Damian McBride

14 Days In May, 26 Years Ago

Tue, 21 May 2013 13:20:49 +0100

Overnight on the 20^th/21^st May 1987, a 26-year old Mississippian named Edward Earl Johnson was executed in the gas chamber, convicted of murdering a police officer when caught in the act of sexually assaulting a pensioner. There was no medical evidence against him, and he claimed that his ‘confession’ was extracted by police at gunpoint.

His final days in jail were captured in a BBC documentary called Fourteen Days in May, which you can watch in full here. It was shown in November that year, and at a time when there still annual debates and regular free votes in Parliament on the restoration of the death penalty, it had a profound impact on that debate, showing how easily a man could be executed despite serious doubts about his conviction.

On a human level, it is an intensely painful film to watch: an intelligent young man experiencing his own fate right to the end in a state of bewilderment; and his family, trusting to God and the justice system to see the right thing done, while all the while preparing for Edward’s death. You will never listen to the love song ‘Always’, by Atlantic Starr, the same way again, having heard it sung to a young man by his family, knowing it is the last time they will see him alive.

Recalling the anniversary of the execution last night, I stumbled across the transcripts of two interviews conducted with Don Cabana, Edward’s prison warden, and Clive Stafford Smith, the British lawyer who fought to have him cleared, both of whom played prominent roles in the BBC film.

I’d recommend reading all the transcripts on this site, but below are extracts from the Cabana and Stafford Smith interviews, which I think should be read by anyone who casually calls for Capital Punishment to be brought back in Britain.

———

Don Cabana:

In Evans’ case his mother and father, he came from a really good family and, you know, the hardest thing was to have to tell a mother that it was time to say a final goodbye to her son. And when I told her that Sunday before the execution that it was time she came over and she rested her hand on my arm and she said, ‘I’ve known you now for six years and I know you’re a good person and I know you have children of your own, please don’t…don’t kill my child’.

And, that’s…that’s…that’s difficult.

Wardens also, I think, deep down inside they secretly hope for absolution from the inmate. And that’s important because I think, at least my experience, was that every time I executed somebody it was like a little bit of me was dying along with them. And had any of the inmates that I knew well and had gotten close to and executed, failed to give me absolution it would have left me with a very empty, empty feeling.

In the case of Edward Earl Johnson, because he insisted on his innocence and prison officials are used to hearing that all the time. But where a Death Row prisoner’s concerned, once they know they’re gonna be executed, you know, invariably what happens is, I mean, they’re not gonna jump up and say, ‘Well, Halleluiah I might as well ‘fess up, tell the truth, I did it’.

They will say that in their way, you know, if they say, ‘Warden, would you apologise to the victim’s family for me’, well hell, if you didn’t do it then there’s nothing to apologise for. Or ‘Tell my momma I’m sorry’. You know, um, but in Edward’s case, when I asked him if he had any final words, you know, his statement was, ‘I’m innocent. I haven’t been able to make anybody listen to me or believe me, and Warden, you know, in a few minutes you’re about to become a murderer’.

Well, you know, there’s a certain amount of role play that goes on too and inmates and prison staff alike sometimes think they’re supposed to play these macho roles to the very end, you know.

And, because I knew this kid and his grandmother who raised him, and I knew that he came from a religious family and in the prison he was very observant, he was, he didn’t wear it on his sleeve for everybody to see. And so, I thought, you know, what if what we have here is the bravado thing to the very end.

And so I leaned down and whispered to him, I said:

‘Son, I’m gonna step on out of the chamber here in a few minutes and as soon as that red phone rings, we’re gonna have to proceed’. And I said ‘You know what, there’s twenty something people standing around here witnesses and staff and stuff, it’s not important for any of them to hear you say – ‘I did it’, OK. That doesn’t matter.

‘But what is important is that whatever the truth is, that, before I have to give the order, you have made peace between you and your God about the truth. He needs to hear you say what the truth is. Nobody else here needs to and they’re not entitled to. You don’t owe anybody here anything. But you owe yourself and you owe the God that you profess to believe in that clear understanding’.

And I thought, you know, this is pretty good stuff I’m saying here if he’s just playing a role and he really did the crime and stuff, maybe this’ll bring him around because I think you really think about…. I said to the governor one time, ‘Look, part of what Christianity preaches is redemption’. And I said ‘What if some prisoner that I execute might have achieved redemption next week, next month or next year? Once we’ve executed them that possibility’s gone forever’.

And so that was important to me for this kid and he looked at me very calmly and he said, ‘Warden, I’m at peace with my God, how are you gonna be with yours?’ And, I walked out of that chamber convinced that he was innocent, I really did.

