‘There’s no one paper that’s particularly bad for it,’ says one political reporter. ‘It changes depending on who the news editors are at that time, and who the journalists are at that time, and how someone will say, “I need this triple-sourced before we’re even going to look at it!” and others will say, “That’s a good line. And it’s a good headline, let’s run it and see what happens.” And that changes with different papers with different staff.’
This ‘let’s see what happens’ is a great journalistic tradition, and one that has more merit than it initially seems. Sometimes, newspapers will publish items that really do look like pointless bits of gossip no one normal could possibly care about. These can be published for a few reasons, none of them related to their readers outside the bubble. The first can be nicknamed the ‘let’s shake that tree and see what falls down’ approach; you have heard rumours about someone doing something, you’re pretty sure it’s true but you cannot fully stand it up with your own sources, so you publish a smaller, broadly related story about that individual, then sit and wait. If you’re lucky, better sources with actual knowledge of the bad thing the person has done will notice the article, realise that it is an area you’re keen to explore, then get in touch. If it doesn’t work after the first try, no problem: just keep dripping these small stories out until you can stand up the main one.
The second one, ‘we know, you know we know, we know you know we know’, works fairly similarly, but has a different start-off point. The set-up usually consists of one important person who has done something questionable, one paper who has become aware of it, and some reason why the story cannot be published. It is usually a reason involving lawyers, or the fact that though both parties know the story to be true, it is impossible to gather just quite enough evidence to publish it. In this case, what a newspaper might do is dig around for minor negative stories about the person, and publish them at a frequent rate. Drip, drip, drip. It is not as good as publishing the real thing, but petty enough to do the trick.
There is one other genre of gossipy, not-strictly-important story that can get published, and it is stories that journalists think are funny. There’s not a lot more to them: editors just find them entertaining and want to share the joy with their readers. In order to do it, they occasionally have to stretch the definition of ‘public interest’ to an amusing extent.
A great example of the genre came from the Sun in 2016. The headline was ‘Sleazy MP Simon Danczuk, 49, had spanking sessions and sex with woman, 22, on desk in his office’. It’s all pretty self-explanatory but to recap: Danczuk, then a single man, had consensual sex with an adult woman. That’s it. That’s the story. Still, the woman talked to the Sun so provided a lot of colour, including an unforgettable text exchange where she asked the MP what would happen to Eurovision should the UK leave the EU, to which he replied, ‘I’m going to fuck you so hard you won’t even think about the fucking Eurovision!!!’
That is undoubtedly fun, but it’s unclear why the press should have a duty to report this to the public – or is it? The first line of the Sun scoop read: ‘MP Simon Danczuk had sex with a 22-year-old woman on a desk in his taxpayer-funded constituency office.’ Boom! There we have it – the sex happened in his office, which is paid for by taxpayers, so it is in the public interest to write about it.
Asked about that specific story, someone who worked at the Sun at the time said, ‘I would admit that’s flimsy. There’s obviously a certain degree to which all tabloid journalists are massive hypocrites, because they lead lives of varying degrees of debauchery and then act as moral arbiters when politicians get up to similar things.’
Another industry favourite is the ‘blackmail risk’ angle. Have you discovered that an MP has unusual sexual proclivities? He could be blackmailed if someone were to find out! Does someone in Westminster have peculiar hobbies that could be frowned on even if they are entirely legal? At risk of blackmail! And so on. A stellar example of this came from the Mirror in 2018, with their big exclusive that then housing minister Dominic Raab’s diary secretary was a sugar baby.*
One might argue that the story falls more into the ‘I heard the weirdest and funniest thing, you’ll never believe it’ pub chat end of the spectrum, but the Mirror clearly wanted to publish something about it, which is why the opening lines of the story were:
‘A top Tory minister’s aide raised security fears after she was caught selling sex to sugar daddies online. Housing chief Dominic Raab’s diary secretary joked how she’d “love to get sacked” for romping on her boss’s desk as she made herself a blackmail target.’
And there you have it! The story here definitely is not that someone in politics secretly sells sex in the evenings, it is that a minister is at risk of being surveilled by Russian spies (yes, really).
Finally, one last justification hacks may jump to if they want to publish pure, unadulterated gossip with a stern face is hypocrisy. It usually is a reasonable point: it is not just about shameless journalists exposing politicians for doing things they also do every other weekend, but about questioning the public image politicians build of themselves in order to get elected.
Stephen Crabb offers a solid cautionary tale. The married Conservative MP ran for the leadership of his party in 2016 then pulled out, and The Times revealed shortly afterwards that he had sent salacious texts to a young woman. There was no suggestion that the pair had got physical, and the most explicit text involved Crabb telling the woman he wanted to kiss her ‘everywhere’.
(What is it with MPs and corny sexts?)
