HAVEN’T YOU HEARD?
HAVEN’T YOU HEARD?
GOSSIP, POWER, AND HOW POLITICS REALLY WORKS
MARIE LE CONTE
Published by 535
The Plaza,
535 Kings Road,
Chelsea Harbour,
London, SW10 0SZ
twitter.com/535Books
Hardback – 978-1-788701-77-8
eBook – 978-1-788701-78-5
All rights reserved. No part of the publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or circulated in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing of the publisher.
A CIP catalogue of this book is available from the British Library.
Designed and set by seagulls.net
Copyright © Marie Le Conte, 2019
Marie Le Conte has asserted her moral right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright holders of material reproduced in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be glad to hear from them.
535 is an imprint of Bonnier Books UK
www.bonnierbooks.co.uk
To , who
with and without
whom I
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
The Personal and the Political
Part 1 / People
Part 2 / Places
Part 3 / Personalities
Part 4 / Processes
Part 5 / Power
The Political and the Personal
Bibliography
Cast of Characters
‘The foregoing remarks are not intended to imply that politicians are better than other men, but simply that they are like other men. What other men do in their affairs, politicians do in politics. But so high is the standard of behavior expected of the politician that we refuse him the benefit of any doubt until after he is dead. Then, if he is sufficiently eminent and not too odious, we exalt him as a statesman and erect a monument to his memory.’
– Political philosopher Chester C. Maxey, 1954
‘When people portray politics for the rest of the population, they leave out the most important thing, which is that it’s unbelievably enjoyable and everyone’s having a really great time. Why else would we do it?’
– Former political adviser Miranda Green, 2018
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
There are a number of people without whom this book couldn’t have existed.
Labour MP Tom Watson isn’t one of them; when approached for this book, he refused to be interviewed as gossip ‘isn’t really [his] thing’. This will be news to a number of people. Moving on …
Most of this book was written from The Café, which I originally decided to name then changed my mind as I selfishly want to keep it all to myself. The staff and the regulars are lovely, the music choices charming if occasionally puzzling, and not an eyebrow was raised when I came in five days a week and only ever ordered two drinks a day. A special thanks must be given to Milo as well, the cheeriest and fluffiest dog south London has ever seen.
It also seems fair to say that I wouldn’t have come up with the idea for Haven’t You Heard? if it hadn’t been for Daragh, Agnes, Alex and GH, who are and have always been up for a last-minute pint and a gossip in Westminster. You’re wonderful people and I doubt I would have lasted long in SW1 without you.
On that note, I certainly wouldn’t be where I am today without Joy Lo Dico, who was a brilliant boss, showed me there was a living to be made from clever gossip, and lent me her cottage in the woods when I called her in a panic, convinced that I was never going to hand in my book on time. Few things cannot be solved by escaping to the forest for a few days with an overly enthusiastic Vizsla, it turns out.
This section would be incomplete without Imogen, who agreed to meet me for a coffee after I sent her the vaguest of messages about maybe, potentially, having an idea for a book, then helped me turn that sort of, not-quite plan into a genuine proposal. Joel was an absolute pleasure to work with too, patiently nodding at my madder ideas and letting me realise by myself a few weeks later that they were bad, unfeasible or both. The whole process was surprisingly smooth, especially given that I had no idea what I was doing, and that is entirely down to the two of them, as well as the whole team at 535.
Finally, a hearty thank you to my wonderful, weird and intense friends, everyone who agreed to be interviewed for this book, usually at very short notice, the people who sent me their gossip over the course of 2018, and everyone who follows me on Twitter and was subjected to the daily tedious minutiae of book writing for nearly a year. Oh, and my family whom I adore and now know far more about British politics than any foreigner ever should.
THE PERSONAL AND THE POLITICAL
When asked if they wanted to be interviewed for a book about political gossip, a lot of people seemed a bit worried. They anxiously wanted to know what the tone of Haven’t You Heard? was going to be, what its central thesis would end up looking like, and what view it would take on gossip in politics. Is it a good thing? A bad thing? Somewhere uncomfortably in-between?
The first two points will be answered in due course, but the third one is quite straightforward: this book does not make any judgement on gossip in Westminster. Some of it is unquestionably good, some of it is unquestionably bad, the vast majority of it operates in shades of grey, and in any case, a study that takes a moral view on its topic is only of limited interest. Besides, right and wrong are largely subjective values, both in politics and the wider world. An action can be repellent to you but a necessary evil to someone else, and something might be frowned upon in some situations but welcomed in others.
