Abstract
Political reporting was not always so vicious, says a journalist at the heart of Westminster
Reading Power Trip, Damian McBride's rip-roaring, startlingly self-lacerating memoir of life with Westminster's pack of lobby journalists, set me thinking in new ways about the 30 years of my working life that I have spent there. Were we all spoon-fed, manipulated and cajoled by successive government press operations? Or was it the other way around? Was I naïve about the scale of complicity between the two warring sides? I don't think so, but in the relative calm of the coalition era (Andrew Mitchell MP might dispute that description) some young lobby colleagues are pretty scornful of what went before.
Shortly after Tony Blair succeeded John Smith as Labour leader in 1994, we spoke on the phone. I lack McBride's power of total recall, even though (unlike him) I was probably sober at the time. But as the immediate topic of conversation came to an end, Blair said something along the lines of, “We should see more of each other to talk things over, Mike”. My answer must have sounded more than usually priggish to his pious but pragmatic ear. “My instinct is to keep our distance, Tony. I've seen it done your way and it usually ends in tears.”
At the time I was political editor of The Guardian (1990–2006) and still wonder whether it was the right answer or simply reflected my intimacy-resistant personality. My much-loved predecessor, Ian Aitken (1975–90), was a veteran, Bevanite left-winger, more friendly with Harold Wilson (the prime minister came and sat on his hospital bed when Ian lost an eye to cancer) than with Roy Jenkins, Jim Callaghan or his Oxford contemporary and dishevelled pin-up, Shirley Williams. He tried to be kind but fair to them all.
Aitken was also an intimate of Michael Foot. It did not stop him being hard on Foot when circumstances required it during his brief leadership (they often did) or resisting the great Swiftian polemicist's pleas that Aitken should stop trying to find out which MP said what during weekly meetings of the Parliamentary Labour Party because they're private, Ian. Jim Callaghan, the first incumbent PM I met, had mellowed in office, although Denis Healey once called me “an ignorant bugger” for failing to spot a literary reference he had made in French. That must be why so many Labour MPs refused to vote for you, Denis, I mused, albeit quietly. I would do so noisily now.
Neil Kinnock suffered
John Smith was too self-assured a Glasgow criminal lawyer to care much about the press (“That was a load of rubbish you wrote about me today, laddie” would be the end of it) or about the fiscal sensibilities of Middle England voters either, a more serious failing. But Neil Kinnock suffered under Fleet Street's relentless lash and cared a lot. He wanted his old carousing chums in the press gallery bar to compensate, which was not our job. Working in distant Washington for much of his tenure I could still hear the mutual recrimination and tears. Keep your distance, I concluded.
The Tories expected less from The Guardian, which made it easier: few favours but fewer hard feelings. As a former Daily Express man (leftie scribes like Foot, Bob Edwards and Aitken found it as hard to resist Lord Beaverbrook's mischievous charm as Nye Bevan had), Aitken drank with plenty of Tories too. On top of all his well-documented faults (stubborn, wooden, technocratic) Ted Heath was tricky for him because Europe was a deeper divide than mere party and Aitken was a Beaverbrookian anti. Margaret Thatcher fascinated left-wingers because she was a fellow ideologue who attended Eric Heffer's memorial service. Besides, she was always great copy. As for Willie Whitelaw, he asked Aitken to write his biography (later published as Splendid, Splendid) because he trusted him to be fair.
That still seems to me to be the crux of the matter. “Hostile but fair” was how I was described on some Tory list, a friend at party HQ once told me. I am sure that Patrick Wintour, Aitken's and my successor (2006-) as a recipient of late-night calls from The Guardian's news desk, would happily accept the description from the Cameroons. All the familiar dilemmas remain the same in the 24/7 multimedia age, only much faster. Not so much time for long ministerial lunches nowadays, let alone two-bottle jobs (I last had one during one of Derry Irvine's rare charm offensives: he paid).
Nowadays the minister has an earnest deputation from Policy Exchange to field at 2.15pm and his/her host must file (again) for the website on the latest Liberal Democrat plan for taxing land values, one ear half-tuned to the live television feed from the chamber, the other to 24/7 rolling news.