Had it been another MP, this probably would not have been a story; it is vaguely interesting, sure, but the details aren’t as fun as the Danczuk and the Raab exposés, and the allegations are overall pretty small compared to what other MPs get up to. The crucial difference here is that Stephen Crabb is a devoutly Christian politician with links to an anti-LGBT advocacy group, and who voted for tighter abortion laws and against same-sex marriage. His political platform is that of a proud family man standing for family values. In this context, the people who voted for him and the electorate at large do deserve to know what he gets up to in private.
This was also the thinking behind the story on ‘Lord Coke’, a peer caught taking drugs with sex workers while wearing an orange bra, a bedazzled leather jacket and not much else. ‘I remember when we first looked at what they had on him,’ says one former Sun journalist. ‘Obviously you had the coke and the prostitutes, which is straight up illegal, so that makes it news. Doing anything illegal while sitting in elected office, you’re fair game. But the thing that I really liked in that story is that literally about two weeks earlier he’d written a blog on the Huffington Post about how members of the House of Lords need to really watch how they behave, and their standards of behaviour, because he was the Lords Commissioner for Standards.
‘And it’s that hypocrisy – I mean, you see it all the time, the sort of family values people are the ones who are having loads of affairs and all that. That makes it fair game, because you can’t try and get elected on one thing, and then basically mislead the people. It’s quite high and mighty for the Sun, but I think to a certain extent that is what turns it from being just idle gossip into news.’
So there you have it: gossip is gossip, unless you can (seriously or mischievously) explain why it deserves to be spread beyond Westminster, in which case it is news. There is, however, a flip side to this: because there are so many rumours and so much tittle-tattle in politics, stories that are news can sometimes be treated as gossip, thus taken less seriously by the bubble.
There is one huge and obvious example of this in recent memory: the expenses scandal. The story was mentioned unprompted by several MPs in interviews for this book, and discussed in an unexpected tone.
According to Labour MP Chris Bryant, ‘the whole expenses scandal was a great big old chunk of gossip dressed up as moral outrage’; for Conservative MP Greg Hands, ‘For the first time, MPs’ expenses proved that
there was money to be made out of parliamentary gossip; the Telegraph sales skyrocketed as a result of their investment in the unredacted version of the MPs’ expenses. Suddenly you could actually prove there was public interest in what MPs had spent on cushions for their second home.’
Tin-eared stuff, right? Journalists uncovered endemic cheating of the system and preposterous spending of taxpayers’ money, and MPs’ response to it is flippant at best. One of the editors who worked on the story at the Telegraph was unsurprisingly not impressed when those quotes were put to them, and had this to say in response:
‘In their world it was gossip, in the sense that everybody knew that everybody else was at it, but when it became apparent to the wider population that this was going on in a very substantial way, it became the most important political story from the crash up to, but not including, Brexit. It has transformed people’s impressions of their elected representatives, and I don’t see that being reversed any time soon. A good number of people went to jail, and there are quite a substantial number of other MPs who lost their seats, or were forced to stand down and got peerages, given knighthoods, etc., so it cleared house quite substantially.
‘And it went on for quite a few years, because it wasn’t like we just found evidence of malpractice and put it into the public domain: some of the MPs had been really clever in covering their tracks, and it took months of detective work by a very big Telegraph team; it took months of detective work to actually work out, a mortgage here, another claim there, when were they living there? And while MPs might have thought, well, everybody knew everybody else was at it, the fact that it became front-page news for three months would tell you otherwise. That it wasn’t gossip or tittle-tattle, but actually a terrible public wrong which needed exposing.’
Given what the two sides put forward there, this feels like it should be a clear-cut case; one of an elite group of people who are so used to treating everything as varying degrees of gossip that they are unable to understand that sometimes, bad behaviour is not simply to be frowned upon, but actually so wrong that exposing it is in the public interest. That being said, it is not the case, or at least not quite: they both have a point.
The Telegraph journalist is absolutely right to say that the story shook the very foundations of Westminster, and that it was stellar reporting. Greg Hands is also right in saying that what it proved is at least partly that people wanted to know about MPs’ tastes in cushions. Though an incredible number of MPs were exposed for misusing Parliament’s expenses system, some of them had to entirely leave their political careers behind over it, while others are still happily sitting on the green benches at the time of writing. This wasn’t all to do with the degrees of severity of the infractions; some of the former had made what could be seen as honest mistakes, while a few of the latter were some of the worst offenders.
The differences between them are, if anything, barely related to the gravity of their actions; it all depended on whether their story came out on a busy news day or a quiet one, whether they used their expensable cash in a dull way or on something silly or preposterous, and on whether the leadership and party machines thought highly of them or not.
According to Jim Pickard from the Financial Times, ‘It is a very good illustration of how some people got completely tarred and feathered for relatively minor things, and some people who did quite major things aren’t really remembered at all. Everyone remembers the duck house, and there is a case to be made that the duck house guy just submitted a load of expenses, hoping they would sort out which ones were legitimate or not, and yet he is remembered as the epitome of greed. If you were unlucky enough to be on the front page that day, you’re more likely to be remembered.
