Haven't You Heard

by Marie Le Conte

  This tends to be a happy realisation for journalists as well, but with it comes a hefty caveat: not everything you hear is true, and even if it is, you probably won’t be able to prove that it is. It’s one thing to pass on a piece of gossip to an acquaintance, but revealing it to the public is a whole other kettle of fish.

  For a start, most of what you hear is bollocks. It might be complete bollocks, half-bollocks, or have a kernel of truth hidden inside a big pile of bollocks, but in any case, it is not something you should run to your political editor about.

  It is rarely the case that a story was fully made up by someone, though it does occasionally happen – most of the time, someone’s bad memory and (conscious or subconscious) need to make an anecdote more interesting will be the culprit, even from those who should know better:

  ‘Journalists are absolutely the worst sources, because they can’t help but improve stories,’ says Adam Macqueen of Private Eye. ‘A lot of the time someone phones in or emails in with something that sounds amazing, and all you have to do is ask one question of them and say, “Did you see this first hand, or has this gone round the office a few times?” “Oh no, I heard it from someone who definitely was in the room when someone else…” And actually, it’s just things have been massively, massively improved along the way, because journalists can’t resist doing that.’*

  Though it isn’t exactly surprising, politicians also don’t tend to make the best of sources. They are party-political, factional, constantly assailed with random bits of information, generally stressed and knackered and above all, have their own ambitions. Every new political journalist has punched the air, thinking they got a stonking exclusive from an MP, and every one of them was eventually proved wrong.

  Over time, they will learn how to make sure they won’t embarrass themselves in front of their news desk again – all in their own different ways.

  DIG YOUR HEELS IN

  No one who comes into Westminster really knows what they’re doing because no one really tells you how to do it, and because there is not one way to do it anyway. MPs come in and no one really tells them anything; they get elected then get on with it. There are 650 of them in Parliament and no two offices are the same: some might have one dedicated aide, others a small army of part-timers; some will make debates in the chamber their life, and others will only rise to speak if they really feel the need to.

  You can become an MP because you were a local champion, or because you have worked for the Party since you were a teenager; there might be one area of policy you want to change for the better, or an ideological stance you think deserves to have a shot at changing the country. You can be a campaigning MP or a quiet one; a loyal foot soldier or a rebel with a conscience. Maybe what you want more than anything is to be a cabinet minister, or even in Downing Street – maybe you want to represent your constituency to the best of your abilities.

  Reaching out to more experienced colleagues for advice can’t hurt, but at the end of the day, you will only be the kind of MP you want to be, and no one can make that decision for you.

  Aides are largely the same: depending on your wishes and ambitions, you can focus on policy, the press or both; be out every night in SW1 or have a life outside the bubble; create your own networks within Parliament or stand by your MP no matter what.

  The choices are even more numerous for journalists. From the choice of publication (tabloid? broadsheet? online?) and style (news? analysis? comment? features?) to the way of getting stories (lunches? piss-ups? freedom of information requests? reading parliamentary reports? watching what happens in the chamber? data journalism?), the possibilities are endless. Your editor will usually be on hand if you have any specific queries, but won’t be of much help when it comes to the direction in which you want to take your career.

  As we’ve discussed, there is also the slight issue of Westminster being a fundamentally peculiar place: sometimes, a story that’s obviously a story will fall in your lap. Most of the time, it won’t even be clear if something is newsworthy or not.

  A light example of this took place at the Labour party conference in 2015, not long after the surprising election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader. On the last night, the Party’s young people danced until the early hours at the Labour Students’ disco, as is customary, and ended the night by heartily singing along to ‘Things Can Only Get Better’, the New Labour anthem. One delighted young hack, for whom the conference was a first, thought they’d stumbled upon a cracking bit of news.

  It wasn’t exactly Watergate, but still: Corbyn was supposed to be popular with the youths yet here, in the place where he should have been adored, people showed their defiance by singing an ode to Tony Blair, yadda, yadda. The story was proudly brought into the newsroom then swiftly laughed out of it: it is a tradition for Labour students to sing along to ‘Things Can Only Get Better’, every year, regardless of people’s factional preferences or the leader who happens to be at the helm at the time. You just have to know about it.

  In more serious cases, an MP’s internal party standing, beliefs and ambitions can have a lot of influence on the newsworthiness of their comments. To take a contemporary example: if Sarah Wollaston, one of the most senior backbenchers in Parliament, criticises the leadership of then Prime Minister Theresa May, it feels like a bigger story than if, say, slightly random former minister Mike Penning does.

  It isn’t. Anyone with proper knowledge of Parliament will know that Wollaston has always been independent-minded and, more dangerously, has no ambition to ever join the Cabinet.* She can do and say as she pleases, and has been known to do so frequently. Penning, on the other hand, was a minister under Theresa May at the Home Office, and one of her closest allies afterwards. As a result, him calling May’s Brexit plan ‘dead as a dodo’ carried more weight than anything she could have said, even if her profile is considerably higher than his.