In short, gossip is messy. It is messy because politics is messy, and politics is messy because it is made up of people, and anything with people in it is a mess. Accepting this is a good start-off point. As Maxey’s quote sets out, what follows isn’t a defence of the political bubble per se; simply an acknowledgement that people who work in SW1 are just that: people. People do stupid things, they get drunk, they’re selfish, make mistakes, love each other, hate each other, and let all of the above influence their work in ways it shouldn’t. Of course, said work in this case just so happens to dictate what happens to the country at large, which only goes to add another layer of mess to the situation.
On top of all of this, Westminster is an odd place that makes people take odd decisions, which naturally influences the way they talk and act with one another. Rules are often unclear or unspoken, and so little gets written down or taught through the usual channels that the informal matters to an absurd extent. Thousands of words are written about politics every day, but most of them only ever scratch the surface of why things really happen, and how they really work. This can be alienating and perhaps a reason why so many see politics as dry and dull, when it is often anything but.
It isn’t the fault of reporters; having to explain exactly why and how every single thing came to happen would make the entire news industry unsustainable. There aren’t enough hours in the day for journalists, or enough pages in newspapers. Still, like dark matter hiding in the universe in a form we do not quite understand, this mass of informal conventions, relationships and conversations shapes everything that happens. Take Brexit, for example; as Tim Shipman explains later in this book, much of what has happened in Westminster in the past few years came from friendships, feuds and clashes of personalities. Take them out of the equation and you will find yourself baffled.
There is also something revealing about the way in which parliamentarians never quite took th
e EU’s intransigence seriously. It is, after all, a bureaucratic institution that needs everything to be clear, agreed on and preferably printed and ratified. This realisation seemingly was a culture shock for people here; if British politics can be ruled by nebulous and convenient fudge, then why can’t Brexit be too? Similarly, this crisis which has taken over our political discourse is particularly maddening because so little was ever set in stone.
There were stories about sources saying that maybe No 10 would do this while other sources hinted at the fact that a government department would perhaps not agree to it, for reasons that were never clear. MPs you’d never heard of became prominent seemingly out of nowhere for what felt like 17 seconds then disappeared again, but not before unnamed wags let it be known that the MP was a real kingmaker/the true brain behind their faction/a troublemaker with some scores to settle/an idiot put up to it by enemies he thought were his friends/delete as appropriate. Nothing ever happened yet everything constantly did, and missing a few days of coverage either meant coming back to 12 new protagonists and seven new plots or to everything being exactly the same as before.
This is partly because the press didn’t quite know how to cover Brexit in a way that was accurate, clear and served their readers, though this isn’t what Haven’t You Heard? is about so we can set it aside. What is relevant here is the fact that those months of confusing reporting on things that may happen or maybe won’t and factions being created, disbanded and split in two, more or less at the same time, weren’t really special. Well, the reporting of all of this was, as what usually wouldn’t be a story turned into one given the wider context, but it largely is how Westminster usually functions.
It may well be the case that politics soon goes back to normal and most of what goes on behind closed doors doesn’t bubble up to the surface, but it certainly doesn’t look like it at the time of writing. If we can no longer rely on the ways in which politics is supposed to work, we need to understand what other forces make politicians say what they say and do what they do.
There is only so much you can explain without physically bringing people into the heart of Westminster, but it is at least worth trying to show how it all works. Which relationships matter? Who really has power? How does information travel? Who gets caught with their pants down and who doesn’t? What deserves to be news? What do people talk about? What don’t they talk about?
Trying to disentangle all this wasn’t easy, and explains why the structure of this book isn’t purely thematic; if everything influences everything else, it is hard to decide once and for all how to organise it all. Instead, we will start with a handful of characters, all taking their first steps in Westminster, then follow them as they discover the eccentricities of the Palace and the ways in which its physical spaces influence what happens there. After a quick detour through the Lords, we’ll move on to the type of people who choose to join the SW1 beehive, and why their personalities matter. This is where some of the ensemble cast joins us, and we start to look at other corners of the bubble. Once we’ve established the who and the where, we have to move on to the what – and go through what actually happens in politics – and, of course, the why. Some people and groups will stay with us for the whole journey, while others will pop up occasionally and a handful will make one appearance then leave us to it. Some stories will be true and named, others true but anonymous, some imagined but useful, and one or two almost certainly false but entertaining anyway.
Before we get into this, one quick word of warning: there are few reliable narrators in politics, and I won’t pretend to be an exception. I interviewed over 80 people and read over 40 books and academic papers before writing Haven’t You Heard?, but this does not mean that if someone else were to interview 80 other people and read 40 other books and papers on the topic, they would necessarily come to all the same conclusions. A piece of gossip can be interpreted in many different ways depending on how it is told, so it seems reasonable that a book about gossip would work in the same way.
But anyway, that’s enough for now. The Red Lion is getting rammed and the queue for the bar there is hell. Go get us two pints so we can get started; it’s your round!