———

Clive Stafford Smith:

It was May 21st 1987 they killed Edward Johnson. I mean, you look back on it and you know, certainly, if I knew then what I know now I don’t think he would have died. Um…it’s very sad. You know, I’d just sat in the execution chamber and watched them gas the poor guy to death!

And whatever theoretical views one might have about the death penalty become very much humanised when you meet the people involved, when you watch some guy dying in front of you, who you actually rather like – it’s obscene.

So yeah, I was angry and there are other things too, I had just come from talking with the family and I had to tell these poor people who had been trodden on all their lives, that the government had just done it to them again.

And one of the fascinating things about having the BBC there, was it actually injected such a level of unreality – you kept thinking that someone was going to call ‘Cut’ and it was all going to be over. And thankfully, for Edward’s sake, he believed that too.

When I went into the…I actually walked with him into the gas chamber and he said to me, ‘Is there something you know that I don’t know?’ and I didn’t quite understand what he meant to begin with, but I figured it out – that he really thought they weren’t going to do it. And in that sense it was good to have the journalists.

It was horrendous for him, you know. It’s frustrating later to discover this woman who had been with him at the time of the murder, who could have said that he couldn’t have done it. But, you know, when I talk to her about why she didn’t do anything, it actually illustrates the total powerlessness of someone in Edward’s position and many of these other guys’ position.

She said, ‘Who am I gonna call? I can’t call the FBI, it’s not like in the movies where the FBI come swooping in to do the right thing.’ And she said, ‘Look, I went to the police, I told them he hadn’t done it, and they told me to buzz off and mind my own business.’

And that’s the ultimate powerlessness and, of course, it’s true of so many poor people in Mississippi and elsewhere.

Well, it took forever. I mean, one thing is people always act like this is over instantaneously, it’s absolute nonsense! They had him sitting in that chair for fifteen minutes. And if you think how long a minute can be if we just sit here in silence for a minute right now. You imagine if those was the last fifteen minutes of your life, it just when on and on and on.

And it was about half way through that poor old Edward finally worked out that no one was going to call him. And, you know, he said, ‘Well, let’s get it over with’. And then what he goes through, you know, you always have these perverse discussions where the doctors say, ‘Oh, don’t try and hold your breath that just makes it more painful’. Well, that’s just not a human reaction, of course. And so, it took forever!

We’d raised a legal issue in Edward’s case which the courts rejected, and then about ten years later the Supreme Court said we were right. And the Supreme Court said, ‘Well, the best we can say is we were simply wrong in Edward Johnson’s case’. But, you know, that’s not much consolation because the guy’s cold in his grave.

Well, I very rarely discuss why the death penalty’s wrong, because it seems to me that is the wrong question. The real issue is - why is the death penalty right? What does it achieve?

And, you know, when I’ve watched people die, it’s always at night and you come out of the execution chamber, and you look up at the stars and you say, ‘Well, you know, how did that make the world a better place?’ and it didn’t, and it achieved absolutely nothing positive.

So we can argue about all these different things, about, you know, whether it’s a deterrent or not – the guys I represented didn’t know what deterrent means. Is it a way to save money – no it’s more expensive. Are we going to make mistakes – of course we make mistakes.

I mean there are hundreds of intellectual arguments about why it’s wrong, but I just think we don’t need to go that far because no one can justify why it’s right.

The Promised Land

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 13:33:13 +0100

This night, 45 years ago, Martin Luther King came off his sickbed to the Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee, where a large crowd had gathered for a campaign rally in support of striking sanitation workers.

Memphis encapsulated the problem that the Civil Rights Movement faced after 1965, once its focus switched from civil rights and voting rights in Southern states to the problems of Black poverty, police abuse and economic discrimination in the major American cities.

How do you make a strike by sanitation workers for better wages and working conditions the same kind of moral issue as Blacks in the South being denied the vote or forced to use segregated facilities?

How do you put pressure on faceless corporations through marches and boycotts when you do not face the same open police brutality and White violence that shocked the world when the same tactics were used in the South?

And how do you retain the support of White liberals and the White House itself when your protest is wrapped up with rioting and the activities of the Black Power movement, as it was in Memphis?

Martin Luther King tried to address these challenges in his ‘Promised Land’ speech on April 3rd, 1968, which I believe - partly because of the circumstances and the timing, but mainly because of the scintillating argument and soaring rhetoric - is the greatest speech ever made. It’s worth reading in full, but these are for me the highest points:

Which age would you like to live in?

