Power Trip

by McBride, Damian

  I slept on the floor at Victoria Street that night and skulked back into No. 10 wondering how much longer Gordon or any of us would be there. Over the previous few weeks, a consensus had taken hold among the advisers that, if we lost the London mayoralty, Gordon would probably have to go, and – while the discussions with him about it were more abstract, using phrases like ‘Some people will argue’ – there was little doubt in my mind that Gordon felt the same way.

  If he didn’t go, he would almost certainly be ousted acrimoniously, not least after Ken Livingstone laid the blame for Boris’s victory in London at his feet. Gordon’s last service to the party would have to be to step down with dignity and call for a unifying and constructive contest to succeed him.

  We thought that he’d also have to say – possibly in agreement with the Queen – that whoever the new leader was, they would be given a chance to set out their stall for a few months but with the guarantee that they would call an autumn general election to let the people decide, as Gordon should have done the year before.

  When the news came through on Friday night that Boris had won, I simply told the hacks who rang me that we’d see what happened on Monday. Not for the first time, as Gordon counselled opinion that weekend, there was a split between the MPs he spoke to and his other advisers.

  For the most part, the former were dead set against him quitting simply because the prospect of a general election any time soon seemed like madness for the party when we’d just polled 24 per cent and career suicide for those in marginal constituencies.

  Matters only got worse the following week as MPs already reeling from the results came back to London reporting that dozens of their constituents were bringing in their April pay packets, furious that their income tax bills had risen, as the abolition of the 10p rate kicked in. Gordon’s stubborn insistence that they were not net losers only made things worse.

  These were dark days. Gordon couldn’t do or say anything right, and the party was in open revolt. But, God rest her soul, Gwyneth Dunwoody – who’d died two weeks before the local elections – probably saved Gordon that spring. Internal hostilities were temporarily suspended as Labour attention focused on holding onto Gwyneth’s seat in Crewe and Nantwich. Even though the campaign and the result were disastrous, it gave Gordon a small firebreak and gave Alistair Darling time to rush through a panicked increase in the income tax personal allowance to reduce the number of 10p losers.

  The Glasgow East by-election in July was different. If the waters were muddied in Crewe and Nantwich by the 10p shambles and Labour’s ill-judged ‘Toff’ jibes against the Tory candidate, there was no doubting Glasgow East would be viewed simply as a referendum on Gordon in his own backyard: a safe seat he couldn’t afford to lose.

  When word reached Labour’s Warwick conference – attended by every union leader and Labour Party bigwig in the country – that we were indeed going to lose it, it was arguably the moment of greatest danger to Gordon’s premiership, at least until the botched Purnell coup of June 2009.

  In the heated atmosphere that Thursday evening, the union leaders were of one mind: there was no point trying to negotiate an agreement on policy-making and workers’ rights with a Labour Party run by Gordon Brown because he wasn’t going to be running it in a week’s time. So pointless did they find the situation, they were quite prepared to pack up and collapse the talks.

  If they’d done so, it would have been completely self-fulfilling; the ultimate sign Gordon had not just lost one of Labour’s safest seats but totally lost control of his own party. Gordon’s political fixers, Joe Irvin and Jonathan Ashworth, and his loyalist MPs performed heroics that night, persuading their union opposite numbers to stay round the table.

  The key message that worked was: ‘If Gordon has to go, what do you think will happen next?’ It didn’t take much imagination: Labour would tear itself to pieces in a contest between Blairites determined to seize back the throne and the left determined to stop them; the press and the public would demand an immediate general election; Cameron would win a clear majority and drive through boundary changes; and Labour would be back out of power for a generation.

  ‘Après moi, le déluge’ always has a persuasive effect, even when people are bloody sick of the ‘moi’. I helped this process by briefing the hacks hard that David Miliband and Harriet Harman were already on manoeuvres: Miliband courting wealthy donors to fund his leadership campaign, Harriet touring the bars of Warwick talking about her ‘moment’. At that point, it didn’t matter whether either thing was true, which they weren’t; what mattered was that people heard the drumbeats of a Labour civil war. Rightly or wrongly, Gordon survived Warwick and limped into the summer holidays.