‘David Laws, I’m not taking any moral view on whether what he did was good or bad, but he had a secret boyfriend whom he was renting from and vice versa. What happened was that didn’t come out in the original mass bump of expenses, it came out a few months later, and therefore it was the Telegraph splash and everyone noticed it. If it had come out amid 500 other stories, Laws would be less well remembered for it. He was particularly unlucky.’
Seen that way, the expenses scandal suddenly does look a bit more like gossip: it was scandalous not just because of the gravity of the actions, but because of the colour and the details; if you stuck in people’s memory, you were more likely to not get away with it. The sword didn’t fall in a just way, and what was more likely to get people talking inherently became a more serious allegation.
This is because the public, much like people in the bubble, really enjoys gossip and cares about little else. If you live in SW1, it can be hard to wrap your head around just how little normal people follow politics; days and weeks can pass with a scandal a minute and the majority of people will barely notice any of it.
‘Lots of people did very boring things about flipping their houses round and claiming this one as first residence and the other one as first residence. Those aren’t the ones who got in trouble – the ones who really got in trouble were like the one with the duck house, because he got it and it’s noticeable and it’s human and people noticed it,’ says Anthony Wells, YouGov’s director of political polling.
‘One other example is Tim Yeo, who got in trouble because he claimed a laptop. Of course a laptop is a perfectly reasonable thing to claim, but it was a pink laptop. And yeah, it’s the human things that people notice because no one cares at all about the details of policy. You’re not going to stop and read that, but you are going to read the things about the human things that people have done. No one’s going to listen to most speeches; no one’s going to really understand or care about their reports.’
This is a good reminder that what newspapers publish shouldn’t just be in the public interest, they also need to be of interest to the public. It’s all well and good for the snobbish among us to complain about the media not taking its political reporting seriously enough, but if journalists were to suddenly only start writing about policy papers, there soon wouldn’t be newspapers for them to write for.
‘Often the stuff that does reach people is the most salacious stuff, whether it’s true or not. That does have cut-through,’ says Joe Twyman of political polling firm Deltapoll. ‘And so when Brooks Newmark shows his penis to [reporter pretending to be a young female activist to catch creepy MPs] Alex Wickham, people might not remember that it’s Brooks Newmark unless they happen to be in his constituency, but they all remember that MP that showed that journalist his penis. And the mundane stuff about, oh, so-and-so attended this many votes, or voted for that … Nobody cares. And the idea that there’s people out there carefully downloading each party’s manifesto, reading it from cover to cover, and they come into an informed decision about which party they’re going to vote for based on that doesn’t happen.’
This might sound like a cynical exaggeration but it really isn’t; if you are reading this book, you are in the small minority of people who actually do care about politics – and it really is small. Obama and Cameron’s election strategist has always been fond of saying that people only spend four minutes a week thinking about politics. While it is hard to tell if this is a real stat or one that is too good to be true, there are concrete examples we can look at.
Here is what the editor of a national newspaper had to say on this: ‘Ed Miliband announced a raft of interesting policies and had the Tories on the back foot – you know, we’re going to crack down on the power companies, they were ripping people off, all this quite good populist stuff. When readers were questioned about him, almost the only thing that they could remember about Ed Miliband was that he nicked his brother’s job. So those people are not paying attention all the time. In fact, they’re not paying attention most of the time.
‘Michael Ashcroft is fond of telling a story about some research he did, and it was in the wake of the party conference season, people were polled about “What was the big political event over the past month?” Was it David Cameron’s speech? W
as it Ed Miliband’s speech? Was it this resignation, was it that drama, etc. And an overwhelming majority of people, north of 80%, could remember not one. Nothing. Hours of coverage, acres of space, conference diaries and over 80% of people remembered not a single political event.’
This certainly feels depressing and is something that has been written about again and again, with no one offering a workable solution. In the meantime, journalists must work with the readers they have, not the ones they want, and that means injecting drama and fun personal details into their reporting. It is also worth saying that the personal can absolutely be as relevant as the political; a story does not need to be about a dry parliamentary report to be serious, and the most insightful reporting can often be the one focusing on softer, more personal aspects of Westminster.
‘I’ve always found the personal battles and intrigues as interesting as the policy stuff,’ says Sunday Times political editor Tim Shipman. ‘There’s a tendency for some journalists to be rather pompous about being serious journalists who write about policy unlike those of us who write a bunch of posh gossip, but the posh gossip is what has determined where this country’s gone over the last two years, rather than the grand sweep of policies. If you look at what’s happened with Brexit over the past few years, the decisions of individual people and their relationships with each other are absolutely pivotal. We are living in an age when, yes, there is this broad thrust towards populism and big shifts appear to be going on in the world, but within 500 yards of this building, the interactions of individuals have been hugely important in shaping the path this country has taken over the last couple of years.’
Haven't You Heard Page 13
