Haven't You Heard

by Marie Le Conte

This last kind of connection is the trickiest one, as it is virtually impossible to guess whether two people were friends, lovers or enemies a decade before either reached Parliament unless one of them tells you. They can also be the most random: if you saw a Conservative minister and a Labour special adviser heartily hug when bumping into each other, you’d be forgiven for raising an eyebrow, at least until finding out that they were close friends during their undergraduate years.

  Yet another angle to consider is, somewhat obviously, common interests. Sports is probably the most important one, with a number of MPs, special advisers, journalists and others happening to support the same obscure football team, or be seen at the cricket even in the most appalling of weathers. The most formal end of this remains parliamentary football and rugby teams, who meet regularly and can be cross-party and cross-jobs. Beyond the general links created through those events, these links can be very directly useful for people who, for whatever reason, do not have access to formal information channels.

  Stephen Kinnock is one of them: a Labour MP elected in 2015, he always was one of Jeremy Corbyn’s fiercest critics. As a result, he and his centrist colleagues have little to no contact with the leadership team, which can be problematic as they do still need to vaguely know what their party is up to. Luckily, Kinnock has a secret weapon: football.

  ‘I play five-a-side on Tuesday mornings and a few of the guys who play are on the front bench,’ he explains. ‘I sometimes find that the post-match banter in the changing room can give a pretty useful sense of what’s going on.’*

  On top of all of this – don’t worry, we’re nearly done – there are the connections best stored under ‘miscellaneous’. These can be, in no particular order:

  •Peers, especially for MPs who have been around for a long time

  •NGOs and charities, generally for campaigning MPs

  •Think tanks, for MPs focused on policy and/or with leadership ambitions

  •The parties’ HQs, if the MPs were party apparatchiks before being elected

  •Unions, for Labour MPs

  •Lobbyists, clerks, whips and journalists, whom we’re currently ignoring for a reason.

  (Do you understand now why all those napkins died?)

  So, to sum up: as a backbench MP, you can have connections with your colleagues elected at the same time as you, colleagues with similar politics to you, colleagues from a similar background to you, cross-party MPs you’re on committees or APPGs with, MPs you knew before joining Parliament, your staff and then some. You will get gossip from all those people and are likely to share this gossip with anyone else from those circles, who might then share it with their circles, as while some circles overlap, everyone will be part of slightly different groupings.

  If you had a hard time visualising all these overlapping connections, buckle up: we’re about to add in several extra layers.

  THE HELPERS

  We have now talked a lot about MPs but avoided the elephant in the room, which is the fact that most MPs either become ministers at some point or at the very least are trying damn hard to. So, what is it like to be a minister, to be working in government, to be so close to the top job that you can smell it?

  Well, for a start, you’re completely out of the loop. Chris Leslie, who was a junior minister for several years under New Labour, puts it this way: ‘There are inverted rules – you assume that ministers are going be so busy and to interrupt them would be such a faux pas, but the further it goes up, the fewer people speak to them or ring them or meet them. If you’re stuck in a formal ivory tower somewhere, you’re kind of “Ooh, nobody’s told me that, I didn’t hear that!”’

  Being much busier than a backbencher and having to spend most of your time on Whitehall as opposed to Parliament means that you invariably miss out on a lot. As was made obvious in the last chapter, a lot of information flows through Westminster because people bump into each other, grab a quick unplanned coffee with each other and broadly see and talk to other people all day long. Losing that geographical advantage means that you probably will not know what the latest chat is, hear about the more salacious stuff, or even know what your own party is grumbling about.

  This is an issue because even the most powerful cabinet minister can fall on their sword if they do not have the support of their MPs on a certain policy agenda. If something really is outrageously controversial, they might receive some formal letters, but often rebellions start with a long grumble that you cannot pick up on unless you’re actively listening. This is where Parliamentary Private Secretaries come in.

  To borrow a French phrase, PPSs have their arses stuck between two chairs: they work for a cabinet minister (or a ministerial team) but are not technically part of the government, even though they are expected to vote like they are. Their job involves supporting the minister in any way they can, usually by providing a conduit between the backbenchers and their boss, making sure that MPs support their boss in the chamber during key votes and debates, and generally keeping their boss in touch with what happens in Parliament.

  The task can often be thankless but if you want to go anywhere as an MP, you need to suck it up and do it: being a good PPS means that you’re exponentially more likely to eventually be promoted to a ministerial role, and it is virtually unheard of for someone to miss that stage and join the front bench straight away. It can also be a useful learning experience, depending on how you go about it.

  ‘Ministers’ PPSs hang about because they want to pick up on the gossip,’ explains Lord Norton. ‘They spend a lot of time just sitting, listening, getting the mood, just getting a feel for it. That’s part of the PPS’s task, to be the eyes and ears of the minister, just to listen to what’s going on. It’s very important because if you’re not aware of it, you can’t explain all the outcomes, because what happens in formal space might be a consequence of what happens in informal space; the gossip, joking, picking up on things. So you can not only explain what is in the House, but what isn’t. Because there might be a case of “Oh dear, we’re getting bad vibes. We’d better not proceed with this, either at the moment or not at all.” So, deciding to not do something.’