  As for me on those three torrid election nights between May and July 2008, I did the only positive thing I could do and determined to turn the very awfulness of the results into a way of enhancing our relationships with the political media. In simple terms, I became the only spin-doctor in government or opposition who ever reliably told the truth on election night.

  It may come as a surprise, but very few politicians or spin-doctors do actually tell outright lies, and it’s something of a shock when you find out they have. I mean, why take the risk of being caught out telling a lie when you could simply avoid, obfuscate and divert?

  When I was hurriedly spreading my mischief about Miliband and Harriet the weekend of the Warwick conference, I wouldn’t lie outright; I’d just point a journalist in an erroneous direction by asking a question: ‘Are you hearing this rumour about Miliband asking Lord Levy to bankroll his campaign? Won’t that be a massive story?’

  But election night is when all pretence of being even halfway honest goes out of the window and – almost by convention – politicians and spin-doctors tell the most blatant lies. To understand that, it’s first important to grasp what they know on election night and how they know it.

  On the big Thursday election nights in May or June, when hundreds of party members are knocking on doors getting out the vote, ticking known supporters off at polling stations, or observing the count at the town hall, the information they are gathering is being constantly fed back to regional organisers, then on to party headquarters, and then tapped into central computers. At by-elections, where entire towns are flooded with party activists, the detail gathered is even greater.

  The information gathered on the day is put together with the data they already know from postal votes and phone canvassing, and, by processing all that, each party headquarters will generally know fairly early in the evening which seats and councils they’ll win and which they’ll lose, and be able to estimate their national share of the vote down to the first decimal point.

  As the night goes on, those numbers and estimates are refined, but rarely by very much. Labour Party election experts like Theo Bertram would listen to me and others note optimistically that ‘the early results don’t seem as bad as you’re saying’, smile in a sympathetic way, and say: ‘Well, we’ve never been wrong before.’

  But even though spin-doctors and ministers on both sides know almost exactly how good or bad their results are, tradition dictates that the triumphant party will tell the newspapers and broadcasters off the record that things aren’t looking as good as they’d hoped, while the defeated party will say: ‘Bloody hell, guys, it’s even worse than we feared.’

  This is explained by spin-doctors of all parties as an exercise in trying to get expectations into ‘the right place’, by which they actually mean lying to people so the media’s expectations are in an entirely wrong place.

  Why do they do that? Well, simply because – when the actual results emerge – they hope Nick Robinson and David Dimbleby or Adam Boulton and Kay Burley will spend the following day saying: ‘There will be some relief in the Labour camp that their vote held up as well as it did’ or ‘The Tories are admitting even they were amazed by the scale of the victory.’

  In his later years in office, Tony Blair’s spin team turned the
opposite way entirely, telling journalists they’d done much better than they actually had, simply in the hope that the first editions of the papers that people saw in the morning weren’t as bad as all the rest of the coverage to come.

  There was a disdain for the press in all this behaviour that used to irritate me. We saw the same thing with Alastair Campbell in 2005 writing one of his ridiculous top-secret memos designed to be leaked shortly before the election warning that Michael Howard could win because Labour voters assumed victory was in the bag and were planning to stay home.

  So, when I was in charge of this process, I made a conscious decision to do the opposite. I met at the Pimlico Tandoori restaurant around 9 p.m. on each disastrous election night with a handful of political editors, had a curry and told them exactly what the result was going to be, then got them to pass it on the others. And I told them: if I’m wrong, never believe another word I say to you.