A magnificent opening theme, where MLK imagines the Almighty inviting him to choose an age to live in, allowing him to conduct a rapid survey of history from Moses through to Memphis, and proclaim that now is a more important time than ever:

“I can remember, I can remember when Negroes were just going around as Ralph has said, so often, scratching where they didn’t itch, and laughing when they were not tickled. But that day is all over. We mean business now, and we are determined to gain our rightful place in God’s world.”

Tell them not to buy Hart’s Bread:

How many great speeches in history contain detailed instructions for direct action campaigning, including which banks, bread makers and milk companies to boycott. Yet here, MLK makes a practical reality of his rhetoric on forcing change, and persuades his audience of their collective power.

The road to Jericho:

MLK’s re-telling of the parable of the Good Samaritan is brilliant in his personalisation of the story, and his almost comic empathy with the priest and the Levite who passed by the stricken man, arguing that they asked themselves: “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?” But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?”.

While it should not matter:

The reading of letters is a familar rhetorical tool, used to great effect most recently by President Obama, but never used to greater effect here, than when MLK says he’d forgotten all the letters he received from the great and good when he was stabbed in New York ten years previously, except one from a little girl, which he would never forget:

It said simply, “Dear Dr. King: I am a ninth-grade student at the Whites Plains High School.” She said, “While it should not matter, I would like to mention that I am a white girl. I read in the paper of your misfortune, and of your suffering. And I read that if you had sneezed, you would have died. And I’m simply writing you to say that I’m so happy that you didn’t sneeze.”

I’m glad I didn’t sneeeeeeze:

Surely the strangest peroration in the history of great speeches, but it works astonishingly well, not least because of the aural reminders of the ‘I Have A Dream’ speech, and his inspiring tour of the great achievements of the Civil Rights Movement. The crowd starts to build into a frenzy as he says:

“If I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have been around in 1962, when Negroes in Albany, Georgia, decided to straighten their backs up. And whenever men and women straighten their backs up, they are going somewhere, because a man can’t ride your back unless it is bent.”

The Mountaintop:

With the crowd clapping and cheering, MLK then drops his voice and his pace to tell of the threats on his life, and how it doesn’t matter to him now. It’s a sombre moment, instantly lifted as he explains in soaring tones why it doesn’t matter:

“I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land. And I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

In 1993, when history undergraduates at Cambridge were listening to pitches by the various faculty members for what they should choose as specialist subjects for their finals, Professor Tony Badger - who taught the Civil Rights Movement course - played an audio recording of the last few minutes of the ‘Promised Land’ speech, switched the casette player off, and then simply said:

“And the next day they shot him…..If you want to sign up for the course, there’s a sheet at the front.”

I think every one of us in the room did.

The day they shot him - April 4th 1968 - there were riots in most major American cities and university campuses with large Black populations. Except Indianapolis. That was in no small part to what I would regard as the greatest improvised speech of all time, Robert F Kennedy’s announcement of MLK’s death to a campaign rally in the city.

“What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.”

And two months later they shot him too.

————-

Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam

There’s another anniversary today, which closely relates to the same time period. 25 years ago today, the documentary film Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam was first telecast by HBO in the United States, having premiered in film festivals the previous year.

It is to my mind the greatest documentary of all time, and with a beautifully simple concept: over documentary footage of the war and excerpts from news broadcasts, a montage of letters from soldiers who served in Vietnam is read out by some of the leading actors and actresses of the 1980s, all against the greatest soundtrack you’ll ever hear, from the Beach Boys at the start of the war to Bruce Springsteen at the unveiling of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington D.C.

Some will say the weakness of the film is that it doesn’t convey anything of the war from the Vietnamese perspective, but that’s not what the film is about: it’s simply about the authentic experience of the war from the US soldiers who served there. Their letters are alternately revealing and heartbreaking, and you can get a sample of the film in these clips: here, here, and here. and you can watch the whole film on YouTube here. I can’t find it on a Region 2 DVD, but it’s the main reason I keep my old VHS player in working operation.

2010: A Particularly Sharp Intake

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 06:30:00 +0000

This feels like deja-vu, but I had a quick thought on Ben Brogan’s latest essential article on the mood inside the Tory party, especially his conclusion that its next leader may come from the hugely ambitious and variously-talented group of MPs first elected in 2010.

There are many Labour types who look at the superb calibre of its own 2010 intake, and think the same thing. Well, what are their chances?

The whole idea of the ‘intake’ may not mean anything to anyone outside Westminster, but it matters hugely inside. For MPs, it’s equivalent to your year-group at school or university, but even more so, since they tend always to be 4-5 years apart from the intake on either side.

