Haven't You Heard

by Marie Le Conte

  ‘I never thought that Guido and us were doing the same thing at all,’ says Adam Macqueen of Private Eye. ‘Because Guido stuff is entirely bubble stuff. I mean, it’s genuinely like, what spad has been appointed? And you read it and you think, so what? I don’t know this person. Unless you’re telling me what the significance of this is. It’s deliberately written for insiders. If you know these people it’s really, really fascinating.’

  Another thing is that it arrived at precisely the right time; by the early and mid noughties, the internet was revolutionising the way the media functioned, but newspapers were slow on the uptake. Some thought digital media would only be a fad, or that physical newspapers would always be the way to go, and others didn’t want to dedicate proper resources to something they didn’t really understand, and which was in a constant state of flux. Still, technology soon meant that stories no longer had to be printed on paper or included in news bulletins to reach readers, and that news frenzy promptly reached Westminster.

  Guido got there early, and aimed to be publishing a steady stream of pieces of gossip throughout the day, every weekday. There was no Twitter at the time, so people in the bubble couldn’t just sit at their desk and endlessly scroll whenever they wanted to avoid working. Instead, they would be refreshing the Guido website every few hours, both hoping and fearing that a new morsel had come out. This created a paranoid atmosphere among those who could plausibly be written about by the website, which was pretty much everyone. Because it was so unashamedly insidery, Guido could get away with publishing stories about minor aides or junior journalists as long as they were fun or damaging enough. There is no straight answer to this, but it is worth wondering what effect this had on the behaviour of people in SW1, and whether it turned out to be accidentally positive. If you knew that there was a new outlet in town who would gleefully report on any questionable actions from anyone in your world, would that make you think twice before doing something you probably shouldn’t? Its continued existence shows that it clearly could never make everyone in Westminster suddenly start behaving impeccably, and there is no real way to measure a potential shift anyway, but some signs are there.

  For a start, one former Guido employee points out that they used to love running stories about MPs claiming very small expenses, with classics including Stephen Hammond’s £4.50 for mileage when going to Remembrance services and Jim Murphy’s two cans of IRN-BRU for £1.30. Over the past few years, however, this stream of stories has stopped, because MPs no longer send in ridiculously small expenses claims for things they really should pay for themselves. ‘The thing about Guido is, no story is too small for Guido,’ says someone who used to work there. ‘If it’s the tiniest, tiniest little hypocrisy, we will run it. As a funny sort of, just pointing out this double standard, in a way that no other news organisation would. That’s the thing that some politicians don’t like, because they’ll say, “Oh, for goodness’ sake, is this really a story? You’re just saying everyone’s awful, you’re just corroding the public view.” Well, I take the view that there is no story too small. If a politician has done something that is two-faced, even if it’s on the most minor issue that doesn’t affect anyone, it shows something about their character that voters should know about.’

  This is all fair, but does paint Guido in a rather flattering light; a lot of the time, this explanation stands, but the website will also happily publish small, petty stories just because it wants to. Its view, after all, is that politicians are all out for themselves, few of them have any redeeming qualities, and the ones who are seemingly squeaky clean only appear so because they’ve not been caught yet. ‘I have colleagues of whom I am enormously fond, and some of the best lobby correspondents out there, and one of the things a lot of them have in common is they always believe the worst about everyone,’ says Rob Hutton. ‘So there’s the Guido view, which is that everyone is always absolutely awful and everyone gives into their worst instincts at all times. So there is no possibility of a man and a woman going on an overnight trip without shagging, that’s the Guido view; there is just no way in which that happens.’

  Lord Livermore goes even further: ‘It’s the descent into a view of the world where every politician is on the take, automatically; that you can’t trust a single politician. Obviously trust in politicians is at a historic low, but you know, “They’re all cheats, they’re all liars, they’re all on the make and our job is to try and prove that.” That I think is so corrosive of democracy. I’ve been lucky with the type of people I’ve worked with in politics, I’m sure, but the people I’ve worked with genuinely come into politics for the right reasons, genuinely want to make Britain better, want to do their very best, believe things deeply and passionately and want to put those beliefs into practice. I’m sure there are some politicians who come in for less noble reasons, because in any walk of life you get good people and bad people, but that sort of cynical agenda, that they’re all bastards, is, I think, really unhealthy, and really worrying.’

  If you see the world through that lens and your goal is to prove that the entirety of Westminster is rotten at its core, then publishing any negative thing, minor or major and about someone senior or junior, becomes a no-brainer. What remains surprising is that everyone else played along for so long. After all, it is not in most political people’s interest to consistently make politics look even worse than it is, but short-term personal gains are easy to put above long-term structural pains. The partial dysfunctionality of Westminster is also to blame. As we have seen throughout this book, SW1 is a messy place full of incomprehensible conventions, informal networks filling in for the lack of formal processes, and chains of events linked more to the personality of the people involved than anything else.

