Power Trip

by McBride, Damian

  There is another reasonable criticism of the relationship I had with the hacks and the effort that I put into maintaining it – which I recall Steve Richards among others making – that this was no substitute for, and was probably an almighty distraction from, the need to establish a clear and coherent media strategy for Gordon as Prime Minister.

  But I look back at Gordon’s time in No. 10, or at the least the two years when I was there, and I ask myself: if we could never come up with a clear and coherent political strategy and stick to it from two months to the next, what hope did we ever have of establishing an accompanying media strategy?

  In the Treasury, it was relatively easy: we had clear objectives for all the major set-piece moments we had across the year, as well as broad objectives for the parliament as a whole, and we built our political and media strategies around them. And on a micro-level, we were also able to deliver media strategies extremely well for many of Gordon’s smaller set-piece moments inside No. 10 – reshuffles, overseas trips, summits and the like.

  Indeed, it’s interesting that one of Gordon’s big constitutional plans that never saw the light of day was to establish an annual ‘State of the Union’-style address from the Prime Minister to Parliament, setting out what had been achieved and announcing new policies in each area, as if trying to recreate the strategic planning and set-piece management processes that had worked so well in the Treasury.

  But if anyone had come to me before we went to No. 10 and said they wanted me to draw up a comprehensive six-month media strategy with objectives and messaging and delivery plans and key moments and milestones and an evaluation plan, I could have done it, but I’d equally have complained: ‘This is all very well but what happens when the next bomb goes off?’

  We soon found out.

  38

  RIDING HIGH

  After the success of Gordon’s first speech outside Downing Street and his well-received reshuffle the following day, we were off and running, and could start to focus on delivering the short schedule of planned announcements, events and speeches before the summer recess, many of which revolved around ‘firsts’: Gordon’s first Prime Minister’s Questions, his first overseas trip and so on.

  But the night after he’d gone into No. 10, we got our first surprise: a thwarted bomb attack on London’s Haymarket, followed by another shambolic effort the next day at Glasgow airport. When Gordon and his new Home Secretary Jacqui Smith addressed the media and public over subsequent days, their unshowy style and calm demeanour went down well. We didn’t need to highlight the difference with Blair’s overblown rhetoric and emotion for others to point out the contrast.

  The key to getting Gordon to come across in that unvarnished, businesslike way wasn’t to tell him that was the image or tone we were going for – it was to tell him nothing, and just let him be his normal self. My ‘direction’ before he did interviews in those days was just: ‘Walk up to the microphone, say your piece, take two questions, walk back.’

  And for all the criticism we got from some quarters about his dandruff, his unkempt hair and his skew-whiff ties, the public didn’t seem to care, and it simply burnished his reputation for being an honest, hard-working bloke who cared more about doing the job well than how he looked. Boris Johnson without the jokes, if you will.

  That image of him was encapsulated when he went on his first holiday as Prime Minister at the start of August. We kicked off his break with a trip to visit the Olympic sailing venue at Weymouth – including the obligatory photos of Gordon looking over-dressed and awkward in beige jacket and navy slacks while strolling among his fellow holiday-makers.

  We announced that Gordon, Sarah and the boys would be staying in a small holiday cottage at a secret location near Weymouth, a suitable contrast with the private Caribbean resorts of Tony Blair’s summer holidays. The only people who were downright disgruntled about this were the Downing Street staff and protection officers who used to accompany Tony on those luxury holidays and now had to set up shop in a small conservatory in Dorset.

  In America, they believe that the President should be able to exercise all his powers at all times – right down to Air Force One functioning as a mid-air White House and the constant presence of the ‘nuclear football’ allowing him to destroy the world from a small suitcase. In Britain, we send our leaders away on holiday with a laptop, a satellite phone, and a couple of clerical and secretarial staff.