  They’d then be in the bizarre position of calling my Tory counterparts and saying: ‘So we understand from the Dog you’ll be on 44.2 per cent or thereabouts, and you’re going to gain Solihull and Bury’, and they’d respond: ‘Don’t fall for that old rubbish. Are you kidding? Not a chance!’ And of course, within a few hours, I’d be proved right and my opposite numbers would be exposed as blatant liars.

  What purpose did that serve? Well, at the time, it did precisely zero to improve the coverage of those elections; in fact, it only ensured that the first editions of the papers had a fairly accurate sense of the dimensions, duration and crimsonness of each bloodbath.

  But, it ensured – at least at that time – that Labour was still seen as having a more professional and honest press operation than the Tories, it ensured that our flows of intelligence and trade with the media remained open, and it meant that the party and Gordon were still being listened to and reported in a reasonably fair and objective way, no matter how bad the polls looked.

  My election night honesty was only one part of the way I maintained those relationships, but it was a symbolically important one. And, of course, the odd times when – as at the Warwick conference – I thought I needed to bend the truth to protect Gordon’s interests, it meant I tended to be believed.

  44

  FOR THE GLORY OF GORDON

  My dad was very fond of shouting things out in public. An entire cross-Channel ferry found out about Bob Willis’s eight for forty-three to win the 1981 Headingley Test because my dad was relaying every wicket with growing volume and elation from his transistor radio.

  When I was very small, our trips to Sainsbury’s would stop for ten minutes while he screamed about the Highland Clearances or the Famine to any fellow shoppers he heard making anti-Scottish or anti-Irish remarks. He’d berate me or my brothers in public if we said a word out of turn on the walk to church. And – while I wouldn’t always understand the reasons – I’d regularly hear him hurl abuse at passersby with whom he had ongoing grudges: ex-pupils, former colleagues, old friends.

  But what I remember most of all, and in retrospect much more fondly, was him seizing me by my tiny arm the many times we visited an ancient church or cathedral, pointing to the detail of the masonry or frescoes in the highest alcoves, or getting me to feel the intricacy of the wooden and stone carvings of statues beyond the point the eye could appreciate them, and shouting: ‘Do you understand? Done where only God can see! For nothing but the Glory of God!’

  If I felt he was sometimes a hard man to please, it was just because I often didn’t grasp what pleased him. The only time he saw me captain Peterhouse at Cambridge was against the whipping boys in our league. We beat them 11–0, and I scored five of them. As I came off to greet him afterwards feeling proud of myself, he walked straight past me, shook the opposition captain’s hand, and – with tears in his eyes – said to him: ‘You were magnificent; you kept your team going the whole game; you never stopped running.’

  It was the same spirit drilled into me by my mum when she taught me cricket, read me ‘Vitai Lampada’, and explained that you were measured by playing the game with the same passion, effort and determination whether you were coming into bat at 300 for one or at eighty for nine.

  To look at my sporting or my political records – the very antithesis of playing the game in the right spirit, respecting my opponents and taking defeat on the chin – you might think I owe an apology to my mum and dad for not listening to a word they said, but they would know better. They would look at the long, dark days I spent in Downing Street during 2008, and know I did them proud.

  Now don’t get me wrong: No. 10 itself is the best place to work in the world, and being the political media adviser probably one of the best jobs.

  Walking through the black door each day felt like a thrill: the Cabinet room and Downing Street garden straight ahead down the corridor; and each room off to the side or up the stairs with its own history of famous meetings, summits, banquets or interviews. And – whether we were in No. 10 or out on the road – the days themselves in 2008 were often thrilling.

  In March I helped to ensure the first Anglo-French summit between Gordon and President Sarkozy took place at Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium, when I convinced a sceptical Gordon that he should use the soundbite suggested by his genius foreign policy adviser Tom Fletcher that we wanted ‘the Entente Cordiale to become an entente formidable’. It made Arsène Wenger smile!

  In August in Afghanistan, we were driven at high speed from Kabul airport to the presidential palace with a squaddie telling me how to fire his rifle if he was incapacitated or killed, then swooped back to the airport from the British embassy, flying low and twisting sideways over the rooftops in a machine-gun helicopter, because of fears of a Taliban missile attack.

