I was effectively left to make my own judgement, and – whether it was right or wrong at the time – the way I responded became a bit of a template for how to deal with David’s interventions. Talking to the lobby hacks, they were a bit baffled that there seemed to be no coordinated follow-up from the Miliband camp: no one calling up to brief them on what it all meant and what the next steps were; and no serious figure doing a round of broadcast interviews.
It was as though he’d lit the blue touch paper, but forgotten to connect the fireworks. Or, if I was being generous to David, perhaps all he or his supporters were looking to do was sow a little seed over the summer and see what it had grown into by the time of party conference.
Given that was the case, it suited me to present this up front as a full-blown coup attempt – the first shots in a Labour civil war – and say that everyone was anxiously waiting for David’s next move. When, inevitably, nothing happened, it looked like he’d bottled it. Worse for him, he felt obliged to come out and explain that wasn’t his intention at all, that people had misinterpreted his article and that he had full confidence in Gordon’s leadership.
Put together with David’s failure to challenge Gordon for the leadership in 2007, the whole episode helped to form an impression of him in the media as being over-cautious and over-calculating, lacking that crucial level of ruthlessness required to seize the crown. And when we came to party conference that autumn, that impression of him proved self-fulfilling beyond my wildest hopes.
Even though we’d trounced the attempted Blairite coup in September, the atmosphere at the conference in Manchester was raw. The leaders of that coup sat prominently in the bar at the Radisson Hotel the first night we arrived, and many Labour MPs and party organisers made a point of being seen to go and sit with them out of solidarity and sympathy.
There was much whispered discussion about the fact that the Mirror – never seen as a paper to agitate against the leadership, and still on good terms with Gordon – had thrown over several pages of their weekend edition to a David Miliband interview and profile. Those things don’t happen by accident, and at the very least, it was seen as them nailing their future colours to the mast.
The whole conference was therefore set up as Gordon’s make-or-break speech to save his leadership versus David’s best opportunity to convince the party and the country he would make a better alternative. Gordon grasped his moment with arguably the speech of his life, while David just grasped a banana and let his chance slip by again.
While people remember the banana photo best from that conference, the story that damaged David most at the time was the BBC’s report that he’d got into a lift with an aide, who chided him that his speech only deserved a ‘six out of ten’, to which David had supposedly responded: ‘I couldn’t have gone any further. It would have been a Heseltine moment,’ a reference to the idea that by wielding the knife against Margaret Thatcher, Michael Heseltine guaranteed he could not succeed her.
When Nick Robinson drew me to one side at The Guardian’s party that evening to tell me the news, I was beside myself. It was over-cautious, over-calculating David in a nutshell. Nick wouldn’t tell me how they got the story, but it became clear that a BBC employee had been in the lift with them.
It still made absolutely no sense that David and Sarah would have had that conversation in front of anyone, until I was told that the chap in question had been wearing a scruffy T-shirt, jeans and trainers, and, of course, some people think you can say what you like in front of people dressed like that.
If that makes David sound a little arrogant and haughty, well – as far as I was concerned – he certainly had his moments. I always thought he could stand in a conversation with Barack Obama and the Dalai Lama, and still look over their shoulders to see if anyone more important was around. That disengagement would trip him up even more damagingly during the 2010 leadership election when he left his campaign staff to call MPs and ask for their votes because he couldn’t lower himself to do it.
But none of David’s self-inflicted wounds that week in Manchester would have mattered as much if Gordon’s speech hadn’t been such a success, and I had a job to do on that front too.
The morning of the leader’s speech to conference is a lot like a Budget Day in terms of the routines of walking the Standard and the broadcast political editors through its content and structure in advance, thankfully without the need for as much secrecy.
I had two priorities for those briefings: the first and simplest was – without mentioning David Miliband’s name at all – to get into their heads that the key quote in the speech was ‘No time for a novice’, the line worked out by Ed Balls the evening before. They all liked it, Nick Robinson chuckling and saying: ‘I wonder who that’s aimed at.’ Sure enough, when Gordon delivered that line, the cameras cut right on cue to a stony-faced David Miliband. Perfect.
My second priority was to make the idea for Sarah Brown to introduce Gordon – which had been in the back of people’s minds for a while and discussed in earnest early in the conference – look like a totally last-minute, spontaneous decision on Sarah’s part, and one that would come as a genuine surprise to the hacks and the Labour members.
So the way I briefed that on the morning was to say: ‘Sarah’s woken up with this idea. It might happen, it might not. We’re trying our best, but Harriet Harman was due to introduce Gordon so we need to persuade her to stand down. Have the cameras primed just in case, but don’t do any advance speculation.’
Briefing the Standard over the phone on one of the Radisson’s balconies, I went a bit further and totally fabricated the idea – albeit I said ‘not for use’ – that Harriet was pissed off about being replaced, and we therefore weren’t sure if it was going to be possible, fingers crossed and all that – all simply to cultivate the sense that this was a very last-minute, totally thrown-together decision.
