After all, with everyone being so busy and constantly running around, being able to properly talk without having to physically meet works for everyone. Journalists can watch a speech in the Commons then send the same message to a dozen MPs to see what they made of it, MPs can message a group of their colleagues to see what they make of a new policy that will affect their constituencies, and no one has to be in the same place at the same time for it to happen. Naturally, it has also made plotting and factional infighting easier to organise as well.
According to one adviser who has worked for Labour since long before the WhatsApp age, ‘These groups are fascinating. I don’t think that kind of conversation could have existed pre-that. If you think about some of the people who are on the WhatsApp groups, in the old days most people just sat in Portcullis House and chatted, and that would’ve instantly looked like a plot – you couldn’t possibly do that now, you couldn’t get those people together. So that is a really interesting development.’
There is a reason why this matters: in politics, it is just as important to know who is plotting with whom than it is to know what they are plotting about. A lot of the whips’ work, for example, involves the ability to map out the informal networks among their benches. Alliances aren’t always about policy agreements, intakes or any other obvious link; MPs might get along because they were at university together, have mutual friends outside Parliament, got raucously drunk after an APPG meeting and took it from there, and more. Knowing who these groupings are is vital if you want to understand what is going on, and not be taken by surprise if a rebellion pops up out of nowhere. These networks can also help if, say, you want to run to be the chair of a select committee, or the Speaker of the House of Commons; in order to efficiently canvass votes, you need to know where to go.
It used to be possible to get an idea of who liked whom and who didn’t by observing what happened in the tea rooms, bars and Portcullis House, and it still is to an extent, but a lot of social interactions have now gone underground, making it hard to know what is really going on. There is also the issue of known unknowns and unknown unknowns. Sometimes, you will be aware that there is a social group that exists, and is crystallised by the presence of a WhatsApp chat, even if you are not part of it and do not know what they discuss. It all gets a bit more complicated when it comes to social groups you’re not even aware exist, if they do exist. It is, after all, impossible to snoop around a conversation you’re not meant to be included in if you don’t even know that the conversation is happening.
On top of this, there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation with a number of groups: was a WhatsApp group started because of pre-existing friendships, did friendship become the logical conclusion after a WhatsApp group was created, or was it something in between? In politics and journalism as in life, temporary groups can be created to deal with one specific issue then snowball into a more generalised chat, which can then bring people together. ‘I’m on a WhatsApp group which is mostly devoted to slagging off one journalist in particular,’ says one reporter. ‘It’s called Dickwatch, and it is about one journalist we’ve all worked with. It’s become a very eclectic group.’
There is also a group dedicated to American Football, which has now brought together a group of MPs, journalists, special advisers and others, a group of various hacks which started because they were trying to organise drinks and subsequently kept on chatting, and probably many more (though, well, who knows?).
One direct consequence of this is that information now travels fast; it always did, but it now does so even quicker, and through unexpected ways. This is a problem for political journalists. ‘Gossip spreads below the radar now, so you can have everyone knowing that you’ve slept with that person, but no fact-checking at any point,’ explains Jim Waterson. ‘Previously it was limited to what went round the bars, but fundamentally the sleepiest MPs would only find out when the gossip column wrote it up a week later. Now if there’s a good bit of gossip, every researcher in Parliament is going to see it within hours, if that. And stuff can be established as fact on an enormous scale without any checking at all.’
It also harms journalists’ ability to check said gossip. The way reporting usually works is that a piece of information should be double-sourced, so if for example you hear something from one MP, you need to find another MP from a different party or faction who also has knowledge of that piece of information, and your story is then stood up. With WhatsApp, rumours travel so fast that information can be shared third or fourth hand quicker than ever, and it might travel in unexpected ways.
One MP explained this well: ‘If Joe Bloggs MP says, “All right, there’s going to be a new centrist party, I’m going to mention it to a sensible group of MPs,” he can then put it in a WhatsApp group. Then if you as a journalist ring someone on Joe Bloggs’ WhatsApp list and ask, “Have you heard that there might be …?” We have to say, “Oh yeah, I have heard that!” because no one’s going to say, “Oh yeah, Joe Bloggs has just sent it round the WhatsApp group” – they don’t want to compromise Joe Bloggs, so they say, “Yeah, I’ve heard that too!” And then you ring another MP who’s on the same WhatsApp list, “Yeah, I’ve heard that too!” And we’ve all heard it from the same person. I think it is much harder now for journalists to try and distinguish between fact and speculation, and to try and cut through the crap, and we really rely on them to do it.’
What this means in practice is that a story can often seem iron-clad due to having been double- or triple-sourced, but is in fact partly or fully bollocks and based on one person hell-bent on telling everyone about that one rumour they heard. WhatsApp isn’t the only culprit for this either: Twitter took over the Westminster bubble some years ago, and has also changed the way in which many things operate.
