Haven't You Heard

by Marie Le Conte

  SPINNING AROUND

  It would be unfair to start this part without paying tribute to ‘The Spin Doctor’, a washing machine repairman based in London who managed to get to the third result on Google for ‘spin doctor’. Politics could do with more brains like his.

  Putting this aside, what reliable sources tell us is that the term ‘spin doctor’ first started being used in its political sense in the mid-80s, though it only really became a commonly used phrase in the UK during the New Labour years. Alastair Campbell was one, Peter Mandelson was one, and what they did was referred to as ‘the dark arts’; like magicians but with disappearing and reappearing stories, as opposed to rabbits. Their job nominally involved talking to journalists and making sure that the Labour Party’s aims, actions and policies were always portrayed in the best possible light in the media. This is easier said than done, and in order to work efficiently, they did, said and threatened things that eventually left them with a tarnished reputation, and the questionable legacy of having created a toxic political culture.

  They also arrived at a time when technology was being revolutionised, which made the shift drastic in more ways than one. Here is a former civil servant explaining what life was like in the John Major years:

  ‘During the ’90s, when I worked in a press office at No 10, well, first of all, we didn’t have email and mobile phones were still quite uncommon. And in No 10, the press office was a purely civil service regime. There was a political office, but that was a political office with about four people, and they didn’t really do any media press operations. And I think that our press office amounted to, including administrative staff, ten people? It was tiny, and we were all gifted amateurs. Our approach to media and comms back then was much less about how to seek to control the media in that way, it was very much about how we relayed information. So it was quite unsophisticated, really.

  ‘Of course we had lots of scandals back then, but I don’t know that we got much by way of pre-warning of them. Back then, there wasn’t quite the iron grip from No 10 on the rest of Whitehall in the way there is now – this started during Blair’s time. So people were effectively controlling their own information when they published it.

  ‘Really, the most effect you can have is on controlling what news comes out on what dates. And No 10 have now a much stronger grip on that than there ever was in the past. We used to have a Whitehall weekly meeting of press officers, and it was not unusual for half of the Whitehall press officers not to turn up. Now I think about it, it’s amazing we got anything done.’

  Doesn’t this sound quaint? Spinners are now everywhere, and when the government is vaguely functioning, the tentacles of No 10 retain a firm grip on nearly everything that comes out of Whitehall. There are lines to take, ministers sent out to trot out those lines, headline-making news is prepared weeks if not months in advance, and fires are extinguished long before the first spark makes itself known. At their best, they can keep the media docile enough not to be too much of a pain in the arse to their bosses; at their worst, they will throw opponents (internal and external) to the wolves with no chance of survival.

  How do they do it? They chat, mostly. To journalists, to each other, to people in their party – they spend a lot of their time talking.

  This is how Sean Kemp, a Liberal Democrat comms spad in the coalition years, describes it: ‘There were two parts of my job, one was just the internal political stuff; the other part, which is the engaging with journalists bit, that’s entirely gossip. Basically, the simple foundation of what you tell people, how you do good media management, is you’ve got to do a lobby round. So you’ve got to do it every day, me or James McGrory. Usually James. You’d go and do a lobby round. Even if you’ve got nothing to pitch, nothing to say, you’d go into every single newspaper office and you’d have a chat for, like, ten or 15 minutes. And some of that is useful, some of that, you’re just having chats. All of your press and conduct operations, it’s not press releases. There’s a bit of that but it’s almost entirely basically based upon having loads and loads of chats. It’s all you do, spend your time talking and joking with journalists.’

  The obvious questions here are: what do they talk about, and why do they talk that much? The former is fairly straightforward – both sides are politically obsessive, professionally and most of the time personally, so it cannot be hard for them to come up with endless topics, from the dry end of future policy announcements to the more fun titbits about the rumour(s) of the day.