Unbeknown to me, Harriet was on the floor below and heard every word. She was naturally furious, given she’d been actively encouraging Sarah to do it. Sometimes I just didn’t help myself: what I regarded as harmless white lies designed to tell a wider story seemed like gratuitous and totally unnecessary slanders if you were the person on the receiving end.
But in terms of the overall presentation, I did my job: the broadcasters treated Sarah’s appearance as a big surprise and she gave an incredible performance. Gordon had a great speech written, but it was the combination of Sarah’s introduction and David’s dismal week that put him in exactly the right mood to deliver it.
You would think that David would have come away from that week both smarting and determined to do things differently next time around. But a few months later, he bottled it again after the 2009 local elections, and by that point, most lobby hacks felt they could write the script for his timid attacks and panicked retreats by rote.
Perhaps David had simply given up on the next general election by that point, and assumed that the leadership contest that followed would be his to win almost by default. He didn’t count on the fact that his brother had clearly inherited all the ruthless genes in that family.
And it does raise a basic question: when is ruthlessness in politics a bad thing?
We applaud prime ministers who are ruthless in their reshuffles, especially when it comes to getting rid of well-liked but ineffective ministers, or sacking colleagues they regard as friends. We applaud their ruthlessness when they realise a policy announced by one of their departments is a pig’s ear and intervene to demand it is ditched.
We also bemoan a lack of ruthlessness when a politician like David has the chance to kill off an unpopular leader, or when a Prime Minister like Tony Blair has the chance to sack a troublesome Chancellor, but they hesitate to strike, leaving long enough for the moment to pass and often for the problems to grow worse.
But, conversely, when we see political ruthlessness demonstrated through the suppression of dissent, the manipulation of the media and the knifing of rivals, it’s usually s
een unequivocally as a bad thing. People talk angrily about such politicians and their advisers behaving like gangsters.
Frankly, I always thought there was a lot to learn from studying a walk of life, much like politics, whose most successful practitioners usually combine their mental strengths and business skills with a bit of brute force and some ruthless competitive instincts. As Al Capone once said: ‘You can get more with a kind word and a gun, than you can with just a kind word.’
And if I could offer my simple view of why David Miliband will be remembered in political history for failing to live up to his potential and achieve his great ambitions, I believe it’s because – when it came down to it – he just had no gun.
Come to mention it, a few more kind words to Labour MPs would have helped as well.
47
THE ART OF THE RESHUFFLE
A reshuffle is just a Budget, but with human beings instead of taxes.
The Prime Minister organising it, and the team helping him, need to know a hundred or so people inside out: their strengths, weaknesses, pros and cons – just like Budget measures.
They then need to bring this altogether into a coherent, convincing package with an overall narrative and a few big stories for the media, and they need to convince everyone on the day – politicians, press and public – that they know exactly what they’re doing.
Tony Blair had a bad habit of botching the re-jigging of his ministerial teams, so much so that the starting point for the press in reporting his reshuffles ended up being: ‘Will he botch this one or not?’
I had a minor but crucial role in that process. Early on the day of a Blair reshuffle, I would sow a few seeds with the press about switches we were fairly sure were going to happen, because they involved either members of the Treasury ministerial team or Gordon’s close allies. On a day when each member of the press is desperate to be the first to speculate about something that will later prove correct, having a text from me saying: ‘Des Browne – Defence’ was gold-dust.
Most importantly, it established the credibility of my intelligence. So when I subsequently started to spread a bit of gossip – some well sourced, some pure guesswork, some pure mischief – I would tend to be believed.
I only needed to do a tiny bit of that – a text message saying ‘Hold on re Des; it all hinges on Charles Clarke’ or ‘Blair wants to make some gender history so Ruth Kelly in flux’ – and that was all believed too, occasionally because it was true. By then, the whole thing would start to be seen as botched and the shambles would become self-fulfilling, as ministers watching the TV thought: ‘Well, if everyone else is digging their heels in, why shouldn’t I too?’
As the French Resistance showed, you only need to set off a couple of small bombs to make the whole railway grind to a halt.
My rationale wasn’t quite as clear as the Resistance’s though. At its most basic level, I was just trying to make the Blair mob look as though they couldn’t run a whelk stall, let alone reshuffle a government; and I was also trying to make it look as though Blairite ministers were able to run rings round him as the price of their loyalty. And since I would join the hacks in rolling my eyes at the perceived incompetence, there was also the implication that it would all be different under Gordon.
And it genuinely was. Gordon’s reshuffles were planned and delivered with the same precision as his Budgets, and with the same focus on handling the media, not just making the decisions.
The key to the process was an enormous magnetic whiteboard in an office adjoining the Cabinet room, on which a table would be drawn with the name of every government department and a number of slots under each name representing the ministerial positions.
The names of every current and potential minister were then written on individual magnetic plates, in black and red felt-tip respectively. Then there were some extra names, written in blue: people from outside Westminster entirely who might be brought in as ministers via the House of Lords.