  In this context, it is not hard to see why people might feel the need to leak, even to a website they find distasteful. As spinner Malcolm Tucker puts it in one of the later episodes of The Thick of It, ‘If a government can’t leak, do you know what happens? Dark shit builds up, and it bursts.’ And yes, sure, people could just go to newspapers instead but it isn’t quite the same; most papers will put their own slant on a certain story, but lobby journalists are more likely to – shock, horror – seek a proper response from each side involved before publishing anything. It is not hard to find out which hacks are friendly with which factions, thus potentially outing you, and they might just decide that your story is too toxic or transparently vindictive to be printed. For the most part, Guido Fawkes doesn’t have such qualms.

  According to a former Guido employee, ‘The birth of the brand and becoming the brand was all to do with that, kind of, dish the dirt on everyone, anarchic, freewheeling approach, and obviously that does put people off you. It’s always the trade-off, isn’t it? Who are you serving? Are you serving your readers or are you serving your sources? That is the classic dilemma. And I think that on some days, to be frank, you could look at certain bits of the output and think, that serves sources more than it serves readers.’ Given the primary readership of the website, this isn’t always a bad thing; more than what a story is, what matters as well is the fact that a certain story was given to Guido at all, so even the most pointless and vicious of briefings can be of interest.

  Still, what is so interesting about Guido Fawkes isn’t just its rise, its fall can tell us a lot about the way Westminster works. How do we define its ‘fall’? It isn’t easy, but one metric is the fear it inspires, or doesn’t. Ask people in Westminster how scary they find the idea of getting Guidoed and you will come across a certain generational divide. While most of those who were around before roughly 2014 or 2015 have first- or second-hand experience of either having their career ruined or dented by them, or seeing one of their friends go through it, more recent additions to SW1 are less likely to experience that clawing fear of being named by the website. They are also less likely to viscerally hate it. Talk to MPs and aides who were around in the first five or so years of Guido and you will see a fair few of them snarl. ‘I
was working for the Party when blogs first came on the scene, and particularly Guido, and that became a real thing,’ says a former Labour staffer. ‘Everyone started reading Guido, because they would print stuff that the newspapers wouldn’t, and everybody became a bit obsessed with who was going to be in Guido next. And in a way I don’t think they are any more, it seems to have moved on a bit.’

  There are several reasons for this. The first is timing; Guido could only be the one fast-paced Westminster-based outlet for so long, and it eventually found some hefty competition in other blogs and, more importantly, Twitter. This is what the Guardian’s Jim Waterson had to say on the topic: ‘When we started BuzzFeed Politics in late 2013, we were at that point largely focused on doing elevated gossip, so it was all, you know, 11 weirdest tweets from MPs, or this Tory MP just put a picture of him hugging a dog on Facebook. And it was almost like we were taking short diary column stuff and doing it in-depth, and it was funny because we were treating it with reverence and all that.

  ‘For about a year or so that did enormous traffic and people thought it was really fun, because the thing that they previously struggled to get in as a diary piece somewhere was suddenly a thousand words with loads of pictures told in a fun way on BuzzFeed. And then in about 18 months we noticed traffic dropping, because basically it had all transferred to Twitter. The cute picture of the dog wasn’t waiting to go in a publication, it was just being tweeted about by some intern who realised they could get a bit of a following. And then it becomes competitive because the weird picture of Michael Gove doing something strange becomes bigger than you think, and everything becomes a meme within seconds.’

  BuzzFeed and Guido Fawkes might not be very similar publications at first glance, but this analysis works for the two outlets. They built an editorial strategy out of publishing things no one else would publish (both because they were too small or niche, the former because they were too weird, and the latter because they were too controversial), then Twitter came in and ruined it all. In order for Guido to remain an ever-present threat, it needed all the space it could have; as soon as people found something else to anxiously refresh all day long, it instantly lost some of its power. The other explanation behind its decline has to do with Westminster, and what it does to people. It never could have been enough for Guido to sit back and wait for the tips to pour in; otherwise, Paul Staines never would have needed to have any staff working for him. Like any other kind of political reporter, Guido had to become a part of Westminster in order to cover it as well as it wanted to, and that slowly destroyed it. The famous example given by those seeking to show that the once-rebel organisation had become a part of the establishment is that when Guido organised a party for its tenth anniversary, the bash was attended by many senior politicians, and David Cameron himself recorded a birthday message. Another one could be that when Harry Cole left for the Sun, the advert to replace him involved a line about the potential new reporter having the opportunity to wake up sloshed on the sofa of a minister’s office if they played their cards right.

  ‘I don’t think Guido would pretend not to be part of the mainstream media,’ says one person who used to work there. ‘Paul very much still has a view that pretty much all politicians are bad, but Guido has been part of the mainstream for a very long time now, I don’t think it is an outsider. Our office is near Westminster, we go to the pubs of Westminster every night, and it wouldn’t work if we didn’t do that.’

  This is fair enough, but if there is one thing about Westminster it is that you cannot be in it and not of it. You can hate politicians all you want, but if you spend enough time around SW1, you will end up making friends and enemies like everyone else. Once that starts happening, it will be obvious to those who know where to look; stories will suddenly start coming from some quarters more than others, or will be spun in a way that slowly becomes predictable. Another thing that happens when you go mainstream is that you will start being seen as not just a conduit for mischief, but a good place to get something out if you want it seen by everyone in the bubble.

