This is a bit of an extreme example, but also the reason why it is good for civil servants to develop a good network of contacts beyond Whitehall. If a lot of your job is going to rely on informal pieces of information you get from your personal contacts, then it does seem judicious to have as large a network as possible. According to a former permanent secretary, ‘There are some networks which I find useful for gossip purposes, for the informal information. One is the private office network as all the ministers’ private secretaries across Whitehall have quite a strong network and clique. The other is parliamentary clerks, and sometimes it’s quite smart for civil servants to form a relationship with a government whip. It’s a bit unusual because they don’t generally do a government brief, but if you’re really trying to make the department aligned to what ministers are trying to do, you need to rope in the special advisers, need to rope in the whips, and you can’t be too fussy about whose side of the line you’re on. You’ve got to form these quasi-political relationships, and it’s quite a grown-up thing to do and requires a bit of judgement.’
This is because politics is about, well, politics: a policy can be as good as it gets in the technocrat world but if the optics of it are uncomfortable to the party leadership, or it is for whatever reason unpalatable to the backbenches, it won’t be going far. It might not be the job of civil servants to come up with policies that satisfy all the internal politics of the main party in the House of Commons, but policies that do not are likely to turn into one gigantic waste of time, which is useful to precisely no one. That logic also works for keeping an eye on who gets along with whom in the government, and how much they can be made to work together. A lot of policy work needs pitching from several areas of Whitehall, but the formal structures aren’t always there to ensure that this can always happen without a hitch. As a result, the personal relationships of ministers can have a tremendous influence on civil servants’ abilities to get on with their jobs.
‘So much of it is based on how those ministers worked together,’ says Nicole Valentinuzzi from the Institute for Government. ‘When I worked at the Ministry of Justice, Jack Straw worked really well with the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, and there were a lot of cross-departmental policies. When they had meetings together, they could come out with something and both private offices would be saying, “Okay, this is all pretty good, we can send this to write-round.” Whereas after a meeting with two Secretaries of State who didn’t get along as easily, the private secretaries would come out after and be saying, “Well, actually, that’s not my interpretation of what was agreed.” So much is based on the relationship between these people, rather than any kind of rationality.’
On top of all of this, the civil service itself is not one gigantic blob with everyone peacefully agreeing with everyone else all the time. It has internal strife, power battles, personality clashes and needs effort to remain as functional as possible.
Cross-departmental plotting and cooperation happens at a number of levels: there are the informal drinks and gossip networks we mapped out at the beginning and the private offices network, but coordination also happens at a higher level. The Wednesday morning meeting, where departments’ permanent secretaries and the Cabinet Secretary gather, is the stuff of legends. Because nothing ever really leaks from it, it has become the obsession of various political operatives throughout the years, who end up convincing themselves that it is the ‘real Cabinet meeting’, and the place the country really is run from. Even ministers have fallen into that paranoia, with David Cameron sending one of his secretaries of state to spy on the civil servants during the coalition.
A former permanent secretary recalls: ‘Michael Gove, when he was Chief Whip during Francis Maude’s reign of terror, inserted himself in the Wednesday morning meetings. So he would come every other week and we couldn’t exactly exclude him, because he got permission from the Prime Minister, but it was deeply, deeply awkward. He would sit there next to Jeremy Heywood, writing a longhand note, and he wouldn’t say a word in the meeting, but occasionally he would say, “Very interesting.” And I would say afterwards, “How did you find it, Michael?” “Very interesting. Very interesting.” God knows what he was doing with his notes but he was clearly writing it like he was the Cabinet … “Thank you very much. Very nice.”’
That still does not answer our question: What really happens there? Here is what two people who used to attend them had to say: ‘There’s usually a slightly fumbling, not very good presentation from someone on something, which is their time to shine in the sun. Sometimes they’re good, sometimes they’re not so good. Sometimes we get a really good lively conversation, sometimes there’s a feeling that the real action’s happening outside the room. The Cabinet Secretary generally constructs an agenda, it’s pretty informal, it’s usually constructed two days before. There are two or three items of business, but we do have some pretty frank conversations about security, for example, or how the Prime Minister is feeling at the moment in case you get something from No 10.
‘Then we get a sense of how the civil service is doing corporally, so rotation, whether it’s trusted, whether some things have happened which have undermined us or supported us or professionally reflected well on us or otherwise. Do we still have significance and presence? Are we still in the room? Are we still players? It’s a bit of self-help. Civil servants don’t have many defenders so we defend each other quite a lot.’
The other puts it more succinctly: ‘There is a lot of gossip around the Wednesday morning meeting, just as I imagine there is; in the margins of Cabinet. Do you know why so few things leak from it? Because it’s so boring. During my years, very rarely was there a very interesting discussion in the Wednesday morning meeting.’