Like the old Budget scorecard, none of these names were ever rubbed out entirely. We had to keep track of every person currently in a job or who might be expecting one, so we knew who Gordon needed to call – either with good news or bad news – on the day of the reshuffle.
If you didn’t do that, you could end up in the position Tony Blair found himself in with Angela Eagle in 2002, forgetting the Home Office minister existed, giving someone else her job and effectively sacking her from the government by mistake – and without informing her.
The key individuals in charge of the reshuffle grid were the two Sues: Sue Nye, who was expected to think through all the political and personal implications; and Sue Gray, the Cabinet Office civil servant, who was expected to keep track of any issues around the overall number, grading and allocation of posts, and any security issues regarding particular individuals or jobs.
For example, Sue Nye would remind everyone that if we move this Cabinet minister to that department, we’ll have to move that junior minister somewhere else because they absolutely despise each other, following that unfortunate incident at party conference in 1996.
But Sue Gray might then gently point out that we couldn’t move that Cabinet minister to that kind of sensitive position because he was considered somewhat high risk from a blackmail point of view. Gordon, with his occasional Queen Victoria tendencies when it came to his ministers’ private lives, would always need reminding why they were considered high risk and screw up his face in horror when told.
Incidentally, my favourite Queen Victoria moment of Gordon’s came when I told him on the plane returning from South America in 2009 that the Express had splashed the fact that Home Secretary Jacqui Smith’s parliamentary expenses included a claim for a pornographic film downloaded to her home TV.
Before we could even get Gordon to focus on what to do about the story, we had to deal with his utter bewilderment that those channels just before BBC Scotland on his Sky box were all porn channels, and that you could use them to download X-rated films, particularly when Stewart Wood started listing some of the more famous parody titles. Shaving Ryan’s Privates, in particular, attracted a horrified ‘What?!’ from Gordon.
Back in 2007, when Gordon wanted to make Jacqui Smith the Home Secretary in his first Cabinet, we had to inform him that he was taking something of a risk given that – if asked a direct question – she would confirm that she’d taken cannabis in the past. When he decided to go ahead and give her the job, we thought we could make a virtue of her honesty and encourage others to follow suit, part of the new spirit of transparency in Gordon’s government.
So whereas usually the instruction would go out from No. 10 that if the Mail rang around the entire Cabinet asking them if they’d taken cannabis, every minister’s press adviser should say: ‘We don’t respond to surveys’, we told them all this time to be upfront about it.
Obviously I hoped that process would also put more pressure on Cameron, Osborne and Michael Gove to answer or at least flounder over the million-dollar question which no journalist ever quite asked in the way it needed asking, despite my many entreaties for them to do so: ‘When did you last take Class A drugs?’
However, my wheeze fell apart when three of our own Cabinet ministers wouldn’t answer: the first because – as a point of principle – he refused to talk about his life outside politics; the second because he said, while he’d never taken drugs, he didn’t want to open the door on the rest of his private life; and the third because he said if he answered the cannabis question, he’d have no good reason not to answer the million-dollar ‘Class A’ question.
But before we’d even get to the personal lives of the Cabinet, we’d build the grid from the bottom up, filling the most junior ministerial positions. And here’s where an uncomfortable truth would emerge. There would be at least a dozen post-holders where no one in the room, least of all Gordon, had the slightest clue how they were performing in their ministerial roles.
Gordon or Sue would go round the room asking for
views. If they’d ever featured in a Quentin Letts or Ann Treneman sketch from the Commons – favourably or unfavourably – I’d pipe up. If they’d ever featured on one of Nick Brown’s lists of suspect individuals or alternatively driven through a difficult bit of legislation that Gordon was keen on, Jonathan Ashworth would chime in.
But all too often, we just drew a blank, in which case that minister’s fate would usually hang on whether the whips’ office thought they were a good performer in the House or not, or whether – when Gus O’Donnell phoned the head civil servant in the relevant department – he received a good report about how much work they got through. A laconic response like: ‘Well, I wouldn’t usually look for them at their desk on a Thursday afternoon’ could be damning.
In addition to the vacancies created by the loss of those unfortunates, there were younger junior ministers who were known not to have cut it at all, older ones who’d given up on further promotion and were clearly treading water, and a handful who’d signalled in advance they’d prefer a quieter life on the back benches or in the House of Lords.
With luck, we’d therefore always end up with a fair few positions which we could fill with rising stars from the 2005 intake; or with individuals who’d been highly rated before resigning over Iraq, tuition fees or terror laws; or those who expected to get their jobs back having resigned in the 2006 coup against Blair; or finally with Gordon’s odd collection of outsiders – individuals like Sir Digby Jones and Admiral Lord West – rather mockingly dubbed ‘GOATS’ because of Gordon’s 2007 use of the phrase ‘Government of All the Talents’, a phrase which I insist worked well at the time.
Power Trip Page 38