  As a PPS, you also end up in a privileged position, as some MPs might want to pass on some intriguing rumours or relevant tittle-tattle to the minister but know they can’t do it directly, so they will tell you instead. Another advantage is that you get to rub shoulders with a group of people known for always having their ears to the ground: special advisers.

  Annoyingly nicknamed ‘SpAds’ (there’s frankly no need for that unsightly capital letter), special advisers are temporary civil servants appointed by cabinet ministers, whose roles tend to focus on one or several areas or policies or communications and contact with the press. They’re an interesting bunch.

  The most recent data comes from the snappily titled ‘Special Advisers: Who they are, what they do and why they matter’, and tells us that in the coalition years, the median age of government spads was 31 and that a quarter of them were under 30. Overall, spads are also far more likely to be men than women, and around 80% of them went to Russell Group universities.

  What this means in practice is that they are younger than ministers, and a more homogenous group of people altogether. Crucially, they also tend to form a tighter social circle. ‘Special advisers know much more about what’s going on because they talk to each other,’ Amber Rudd says of her time as Home Secretary.

  Another former cabinet minister agrees, and explains: ‘If I wanted something to happen as Secretary of State, and my department would say to me, “Oh no, the xyz secretary won’t agree to that,” and I’m not sure that’s true, I might say to my special adviser, can you call up a SpAd and find out. They have their whole additional network, which is very effective for the Secretary of State to find out what’s going on.’

  Much like backbenchers might find out what is happening with other MPs by talking to their aide who might know the aides of those MPs, special advisers can
act as an effective network between departments without things needing to happen at a ministerial level. Though their loyalties lie with their own department and Secretary of State, they can also be less hard-headed and more prone to sensible conversations.

  Because they are younger and somewhat less likely to have young families, spads also tend to frequently socialise with one another. Most Thursdays of the year, a combination of them will meet in a Westminster pub to chat, drink, gossip and attempt to ease tensions between their bosses.

  ‘Thursday drinks is an amazing institution for basically keeping government civil,’ says Will Tanner, formerly of the Home Office and No 10. He adds: ‘The spad network is really important. It is something very informal, which is basically friendships and long-standing relationships that have grown up over a long period of time, and are based not really on the job that you do but basically when you get on with someone, whether or not you are nice to deal with. There are lots and lots of instances of where the spad network basically either keeps the show on the road or creates massive problems.’

  There is, predictably, a flip side to this. Despite occasional reports of the contrary, spads are human beings like you and me, and their lives can be just as messy as everyone else’s. This means that friendships can be made and ended, inconvenient affairs can take place and hearts can be broken along the way, which would be all fine if the people involved weren’t partly in charge of running the country.*

  Still, to give you a general idea, this is what a former government special adviser had to say about themselves and their peers: ‘We’re all assholes and we’re going straight to hell. We had to sell our souls on the way in. None of us are good people.’ This is probably a tad unkind, but what they broadly meant was that being a spad involves being switched on 24/7, giving up any hope of a fulfilling personal life and spending far too much time in very stressful situations. It is one of the most intense jobs in Westminster and can turn even the calmest and healthiest wonk into a neurotic, petty mess never too far away from a breakdown.

  How petty and neurotic, you ask. Let’s have a look at this anecdote from Theo Bertram, who used to work for the Labour Party:

  ‘We had a thing at the Labour Party when I was a staffer there; I think I was in the education policy office at the time, and we were the lowest on the ladder. We would all go to meetings with cabinet ministers and we would all spend a long time doing what special advisers wanted us to do, then we all spread gossip among ourselves. We created this thing called the Spad Deck, which was ridiculous, just a silly thing that you do.

  ‘We were rating the special advisers that we worked with, and we had a spreadsheet at one point with categories like: Do they buy a round? Because they’re paid more than us, they’re paid a lot more than us! Do they respond to your emails, ever? Will they return a call? Have they done the things that would help us? And then we rated them. It was just a jokey thing that happened in an office one afternoon, and then it just kind of spiralled, because some of the special advisers found out about it, and they were saying, “Well, I want to know where I am on the list!” And we replied, “Well, we can’t disclose any of that, we’re not disclosing that.” And then it became this weapon that we used, where they were saying, “Well, what if I told you this about so-and-so?” And they would bad-mouth each other on the list, and then there were constant questions about who was on top of the list. It didn’t last very long.’

  Anyway, this is getting off-topic. To sum up what we have so far: if you’re a Secretary of State or a minister, your information networks are the MPs in your faction and the ones you’re personally friends with, your PPS and your special adviser(s). There is one group missing, the one you actually spend a lot of your time with, and who belong to another species altogether: the civil servants.