  But, in fairness, these were no ordinary staff. The ‘Garden Room girls’, so called because of their office adjoining the Downing Street garden, and the private office ‘clerks’ were fixers nonpareil. If Gordon wondered aloud: ‘What was that war thing with the English guy playing an American?’, he’d have the Band of Brothers book and box set on his desk, and its creator Stephen E. Ambrose on line two, within five minutes. And yes, I know Ambrose is dead, but that never stopped the Garden Room girls.

  As well as those staff, his team of protection officers and his family, Gordon also had me for company in Dorset, at least for the first week. It was generally agreed that, if anyone had to give up their own holiday to join Gordon’s, it should be me. I had no family commitments and no holiday plans of my own, and I was best placed to deal with any disturbance caused by unwanted press intrusion once the media worked out where he was.

  Most importantly, the entire office and Sarah knew that if there was a single bad story in the papers, or any emerging issue with a hint of crisis about it, Gordon’s first instinct would be to ring every other person trying to take a break to see what they thought, quickly followed by an urge to rush back to London and deal with it. So my primary job was to calm him down about any media stories that emerged and reassure him they didn’t require his attention.

  Ed Balls – who plays the drums very well in his spare time – used to reflect in musical terms that there were two types of people around Gordon: amplifiers and dampers, and his reactions to external events depended on what kind of person was around him at the time. If he was wound up about something inconsequential and you either argued, agreed or – worst of all – asked him more about it, you were just turning up his volume. If you immediately changed the subject and told him he needed to focus on the next and much more important thing, you were damping it down.

  I will always maintain that the person most to blame for the Mrs Duffy incident at the 2010 election was not the person who arranged the chat with her, or the person who was supposed to take Gordon’s lapel microphone off, or even Gordon himself, but the aide in the back of the car who had three opportunities to change the subject and get Gordon focused on his upcoming Jeremy Vine interview, but instead made the cardinal sin of asking him: ‘What did she say?’, classic amplification which invited the killer quote about Mrs Duffy being ‘a sort of bigoted woman’.

  It didn’t make it any easier to listen to the Mrs Duffy recording knowing that – just as it was me sent down to Dorset to do the damping at the start of Gordon’s holiday – it probably would have been me in the back of the car with him on that day, if I hadn’t got myself sacked by then. I like to think I would have seen the red light on the microphone as well; I always had a good eye for trouble, except when it was coming for me.

  The afternoon that we arrived at the cottage, I went tramping round all the neighbouring fields to examine potential vantage points for long-lens photographers, and identify all the parts of the property where Gordon and Sarah could be overlooked. I returned a bit exhausted and muddy, and instructed them: ‘Right, that bedroom window, that side window and that bit of the garden – all of them are overlooked so make sure you’re fully clothed at all times.’

  Sarah took careful note; Gordon muttered that the press were bastards – even though at this point none of them had even worked out where he was, let alone sent snappers down there. I was keen to get away and check into my hotel before it got dark, but Gordon insisted I stay for dinner and opened a bottle of wine. He was in a happy and chatty mood, and got into an animated discussio
n about whether José Mourinho would stay at Chelsea another season.

  Then Peter, the private office clerk, popped his head round the door: ‘Gordon, I’ve got the office on, they say it’s urgent.’ Gordon slammed his wine glass down, as if cursing himself for having a drink before the day was through. ‘Is it another bomb? Get the news on. Why isn’t the news on?’ He zipped through to the impromptu office set up in the conservatory and I watched him through the window listening intently to the person on the other end of the phone, then barking orders back at them and at the staff in the conservatory. He gestured me in, hand over the mouthpiece on the phone and said: ‘Foot-and-mouth disease. Bloody foot-and-mouth.’

  This was not going to be a question of damping Gordon down and telling him it didn’t need his attention. He set up an immediate conference call with the Chief Vet, Debby Reynolds, and Hilary Benn, the Cabinet minister for farming and rural affairs. He told them he’d head back to Downing Street in the morning to chair a meeting of the COBRA emergency committee, named after its original secure location in the basement of Downing Street, Cabinet Office Briefing Room A.

