script I’d written him, one of the hacks started looking visibly faint. I thought it might be the heat or Delhi Belly or last night’s drinks catching up with him, but when I asked him if he was OK afterwards, he said: ‘You said he was going to come out hard for Ken. I thought you meant he was going to attack him, not endorse him. I’ve told the desk I’ve got a guaranteed splash.’

  He looked through Gordon’s words again, desperately trying to find some nuance that would fit with what he’d told his news desk, but just kept shaking his head. There was nothing I could do, but it was a reminder to me to be careful with the wording of my trailers.

  If all that sounds like we focused far too much on the needs of the media, I’d say you’re damn right we did. After all, they were the buggers effectively paying for the trips. Chartering a plane or, less preferably, block-booking dozens of seats on a scheduled flight was always the most expensive aspect of any overseas visit, and the way we paid for it was by inflating the fares charged to the press to subsidise the travel of Gordon and his team.

  There was one aspect of that arrangement that always intrigued me. If we chartered a flight from BA, Virgin or one of the occasional private airlines we used, then all the food and booze we’d normally consume on a flight was obviously thrown in as well. That meant if the galleys were still full of unopened bottles of champagne, wine and beer when we were on our return flight from Japan, Santiago or Cape Town, that was all booze already paid for by the hacks just waiting to be drunk.

  Well, that was no situation for shrinking violets. I’d explain to the cabin crew that – rather than everyone sitting in their seats occasionally having their glass topped up while watching one of the Bourne films – we were going to hold a proper end-of-trip party on board, and would happily serve our own drinks so they could have a break.

  We’d start slowly, usually with Gordon and Sarah coming back to join us for a relaxed chat, but after they went to bed, or in Gordon’s case, off for a good, uninterrupted eight hours of work, the hard drinking would ensue. I’d kick things off with a quiz, then there’d be hours of standing around swapping war stories and jokes, a bit of singing, and eventually a core group of stalwarts settling down for an all-night session of poker, Scattergories, charades or whatever other game we felt up to, all while steadily draining what was left of the booze.

  There were some civil servants and journalists who fastidiously refused to take part, but a hardy few of us used to come off those flights – often in the cold light of the morning at Heathrow – absolutely plastered. It made for outstanding bonding, even with those journalists sensible enough to get some sleep, and generally meant that, even if there had been tensions during the trip, they all felt they’d had a good one.

  Of course, besides the fact they were paying for the trips, there was another very good reason for making sure we geared everything around the media entourage. Simply put, if not looked after, they have the capacity, incentive and pack mentality to destroy you on a foreign trip. I always disagreed with Tony Blair’s description of the press as ‘feral beasts’, but one thing’s for sure – if you didn’t feed them properly, you’d soon find your boss on the menu.

  And a foreign trip is so fraught with potential gaffes, snubs, misfires, examples of excessive spending and rows about what is on or off the record, that an angry entourage of journalists can easily spend an entire trip giving you a kicking, and – if you cut off all contact with them in response – they’ll just report that as well, with accompanying analysis that the pressure of the job was clearly getting too much and leading to increasing worries back home.

  Sometimes bad days on trips are inevitable: such as the occasion when Gordon did a briefing at the G8 summit in Japan about the need to tackle the world’s waste of food, and then found himself at a luxurious thirteen-course banquet laid on by the hosts that same evening. The press got hold of the menu and it was Sayonara Sapporo.

  Sometimes, you can even have two or three bad days in a row, as Gordon found on a trip to Washington in 2008, when the row over scrapping the 10p tax rate was starting to blow up at home. Gordon was in a foul temper anyway, preoccupied with the emerging financial crisis, and every time he spoke to the press – whether in formal briefings or supposed off-the-record chats on the plane – things got worse and worse. My schedule of stories ceased to be of any value on those days, when the only story was Gordon’s mood and the pressure he was under.

  But the worst thing you can do in those circumstances is start isolating yourself from the press or dismissing them all as bastards. That couldn’t really happen as long as I was around because I regarded myself – to use the journalistic term – as ‘embedded’ with the entourage on those trips, and, because of the constant engagement with them I had, there was always a subtext of saying: ‘OK guys, you’ve had your few days of fun – it’s a fair cop – can we get back to normal now?’

  And that suited the hacks too. No one wanted to go back to the days when Tony Blair refused to come to the back of the plane to speak to them; that kind of access is invaluable no matter how bad relations get. And they didn’t want to lose the supply of good stories and useful information that Michael Ellam or I always provided.

  It was telling that probably the worst foreign trip Gordon ever had came after I’d been sacked and Michael had left, when – despite the best efforts of our replacements – Gordon had become consumed in contempt for the press, a feeling reciprocated by many of the travelling journalists. His trip to New York in September 2009 was a real low point at a crucial time, with Gordon needing a boost to take him into the last party conference before the election.

  A leaked story about Gordon’s five snubbed requests for a one-to-one discussion with President Obama was compounded by a further report that the eventual meeting they’d had – much heralded by Gordon’s new spin-doctors – had actually been a snatched conversation when walking through a United Nations kitchen.

  The papers were merciless, and Gordon’s reaction told me everything about what a low ebb relations had reached; he sent a text message to one of my successors saying: ‘Cut off all contact with Telegraph, Guardian and BBC’, the three outlets who had broken the story.

  Incidentally, the witch-hunt for the source of that snub leak was conducted with a level of intensity, suspicion and anger that made my ‘African Coup’ inquest on a previous Washington trip look like a game of Happy Families. There were many suspects, and it was commonly assumed to be a
Foreign Office or embassy staffer disaffected with Gordon’s gauche behaviour to his American counterparts and possibly serving the interests of their much smoother immediate boss, David Miliband.

  That wasn’t correct. The leak came from a source close to Douglas Alexander, then Secretary of State for International Development.

  With friends like that…

  29

  THE EDITORS

  Despite the way Gordon and the Eds demolished the hierarchical structure of the Treasury, we still believed in pay grades when it came to dealing with newspapers.

  My pay grade was the political and economics editors on every paper, and all the individual reporters beneath them. For the two Eds, their pay grade equivalents were the columnists and, on Budget Day, they’d divide phone calls to all the Polly Toynbees and Jonathan Freedlands between them.

  After I was sacked, one senior Guardian columnist bemoaned the fact that I didn’t ever return her phone calls. That was because it wasn’t my job, much as I would have liked it to have been, and part of the discipline of Gordon’s media operation was that everyone stuck to their task so there was no confusion and mixed signals.

  And Gordon’s task – his pay grade equivalent – was to keep on board the newspaper editors. He would regard them as equals, whereas he treated proprietors, like Rupert Murdoch, Lord Rothermere or the Barclay brothers, more like he would the Pope or Simon Cowell.

  He was always the first to send a new editor a text message congratulating them on their appointment and inviting them into Downing Street for breakfast. And equally, he was the first to text them and commiserate when they faced the near-inevitable axe.

  I sat in on countless breakfasts, lunches and dinners between Gordon and newspaper editors. It was very important for me to be there because – while Gordon’s account of what had been discussed at such events was photographic – his account of what had been agreed was notoriously unreliable.