There is no doubt that they’re being somewhat facetious, but there is an interesting dynamic at play here. Cabinet meetings usually leak a bit or like a sieve depending on the administration and its current state, but Wednesday morning meetings rarely do; 1922 Committee meetings often leak, but meetings of the 1922 Committee’s executive (almost) never do. There are things in Westminster which will always come out, and others which won’t. As with everything else, these rules aren’t set formally, but they do exist. At a more personal level too, there are things it is socially acceptable to gossip about and others that will reflect badly on you. We’ve now spent a lot of time discussing what people talk about; let’s take a look at what they don’t.
WHAT WE DON’T TALK ABOUT
Gossip spreads in Westminster and elsewhere because people are told about something, then decide to tell other people about it, who will then tell others, ad nauseam. There has been academic work on why people decide to pass on information, but not about the situations in which they decide not to. This must have happened to you too; someone once told you something and you decided that, on balance, you probably shouldn’t tell anyone else. Why was that? Let’s assume that it wasn’t because the something in question was simply very dull, because that would make your decision pretty self-explanatory.
Maybe you didn’t say anything because the person made you swear not to tell anyone else, and you didn’t want to betray their trust. This is a straightforward reason, and an honourable one. It is, by definition, impossible to know how much of it exists in politics, but there is one example of someone just keeping their mouth shut because he felt he had to: Tony Newton. ‘One of the massive pieces of gossip of our time was John Major shagging Edwina Currie, which was a genuinely clandestine secret,’ says The Times diary editor Patrick Kidd. ‘The only person who was confided in was Tony Newton, who was the MP for Braintree. He’d been in the same social security ministerial teams as both Major and Currie, and was trusted by them as a confidant, and he didn’t blag. After it came out, he just said, “Well, they told me not to say anything about it, so I didn’t.” Didn’t even gossip about it.’*
Though it is possible that you really are the sort of person to take trust so seriously that you would keep shtum about som
ething if asked to, there are other reasons why you might decide not to repeat a piece of gossip. Say, for example, that your boss confided in you about something one of your colleagues did, and which none of the people at your level could have known about. The temptation to share that piece of information with your office friends will be there, but it has to be counterbalanced with the fact that it might then spread and eventually get back to your boss, which would guarantee that said boss would never confide in you again. On the one hand, you can enhance your status with your peers by handing them information that they do not have access to; on the other, doing this might mean shutting off your supply of privileged information, as well as wider consequences. Which one would you choose? Risky short-term gain or potential long-term gain?
Unless you’re decidedly Manichean, chances are that your answer will be: ‘It depends.’ This comes back to our journalists explaining that there are no definitive rules on what should and shouldn’t be published. If, for example, an MP who is an excellent, high-level source does one slightly silly thing once, it might not be worth publishing a hit job on them and losing that relationship. This logic works away from the media as well. Lobbyist Andy Williams explains this well: ‘Most people who work in politics are narcissists to some degree, and that includes people in public affairs, because they want to feel like they’re more in the game than they are, and they want to look like they’re more in the thick of things than they are. There’s a constant judgement call going on, which is: where does this friend of mine fit in, and are they a good enough friend that I’m prepared to keep what they said quiet? Or actually are the chances that it’s never going to come back to me, so I don’t mind telling someone? If it gets into the public domain they probably won’t find out. But there’s also something about power relationships. When it comes to gossip, often someone really well known or senior or in the know might tell someone more junior something, and they just don’t expect you ever to say anything. Because they think, well, why would you sell me out? Because I’m more useful to you than you are to me.’
This makes sense: if gossip is used as currency in Westminster, then people must be careful about whom they use it with and how much of it they use, especially if they want to go far in their given field. As Catherine Haddon from the Institute for Government puts it: ‘One of the things to prove you are important and have influence is whether or not you’re in the know. So being in the know, being in the room, being in the email chain, all of that kind of stuff, is part of your domain, your power. But the interesting thing is gossip, like other forms of information, is one of those things where you have its power as long as you know it and somebody else doesn’t. So, as soon as you tell them about it, you’re showing off your power, but you’re also losing it, because then more and more people know.’
The other point made by Williams is also interesting: whom you’re telling something to matters just as much as who told you the something and what the something is. Relationships in Westminster are fundamentally transactional, so there is little point in just sharing a piece of explosive gossip with someone if you know that they will never be able to reciprocate or return the favour in some other way.*
There are also more concrete reasons why you might want to keep your mouth shut when you learn of something juicy that would piss people off if it were to get around. Sure, you can decide not to spread the rumour because you fear it may come back to bite you in the arse at some point in the future, or because you’ve decided that your relationship of trust with the person who told you in the first place is too important to be broken, but it might also be about the future of your career. As we saw a few chapters ago, the role of spinners is not only to make sure that good stories end up in the papers, but also that bad stories never see the light of day. To do this, they can ‘not quite lie but slightly mislead’ journalists, make sure they know where the bodies are buried in advance, but they can also just threaten the journalists. It’s a risky tactic, and it can only work if you have the clout to pull it off, but it is a tactic nonetheless.