‘The number of times I go to someone who ought to be a primary source, a minister or an MP, and they’re telling me something interesting, and then I realise they’ve just read it on Twitter like everyone else,’ complains the FT’s Jim Pickard. He is right; with its snappy addictive format, Twitter has become the ideal platform for people who enjoy reading gossip and sharing it. It can be anything from a furtive picture of an MP taken somewhere embarrassing to an overheard conversation or a wild theory about what really is happening that day in Westminster; if it’s eye-catching, it will be spread around quicker than you can say, “But is that really true?” With the vast majority of MPs, advisers, journalists and assorted SW1 inhabitants partially living on Twitter, the platform has become the place where careers, factions and policies can rise and fall in the space of a few hours.
As Lord Livermore puts it, ‘There’s no publication hurdle – so in the old days an editor would decide, “Do I want to publish this? Is it well sourced enough?” and now there can be an anonymous account spreading pure rumour, completely unsubstantiated. No proof required, could be totally made up. And yet it can be around Westminster in seconds.’
Given that a lot of people do not feel the need to fact-check or double-source claims before they tweet them, the pace at which news (and fake news) happens now is incredible – and an issue. ‘To give you an example of how much things have sped up in the way gossip’s changed, in 2010 I remember being at university refreshing the Andrew Sparrow Guardian live blog while Gillian Duffy, the “bigoted woman”, played out in real time,’ says Jim Waterson. ‘And it was extraordinary, because it was the first properly online election, and I’m sitting there in the library, and every five minutes there was an update! And he even put the odd funny reaction in. There was the odd tweet coming in, and he was saying, “And Sky News have got this …” and it felt extraordinary, it felt like you were following the story in real time, it felt so new and fresh. If that moment happened now, you’d have the memes within about three minutes and it would burn out within about an hour. Everyone would have gone through her Facebook within about ten minutes and the whole gossip cycle of what used to be played out over several days would happen in about an instant.�
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‘Nowadays, let’s say a story breaks, someone says something equivalent to Gillian Duffy. It takes realistically half an hour to an hour for a newspaper website to get an initial take live. Just to check a few facts, make sure that their transcript is correct, all the rest. By that point someone will have tweeted it out, lots of people will watch the clip direct, the public will be making the jokes, and often in many cases digging on the woman themselves. Essentially the gossip has happened; it’s happening as the main story and often before the main story’s put out there. Half the time you learn what the news story is from the meme or the gossip, rather than from reading the original take.’
This often ends up blurring the line between news and gossip. Sometimes, what is (rightfully) seen as a piece of gossip gets shared around so much on social media that journalists feel the need to write about it, either to debunk it or simply to try and get some clicks. On the other hand, there might be a bona fide news story that becomes gossipy because the Twitterati decides to focus on one detail of the story, usually a colourful, salacious or personal one. It is also possible for anyone with reasonable access and no fear of getting sued to start their own account and spread whatever they want for whatever reason; some of UK politics Twitter’s most famous accounts are, like ‘General Boles’, entirely anonymous.
This makes journalists’ jobs harder: on the one hand, Twitter is a handy way to see exactly what people are talking about, what they care about and what they may want to read about; on the other, a lot of what happens on Twitter stays there, and cannot be translated into online traffic for their publication. Still, this is not to say that hacks have had no part to play in the corrosive effect Twitter has had on the political discourse. If everyone else can gossip, then so can they.
Lord Wood, the Labour peer and former special adviser, explains: ‘There’s a classic journalist device which is to say, “Rumours about X, there’s growing talk of X, hearing whispers that X,” and with Twitter, well …The other day I had a good journalist message me and say, “I’ve got a theory about this Labour thing and what’s going on there – have you got some evidence that this thing might be true?” And I said, “Not really, no,” and he replied, “Well, can you categorically rule out that it’s untrue, because if you can’t, I might think that’s enough to float it on Twitter and then get the trail going?” It’s an entrepreneurial approach to a story. Eventually, he did put it on Twitter and it was along the lines of “hearing that …”.’
As discussed earlier in the book, the technique of trying to float something because you suspect it to be true but can’t quite stand it up isn’t a new one, but it takes on new proportions if it happens on Twitter where everyone can see it instantly, as opposed to halfway down a column not everyone might read. Tweets can be retweeted, or forwarded privately to someone else in order to be secretly discussed. A rumour can start out one morning with one journalist trying to see if a flimsy bit of information might by any chance be true and end that evening with most people in Westminster broadly assuming that it must be true.
This usually happens because of a combination of WhatsApp and Twitter; someone might post a piece of gossip on a WhatsApp group, one of the MPs in it will screengrab it and pass it on to a journalist, the journalist will tweet that they’ve heard of something happening regarding that piece of information, the tweet will be copied and pasted into WhatsApp groups by people wanting to ask their friends and contacts if it is correct, and on goes the merry-go-round.