  These calculations permeate every layer of Westminster, so need to be taken into account by everyone involved. The only issue is – predictably – that not all that information has been formally published, and no one could possibly have the time to read enough to find it all out anyway.

  This is where gossip first makes itself indispensable: in order to fully understand how everything works, and how to go about your job, the informal must be taken into account – even academics who study politics say so.

  ‘I think there’s a slight snobbery about gossip, because otherwise, what is there to separate academics from journalists?’ says Tim Bale, who teaches politics at Queen Mary University and has written countless books about Westminster. ‘So we shouldn’t really be interested in tittle-tattle and all the sort of stuff that people leak to journalists. But actually that’s bullshit, because you can’t really understand how parties tick, you can’t get under a party’s skin, unless you have a sense of what people are talking about on a day-to-day level and the way that they’re doing it.’

  In Westminster as in life, those day-to-day conversations can be about the professional, but a healthy chunk of those will be about the personal. Some of it will involve the swapping of anecdotes purely for entertainment purposes, but, to be blunt, finding out who’s shagging whom from the outset can be useful.

  Take Conservative MP Philip Davies and (at the time of writing, heaven knows where she will be by the time this is published) Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Esther McVey.* The pair have been an on-again, off-again couple for a few years – the relationship was never announced properly, but did make a few appearances in political gossip columns. Besides the fact that finding out that two MPs got together, there is a point in being aware of that relationship.

  In May 2018, it was reported that McVey had strongly objected to government plans to reduce the maximum stake for fixed odds betting terminals (FOBTs) from £100 to £2. So far, so dry. However, sharp political observers remarked that the Secretary of State had gone to Cheltenham races only two months earlier, all for free, courtesy of William Hill. Now,
no one is inferring that her interests might have been in any way swayed by the generous freebie, but people should certainly be informed of the sequence of events, then left to make up their minds.

  The issue, though, is that the kind gift was never declared by McVey, and she wasn’t even at fault. To find the declaration of hospitality, you had to look under the name of … well, you can guess. Davies had received the freebie, and invited his girlfriend along. Obviously. Still, to put the pieces of the puzzle together, an awareness of what could easily be described as tittle-tattle was needed.

  Looking at this story through the other side of the lens is also useful: this became news and deservedly so, and Esther McVey probably should have known better. If you work in a place where people talk and talk, it seems obvious that someone was going to put two and two together eventually.

  It didn’t damage her career because she is already in the Cabinet, but becoming the source of gossip early on in your Westminster career can be damaging. Just ask John Hemming. The Lib Dem MP was in Parliament for a whole decade, but if you ask anyone about him, only a few stories will come to mind. The second one was widely covered in the papers – search for ‘MP cat mistress’ – but it is worth going through the first one now.

  Our story begins on the day after the election of 2005 and was recounted by several journalists working for Private Eye. Ian Hislop, the editor of the magazine, comes in and says: ‘There’s this new MP John Hemming. I saw him on election night on the telly and I thought, good God, that’s that bloke who used to live along the corridor from me at Oxford.’

  Amused to see his contemporary become an elected representative, Hislop decides to invite him to the Eye lunch, which brings together a rolling group of MPs, journalists and all-round interesting people every two weeks. This particular lunch was to take place less than a month after the general election.

  The day comes, other guests arrive, Hemming is nowhere to be seen, everyone else sits down. About half an hour later, he stumbles into the room, blind drunk. ‘Oh God, oh God, I’m such a mess,’ he slurs. The room is silent. He continues, ‘I’m such a mess, I was such a mess. The papers are going to be on to me. So, I might as well say it. I’ve just … I’ve just discovered that I got my mistress pregnant.’

  Another pause.

  ‘… It’s all going to come out now. All going to come out. They’ll find out … about … the other 24 mistresses.’

  Poor John. What had been intended as a nice gesture from an old university friend had clearly been interpreted as a sign that the press were onto him, his questionable behaviour was about to be shared with the whole country, and that he had no choice but to get in front of the news, with some Dutch courage to help him along the way.

  That being said, he wasn’t wrong: some hacks genuinely had scented blood and news of his affairs were splashed across the tabloids not long after. He even got on the shortlist for the News of the World’s ‘Love Rat of the Year’ award, and phoned in to vote for himself.

  Now, you might be thinking that these examples are a tad extreme, and that as a new MP, aide or journalist, you have no immediate intention of influencing Cabinet discussions on anything, or having 25 affairs. This would be fair, but missing the point: at the end of the day, McVey and Davies didn’t break any rules by being together and going to the races for free, and neither did Hemming by cheating on his wife (who, by the way, still took him back after all this).

  Their actions were still frowned upon and discussed at length, both in and out of the bubble, as they were deemed outside the realm of acceptable behaviour in Westminster. Conveniently, this is something that has been studied before: among other things, gossip is useful to a community as it can help define what is socially permitted and what isn’t.