  As mentioned earlier as well, good spinners will always try to have some crumbs up their sleeve, a fun bit of information or gossip to catch the attention of the news hounds and keep them off their backs. Bored hacks still have deadlines and might well start digging in inconvenient places if there is nothing obvious for them to write about. They are, in that respect, a bit like cats: if you don’t give them toys to play with, they might end up jumping on the counter and throwing cups on the ground. Well, they might do that anyway but are slightly less likely to if you provide them with enough distractions.

  This also works when they are very busy, which is pretty much all the time, as Thomas Quinn explains in ‘Spin Doctors And Political News Management’: ‘The predominance of deadlines ensures that time is a journalist’s most important resource, and hence time is money for the firms that pay their salaries. Everything a journalist does incurs an opportunity cost because of the constant onset of deadlines.’

  You are also acting as a conduit between journalists and your party; the people you work for will often be too busy to always be in the loop, so being able to give them frequent updates on what is happening is a vital part of your job.

  ‘There’s very little currency more valuable to journalists, if any, than gossip,’ says former Lib Dem spinner James McGrory. ‘If your bosses want to know the finer points of some policy paper, they can ask someone cleverer than me. If journalists want to know the ins and outs of how a policy’s going to work on pension reform, they can speak to someone cleverer than me. The only reason I have any currency with either of those two people is because I can tell them what the other side is thinking. So I can tell my bosses and the politicians, well, this is what the lobby are saying, and that works both ways. If you think of yourself as a business, you only have two clients. Your bosses, the politicians and senior advisers who are more senior to you, and journalists.’

  Another reason why they might want to pop by and have a biscuit and a chat is that it is useful to spot potential problems arising and nip them in the bud. Like ministers with the low grumbling of backbenchers slowly getting louder, comms advisers must keep an eye on what issues journalists are starting to get preoccupied by, which minister they’ve begun gossiping about, and so on. Big stories rarely come out of nowhere, and whenever possible, it is better to be prepared than get surprised by an embarrassing scoop for your party that you did not see coming.

  This cannot always happen, especially as people in your party will rarely come to you if they’ve done something wrong, as they assume (or at least hope) that it will quietly go away. If it does not, a conversation needs to happen between the spad and the person who’s messed up, which according to one of the latter usually goes a bit like this: ‘You always have this chat, which is, “Did you say it?” And generally the response is, “Oh, I can’t remember.” “Is it possible that someone recorded you saying it?” Then you suddenly find that the answer is, “Er … I don’t know.” So we can’t actively deny it, can we? And that sort of drags out for a while.’

  There are ways to go around this. During his time in government, McGrory came up with a technique to anticipate potential stories and, perhaps more importantly, find out where the bodies are buried before they catch the attention of journalists. It goes like this:

  ‘Sometimes you pick up stuff about your own MPs, a bit of information in your life that has the potential to be damaging. And my tactic was that I’d ring them up and I’d say, “This has been put to me by …”
And then you just name the publication of the person who told you about it in the pub, and who is not writing it as a story, because they can’t stand it up or they’re not interested or the desk don’t give a shit or whatever. And they would think, Fuck, they’re writing a story about this. And so I’d be saying, “Look, they don’t seem to have very much. I think I can kill this.”

  ‘The person at the other end of the line would then almost always give you, if not a properly true version of events, then at the very least their side of the story, and then you say to them, “Listen, I’m pretty sure they’ve not got enough to run this. I’ll speak to them.” Of course you don’t have to actually speak to them because they’ve not put anything to you, it’s a rumour you heard in the pub last night or two nights ago. So you just end up ringing them back and saying, “It’s all sorted, they’re not going to run this. If you hear a whisper about any of this again, let me know, and I’ll do the same at my end. But I think we’re safe for now.” Then you’ve inherited more gossip.’*

  Of course, the whole job of a spinner isn’t solely to prevent stories from being printed, they also have to try and get positive stories about their parties published, even if said stories aren’t always riveting. That can be done by chatting to journalists and explaining that a seemingly dull-as-dishwater policy announcement would actually be life-changing for their readers, though it is easier said than done. The real talent here is to find the one eye-catching angle the hacks were probably too busy to spot themselves.