  DOWN ON WHITEHALL

  Having looked at the highs and lows of life as a minister, it only seems fair to mention one crucial fact: when you first join the government, no one from your party will formally be there to hold your hand. Getting shipped out to a department might be exciting, but until the civil service steps in, you’re on your own. Interviewed for the Institute for Government’s Ministers Reflect series, now Cabinet veteran Ken Clarke had this to say about his humble beginnings on Whitehall:

  ‘When I was first appointed, my first parliamentary secretary job, there was no induction or anything. I was just told by the Prime Minister that she wanted me to go and be Parliamentary Secretary for Transport […]. Apart from anything else, no one in Downing Street could tell me where the department was, let alone give me any other guidance as to what I was supposed to do. Having found it was in Marsham Street Towers I turned up, rather nervously, and said, “I have just been made a minister here,” and a guy came up and said he was my private secretary. And I had no idea what a private secretary was.’

  Clarke can be forgiven for not having Googled ‘private secretary’ before joining the DfT given that Google didn’t exist at the time, but as with most things in Westminster, this whole process (or lack thereof) hasn’t really changed since the days of Thatcher. New ministers are snatched from Parliament and dropped into a department, then expected to work with a group of people they haven’t met until that day.*

  There are a number of different civil servants working around the ministerial team in a government department: numbers may vary, but walk through the door of any of these buildings and you will find a policy team, a strategy and/or implementation unit and a communication team, all of which do exactly what they sound like they do. Move closer towards the politicians and you will find the private office, who organise their diary and day-to-day communications within the department and the rest of government.

  Because the civil service tends to be more formal and organised than the Palace of Westminster, you’d be forgiven for thinking that people walking into these jobs are adequately prepared for what’s coming. Mind you, you would still be wrong. In a very entertaining speech from 2010, former private secretary Edward Bowles explains:

  ‘…There is no guidebook on what it is to be a private secretary. That is not, I suspect, what you thought you’d hear. When I was first appointed, I hoped and expected that, for such a role, it would all be written down, worked out, in tablets of stone – after all, this is the civil service that we are talking about. But no, nothing.’

  Still, he then goes on to explain that it is mostly because the relationship between a private secretary and their minister depends so heavily on the personality of both the former and the latter that there would be no point in trying to issue one-size-fits-all guidelines. (Sound familiar?)

  We will come back to them in a minute, but to finish our quick overview, we also need to mention the permanent secretaries, who are in charge of the departments. The way all these people interact with each other can be confusing, but Lord Annan once summarised it all pretty well, while attempting to explain the idiosyncrasies of British politics to an American audience:

  ‘The mandarins are the permanent secretaries who are at the head of each ministry. The spies are the young civil servants who are the private secretaries of ministers. Every meeting a minister has is attended by his private secretary, who logs it; every conversation he makes on the phone is recorded; every appointment he makes in Whitehall is monitored. If you try to bend a minister’s ear, what you say will be round the civil service in 48 hours: the only way is to catch him at dinner in the evening when his attendant nurse from the mental clinic, his private secretary, is no longer observing his patient.’*

  What this extract shows as well is that just because civil servants might be seen as more serious and orderly by people on the outside, it does not mean that their world isn’t as ruled by rumours and informal information as anywhere else. The difference is that the gossip is used differently and shared around different circles.

  ‘I think civil servants use gossip just as much as politicians do,’ says one former permanent secretary. ‘The trouble and difficulty s
ometimes is that their spheres are so different there’s very little overlap between the chit-chat on the civil service and chit-chat of politicians. For a start, civil service careers aren’t as straightforward as politicians.’ While only a very small minority of the latter will ever get to work in several different areas of government, it is a given for most senior civil servants to have worked in several departments.

  Naturally, their colleagues will also have worked across a number of departments, so a piece of information can spread across Whitehall like wildfire without necessarily ever reaching Parliament and those who work there.

  ‘Because you move around so much, there’s so much information spreading between units and departments,’ says one civil servant. ‘I did my time at the Home Office, then the Department for Education and the Cabinet Office, and I moved between press office and private office. Whenever I went to another place I would invite whomever from wherever I used to work, and then we all have drinks together. And you know how there are prison rules, where your currency is based on if you square up to a fight or back down? It’s the same thing, you get a bunch of civil servants around the table and they show off about a) the crazy amount of hours they work, or b) the most ridiculous gossip that they know.’

  That being said, civil servants aren’t kept in a hermetic bubble. Though they are impartial in their work, a number of them were involved in party politics when they were younger, or at least have an affinity for one side or the other, which can mean that they end up developing friendships with people in Parliament. They also love a drink, obviously, and there are few better ways of creating connections than social groups merging outside the Two Chairmen between the fourth and fifth pint.

  These alliances and whisper networks don’t simply exist for entertainment purposes; it might be the case that the civil service is the more professionalised arm of Westminster, but that doesn’t mean that what they do isn’t influenced by their party-affiliated neighbours. For a start, understanding politics means understanding politicians, and as has hopefully become apparent by now, understanding politicians means treating them as human beings. In order to do their job properly, civil servants must know about the personal too.