  You could hear the collective groan from London as those civil servants who hadn’t yet escaped on holiday realised they would now be stuck for the duration of the crisis. I was in the same boat, but my more immediate priority was knowing that I was sitting on an enormous news story as the first editions of the newspapers were almost ready to go to print.

  I had no mobile signal in the cottage so ran up the steep path to the A-road, standing on the hard shoulder and beginning a set of nine almost identical phone calls to the political editors of the national daily papers. I hadn’t written out a script but the conversations all played out the same:

  ‘Hi mate, massive story for you in case you want to crash it into the first edition. But I don’t want to see anything on Sky or online. Right? OK. Foot-and-mouth outbreak in Surrey, near Guildford. One farm so far. Symptoms reported yesterday. Test came back positive today. Cows. About fifty. Yeah, five-zero. Testing neighbouring farms to see if it’s spread…

  ‘Gordon’s spoken to the Chief Vet, and he’s coming back to London in the morning to chair COBRA. Yeah, I know! Massive. Debby Reynolds. Like the actress but with a ‘Y’. No. 10 spokesman quote: “We are doing everything in our power to identify the source of this outbreak and control its spread. We are determined to protect the British farming industry.” Right, got to go. Talk later.’

  Next, I called the BBC, then ITN and then Sky, giving them all a 10 p.m. embargo so they could all break it at the same time. Then – just so they could be the first to break the news to their editors – I called the political editors from all the Sunday papers. I was up on the hard shoulder for about two hours shouting over the traffic, and didn’t even have enough battery left to light the road in front of me when I stumbled back to the cottage in the pitch dark.

  Gordon was still working away, so I reassured him the media were impressed by the grip he was taking, and finally headed back to my hotel at midnight. I was back at the cottage at 5 a.m. for the drive back to London. I asked the protection officers in the driveway: ‘Gordon up yet?’ One of them gestured up at the bedroom window I’d warned Gordon about, where, sure enough, he was peering out into the morning gloom naked from at least the waist up.

  He barrelled into the back of the car with a cry of ‘Let’s go!’ as if we were in The Sweeney. There were times I dreaded long car journeys with Gordon, when he was in a grumpy mood with little to do but gripe about how long everything was taking, what a waste of time it all was, and eventually asking the unanswerable question: ‘Why are you doing this to me?’ – his version of ‘Et tu, Brute?’ – uttered with the weary desperation of a man realising his most trusted staff were wilfully trying to sabotage his political career, physical health and sanity by filling his day with useless demands.

  Often, when attending a visit with Gordon, you’d see fellow staff members step out of the car with him, carrying the blank look of an American soldier released from a Vietnamese prison camp in the mid-1970s, relieved the ordeal was over but unsure whether life could ever feel the same again, just muttering under their breath: ‘Tailback. M6. Very long. No phone signal. Very bad.’

  Fortunately, the two-hour race from Dorset to London that day was not such an experience. In fact, it was everything that was good about Gordon as a leader and man of action. I asked whether he’d slept. “No, I was reading all this stuff.”

  He had in his hand the 187-page report by Dr Iain Anderson into the government’s disastrous handling of the 2001 outbreak and the Royal Society’s report into the science of the 2001 outbreak. Every single page of both reports was covered in scribbles from his black felt-tip pen, and he had an extra twenty-page note just consisting of his scribbled action plan for the next twenty-four hours.

  He seemed to get through half that action plan just in the course of the journey, barking instructions and questions at officials and ministers, all lifted from his study of the two reports, about footpaths, bridle paths, cull zones, exclusion zones, buffer zones and export restrictions.

  It was reminiscent of the Treasury at times: ‘Get me a horse-racing guy at Culture’, ‘Get me a tourism guy at Business’, ‘Get me a VAT guy at HMRC’. At times he had a mobile at each ear so that two ministers or officials at different departments could receive the same orders. I texted culture buff Stewart Wood – another of Gordon’s long-standing special advisers – saying it was like being with The Wolf from Pulp Fiction.

