Haven't You Heard

by Marie Le Conte

  The second is considerably lighter but still drew the ire of the highest levels of government, when in 2000 the Belgian Ambassador told a diarist that his prime minister had offered Tony Blair the use of his Tuscan villa for a holiday.

  ‘Downing Street went ballistic, Alastair Campbell, Blair’s spin doctor, demanded that the reporter be sacked (he’s now on the Mail on Sunday) and the ambassador retracted his story,’ the book explains. Man of the people Tony could not, after all, be seen as the type to abscond to the glamorous houses of foreign dignitaries while in office.

  While these are as representative as it gets, a diary story can still be many other things. According to Joy Lo Dico, who used to edit the ‘Londoner’, ‘The perfect diary story has got a mixture of something serious and inane in it, or absurd.’ During her time at the helm of the column, she would tell her reporters to try and get a serious quote from someone silly, or a silly quote from someone serious; funny anecdotes about the pets of cabinet ministers and stern opinions about Brexit from TV celebrities are always a good bet.

  Another classic is to take a story currently being covered everywhere else in a straight-faced fashion, and find one angle that suits the column. A brilliant one of those came during the Damian Green scandal, shortly after journalist Kate Maltby accused the Secretary of State of putting his hand on her thigh as she was asking him for career advice. Green’s camp had shot back by saying that she must have been confused and felt the tablecloth on her leg, as he had not touched her. A classic he-said, she-said, surely? Well, not for the ‘Londoner’:

  ‘The diary story did not engage specifically in the kind of politics around the allegation. Like a lawyer, we went along one particular detail, which is we found out where the bar was, and we were thinking, hang on a second. Damian Green replied, saying it could have been a tablecloth. And lo and behold, my staff knew the bar, and we checked some photos, we found somebody who’d been there very recently, and we called up the bar as well. They said no, no tablecloths – once in a blue moon we have a set dinner, but it certainly wasn’t that. And at that point you can undermine Damian Green for just tiny little inaccuracies, which may be human failing, but may also be him trying to pull out a defence via his friends.’

  This detail didn’t change the course of history, but it was still something worth exploring that other journalists had either not thought of or considered too minor a clarification. A Westminster-wide scandal was taking place and the diary played its part. In some ways, this is diary columns at their best, though their primary role remains to be entertaining, which gives them some leeway to occasionally publish something utterly absurd and pointless that happened to cross their desk.

  Take the toenails. ‘There was a story about the former Director-General of the BBC John Birt,’ explains one journalist who used to work at the ‘Londoner’. ‘And it was a story that he kept his toenail cuttings in a little box. That was the story. And you know, it was so memorable, that out of all the great Birtean strategic differences he was making at the BBC, they still couldn’t get out of their minds what kind of person would keep their toenail cuttings in a box.’

  The story does not say what Birt himself made of that story, especially as there is no way for someone to tangibly prove that they do not keep their toenail clippings in a little box. Still, working at the diary means having to deal with peculiar characters who do not take kindly to being mischievously written about. Sarah Sands, a former editor of the ‘Londoner’, recalls one of her most memorable encounters: ‘I remember Bron Waugh, the son of Evelyn Waugh, writing to me to say that he was putting a curse on me after a story he had not liked. He said it gave him no pleasure, but something terrible would befall me.’

  Waugh clearly needed to brush up on his occult skills, as Sands then went on to become – among others – the editor of the Evening Standard and the Today programme after that. She is far from the only senior media figure to have started out by slumming it on a diary desk.

  The full list would take too long to type, but to use wide-ranging examples, former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger and former Telegraph editor Charles Moore were also once diarists before eventually taking the helm of their paper. There’s a number of reasons for this. One is that to be a good diarist, you really have to be a good journalist: while reporters will often get their quotes from, say, a press conference or an arranged interview, diarists have to roam the streets and parties of London in search of stories. Most of their job happens at night, at parties and drinks receptions attended by the great and the good. You might think that it’d be easier to get a line out of someone when they’re three champagne flutes down, and you’d be partially correct, but it is harder than it seems to turn up to a party, sometimes uninvited, often not knowing anyone there, and mingle without seeming out of place, and trying to make important people stop talking to their friends to talk to you, a journalist, instead.

  If you really were uninvited, chances are that your editor won’t take ‘Sorry, just couldn’t get in’ as an excuse – if the desk wants you there, you’ll have to find a way in. This can involve pretending to be someone else, climbing over a balcony, finding the fire exit, hiding in a cloakroom, walking around with an empty glass in your bag to be able to pretend that you’d just gone for a cigarette – just get it done. Once inside, you need to know exactly who is there and who is worth talking to, so a large portion of your brain must be effectively turned into one big Rolodex of London society. You must then go and talk to them, either interrupting their conversation or hovering like a shark until they find themselves alone, and convince them to have a pleasant chat with you. Convention differs from one diary to the other, but good etiquette usually means introducing yourself as a diarist, which basically means fessing up to trying to fish a funny or awkward quote out of your new-found friend.