  There isn’t always one, sadly, and spinners have been known to try and work it the other way around, by getting a sense of what journalists might want to write about, and building stories around them. It is hardly the best way to go about policy-making, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. Ben Wright offers a good example of this in Order, Order!, with an anecdote that starts off with a piss-up involving reporters and New Labour spad Charlie Whelan, and ends with the Queen crying by the seaside.

  ‘The royal yacht supposedly ruled the waves, but 1997 was a time of cool Britannia, not old Britannia, and the Treasury was keen to cut the £11 million a year cost of keeping the Queen’s boat afloat. So when the Chancellor’s spin doctor was drinking with a couple of Sunday newspaper journalists soon after the general election, they agreed to splash on Britannia being scrapped. “We dreamed up the idea that doing in the royal yacht would be a good idea, a good story. That was dreamed up over a few drinks at the bar,” claims Whelan. Like many Sunday newspaper stories it was a kite-flyer, a way of gauging reaction to a policy plan before formally announcing it. And within months the Queen was standing on the dock at Portsmouth naval base watching her beloved ship being decommissioned.’

  This story worked because it was a colourful one, and one that meant far more than the Treasury trying to find a way to save a bit of money. It said something about the Britain New Labour wanted to create and the choices they were making to get there; the decommissioning of the royal yacht was symbolic of a country slowly getting ready for the 21st century, and that is why it piqued the interest of those Sunday reporters.

  Good advisers know this, obviously – journalists are not stupid, so won’t find something interesting purely because you tell them that it is interesting, but there are ways of making dry news sound more exciting, so more likely to get published.

  ‘The truth that journalists won’t really want to hear is that a lot of the time the little rumour-type stories that appear in the papers, we’re giving them to journalists intentionally with a view to them printing them. Which I think sometimes some people get and some people don’t get,’ says one former Labour adviser who worked for Ed Miliband.

  ‘When you’re briefing a journalist and you want a bit of the story to carry, you want it to go somewhere, you’re adding a bit of colour and stuff about it. I remember the time they wanted a phone hacking story to carry about Ed negotiating with the other parties about Leveson. And they just briefed out this part of it that it was all done over pizza, which made it the most interesting part of the story. It became the pizza briefing. And that was totally intentional. That was Stewart Wood, and he didn’t accidentally go into the pizza thing. He thought, how can I make this sound interesting?’

  This absolutely worked: a glance at the papers from that day in March 2013 shows that the Guardian, the Mirror, the Independent and the Telegraph, among others, published a story about the late-night negotiations that mentioned pizza. While hardly a fascinating detail, it unquestionably brought a bit more life to a story that would otherwise have been about the future of press regulation and nothing else.

  This wasn’t a piece of gossip per se, as it was willingly shared around by people who had taken part in the pizza eating, and because eating pizza hardly is scandalous, but it remains a part of the same ecosystem. Information will travel faster if it is interesting and has a human element to it; organic rumours may be more fun, but manufactured colour is the next best thing.

  That being said, all the rules spelled out above only really work if confronted with political journalists whose job is solely to report (relatively) impartially on what goes on in Westminster. For some other hacks, this approach is far too strait-laced and nowhere near entertaining enough. Lobby journalists can certainly create some chaos if they so wish, but it isn’t really part of their job description. That role falls to another group: the mischief-makers.

  LOOKING FOR TROUBLE

  We’ve established that newspapers will publish gossip if it is indicative of someone’s character or, more generally, has a wider meaning. What we haven’t discussed so far is political gossip that is just that: an amusing or scandalous piece of information that serves no real purpose besides its entertainment value. It has a fine (if controversial) history in newspapers, and can all be tracked down to one man: James Gordon Bennett Sr.