Just like at school, it throws up rivalries and tensions, but equally a sense of solidarity, and certainly a desire that your group should be regarded as the lead candidates for promotion and advancement, provided of course that you are one of those advanced.

It was hugely symbolic that, in 2006, members of every recent intake wrote to Tony Blair calling for him to set out plans for a stable and orderly succession to Gordon Brown; it showed - in a way nothing else could have done - that there was broad (although not universal) support for that view amongst the younger Labour backbenchers.

So what does history tell us about the chances of the Class of 2010? Well, if we assume that modern British politics began in 1975 with the selection of Margaret Thatcher as Tory leader, then this has been the sequence of Tory leaders, alongside the year they first entered the House of Commons, and how long they led the party for:

Thatcher: 1959 - leads from 1975-1990 (15 yrs)
Major: 1979 - leads from 1990-1997 (7 yrs)
Hague/IDS/Howard: 1989/1992/1983 - collectively lead from 1997-2005 (8 yrs)
Cameron: 2001 - leads from 2005 to present (7 yrs and counting)

Now, I’m cheating a little by bracketing together the group of Tory leaders who took on Tony Blair as PM, but - strategically - that was a weird period in Tory history, and I’ll long argue that the Tories should have stuck with William Hague even after 2001, and that the short reigns of IDS and Howard were an aberration.

As our internal polls used to tell us, there were a number of Tory leaders who could potentially have beaten Tony Blair in 2005, and Hague was arguably one of them. Michael Howard definitely wasn’t.

Anyway, if we imagine - not implausibly - that Hague had seen the Tories through two elections, then we’d observe a pattern where - for every 7-8 years a Tory leader is in charge - recent history suggests that the intake from which their successor is drawn shifts forward around 10 years.

Which would mean - if the Tories decide to unseat David Cameron in the coming year or more likely, as Ben says, after the next election - then it is indeed most likely his successor would come from the 2010 intake, even though none of the current Cabinet come from that group.

Of course, the optimistic scenario for Cameron loyalists is that he wins the next election and the one after that, and steps down in 2020 after matching Lady Thatcher, and leading the party for 15 years. In which case, the pattern would suggest his successor would come from that 2020 intake. Boris, anyone?

And what of Labour, which has been quicker to advance members of the 2010 intake to its front bench, notably Chuka Umunna and Rachel Reeves? Their recent history - since the Thatcher period began - is even clearer. Look at the list of intakes from which their last 7 leaders have been drawn:

1945: Jim Callaghan
1945: Michael Foot

1970: Neil Kinnock
1970: John Smith

1983: Tony Blair
1983: Gordon Brown

2005: Ed Miliband

So the pattern is that - while their periods in office differ - the Labour leadership tends to skip several intakes at a time, and shifts forward around 12-15 years each pair of leaders that go by. That would suggest the next Labour leader will - like Ed Miliband - come from the 2005 intake, but the one after that is not yet in Parliament, and will take his or her seat for the first time in the 2020 election.

Of course, patterns are made to be broken, and all this may change. But, right now and mainly because I’m a great believer in political history repeating itself, I’d have my money on Cameron’s successor coming from the 2010 Tory intake, but their exceptional Labour equivalents - Chuka, Rachel, Tristram Hunt, Gloria De Piero, Michael Dugher, Jonathan Ashworth and many more - having to settle for great Cabinet careers instead of the top job.

So the question for them becomes not: which one of us is ahead of the others, but which one of us is capable of breaking the mould?

—————-

Post-script:

Of course, it’s also worth noting from the sequences above that - the Howard aberration aside - neither main party in the modern era has gone back to a previous intake to select its new leader. There are good explanations for that on both sides, but nevertheless, if you were placing your bets the way you always must in the Grand National - taking past history into account - you wouldn’t see why William Hague, Theresa May, David Miliband and Yvette Cooper are the bookies’ favourites to take the lead if Ed or Dave fall at Becher’s, given that they are all from previous intakes.

Standard Practice

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 15:57:51 +0000

A quick comment on the Standard controversy, just because a few people have asked me what the practice was under Gordon Brown.

Obviously, The Standard are in a hideous position on Budget day, especially lunchtime Budgets, with an edition usually going off stone while the Chancellor’s on his feet, but hitting the streets after he’s sat down, in which they’re required to have maybe 3-4 pages of coverage and a splash.

So the way it usually works is this: you have a strictly confidential discussion with the Evening Standard political editor on the morning of the Budget or the night before which just ensures they know broadly what they’ll be writing about later and can plan their pages accordingly.