Unsurprisingly, some MPs have been known to abuse this system. Say you’re an MP who is somewhat influential but not a government minister or a party grandee, and you want to make your voice heard on the issue of the day. What do you do? Email or message a journalist directly? They might include one line of your quote deep down in a story if you’re lucky, but you are likely to get roundly ignored; you’re not that important, so what you think isn’t exactly headline news. Instead, then, how about posting a few paragraphs outlining your views in a WhatsApp group of, say, Conservative MPs? And after that, wouldn’t it be dreadful if you or one of your mates were to screengrab your comments and leak them to a journalist? That way, the story is no longer ‘MP thinks X’, but ‘Leaked messages from confidential MPs group reveal that MP thinks X’, and we all know which one sounds like the more exciting story. The secret, once again, is to make boring news sound like gossip; the important element here is not the opinion of the backbencher per se, but the fact that information that was (apparently) meant to be private was made public.
Still, times are changing fast and even at the time of writing, this practice has already become a bit outdated; the frisson has gone from this kind of story as it is reasonably easy to tell the difference between a managed leak and a truly unplanned one. Smarter MPs and advisers have also quickly learnt not to post anything too newsworthy in WhatsApp groups they know to be sieve-like, so we might be heading towards a new culture that is more like the old one; leaks still happen, but manufactured ones are frowned upon.
According to Labour MP Chris Leslie, ‘There are some very, very large WhatsApp groups, and as long as they’ve been administered and curated carefully, they should have completely leaked out, but they haven’t. And so my faith in humanity’s ability to keep gossip under wraps isn’t totally dead. But obviously, I’m not a gossip in the least, so I wouldn’t understand.’ (Debatable.)
Still, one journalist was more – somewhat cynically – positive about the rise of technology: ‘It’s made it a lot easier to leak things, because you no longer have to steal a document from your office and pass it in a brown paper envelope to a journalist or leave it in a photocopier somewhere, you can just take a picture of it and whack it over. From my point of view, it’s been a great thing; whether the good governance of the nation has been advanced by it is a slightly different question.’
Another thing social media platforms have been instrumental in is making the set pieces of Westminster even more momentous than they already were. Take, for example, an event that happens every other year, involves a whole lot of power changing hands, shadowy figures in a locked room deciding where the power needs to go, and everyone else trying to guess what is about to happen to show just how in the loop they really are …
IN & OUT
‘Colleagues walking around Westminster staring at phones. Not sure if they’re waiting for “the call” or trying to catch Pokémon,’ tweeted MP James Cleverly in July 2016, at the height of the Pokémon Go craze. The context for the quip was that Theresa May had just become the new prime minister and had to do what everyone does once they get into No 10: a ministerial reshuffle. These both happen when a new PM comes in and when a PM has been in power for long enough to need some fresh faces to join their government. The principle is straightforward enough – promote the good people, demote the bad ones, sack the very bad ones – but the reality of it is far more complex.
In fact, if you look at it from the outside, the reasoning behind most reshuffles is unclear at best. MPs rarely get to head departments where they have prior experience either from their life before Parliament or their backbench careers, and it is entirely possible for someone to be expected to know everything about culture then suddenly to know everything about health instead. Some MPs are seemingly plucked out of nowhere and their appointments lead to journalists having to sneakily run to Wikipedia before offering any wisdom, and others have to remain ‘rising stars’ for years before finally making it onto the front bench.
This is because there are many things to take into account in a reshuffle. There is the current position of the Prime Minister (or Leader of the Opposition) and why they’re having a reshuffle in the first place. So, are they in full control of their backbenches or do they need to quell potential rebellions? Which groups have been causing them trouble recently? How long have they been prime minister for? Is there new blood getting restless on the backbenches? How are they doing in the polls? Do they need to show that they’ve listened to th
e public and decided to change course, or do they want to solidify their existing agenda? What policy area have they been doing well in and which ones do they need to do more in?
Then there are the MPs themselves. Is a junior minister doing well enough that they should be promoted? What sort of ‘well’ are we talking about here – have they been modernising mavericks or a safe pair of hands, and which one does that department and government need right now? Have they been involved in ministerial infighting with their colleagues? If so, was it on the side of the PM or on the other side? If not, what do they really think of the PM? Do they have leadership ambitions? Are they close to someone with leadership ambitions who might have promised them a better job in their administration? If so, would promoting them quench that thirst for a more important job or would it give more power to someone determined to get their own candidate in the top spot? What is their relationship like with the backbenches, and what do the backbenches make of them? Are they popular with party members? What are their personal politics? Are they driven by a sense of duty, devotion to an ideological agenda, a bit of both? Once they are in a department, will they be a big ideas person or a wonkish technocrat? Are they a good media performer? Can they be relied on to defend the government line on Newsnight or the Today programme if needed?
And you cannot forget about the personal stuff, of course. So, how do they treat their civil servants if they are already a minister? Do they play well with other departments when it comes to policy? What is their relationship like with political journalists? Are they trusted to not leak at all or strategically leak or are they a sieve? Do journalists like them or will they be waiting for them to trip? Do they have an alcohol problem? A drugs problem? A sex problem? A bullying problem? Are they currently doing anything that could turn into bad headlines for the government? Have they ever done anything bad enough that they could now turn into bad headlines for the government? And on and on and on.
Haven't You Heard Page 19
