Abstract
Would Liz Truss have lasted longer if she had communicated better? No one can remember a leader being so bad at it
God mocks those who make plans, and howls at those whose ambitions are unchecked by humility. Former prime ministers sometimes say they were too cautious after arriving in Downing Street, but Liz Truss’s extraordinarily misplaced belief in her abilities had her hitting the ground sprinting – and stumbling. The removal men had barely finished their tea before she was making a dash for growth in a way more redolent of Anthony Barber than of her heroine Margaret Thatcher.
This was, of course, the disaster that defined her brief premiership, but it was compounded by an over-confident assumption that she, like Thatcher, would quickly be able to overcome a woodenness of delivery. With Thatcher, the early lack of fluency was taken to show conviction and authenticity. It added to the sense that she was no fake. But, to be unfashionably fair to Truss, Thatcher’s premiership had a big advantage over her admirer. It was still the age when – roughly speaking – No 10 called the shots. The deferential age of journalists kowtowing to the prime minister had gone, but the game was that much simpler than now.
Thatcher’s first couple of years were wobbly, but once the unions, the Argentinian junta and her cabinet “wets” had learned who was boss, her authority over the news outlets was established too. Not that the media particularly worried her. She left that to Bernard Ingham, a civil servant, let us not forget, who played hardball with less pliant journalists. Particularly after she trebled her majority in the 1983 election, Cabinet assumed a role of dull conformity, the Heseltine shooting star being the only exception. Norman Tebbit played the polecat, ensuring the sidelining of non-believers, and the media reflected to its reassured consumers a belief that the strikes, inflation and unruliness of the 1970s were vanishing into the past.
What’s more, there was money to be made as the newly unchained multitudes bought shares in the newly privatised state assets. There was a clarity of purpose, and potentially dissenting voices could be anticipated, pre-empted and, if necessary, rubbished. On television, big beasts such as Robin Day and Brian Walden prowled proprietorially, but performances on their stages could be prepared for and contained.
The lobby played its part, unattributable smears being administered to warn any faint-hearts thinking of straying. “Friday night drops”, when journalists would obligingly hold their mouths open to be fed easily recycled titbits from Downing Street, were the norm. A boycott of the lobby, led by vigorous newcomer The Independent, became a succès d’estime among centre-left idealists, but they were outside the orthodoxy in any case and could be safely ignored. It wasn’t quite groupthink, but it was not journalism’s finest hour. For government, though, it was a golden age of control. Never did the phrase “one of us” carry more menace.
Which cannot be said of the John Major years, when Euroscepticism, largely massaged into quiescence under Thatcher, was on the march, making the Tory party harder to manage. Major’s small and shrinking majority, his divided party and his self-harming scrutiny of the newspapers fed a frenzy. Not only was the prime minister unable to gag his dissenting Cabinet ministers, but he lacked the authority even to prevent his collective term for them – “bastards”, enunciated in private but recorded and disseminated – becoming central to the narrative.
According to even the Tory papers, this was not a big man with eyes set stirringly on distant horizons. On the night of Black Wednesday, one of his biggest crises, Major phoned the editor of The Sun – who was astonished to receive any call from the PM amid such mayhem – with a friendly inquiry as to how the paper planned to cover the episode. The reply from Kelvin MacKenzie was as anarchic as can be imagined: “I’ve got a bucket of shit on my desk, prime minister, and I’m going to pour it all over you.” We must hope Major acknowledged, at least, the respectful use of “prime minister”. Famously, that was the moment the Tories’ record for economic competence evaporated, triggering a fusillade of hostile leaks from “stab-in-the-back” Thatcherites and rumours of challenges to Major’s leadership.
The 1997 landslide victory for “New” Labour now looks more like an inevitability than any election result in recent years. It came about because the public could recognise a shambles when it saw one, and after 18 years in office, that is what the Tories had become. Labour, by contrast, in opposition was terrifyingly disciplined, and even more so in government. The implicit control of the Thatcher years returned, though in a more mechanical, formalised guise, rebutting here, smearing there. Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell were ruthless, freezing out “unhelpful” journalists, schmoozing susceptible ones, and keeping Tony Blair, Thatcher-like, above the fray. The “grid” was developed, ensuring the news outlets were well fed – hence Blair’s famous search for “eye-catching initiatives” – and had little time to indulge in mischief.
The Iraq war of 2003 was the ultimate symbol of No 10 media control. The awkward squad that disliked Blair would always be likely to oppose unseating another country’s head of state without unambiguous UN backing, but there were awkward voices ideologically not far from him who needed bringing round. And sufficient of them – it is not unfair to call them the “should have known better” brigade (I’m thinking particularly of you, The Observer), excited to be briefed by real-life spies and others – ended up deferring helpfully to the Blair-Bush insistence on seeing off Saddam Hussein and supported the war. It was a remarkable example of what No 10 can swing, given a large majority and the full forces of the state behind it.
