Abstract
The new Conservative government has been bringing in journalists to help it rule. A former ministerial adviser discusses his own Whitehall journey
The interview in the paint-peeling offices of the Wood Green job centre in north London after I lost my high-profile political job was cathartic. “What was your last employment?” inquired the clerk. “Special adviser to the Secretary of State for Education,” I answered, explaining that my boss had decided she was not up to the job and had resigned, consigning me to political suttee on the funeral pyre of her career.
“Well, we don't get many of you in here and I am pretty sure there are no equivalent jobs on offer,”.
I was not seeking a job or dole money but to maintain national insurance contributions that, at the age of 52, had suddenly taken on more importance. Less than two years after quitting as head of news at The Sunday Telegraph to be a mover and shaker in the New Labour revolution, I had joined the the unemployed.
The call telling me I had been resigned came from Downing Street, with a switchboard operator asking if I would speak to Alastair Campbell. I was on holiday in Spain when Estelle Morris, my boss, had popped into Number 10 and handed Tony Blair her resignation letter. Campbell said they had tried to persuade her to stay but Morris was adamant. His call was followed by scores more from political journalists asking me why she had quit. None of them quite believed that I had no idea and, until the call from Campbell, no inkling of her intentions.
My political antennae were obviously acute.
It had been Campbell, a close friend and old drinking pal, who paved the way for my debut in the political arena when I mused about moving on from the Telegraph. Under the indulgent editorship of Dominic Lawson I had almost free rein as news editor, but after 30 years as a reporter and news editor on various titles I had an itch to do something else.
Labour had just won the 2001 election and Morris was elevated from schools minister to secretary of state and Campbell said she needed a special adviser who knew the media. Most cabinet ministers have two advisers, one in a communications role and the other a policy wonk. There were a few hurdles to overcome. I was not a member of the Labour Party, having taken the view that journalists should not be members of any party, and both my children had been educated at public school, for which I had no regrets.
A news-neutered former journalist
The first was easily sorted out and after “confessing” to Morris about the schooling decision I was hired. In the week between my leaving Canary Wharf and moving to Westminster, Arab terrorists launched the 9/11 attack on America. I watched it all on television, kicking my heels, wanting to be involved but news neutered, a former journalist.
A month later I really knew I was on the other side after a fictitious story appeared on the front page of The Independent linking me with Jo Moore, a political adviser to the transport secretary, Stephen Byers, who had been sacked a few days earlier for sending the infamous memo on 9/11 saying it was a “good day to bury bad news”. The two bylined reporters, one of them a former colleague, claimed I had conspired with Moore to plant an untrue story in The Sunday Telegraph when I had been news editor.
I sent a friendly note to the editor, Simon Kelner, asking for a correction, as I had never met or talked to Moore and had no knowledge of the story, which had been published while I was on annual leave. It took two more letters, including a threat to sue, before the correction appeared – obviously not on the front page – but there was no answer as to why the story was not put to me before it appeared. The separation from my former career was complete.
I was not the first, and certainly not the last, to morph from journalism to politics, and the rate appears to be increasing. There have always been defections: some of the recent high-profile characters – Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, for instance – believing journalism schools them to exercise power; others, me included, as technocrats with a political leaning and reckoning there is a fulfilling job to do.
In my memory Joe Haines, Harold Wilson's press secretary stands tall, as does Bernard Ingham, the fearsome, bushy-eyebrowed protector of Margaret Thatcher and, in recent times, Campbell, for Tony Blair, and David Cameron's short-lived cypher in Downing Street, Andy Coulson. Of course, there have always been journalists working as civil servants in the press offices of all the ministries, but the migration from Fleet Street to become political special advisers appears to a modern phenomenon.
Journalists, and their proprietors, have always been unofficial sounding boards for politicians, and biographies of the great and the good from both worlds are scattered with such references. It was not, and probably still is not, unusual for the editor of The Times or The Telegraph to get a call from a senior politician asking for advice, and in the last century distinguished editors and their owners were often quasi members of the government.
Sometimes their advice was sage and productive, but when John Major called The Sun in 1992 and asked Kelvin MacKenzie what he was going to publish about Black Wednesday in the following day's paper he got the reply, according to the editor: “I've got a bucket of shit on my desk, Prime Minister, and I'm going to pour it all over you.”