As the former press secretary to Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown during the New Labour years, Miranda Green has opinions on the topic: ‘At the time I was doing that job, Alastair Campbell was my opposite number,’ she says. ‘Can you imagine? It was absolutely hilarious. I was 28 years old and all of the tricks that he could use to just shut people up … I mean, I had no power. I mean, what political editor would have wept if I had threatened to throw them into the deep freeze and cut them out from Lib Dem briefings? It’s laughable, right? Whereas he could exert control by excluding people. And that’s what they did, Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson; their system was not just favoured journalists to give the stories to, but also, you know, you piss us off, we won’t give you the info for a while until you’re really scared that it’s drying up. I couldn’t do any of that. So what you can do to control rumour and gossip depends on your pecking order in the Westminster hierarchy.’
This is a way in which politics differs from the real world: though it would be generally ill-advised to spread gossip about one of your superiors at work, there generally will not be formal ways in which that superior will be able to strike back and make your working life worse. They might try to make sure you don’t get a promotion, or remain stuck with dull projects, but anything genuinely serious could end up with HR on your side. If, on the other hand, the head of comms of a political party suddenly decides that you won’t get access to off-the-record briefings for a few weeks because you printed something they wanted to remain secret, there’s not much you can do about it. The threat is also quantified in a way that it might not be in a workplace outside of SW1: while there’s no guessing how a manager might react if you tell everyone in the office that you saw them drunkenly kiss a woman who was not their wife, it’s a pretty safe bet to assume that, say, you’ll suddenly have a hard time booking ministers on your current affairs TV show if you pissed off the No 10 broadcast team with a story about how dysfunctional it is.
That being said, there is other reason why you might decide to keep a rumour to yourself which is altogether more universal: you like the person that rumour is about. This works on two levels: the first one is that it is not in your interest to, for example, tell several of your colleagues that your office best friend cheated on her boyfriend at the Christmas party. She is, after all, your office best friend, and unless you’re a sociopath, you probably do not want everyone to find out about the mistake she made. The second one is that you are more likely to take a kinder view of the problematic things those close to you have done. Take that cheating example: if the drunk cheater is someone you dislike already, you will probably take the sloshed snogging as extra evidence that that person is untrustworthy and/or a mess, depending on why you dislike her. If, however, she happens to be a close friend of yours, you will be more likely to find extenuating circumstances; she really was very drunk, he leapt on her, her boyfriend is awful anyway, etc. Seen from that angle, the story immediately becomes less juicy, and there is less urgency to share it with everyone you know.
This happens in Westminster as well. Here is how a senior political journalist puts it: ‘The relationship with a source can definitely be corrupting. We like someone, therefore we are reluctant to believe bad things about them. I mean clearly, interestingly, no one seems to like Andrew Griffiths very much, that’s what you learnt when that sexting story came out. But I think that if it turned out a popular MP was having an affair, you’d find everyone was much more understanding. Because we wouldn’t want to believe it, we’re all fond of him, we don’t want to believe wicked things about him, even in the face of obvious evidence of it. And that’s hugely problematic in a way.’
Finally, there is one other reason why something might not spread: it is too bleak, too personal, or a mix of both. There is one story that illustrates this perfectly, and relates to something tragic that happened to someone who is very close to a person who was a very senior politician at the
time. That event definitely was news, as it was something big which would have deeply touched the politician, who in turn was running the country. The whole lobby knew about it; most political journalists who weren’t around at the time now know about it. Still, it never made any of the papers. This is how it went down, according to one lobby hack who was there: ‘That happened more or less the week I joined the lobby, and I found myself in this weird situation where I didn’t even have a parliamentary pass, so I couldn’t get into the building. And this was a major moment, and what the hell are we supposed to do? And I only had it as gossip. And I basically just sat there and I said, “Well, okay, we’ll see if it’s in the Sunday papers.” We won’t be first with it, but we had to have it, because the feeling was that this might prompt [that politician] to resign. And this very strange thing happened, and I felt it was absolutely right not to run it. At every level it was right not to run it, and the most amazing thing is that that held. And that was still an internet age. So you could find things out about it, and if you Google the right words, you’ll probably find it.’
This book is not the right place to reveal what happened; the judgement of political journalists is not always the correct one, but they were right on this. It is also not the only occurrence of this kind; sometimes, the graveness of a story is more important than the story itself, and though it could be shared around the bubble and with the public outside of it, it isn’t.
Haven't You Heard Page 24