  Given that it is a chat and not an interview, you need to charm them and have a proper conversation with them, as opposed to going up to them with a number of questions and asking them. That being said, you do need to have some questions prepared so you can slide them in: you are, after all, out looking for stories. Some diarists can make it up as they go along, but it is not always easy. A solid cautionary tale comes from a former Times diarist, who was having so much fun at a bash that he got merrily drunk and forgot to ask anyone anything. The party was about to end and he panicked, as the only person of interest left was famously dry Philip Hammond, then Defence Secretary. The diarist went up to him, introduced himself and shook his hand, then realised to his horror that he’d forgotten to think of a question to ask. Stumped, he followed his hello with, ‘So, Minister, what’s your favourite gun?’ Philip Hammond asked him to leave and the diarist went home empty-handed.

  Even if well prepared, this can be an issue: not everyone is interesting, ready to give out a quote freely to some random journalist, or both. A diary column must be entertaining above all, and the page won’t fill itself, so diarists will often need to use their inventiveness to liven up the stories.

  After all, no one reads that part of the paper while expecting everything to be absolutely true; a good diary column is one that makes good occasional use of poetic licence. While each paper will have a slightly different version of that motto, the broad rule of the desk is: ‘Every column you write has got to have a couple of stories that are definitely true, a couple of stories that are probably true but you don’t want to check out too much in case there’s deniability, and then one or two that are probably not true but you’re not going to get sued over it.’

  A stellar example of the latter is also (oddly) linked to Philip Hammond, this time during his tenure as Chancellor. One diarist went to talk to someone who worked for him and struggled to find out anything amusing; the only thing they said was that Hammond was known to enjoy a KitKat. Boring? Sure. Has easy room for improvement? Definitely. The diarist remembered that new pound coins had recently come out and proved to be a pain in the arse as they didn’t work in most vending machine
s.

  How to link those two facts together? Easy: in the next day’s paper, a fun short story could be found about Philip Hammond’s obsessive love of KitKats, which led to sightings of desperate aides trying to rub their new pound coins to trick the vending machines into taking them, all so they could keep the Chancellor happy with a constant supply of his favourite chocolate bars.

  Is everything in this story strictly speaking correct? No. Would anyone be terribly upset by the aspects of this story that aren’t strictly speaking correct? Almost certainly not. Do the not strictly speaking correct details turn what would have otherwise been dull into a fun little story? Absolutely.

  Another angle of this is that the diaries have been around for a long time, and mischief is expected of them; they might sometimes be wrong, but there is rarely a point in trying to publicly complain about how they’ve covered you. By all means talk to the diary editor if you feel you were unfairly done in, but any retribution more serious than that will probably be more amusing to them than useful to you.

  ‘One of my favourite stories was the time I was sued by the Royal Navy over a story involving the Prime Minister, hardcore pornography and submariners,’ says Patrick Kidd of The Times diary.

  ‘There was an LGBT reception at Downing Street. My diarist Grant had been there, and he’d spoken to two submariners who’d chatted to May, and not unreasonably, he asked them what they talked about. And they said, “Well, she asked what could you do to make life better on board the ship.” And they said, “Well, you can improve the Wi-Fi because it’s very slow.” And then the other one said, “I told her it’s hard to download porn, you have to bring it in on hard disk.” And I put that in the column and we got a stinking complaint. In fact, I met someone in the Royal Navy press office recently who told me how much hoo-ha it caused. It’s terrible when people take diary stories too seriously. But the top brass were very upset, went to the submariners, and they said we never said that. So then we got the legal letter, and of course we got the sniffy, “I understand you didn’t run it past Downing Street.” I am not going to ring up and ask, did the Prime Minister discuss porn with submariners?

  ‘But also, Grant had got it from them directly, and I trust Grant, you know? And he said that actually he’d heard it, that they’d said it to someone else who then reported it circularly. So what I suspect happened is that they’d wished they’d said that to the Prime Minister. And we’ve all done that, we’ve all embellished something, not thinking perhaps it would end up in The Times. And yeah, legal letters were exchanged, and in the end there were two other things, that the Navy said that they don’t watch pornography, and they also said, and this is where I was wrong, I admitted that one of them was rather refreshed. We always use clichés like that, because I assumed you wouldn’t discuss porn with the Prime Minister unless you’d had a drink. And they said these submariners don’t drink. And so I said to our lawyer, well, let’s print a correction saying that they are members of the Royal Navy who don’t watch porn, they don’t drink, but I think that’s more damaging to their reputation! But nonetheless we backed out of it and just said their version. I did argue with our lawyer that we should go to court though, because I quite like the idea of the Prime Minister taking the stand to discuss porn.’

  This is pure, unadulterated mischief, but then that’s what the diaries are for, and why they can get away with it: a well-informed and fun diary column is good for the readers, and even better for its editor. The press might have drastically changed since the days of Beaverbrook, but diaries remain one of the most useful parts of the paper for the one at the helm. After all, a journalist’s job is to know what’s going on, and where better to turn for information than your society columnists? Just like the PPS of a minister must keep them in the loop while they are holed up in their Whitehall department, a good diarist will go out on the town and soak up all the rumours so they can regurgitate them to the people at the top who are too busy for endless cocktail receptions.