The tone of that initial conversation is things like: ‘Big push on housing’; ‘Small boost for pensioners’; ‘New efficiency measures on public spending’; ‘Tough message on public sector pay’; ‘Massive tax avoidance crackdown – that’s the biggest new money coming in’; ‘Little bit of a surprise on beer duty’; and ‘Big measure at the end on job creation – that’s the biggest money going out’.

Incidentally, you have exactly the same discussion with the broadcasters on the morning of the Budget given they have to react in real-time and prepare packages for the news bulletins afterwards.

That conversation is also a chance for the Standard to ask how reliable the stories are that have appeared in other newspapers in the previous week, to which your responses might vary from: “I think that’s pretty safe” or “I’d steer clear of that one” to “They’re in the right territory but the figures are wrong”.

Again, that helps them plan their pages, and – where you’ve indicated a story is safe – they can write it pretty hard to save themselves a job later.

There is then a second crucial conversation with the Standard, which I always had only after Gordon had stood up to speak in the House – and usually in a frantic 2 minute whisper outside the Parliamentary press gallery – where I’d go through all the themes I’d referred to earlier and fill in the gaps with detailed facts and numbers.

The political editor would then run off and make the necessary additions to his stories, fire them off to the Standard news desk and the presses would begin to roll. While doing so, he’d also keep one ear on the Budget as it was being announced in case I’d left anything of interest out, but frankly I never did.

So, in short, the Standard would have no detailed facts or figures on individual measures or taxes until Gordon had stood up, and there was no risk of any of those figures hitting the streets before Gordon had sat down. It was a tried and tested process, which almost never went wrong, although I’ll admit it might have been a bit more difficult in the days of Twitter.*

Now, importantly, I can never remember in any of those conversations I had over the years giving any indications or hints on growth or borrowing or any of the key market-sensitive fiscal figures. That’s partly because in the days I was doing the job, that was rarely where the attention was focused, which is clearly a bit different today.

But it’s also the fact that – whether it was the Budget numbers twice a year or ONS data every month – I knew it was career death for me (and possibly Gordon) to take any risk of market-sensitive numbers leaking in advance.**

So, what did I make of today’s events? Well, clearly, it was an unfortunate cock-up at the Standard’s end, and I’m sure they’re mortified about landing the very helpful Treasury officials and advisers in trouble.

But I wouldn’t say those officials and advisers are entirely innocent. It seems to me: (i) they must have had the second, detailed conversation too early, or possibly given out too much detail in the initial conversation; and (ii) they also divulged stuff in advance which frankly they never should because of its market-sensitivity.

As for the Standard themselves, if the Treasury choose to divulge that level of information and do so too early in the day, what are they meant to say? “Hold on, I think you’re telling me too much too soon”. Of course not.

And it’s the telling of too much too soon that’s caused the problem – not the long-standing arrangements that I’ve described, or even the Standard’s cock-up in posting their splash online – so I hope no-one in the Treasury will think about abandoning those arrangements as a consequence, and I hope no-one at the Standard is in any trouble tonight.

—————-

Footnotes:

* We did have one cock-up, which I still remember with a shudder, especially after today’s events. I think it was an afternoon rather than a lunchtime Budget, so the Standard had already done one edition based on a very broad initial conversation saying things like: “The Chancellor is set to give a boost to pensioners” and “Gordon Brown is expected to ease the burden on motorists”. In their rush to get the next edition printed after Gordon had stood up, the Standard inserted the details into those sentences, but didn’t change the tense of them – so it read as though they were still speculating but with the exact detail of what he was going to announce. The paper didn’t hit the streets until after Gordon had set down, but questions were still asked in the House about it.

** There was one occasion when Gordon was adamant for at least 2 hours on the night of a Budget that he was going to have to resign – after he personally had inadvertently leaked every single market-sensitive number in the forecast. But, with apologies for being a tease, I’ll save that cracking story for another day……

The Budget and The Bloke In The Pub

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 01:03:00 +0000

Two immediate thoughts on Ben Brogan’s superbly insightful and well-informed piece about Wednesday’s Budget and the Lynton Crosby impact on Tory messaging.

1. First, the latter. It sounds eminently sensible on paper for the Government to talk solely about the issues that are the public’s priorities for the two years until the election. But how do you decide what their priorities are?

According to Ben, the answer from the PM’s pollster Andrew Cooper is by asking people: ‘What issue would you raise with the PM in the pub if he came in for a pint?’, to which the overwhelming answer seems to be ‘immigration’.