  Like indie bands deciding to sign to a major label and losing their edge along the way, this can have its downsides. The dynamics of everyone dishing dirt on everyone else is different from party structures getting involved, and once that starts happening, there is no going back. After all, Guido Fawkes has lost some of its gratuitous viciousness over the years, but it fundamentally remains a gossipy political blog. It being used strategically by parties to attack others has made some uneasy. ‘What I don’t think is legit is a big press operation using Guido as one of their main story outlets,’ says one person who used to work at the Conservative Party headquarters. ‘You’ve got a team of people writing up stories, digging on people, getting good stuff that ends up on a blog, and you get a half-arsed write-up that then disappears when the next story comes on. It gets put down the list. You should be reserving this; putting it in a war book, ready for the next election, or putting it in real papers and getting real hits out of it. It’s losing its impact, and stories are losing their impact. There hasn’t actually been a juicy cock-up story recently that’s got a lot of traction that’s come out of Guido. This should come out of the actual papers.’

  Once the line starts to get blurry between the lobby and the blogs around it, both can suffer. On the one hand, Guido getting involved in the big, serious news stories of the day instead of keeping it short and salacious makes it lose some of its purpose. After all, no one goes to Guido Fawkes to get a run down of that day’s news agenda. On the other, the bar for what is and isn’t a story can shift, and suddenly the political discourse starts to get that bit more lowbrow. Paul Staines might not have been responsible for the human nature of people working in Westminster, but by providing a space where people could be their pettiest, nosiest selves, he opened Pandora’s box. ‘I do think there’s a Guidoisation of politics,’ says one Labour peer. ‘To take a really topical example, I read The Times Red Box email every morning, and this morning it started with – it actually shocked me and maybe this is ridiculously naive – “MPs are on holiday, the House has risen, anyone who spots an MP on holiday, please take a photo, please email it in. Please let us know if anyone’s been upgraded to business class on their flight, let us know what hotels they’re staying in.” And I just think it’s terrible, it’s so wrong, and yet that is The Times, in an email that I respect, a newspaper I respect. It so fundamentally crosses a line.’

  This comes back to our earlier conundrum of what is news and what isn’t, but also asks another question: how much personal life should politicians be allowed? Journalists, especially on tabloids, have always pushed that line a bit too far, but always at least pretended to care only because the personal lives of MPs had an influence on their professional ones. One magnificent example of this comes from The People who, in 1992, bugged the house of the mistress of minister David Mellor to catch them in the act. In order to justify that invasion of privacy, then-editor Bill Hagerty explained: ‘Mellor has complained he’s been unable to write speeches because he’s too tired. Now we know why; Mr Mellor’s love life has interfered with his effectiveness as a cabinet minister – and that’s a matter of legitimate public interest.’

  This justification is about as shameless as it gets, but at least it felt necessary; affairs have stopped being the scandal of choice for the political press, but other personal matters can now be covered with fewer qualms. According to one former Guido hack, ‘Politicians do make a large amount of their private lives public by default, when they become politicians. They are volunteers; nobody makes them do this. They get a lot of power and influence from doing so, relative to the average person.’ As a result, a lot of what they do and say is fair game, even if it was not said or done in the public eye.*

  Still, Guido’s success became its downfall. Like diary columns before it, its influence meant that what made it special could suddenly be found nearly everywhere else. As one Guido alumnus puts it, ‘I don’t think there
is actually that much difference between Guido-style reporting and lobby reporting. You will see a lot of political news stories in newspapers that are single-sourced, or worse than that, that are untrue and are just run with the denial at the end. So for example you will see lots of political news stories where an assertion is made in the top line of the story, “X is happening”. There’ll be three paragraphs of filler. And then at the bottom a spokesman for the politician will say, “This is completely untrue.” The threshold for what is a story, and how much evidence or proof of how true the story needs to be, there’s not much difference between lobby and Guido.’

  On top of this, one thing happened which meant that Guido’s position was always going to be unsustainable: Brexit. While the website always managed to broadly remain open to all sorts of factional infighting despite liking the Conservatives more than it liked the Labour Party, the referendum made it pick a side, and pick it for good. Once that happened, Guido’s mischievous lightness disappeared and became pointed gossip with a purpose, which automatically is less fun. Like Popbitch, people sent information to Guido Fawkes because they knew that the blog would gleefully tarnish the reputation of anyone in Westminster. Lose that, and you lose the impetus people had to go to Guido with their rumours, as opposed to other outlets.

  It is impossible to say whether Guido will pick up again once the wounds from the referendum start healing in Westminster and the country, or if this state of affairs is permanent; at the time of writing, things do not look good for the website that once dreamt of blowing everything up. Maybe it was always meant to be ephemeral; stuck forever in those few years after the internet started to democratise gossip, but before everyone realised what else the internet could do to secrets hidden in a bubble.

  BURSTING BUBBLES AND THE DEATH OF CONTEXT