  In a paper called ‘Reporting Tittle-Tattle’, South African academic Nicola Jones discusses the fact that ‘gossip is a means of testing or rehearsing community values by exposing conduct the community would seem to proscribe – by doing so, these values […] may be reaffirmed. Gossip also exposes the wrongdoer to public shame or ridicule and consequently functions as a deterrent to such wrongdoing.’

  Now, Westminster isn’t most places so that last part isn’t always true (see: our friend John Hemming), but the rest still stands. In order to find out what the boundaries are, it is useful to keep an ear out to see what people natter about and adjust your behaviour in consequence. An old way to explain what constitutes news to cub reporters is that ‘Dog Bites Man’ isn’t a story, but ‘Man Bites Dog’ is. Rumours work similarly: people will only talk behind your back about something you have done if it is something they think you shouldn’t have been doing.

  Sadly, this system doesn’t always work, as different people with different sets of beliefs will have their own ideas of how one ought to behave. There is also a tendency to see the worst in everyone and turn mere sightings into confirmation of bigger things at work. Perhaps unsurprisingly, one group of people tends to feel this more than others.

  ‘If you’re a young woman in Westminster, people are always focusing on the fact that you hanging out with a male MP is always going to be a thing,’ says one aide. ‘I don’t want to be linked to someone who hangs out [in the bars] with older men – it does very easily become, “Oh, blah blah was seen talking to blah blah”. I think you have to be really careful whom you’re seen with, where you’re seen and what time of day you’re seen doing it.’*

  That a workplace is tinged with sexism and particularly unkind to young women is hardly headline news, but in an environment where the informal matters so much, having to constantly self-police when interacting with others will be a hindrance to your career.

  It might seem like an obvious thing to point out, but it is still a shock to a lot of people starting out in politics: Westminster really is not a level playing field, and anyone pretending that it is has conveniently outed themselves as someone who has been playing the game in easy mode all along.

  But anyway, more on this later – our base has now been set. These past few pages have hopefully given you a decent introduction to our main characters, but before we go on, there are a few other people worth mentioning.

  INTRODUCING: EVERYONE ELSE

  We often talk about the ‘Westminster village’, but numbers-wise, it is closer to a town. It is impossible to know exactly how many people work in the bubble, as that would require agreeing on what counts as working in politics, but for the purpose of this book, let’s say that when we mention SW1A, we mean the 10,000 to 20,000 people who are, to different extents, in the thick of it.

  There are many tribes in this town: MPs (650 of them), parliamentary aides (3,150 as of 2015) and journalists (around 400) have already been mentioned. Other obvious groups are peers in the House of Lords (around 800), their aides (560 as of 2015) and government special advisers (87 as of December 2017).

  Then, it gets complicated. Civil servants are definitely part of the bubble, but there is no data on how many work specifically in Whitehall; besides, it would be hard to decide whether the bubble dweller status should be linked to the physical location of the office they work in, the nature of the job they do, both, neither, or some other measure entirely. As a result, we will settle on ‘a lot’ as a general number: there are a lot of civil servants, and that is that.

  Defining parliamentary staff is equally hard: their data shows that around 3,200 people are employed by the House of Commons and House of Lords, but they make it clear that there are also a number of contractors on the estate, the number of which has not been made public. It is also unclear, again, whether physically working in the Palace of Westminster means that you automatically become part of that world. For example, there are always a number of builders working onsite, but most probably have no particular enthusiasm for political intrigue. There are also doorkeepers, attendants, housekeepers, chefs, catering and retail staff, who might well hear and see things but not necessarily want to get involved in the whole shebang.


  There is also the Serjeant at Arms, who is responsible for keeping order within the House of Commons, and Black Rod, who does the same for the Lords: they are definitely senior enough to be privy to all sorts of information, but their roles may not revolve around gossip as much as others.

  Then there are the clerks, who pretty much run the Houses. They can be found working for select committees, the library, and basically everywhere else: they rarely get mentioned in press coverage of Westminster, but it doesn’t mean that their influence is to be discounted. Clerks tend to be very well informed, and all talk to one another: they might work in the relative shadows, but as we will see in a bit, the information they gather and the way they use that information is a crucial part of the political machine.

  We should now move on to the places but before that, a good conclusion to this introduction comes from former Conservative adviser Will Tanner. ‘Politics fundamentally is about two things. It’s about people’s character, whether or not you believe what they’re saying, and then, people’s intentions about what they’re trying to achieve, where they’re trying to get to. Those are the two things that people are really interested in in politics. Who is this person and what are they trying to get, basically. And that’s true of the media, it’s true of politicians themselves, it’s true of the civil service, that’s basically the way people think. It’s fundamentally judgemental and suspicious. In that respect, gossip is really, really important, because gossip basically is the verifier of whether or not someone’s character is right, and whether their intentions are pure or not.’

  ____________

  * As one former aide now in the public sector coolly remarked: ‘All of the companies I interviewed with went big on salary, personal development, team building, value and interest of work; as if I wouldn’t be sold on flushing toilets and no rats…’