Major told the Leveson Inquiry that his recollection was different but admitted. “It wasn't a successful phone call.” He added: “I have read the substance of the alleged conversation with a degree of wonder and surprise.” Surely MacKenzie didn't make it up?
Making something up is not particularly desirable either as a journalist or a political adviser, although the euphemisms of pushing a story to its limits – or spinning – may give the opposite impression. When I first met the permanent secretary at the Department for Education and Skills, David Normington, who went under the sobriquet “the smiling assassin”, I put forward the proposition that my job was to maintain the share price of the secretary of state and the department and that the best way to do that was to be straight. He smiled.
I joined the political fray in the Westminster equivalent of the football transfer window, just after a general election. In the past few months, after the Tory victory on May 7, we have seen a few players move over and some not have their contracts renewed.
My former colleagues, Tom Baldwin and Bob Roberts, former political editors of The Sunday Telegraph and Daily Mirror, have gone the way of most Scottish Labour MPs and are looking for new employment after leaving their jobs as, respectively, director of strategy and communications chief for Ed Miliband.
On the other side Camilla Cavendish, the cerebral comment columnist on The Sunday Times, has moved to Downing Street to advise on policy and James Chapman, political editor of the Daily Mail, to be the link between George Osborne and the press. The jobs are different, with Cavendish being able to indulge in blue-sky thinking while Chapman will have the more traditional role of making shit shine. His would seem to be the more career-motivated move given the statement by Cameron that he would be stepping down before the end of this parliament, seemingly leaving the way for George Osborne and for Chapman to be ensconced in Downing Street where he will meet up with Graeme Wilson, former deputy political editor of The Sun.
Nick Robinson rejecting the call from Labour
Taking up his new post at the Today programme will be the BBC's Nick Robinson, after rejecting the call from Labour to work with it in trying to deliver a political victory. He wrote in his election memoir: “I was being asked whether I would consider taking on the job of spin doctor, with a role at No 10 to follow, naturally. For the rest of the conversation I had to resist the urge to roar with laughter and inquire whether the caller had got the wrong number.”
For those who take the political shilling, life is different from sitting in a news room or the press room in Westminster. Starting work at eight in the morning was the first culture shock, and then the sheer scale of the department. In the private office of any secretary of state there are probably three or four private secretaries and a diary secretary, all under the control of the principal private secretary.
At the education department on the same seventh floor were five other ministers with their own private secretaries, and in a small office tucked away in a corner the special advisers and their two secretaries. Virtually every minute of the day there were ministerial meetings where policy was discussed and jammed in between were political meetings that had to be kept separate and were not minuted by the civil servants.
The revolving door of ministers meant that new policy asked for by those who had moved was still being worked on despite having no flag bearer, and there were hundreds of emails, each detailing some aspect of education, and every one of them had to be read.
As a media adviser, I was the conduit between the press office and the minister, along with the head of press who was not a political appointment and answered to the permanent secretary. We worked together on honing the message from the department while I spent more time maintaining the profile of the ministers, especially the secretary of state. There was always something to worry about, whether a speech, the murder of two schoolgirls by a school caretaker or, as I found out in the third week of my tenure, a financial scandal of massive proportions.
The Labour government, when it came to power in 1997, announced a laudable project – Individual Learning Accounts, which aimed to subsidise both learners and education suppliers. Four years later it had been hijacked by fraudsters.
The true value of the fraud will probably never be known, but ran into hundreds of millions of pounds. My first thought: what a great story, and then: how do we hide it while closing down the whole project? I leaked the story in complicated dribs and drabs, making it boring and statistical while the smiling assassin conducted a purge. It became a story that only education reporters understood and never excited news desks or political editors.
If political editors took over a story from their educational specialist it was a sure sign that you were in trouble. Sketch writers were also the bane of the special advisers' lives, passing comment on the performance of ministers on the floor of the house and seizing on every twitch and peccadillo. John Prescott, always a favourite target for his mangling of the language, was saved from a brutal mauling standing in at prime minister's questions when Blair was out of the country. We had groomed a pliant MP to ask the PM: “Would he agree that the standard of grammar in schools was considerably better …” and so on. Finding out that Prescott would be answering, we quietly stood the MP down.
After I was stood down, I went back to the day job, making a couple of bad decisions along the way but enjoying being back on the road as reporter on The Daily Telegraph under Charles Moore and then news editor of The Observer. By then, I knew just a little bit more about how governments can kill stories.