The trouble with all that is that, frankly, there’s a certain kind of person who bangs on about politics in the pub, and you don’t necessarily want to base your political strategy around them.

I’d say in general that what wins elections is targeting the kind of voters whose first question if the current PM walked into their pub would be: ‘Alright fella, what’s the Queen like?’, or ‘Do you think Villa are going to stay up?’, or even just ‘How are you, mate?’, rather than ‘What are you going to do about those Romanians?’

It does all slightly remind me of Tony Blair’s obsession - encouraged by Philip Gould - with talking about anti-social behaviour, then law’n’order more widely, and eventually the catch-all theme of ‘security’ in the run-up to the 2005 election, because these were the issues that people would ‘raise in the pub’.

What Tony found is that the more he banged on about anti-social behaviour, the more the media and the public identified it as a big issue, and the harder it became to demonstrate that the Government was capable of doing anything about it commensurate to the scale of the ‘problem’ he himself had talked up. So it played into then Tory leader Michael Howard’s hands.

Of course this made Gordon Brown tear his hair out. He argued - correctly - that Labour would win the 2005 election, as it had done in 1997 and 2001, by focusing on the economy, jobs and public services, and the more the Government itself talked up another issue as the main public priority, the harder it would be to get back to that core agenda.

So - in light of that - tempting though it might be for the Tories just to talk about those ‘pub issues’ of immigration and welfare for the next 2 years - I reckon they’d be handing a bit of an open goal to Labour if that’s at the expense of talking about the economy, the NHS, police and schools.

2. On the first point, if Ben’s correct that George Osborne is going for a ‘steady as she goes’ Budget, similar to that called for by Ed Staite, then there’s a certain logic to that, i.e. if there’s no money for any fireworks, and he doesn’t want any scope for pasty-style disasters, then he should keep it simple.

Gordon Brown often did Budgets and PBRs like that, with very few ‘big-ticket’ measures, usually in the fallow years in the middle of the Parliament.

But in those years, Gordon did something else that George could learn from: when the gruel was thin, he always poured in a few small dollops of honey so there were some positive stories on the day, and some ways of demonstrating that he was conscious of the pressures on working people, not least for the backbenchers who had to hit the doorsteps that weekend.

Look through Gordon’s Budgets and you will see a pattern of small but populist measures sprinkled through every one aimed at core lower and middle income households, from freezes in beer duty to reduced rates of VAT on everything from children’s car seats to tampons. Never enough to affect the bottom line; never a headline measure; but enough to affect public perceptions.

I remember telling Gordon that, before I’d started working as his Head of Communications - on one of my spells back in Customs - I’d watched the 2003 Budget in a backstreet boozer in Southwark. As I watched the TV, I had one eye on a bloke who stood at the fruit machine underneath.

He looked up at the TV screen just three times in the entire Budget: once when Gordon said fags were going up 8p a packet (“F*ck’s sake”, he said); once when he said spirits duty would be frozen (“Wayyy!”); and once when he said he was abolishing bingo duty (“Waheeeey!!!” he said, turning to the barman, “My mum’s going to go nuts”).

He then called his Mum and told her about it, including the immortal phrase - “You won’t be calling Gordon Brown a **** again, will ya?”

I tell that story for a simple reason. That bingo measure cost £20mn - about the same as would have been raised from the pasty tax.

George Osborne would be forgiven this year for not wanting to see a single submission from the tax officials who delivered him VAT on pasties and the granny tax last time round.

But instead he should have told them: “Right you lot, we scr*wed up last time cos I asked you to raise £2bn in a painless way, and I didn’t check the proposals out thoroughly enough. This time, I want the opposite of pasties: the small stuff I can do that will set the tone of the Budget without costing us too much.”

I can tell you, tax officials love that kind of Budget even more than the revenue-raising kind. I always did. And if George thinks Gordon has already picked off all the low-hanging fruit, I’d only recommend he should go back to the tree and see if it’s growing again, for example:

Gordon abolished TV licences for pensioners; George could abolish the surcharge for poorer households who pay by direct debit;
Gordon expanded the sizes of clothes and shoes that qualified for the children’s zero rate; George could do so again (it’s 12 years since Gordon made his change - kids have grown since then); and
As Robert Halfon MP has observed, there’s an easy change that (I believe) can still be made to the specification of Ultra Low Sulphur Diesel to bring pump prices down, without costing a penny (except through VAT).

In short, if George Osborne tells his backbenchers that there’s no scope for tax cuts, well - fair enough - but let’s hope he’s looked at all the options, not just the big ones called for by the Opposition and his own backbenchers.