  When we got back to Downing Street, Gordon convened the COBRA meeting in the Cabinet room and stood like a four-star general over the table with maps of Surrey spread out in front of him, Debby Reynolds calmly describing the likely epidemiology of the outbreak and Gordon issuing instructions on the size of the cull zones.

  Every time he asked how many more livestock would be slaughtered if he stretched the cull zone further, his voice would drop, as if the affected cows were listening at the door, but he was determined not to repeat the mistakes of 2001 when an insufficient initial response led to the outbreak growing out of control. I asked him later if it affected him ordering those slaughters, especially when the cattle were probably not infected. He screwed his face up as if to say ‘Don’t be silly’, but then muttered quietly: ‘You feel sorry for the little ones.’

  When he made his statements to the media during the course of that day, he looked a mess, but no one watching him would have been in any doubt that he was in charge, in control and totally the right man for the job. For all the complaints about Gordon being a micro-manager, there were times like that crisis when a bit of micro-management was required. And it not only succeeded but went down hugely well with the public, even after it emerged that the cause of the outbreak was lax security at the government-owned medical research laboratory at Pirbright.

  It was driving the Tories mad. Who would have thought that their effort to turn the battle between Brown and Cameron into one based on personality would work in Gordon’s favour, with people at that point preferring the competent old curmudgeon over the young bloke going on about sunshine?

  I heard that frustration for myself when listening in on one of Gordon’s calls to Cameron during the crisis. The tone was pretty friendly, with lots of affirming of each other’s points, and towards the end Cameron asked Gordon almost pleadingly when he thought things would stabilise sufficiently so Gordon could go back to Dorset and Cameron could go back to Brittany.

  His exact words were: ‘I can’t go away until you do, and we won’t get a holiday at this rate. But you really have to go away first.’ Gordon laughed and said he’d let him know, but he couldn’t go away until they’d had confirmation that the outbreak was definitely contained.

  The call ended, and Gordon immediately ran into the outer office and shouted at me: ‘That was personal, that was private. You don’t say a word about that to anyone.’ So not only was the call civilised, but Gordon’s reaction indicated his desire
to build a decent working relationship for the long term, not allow the likes of me to jeopardise it for short-term political advantage.

  Later the same day, Cameron did a series of TV interviews very critical of Gordon’s handling of the crisis, apparently using information he’d learned from their phone call. Gordon was furious about it and – even before the political tide turned between them – he felt some real acrimony towards the Tory leader.

  That made events interesting a few months later when they were forced to come together and process through to the House of Lords to hear the Queen’s Speech, always an odd occasion when the politicians who have been throwing vitriol at each other for months in the House of Commons apparently turn into long-lost friends when walking down the corridor.

  Gordon’s strength of feeling about Cameron was at a level by that stage that we were worried he’d simply ignore him on the walk through, and that any enforced attempt at bonhomie would have looked so false as to be counter-productive. So my suggestion was simply that as soon as they come together, Gordon start briefing Cameron about some serious issue relating to Pakistan and keep it up all the way through.

  It worked a treat on the television. Gordon looked like a serious-faced schoolmaster giving a boy a short lecture about Byzantine pottery as they strolled through the corridor, while Cameron looked baffled but nodded attentively as if he was hanging on every word.

  As I say, the best direction you could ever give Gordon was: ‘Walk that way, talk … and don’t worry about smiling.’

  39

  PRESIDENTS AND FIRST LADIES

  As an experiment, I once separately asked the Eds which character they would aspire to be in American drama series The West Wing, and which character they thought they currently best resembled. They both gave Leo McGarry for both answers, the wise old chief of staff, perpetually rolling his eyes at the shortcomings and idiocy of his colleagues, but forever inspiring both them and the fictional President Bartlet to greater heights.