By comparison, the old days in the lobby were like an Oxford senior common room crossed with a secretive Masonic lodge, leisurely and respectful, at least on the surface, though chicanery lurked just below it. As The Sunday Times political correspondent (the upgrade to political editor was a by-product of Labour pay policy in the 1970s, when you needed a promotion to evade the guidelines), the late James Margach, who had known Ramsay MacDonald in their Scots youth, was a model of discretion. But his candid memoirs, The Abuse of Power, revealed how No 10 constantly battled to (Lloyd George's phrase) “square or squash” the press.
Thus not long before my own first stint at Westminster (1976–84) Wilson had tried to get The Times ‘s David Wood fired for some slight. Not long before that Harold Macmillan had personally briefed Wood that he was planning to sack his faithful foreign secretary, Selwyn Lloyd. Wood wrote it up gently for his Monday column on non-attributable lobby terms (“One of these days Mr Macmillan will take Selwyn Lloyd by the arm and say ‘enough is enough’”). But it was a slow news day and his editor, the great Sir William Haley (1901–87), promoted it to be the lead, which then meant the top of page two, the front page still being reserved for small ads. Lloyd was at a “Big Three” negotiation in Geneva at the time and it caused a sensation. Wood was disowned by No 10 and denounced by pompous colleagues (“He's only been in the lobby 15 years”), while Lloyd survived for a bit longer.
Ah, happy days.
In 1963 Expressman Aitken got the scoop that John Profumo was going to resign for deceiving Macmillan and the Commons about his affair with Christine Keeler. Macmillan's team had been complacent because it had panicked over false allegations linking the Admiralty spy, John Vassall, to a junior minister, Tam Galbraith (father of the present Lord Strathclyde). Two journalists, Reg Foster and Brendan Mulholland, were jailed for refusing to divulge their sources (did they have any? ask some) to the inquiry. That controversy fizzles to this day, not least because it allows opponents of effective press regulation to say, “Look what those politicians and judges will do to us if they get the chance”.
But it also serves to underline that some scandals, sexual as well as financial (it is usually money or sex), did surface in the old closed shop era when parliament was not televised or easily accessed, and MPs who jumped the cafeteria queue were not immediately denounced on Twitter or in Guido Fawkes's blog. Less than it should have done all the same. The memoirs of Wilson aides Joe Haines (a press secretary who shut down the lobby briefings for a while) and Bernard Donoughue are pretty explosive in exposing the rackety chaos of the later Wilson years. Much of it was caused by the imperious demands of Marcia Williams, now Lady Falkender, the only peer never to have made a Lords speech. Fleet Street long failed to identify the father of her two sons (Private Eye broke the story), who turned out to be one of their own: the legendary lobbyman, Walter Terry. Unsurprisingly, Terry too had failed to trace the secret Lothario for his news desk.
Then there was drink. In his book, My Trade, the Presbyterian Andrew Marr paints a lurid picture of press gallery drunkenness and adultery which I don't quite recognise. Yes, there was both. I was challenged to Indian arm-wrestling on the terrace by a boozy Scottish National Party MP whom I'd only just met (“You don't like me, do you?”) and won 3-0, though he won the rematch on the carpet of the SNP whips’ office six months later. As Alan Watkins wrote, the SNP celebrated Hogmanay at least once a week then.
24/7 media have made us output slaves
In the age of prim, family-friendly hours the atmosphere at Westminster is very different now. Shortly after I counted 11 bottles of water and one of wine on the once-festive “lobby table” in the press gallery dining room the institution was discontinued: the demands of tech-driven 24/7 media have made us as much output slaves as those Dickensian shorthand writers tasked with making sense out of Gladstone's speeches for next morning's papers. Yet the newspaper offices and the gothic Palace of Westminster itself are often deserted by 8pm, a time when they were just getting into their stride a generation ago. Is the nation's business better conducted away from the declamatory drama of the chamber? Probably, though it often does not feel that way to me.