I agree with Ben Brogan and Ed Staite that the Chancellor should keep things simple, and I think he should aim to deliver the shortest Budget in history (44 mins would do it), but he shouldn’t do that at the expense of a few small, symbolic measures to show he “gets it”.

George, Andrew Cooper and Lynton Crosby need to ask themselves: what will that bloke under the telly in the pub in Southwark be ringing his mum about after this budget? It may not be granny taxes or pasties this time, but if he just keeps playing the fruit machine and never looks up at the screen, that’s probably your worst outcome of all.

Going To The Mattresses: the art of surviving a coup*

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 10:31:00 +0000

Yet again, the Sunday papers are full of speculation about the threats to David Cameron’s leadership, revolving this time around yesterday’s (what we might charitably call) ‘wide-ranging’ speech by the Home Secretary about what it will take to win the next election.

This stuff will rumble on interminably unless Plan A eventually comes up trumps - no other issue will matter in the meantime - or until some Massive External Event comes along that gives David Cameron the chance to show that he is still the only person for the job.

My advice to No10 is that neither of those scenarios is worth worrying about – i.e. don’t for goodness’ sake start drafting speeches in response to hypothetical Massive External Events (not on email anyway), and if they’re determined to stick to Plan A, there’s nothing to do but see what happens.

What I think they should be spending their time planning for is what happens if all the speculation, rumbling and agitation comes to a sudden head; if someone somewhere decides to force the issue.

For me, all the talk of stalking horses and leadership contests is an anachronistic nonsense. Not since Margaret Thatcher 23 years ago has a party leader had to resign following a formal leadership challenge.

Since then, four have been compelled to resign (or pre-resign in Tony Blair’s case) as a result of pressure from within their own party, and five as a result of general election defeat. Only Paddy Ashdown and, in tragic circumstances, John Smith escaped either fate.

Britain’s modern party leaders are not ousted by stalking horses; they are dragged from their beds in the dead of night, and shot in the courtyard with a Sky News helicopter overhead. So it would be extremely foolish for anyone in No10 to take the complex rules required to mount a leadership challenge as a reason to relax.

No, when it comes, if it ever comes, I’d guess the attempted ousting of the PM will look like this, all familiar features of past coups:

Leading Cabinet plotters will deliver subtle but incendiary speeches, interviews or articles, calling for a change of approach or style;
Joint letters will be submitted to No10 by symbolically-important groups of MPs, including heavyweight ex-Cabinet Ministers;
With sorrowful and suitably-devastating statements, some junior ministers and PPSs will resign, saying they no longer feel able to serve;
One or more major donors to the party will withdraw their support; and
Above all, supposedly loyal or senior members of the Cabinet will become suddenly absent and turn deadly silent.

These moves will not be the starting gun for a leadership challenge; they will be the sniper rifles attempting to finish the job there and then, by generating enough party pressure and media frenzy that the PM’s resignation becomes inevitable.

So what No10 should be asking themselves is: how well prepared are we if and when that day comes? And if they want to know what it takes to get through an attemped coup, they could do worse than study the record of Gordon Brown – the Charles De Gaulle of Downing Street when it came to surviving assassination attempts. Based on the Brown survival manual, I would ask them the following five key questions:

1. How far in advance do you know what’s coming?

Gordon Brown had hands-down the best intelligence operation of any recent PM. We were having conference calls and going through the ‘secret’ lists and plans of rebels signed up to the September 2008 Blairite plot a full fortnight before they moved into action. By contrast, Brown’s operation knew the Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt coup in January 2010 was a shambolic effort with no support precisely because they didn’t know about it in advance. And I say that with no pleasure given I’m a big fan of Geoff’s, and one of Patricia’s former officials.

But that level of intelligence-gathering doesn’t happen by accident: it’s about cultivating moles; taking talkative, sociable types out for drinks; testing the water with individuals by privately venting (and exaggerating) your own concerns about the future; and above all, keeping your eyes and ears open for unusual couplings or hushed conversations. But that all required hard work and ceaseless vigilance, so what I’d ask No10 is: who is currently putting in that effort for you?

2. Who are your wartime consiligieres?

Of course, good intelligence is only of value if you know what to do with it. Once you know what’s happening, when, and who’s involved, your No1 goal in defeating a coup is to make the whole thing look shambolic and doomed to fail, thereby shaping the media coverage and putting others off from joining.