PART I
PEOPLE
‘When people talk about other people’s offices and there’s a lot of gossip going on in the private sector, they say, “Oh, it’s a bit political,” don’t they? So it’s an acknowledgement of the fact that politics involves a lot of gossip.’
– Amber Rudd MP
THE DEEP END
No one who comes into Westminster knows what they’re doing. You might argue that this is also the case for most people walking into most jobs, and you might be right, but the learning curve in SW1A is steep.
Take new MPs. They have been elected – finally or by surprise, depending on the circumstances – but what follows is usually unclear. In 1970, Dennis Skinner became the new Member of Parliament for Bolsover, near Sheffield. Unsure what this meant for his immediate future, he stuck to what he knew: ‘You never get a letter from an authority saying you’re a Member of Parliament,’ he once explained to the New Statesman, ‘so I went back to the pit at Glapwell Colliery on the Monday, and they said, “We voted for you on Thursday, what are you doing here?’’’
He did eventually make it to Parliament, but was not the only one with a rough start. In his memoirs, former Conservative MP Jerry Hayes recalls receiving a letter summoning him for a meeting in Parliament after his election in 1983 – a good start. It all fell apart soon enough, however, as police officers refused to believe he really was an MP and would not let him into the Palace of Westminster. Some things have changed since these anecdotes took place, but most have not. When MPs get elected, they are expected to suddenly come barrelling down to London and start doing a job there is no proper guide for. Before even getting into the details of laws and how to make, mend and stop them, there are more concrete issues to deal with. For example, how do you set up an office? Who should you hire? How do you know they are the right person to hire? And so on.
Unless they are one of the lucky few who can be welcomed in by existing MPs they knew outside Parliament, most members hardly know where to start, and have no one to turn to. Still, some kind souls have been known to jump to the rescue. On the first day back after the general election of 2017, at least one veteran Labour researcher spent his evening on the Strangers’ terrace (more on that place later) swaying from one new MP to the other, gladly offering to help them set up their office. (It was, of course, out of the kindness of his heart and had nothing to do with the souring relationship between him and his employer).
This particularly entrepreneurial aide might have been slicker than others, but his behaviour isn’t in any way unique. No one who comes into Westminster knows what they’re doing, and those who are trying to help are generally also trying to help themselves. This isn’t to say that Parliament is a pit of snakes where only the most Machiavellian can thrive – simply that there are few innocent bystanders and many interested parties.
But still, back to those parliamentary assistants. If it is hard for MPs to figure out how to do their jobs without much external guidance, think of the people who have to work for them. Usually fresh-faced and recently out of university, aides can be expected, depending on the MP, to be anything from hard-nosed political operators to simple secretaries, or anything in-between. They are hired by the MP themselves, not the Party or Parliament, and there is no formal training for their job either: anecdotally, handover documents for their jobs have ranged from 16-page doorstops to a single Post-it note with relevant passwords.
In any case, their first few weeks will often be a roller coaster. How to be a Parliamentary Researcher, a book that does exactly what it says on the tin, explains that on their first day, an aide might be expected to be ‘tabling Parliamentary Questions, briefing an MP for a TV interview, writing a letter to a Secretary of State on behalf of a constituent, or trying to talk their employer down from an idea that
is likely to result in cold stares from senior colleagues for the foreseeable future’. Easy. That a book on this topic was published in 2015 is a step in the right direction, but most still assume that they can pick it up on the job, that hundreds of pages are unnecessary, and that the advice might not apply to their own MP anyway.
Speaking of people picking things up on the job, now is probably time to throw political journalists into the mix. Journalists don’t simply wing stuff as much as they can, they are part of a trade where winging it is a given. There is a reason why most hacks have little time for journalism degrees and Masters, and it is not that their teaching is inadequate (though often it is).
The great journalistic tradition is one of picking things up as you go along, mastering your craft on the field and being able to think on your feet. If you start a job as a reporter, chances are you will be sent out after a story without much advice from the editor. You will then develop a way of working that might be the same as others’, but also might not – in an aside during a conversation for this book, a senior hack remarked that though she’d interviewed hundreds of people over the years, she still didn’t know if she did it right, as no one had ever taught her.
As a result, starting to report on Westminster can be a daunting task. On top of the journalism itself, you have (at the very least) 650 names and faces to try and memorise, a maze of parliamentary corridors to reckon with, dozens of pages of parliamentary procedures to wrap your head around, and so on. If an old hand offers to help you figure it all out, you can accept the offer, but keep in mind that they might also have some further motives. Back in the newsroom, your editor also won’t expect you to take weeks to get acquainted with the place and will eagerly await your first political exclusive. What could possibly go wrong?
Haven't You Heard Page 1