Or, rather, what it used to be able to swing. David Cameron’s coalition with the Lib Dems largely followed the Blair playbook, the former PR man enjoying the support from the Murdoch papers that had been drifting away from Gordon Brown between 2007 and 2010. The narrative of a nation-saving coalition – rather than of Cameron’s failure to win a majority despite Brown’s uncertain and rift-ridden rule and 13 years of Labour – became the accepted chorus. The presence of a former Murdoch editor by Cameron’s side undoubtedly helped conduct that chorus, and on at least one occasion, I understand, Andy Coulson dictated a Sun front-page headline over the phone from No 10.
A sense of assured competence – or at least one that outflanked Ed Miliband’s – presented Cameron with a shock election win in 2015, but the control was illusory and the forces of mayhem, led by the Eurosceptic Leavers, not far away. The pre-election promise of a referendum that Cameron had used to keep control of his troops had to be delivered, but by then the forces of anarchy were unchained. Whereas in 1975 the referendum on the EU was won by the status quo-supporting side spending 10 times more than the antis, in 2016 that same “sensible centre”, on whose influence Cameron had gambled, let him down. The barbarians had grabbed the levers. Dominic Cummings’s mastery of social media, opinion polling and marketing took back control from Downing Street as well as Brussels.
The media had atomised. The Forum, once peopled by strolling senators musing paternalistically through settled, conventional channels, was now teeming with gadflies, Downing Street’s grip long in the past. Newspapers, though still powerful, had lost their primacy. The BBC was deemed suspect and Radio 4 became an optional. Where previously experts talked of setting the agenda, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook had no such pretensions. What would be would be. Dissenting voices now had any number of platforms, including their own. There were countless more radio and TV shows, many more wannabe Paxmans. No longer did we take what we were given. Now we could choose, algorithms reminding us how right we were.
Enter Boris Johnson with a new approach
Who less suited could there have been to walk onto this meme-infested stage than awkward, faute de mieux Theresa May? In response to “Brexit means Brexit”, the collapsing conference stage and the disco shimmy, the world simply fell about. As we know, her government lasted only three years, until Boris Johnson’s treachery finally had its reward. And in bringing in Mr Take Back Control, Johnson opened a new chapter, one in keeping with the restrictions forced on the government by the pandemic. Under Cummings’s guidance, Johnson’s premiership ended the Downing Street obsession with playing the media’s game. A new, centralising ethos took over. Special advisers were to be chosen by him, not their immediate bosses. Dispassionate technocrat mandarins were replaced by those who were “onside” with the new, polling-driven policy formation.
But the most noticeable change, and what a shock it was to many of us, was the ethos that most voters don’t care about Westminster village talk or Twitter or Private Eye. Sacred cows were machine-gunned. Who needs the Today programme? Millions got their news (“news”) on social media. The BBC could be written off as biased and, with the licence fee looking outdated, on notice. Leaky ministers were to be defenestrated (and, in passing, let us not forget how much Coulson loathed Cummings for his leaking in the Cameron era).
And where they wanted to convey a message, they would make their own news. So, using Covid as the excuse, a snapper from the press pool taking pics was displaced by a court photographer, introduced by David Cameron, taking disarming pics of, say, Dilyn the Downing Street dog and other such Twitter-friendly puffery. The BBC became the subject of spine-chilling briefings as to its likely post-licence fee fate, and its bosses quaked. Paul Dacre was mooted as the new boss of Ofcom.
And, in the most alarming example of the madness of crowds, Johnson’s obvious unsuitability for high office – for his default mendacity, his inattention, his disorganisation – was for a long time, before and after 2019, overlooked not only by Tory members but by their print cheerleaders (again, file under “should have known better”), for fear that Jeremy Corbyn – yes, really – might oust the Tories.
Cummings’s take-back-control strategy for No 10 was not in itself wrong, and as mayor, under the lash of his guru Lynton Crosby, Johnson had shown uncharacteristic discipline, curtailing the clowning and the off-the-cuff, media-friendly soundbites, but it wasn’t a cure-all. Refusing to feed the beast looked absurd when the government refused to put anyone on the Today programme to explain its Covid position. The former health secretary Jeremy Hunt, at that time a critic of much of government policy, had to stand in, effectively as the government’s translator. Remaining mute looked evasive and cowardly when government competence came under fire. So much for control.
Historians will probably look back at late 2022 and agree that running a Tory government then was as hard as it has ever been. Four decades after Thatcher applied her stamp, prime ministers must dream of the sort of control she had, but they occupy a far more unruly media landscape than hers. The media is now too diverse, too hungry, for government to rule from a pulpit.
But competence and conviction are essential if loyalty, and thus control, is to be maintained. The Thatcher government had those. The same cannot be said of Liz Truss’s. Who would be a spin doctor with that hand to play, but she has set a low bar for her successor to improve on.