The bigger change is surely in the default assumption made by so many newspapers today and echoed by radio and TV, that the political class is not merely incompetent but venal, as Blair put it in one of his many valedictory speeches. So an ever-greater proportion of reporting from Westminster and Whitehall is negative in tone and content. “Why is this bastard lying to me?” is a healthy working principle in all forms of journalism (the lobby rarely wins the prize for craven or abusive conduct), but it has gone too far and produced destructive forms of counter-strategies from the political parties.
Which brings us back to McBride's Power Trip. In response to the savage beatings that the Murdoch press and the Daily Mail had given to Labour in the 1970s and 1980s, and the skilful pro-active briefings from curmudgeonly Bernard Ingham, Thatcher's improbable ex-Guardian press secretary, Alastair Campbell, himself a former Mirror political editor, worked hard to neutralise Fleet Street's hostility. He and Blair courted the enemy, Murdoch above all, and even the ayatollahs at the Mail. They lunched, they flattered, they leaked, and won a valuable breathing space.
Unwilling to play that sort of footsie with them (or Gordon Brown's rival operation run by Charlie Whelan), we sometimes felt isolated at The Guardian, as did some others. Rightly or wrongly, I preferred it that way, and when Campbell was overheard saying, “Don't give that story to The Guardian, they won't write it the way we want it,” the team wore it as a badge of honour. It sometimes left us one edition behind a rival and not all scoops were the product of client or chequebook journalism (a lazy excuse one uses to placate the news desk). But during New Labour's Fleet Street honeymoon Campbell once warned my colleague, Ewen MacAskill, that he'd tell Labour supporters to switch to The Times if we didn't behave better. “The Guardian? I prefer to read a Labour paper,” I once heard Blair tell a roomful of puzzled party activists in Luton.
The host MP for the Luton event, Margaret Moran, later helped police with their inquiries over fiddled expenses. Not the lobby's finest hour, the scandal was broken by investigative reporters using Blair's freedom of information laws and a bootlegged CD. The Telegraph handled its stolen goods brilliantly, albeit in a highly partisan way, without ever explaining to its readers that many MPs had officially been encouraged (by Lady T among others) to treat the money as allowances, not as out-of-pocket expenses. “You're not claiming enough,” they were told, a complaint I first encountered as a novice in Fleet Street more than 40 years ago. Journalists exposing expenses scams! What had the world come to?
But McBride's fiercely partisan energy and intelligence, given tacit free rein by the frustrated and insecure Brown, took the process to a level that made Campbell look like Cardinal Hume. He played the Whitehall news grid like an organist, anything to make Blair look power-mad and greedy, anything to make his hero Brown look good. On his own admission, he looted rival departments for stories he could use to keep his media clients happy with a stream of exclusives. True, false or merely expedient, it scarcely seemed to matter. Even in his current sort-of-repentant mood McBride's confessional work seems to have difficulty keeping the line straight for more than a few pages.
He saw himself as “embedded” inside the lobby on Brown's behalf, providing the stories, sometimes even writing them. I thought I knew most of what went on, but reading it surprised me. “Bev (Beverley Hughes) is done, we're all going after Blunkett – YES,” McBride once heard the pack cry. David Blunkett, Peter Mandelson (twice each), Ron Davies, Andrew Mitchell. In 2009 McBride himself fell to a similarly hypocritical feeding frenzy. It was awful, yet on a good day I still love the animal spirits of the lobby in full cry. With the help of an ambitious tax inspector, the late, much-loved Gordon Greig of the Mail polished off the ministerial career of Michael Mates after the Asil Nadir watch affair. But later that evening Mates could be seen buying Greig a drink.
Who could resist the charming Greig or the national serviceman's Brigade of Guards tie that he always wore (“Every little helps, darling”) on Thursdays when the backbench Tory 1922 committee met? One of the first lessons Aitken taught me in the lobby was, “If Gordon ever tries to share a story with you, watch out. It means he's not sure of it. If it goes wrong he can tell the desk ‘it was in The Guardian too”.” Caveat emptor – as reporters don't say often enough.