  An editor who feels they are up-to-date with all the latest gossip is a happy one, and one likely to be kind to the person providing them with all that tittle-tattle, hence the rapid career progression of most sharp diarists. According to Patrick Kidd, ‘The editor wants political gossip, and actually even stuff that he doesn’t want in the column, he wants political gossip for his own gratification. Editors want to know what’s going on and they also want to feel that they know what other people don’t know is going on, so it’s the best way to titillate them. I didn’t have a formal interview for the diary, but when I was asked to go and chat to John in early 2013 about taking on the diary, the first thing I did was to drop in a couple of titbits I knew about MPs and stuff, because I knew people liked to hear it.’

  This comes back to the importance of the personal; even someone who religiously reads every newspaper and magazine and watches or listens to every political programme will never be able to fully grasp what goes on, and why it happens. The more personal information you can gather on Westminster, the better you will be at understanding its intricacies and unexpected movements. And while the news pages of a paper are generally aimed at your garden variety readers and no one else, a good diary column will have the bubble in mind as well; some of the stories will be utterly irrelevant to people with no connection to SW1, and that is fine.

  ‘The diary should feel like the sort of stuff you talk about over a dinner party,’ says Lo Dico. ‘Did you hear this? Did you hear that? Because you are talking, in a sense, to a group of people at a dinner party, with whom you feel you can share confidences. London and Westminster, and the media around Westminster, it’s like a very large family. Strangely enough, when you’re inside Westminster, it’s, “No, no, no, it’s huge, we don’t all know each other actually”. And then every so often you look at this or that party and say, “Well, actually we do sort of all know each other, or we’re all about one removed from all the key players.”

  ‘By having those little things on the record, like who goes hiking in the mountains with whom, at some later point in time you’ve understood a social connection. We all have our official jobs, we all have our official titles, and we look like we sit in these little cubicles in our lives doing various things, but actually beneath it all it’s wholesale social connections that inform whom you know, how you can get on, how you can get ahead, which are built up incrementally over years. And from that you can look at how people source information, trade information, how business deals are done, how political media deals are done. And they’re all done on some level through a personal relationship; it’s quite rare to have something that’s totally raw.’

  This has not only been noticed by diarists: though they might mostly concern themselves with more serious stories and occasionally turn their noses up at the trivial gossip of diary columns, political reporters can and do rely on them to help them join the dots. ‘The number of times when looking into people you think who are wrong ’uns, you find that they have an obscure mention in a diary column from ten years ago which gives you a massive pointer to something else,’ says Jim Waterson. ‘That’s the one thing I think a lot of gossip provides, the, “Oh, that’s funny that that person’s got connections with that businessman”. And then years later, you’re looking at that business and you go, “Oh yeah! Doesn’t that MP speak for him? Oh, let’s go through his Hansard, let’s see. Oh, he’s spoken up on behalf of that businessman. Great, okay. Now this feels like a proper story that might actually be a scandal.” And you might have only read that they were tennis partners.’

  There is also a degree of hypocrisy at the heart of the relationship between political journalists and diarists; though the former will often look down on the latter, they not only rely on the pieces of information hidden within diary columns for their reporting, but also send information their way if it is something they cannot fully stand up. As it stands, a lot of diary items will come from lobby journalists and political editors who might want something to get out b
ut know that it isn’t really a story, or that it is too mischievous to be printed under their byline. After all, diary columns rarely have bylines, and only the name of the editor tends to be fully public, so the diary elves will have fewer qualms about publishing something that might come back to bite them in the arse.

  Francis Wheen, who went on to become the deputy editor of Private Eye, once edited the Independent’s diary column and freely admits that his ‘single best source’ was the paper’s political editor Tony Bevins. In one anecdote from the early 2000s, he explains how ingrained the diary culture is for those in the bubble:

  ‘I remember Charlie Whelan coming to blows with Tom Watson, and having to be pulled apart. They were both off their heads. It was at the Gay Hussar. The drink was flowing, as it tends to, and suddenly Charlie Whelan, who was then still Gordon Brown’s spin doctor, spotted Tom Watson, who had only recently been elected an MP, and for some reason he decided that Tom Watson was a Blairite, which he very much wasn’t. There was some ancient trade union rivalry as well, I think. Charlie staggered up to Watson, who was there with his wife, saying, “I know who you are. You’re a Labour MP, aren’t you? And you’re a fucking cunt, that’s who you are!” And Tom Watson was a bit taken aback, and Charlie said, “Yeah, that’s what you are. Do you deny it?” And Tom Watson replied, “Could you please not carry on like that?” Charlie replies, “All right, do you want to come outside then? And we’ll carry on …” And the next thing they were fighting on the pavement, being pulled apart. And you think, Oh God, this’ll be in ‘Londoner’s Diary’ tomorrow. Who’s going to be the first person to ring ‘Londoner’s Diary’ to make sure it’s in?’*