  According to Joel Wiener’s The Americanization of the British Press, Bennett launched the New York Herald in 1835 at a time when political reporters were told to provide ‘no insight into what transpired behind the scenes at the national capital’, and turned everything on its head. The Herald dedicated many of its inches to ‘gossip and chat’, to the delight of its readers, and jealous competitors soon launched their own ‘Washington Letters’, as they were called at the time.

  The format was a ‘frothy concoction of social and political information’, and crossed the Atlantic not long afterwards. One of the people responsible for the move was T.P. O’Connor, without whom Westminster may not have been infected by Washington’s tittle-tattle obsession. The political journalist was also an MP and wrote in 1889 that ‘everything that can be talked about can also be written about […] No one’s life is now private; the private dinner party, the intimate conversation, all are told.’

  Though O’Connor’s beliefs on privacy rights (or the lack thereof) helped create the environment we have today, circumstances also had their part to play. Until 1881, provincial newspaper journalists weren’t allowed to sit in the Press Gallery in Parliament with their London counterparts, meaning that they couldn’t do any first-hand reporting of speeches and debates in the House of Commons. Resourceful as always, the hacks decided to instead specialise in ‘descriptive’ political gossip, while the London papers wrote about parliamentary proceedings. The journalists were eventually allowed to join the Gallery, but the revolution had already started.

  It eventually blossomed in 1916 with the creation of the ‘Londoner’s Diary’, a collection of three daily columns written ‘by gentlemen for gentlemen’ in the Evening Standard and described as a ‘daily causerie of the world, the flesh and the city’. The rest of the trade sharply followed once more, and according to H Simonis’ The Street of Ink, it was remarked only a year later that ‘the best tribute to the “Londoner’s Diary” is the fact that it now has its counterpart in the other penny evening papers in London’. Intended as a repository for gossip, the diaries quickly became one of the most powerful parts of newspapers: more than frivol
ous entertainment, whispers and rumours could also be used to enhance one’s status in society, as well as building people up and knocking them back down.

  Press baron and then-owner of the paper Lord Beaverbrook was even said to have regarded the ‘Londoner’ as ‘his own personal fiefdom, an armoury from which he could seize a weapon at will; bludgeon, cudgel and rapier lay at his disposal as he sought to fight his way to ever-greater heights of power and influence in between-the-wars Britain’. Ethical or not, this succeeded: Beaverbrook ended up becoming close to everyone who mattered in Britain at the time, hosting Lloyd George, Winston Churchill and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor at his stately home in Surrey. He also acquired a remarkable reputation for ruthlessness when it came to socialising, inspiring Evelyn Waugh to once quip, ‘Of course I believe in the devil. How else could I account for Lord Beaverbrook?’

  Some time has passed, and the media and societal landscapes have changed, but diary columns have largely remained the same, which is to say that they can still contain a multitude of widely different stories. As a matter of fact, a diary item can be many things: it might hint at a politician and a journalist having an affair, or keep a tally of the amount of drinks receptions a certain minister with ambitions has been spotted at recently. It can also be drier, and take a close look at some obscure policy announcement, or it can be entirely inconsequential and point to a funny joke in a backbencher’s speech.

  A diary story is, essentially, something that must get a reaction from the reader. While red tops have the ‘Fuck me, Doris!’ factor – which is what they imagined a man will say to his wife when reading a particularly jaw-dropping scoop – gossip must make some waves, and get people talking. Diary at 50, a book cataloguing some of the best Times diary items, offers two good examples of how wide the spectrum can be.

  In the first, the humble diary column gets in trouble with the authorities and, with the help of someone on the inside, manages to see the (surprisingly serious) story through to its logical end. ‘In 1985, a leak inquiry was launched in the Commons to find who had passed PHS [as the diary column was called then] the details of the draft of a select committee report on the Special Branch,’ current editor Patrick Kidd explained. ‘Twenty MPs gave evidence that it was not them. […] The committee of privileges met late at night to discuss the issue. A report of that session was also leaked to PHS.’