  Everyone else was deliberately downbeat and under-stated about the whole experience afterwards, and nodded sagely when talking about the brave members of the armed forces who did that kind of thing every day. I just sat there grinning, my inner thirteen-year-old saying: ‘That was fucking awesome!’

  Yet, for all the occasional excitement that 2008 brought, and for all that I loved spending every day in No. 10, most of the year felt like one long exercise in dealing with the shit that was happening, trying to stop other shit from happening and shouting at the colleagues who kept adding more shit to the mix: ‘That’s quite enough shit for now, thank you.’

  This is where, God bless him, I have to thank Alastair Campbell, because as well as his No. 10 ‘grid system’ providing me with many years of good stories to leak to journalists in the No. 11 days, it was absolutely fundamental to the whole waste management challenge within No. 10.

  Of all people, I’d have been forgiven for being sceptical about the grid precisely because I knew what a good source of potential leaks it was. But my rationale was similar to Campbell’s: every government faces leaks; they’re annoying, but they’re rarely fatally damaging. What is fatal is the government losing grip over what it’s announcing, how, when and most importantly why. If the price you pay for the grip that the grid offers is the occasional unscheduled Sunday paper splash, it’s worth every penny.

  Not long after David Cameron’s guru Steve Hilton left No. 10, he gave a lecture at Stanford University and unveiled a one-foot-high bundle of paper to his students, which he said represented just four days’ worth of documents circulated to Cabinet committees. He said: ‘This just shows you the scale of what you’re up against in trying to control these things. The idea that a couple of political advisers read through all this and spot things are bad, things that are contradictory, is just inconceivable.’

  But that’s precisely why the grid system was put in place, so political advisers didn’t have to do that. Many Westminster people wrongly think of the grid as simply a news management tool, with a series of announcements, speeches or events plotted to dominate each day’s coverage and give narrative structure and themes to the week, fortnight and months ahead.

  That’s the way it was used when originally conceived for Labour�
��s 1997 election campaign, and the way some businesses now use it to plan the launch of a new brand or product, many of them advised by ex-Labour folk who’ve taken the corporate communications shilling.

  However, within No. 10, the far more important role of the grid system was doing precisely what Steve Hilton concluded was impossible: giving political advisers an easily digestible paper titled ‘Upcoming Business’ and detailing every government announcement or important external news item for the next fortnight. The grid itself was simply a tabular summary of this longer document; that’s what I would see in the Treasury and use to try and decipher those upcoming announcements.

  The ‘Upcoming Business’ paper was compiled and circulated by the great Paul Brown in No. 10’s Strategic Communications Unit each Thursday evening, and would then form the basis of a Friday morning meeting to go through each item in the grid line by line.

  At different times under the Labour government, those meetings were chaired by special advisers like Alastair Campbell or Gavin Kelly, ministers like Ed Miliband or Liam Byrne, and civil servants like Jeremy Heywood or Michael Ellam – what mattered was that whoever was chairing the meeting had the personal clout to sort any problems out themselves, or the influence over Tony or Gordon to tell them when they needed to weigh in.

  The meetings were attended by every No. 10 civil servant or special adviser within the No. 10 Policy Unit responsible for shadowing different government departments, almost all the communications staff, and all the key civil servants in Gordon’s private office. They were the only meetings I used to attend on a weekly basis in No. 10, and the only regular occasions after ‘the election that never was’ when Ed Miliband and I would see and speak to each other.

  They were also a model for a well-run meeting: no agenda, no apologies, no presentations, no minutes, no any other bloody business; just an hour spent investigating the meaning, purpose, impact and timing of every item on every day for the next fortnight. And because each item would get at least two airings before it was due to be announced, it was inconceivable that something would be announced without No. 10’s knowledge and explicit agreement.