Sometimes, the plotters do that job for you. Other times, where you know their plans in advance, your task is sabotage. So if X is waiting until Y resigns, and A, B and C are due to follow X, all your effort goes into delaying or preventing the resignation of Y, at which point – when the expected announcement doesn’t pop up on News 24 – the others get cold feet, and Z – who was the first to resign – is left high and dry, as happened to James Purnell in 2009.

With David Miliband’s various abortive coups, there was a certain crude art to inducing their failure. I was often personally criticised for over-reacting to some new Miliband manoeuvre, ‘ramping it up’ as people would say. But given David’s tendency to treat rebellion like a reluctant bather inching his way into the sea at Skegness, it made sense to push him right in at the outset, on the grounds that he’d run straight back to his towel, and not try again for at least six months.

But all this requires both a gift for battle-planning, an eye for the enemy’s weak-spot, and the agility to exploit the chaos you create. And what you need most of all when fending off a coup is the ability to flood the battlefield – in this case the Commons tea-rooms and Millbank TV studios – with loyal soldiers prepared to work flat out and take some bullets to ensure that the main noise in the ears of wavering MPs is unstinting support for the leader and criticism of the plotters.

3. Do you know where each member of the Cabinet is, in all senses?

The moment of maximum danger in an attempted coup is when Kay Burley says: “We are yet to hear from the Home Secretary”, or Nick Robinson says: “The most intriguing thing I’ve heard, not confirmed yet, is that the Education Secretary – one of the PM’s closest allies – did not try and persuade his PPS to stay on.”

Once the test of a coup’s momentum becomes the response of key Cabinet ministers, every hour of silence that ticks by piles pressure on the PM. So you need to know in advance where each individual is, and have a guaranteed way of getting a message through. If the response is they’re in a meeting, then forget it – they’re Fredo Corleone. If they answer, you tell them to get a statement on PA asap, and refusal is not an option, as was the case with Alistair Darling during the Hoon/Hewitt coup. You must put the questions in the mind of a wavering Minister: How can I say no? And what if I get this wrong?

But right now, No10 need also to ask themselves about each Cabinet member: where is their head at? If they seem suddenly to be lunching more journalists, doing more speeches, appearing at more receptions, chatting more in the margins of Cabinet and doing less nodding when the PM talks, then they’re probably already thinking about the next reshuffle after this PM has gone, or – in some cases – of taking his place. So, the question for No10 is: are you monitoring all of that, especially with those the PM considers his closest allies?

4. How’s your relationship with the media these days?

As I’ve said, momentum is everything in an attempted coup: to succeed, the plotters must keep pushing the leader towards the cliff. The media are crucial in determining that momentum: if they say it’s fizzled out, then it has; if they say one more bad day will make the leader’s position untenable, then it will.

But, even for the BBC, this is not an objective, scientific process; it’s about 100 or so very influential people at different media outlets forming a view based on their conversations with each other and with key players on either side of the plot, as well as, to some extent, on public attitudes. That is why, no matter how bad the coverage of Gordon Brown’s Premiership became, it was still vital for us to maintain strong and friendly relationships with those 100 or so people.

So, when and if the day comes, the question is: do the PM, his genuine supporters, and his Communications advisers have strong enough relationships with the media that their reading of the situation will trump that of the rebels, or at least be given equal weight? If Craig Oliver and Liam Fox gave entirely opposite views to a senior political editor about whether an ongoing coup was likely to succeed, who would they currently be more inclined to trust?

5. What are you prepared to concede to survive?

Perhaps the hardest question of all is if, despite all your efforts, you are still pushed towards the crisis point – where the media have decided one more bad day, resignation or letter will kill you – how do you save yourself? The only answer is to negotiate, perhaps not with the plotters directly, but with influential Cabinet ministers or party figures, asking them what it will take to reach a deal.

So it’s vital for the PM to ask himself how far he’d go to make the peace. Would he agree to replace individual advisers, change his style of government, or cancel planned reshuffle moves, all compromises that Gordon Brown made to defuse different coups? Would he agree to move his Chancellor or bring forward an in-out referendum, having previously vowed to do neither? These are not decisions that should be made under the intense pressure of an attempted coup, but thought through rationally in advance, so that the twin temptations to concede too much, or to resign impetuously on principle, are both avoided.

————-

My final reflection on Gordon Brown’s record of overcoming coups, is that – however arduous or brutal some of the methods were – his instinct for survival was there for a reason, in that (by the time the Global Financial Crisis started) he knew why he wanted to be in No10 and what he wanted to achieve – even if he often struggled to explain it.

If that instinct for survival – and everything that goes with it – is lacking in No10 at present, then it may point to a wider problem; with apologies to John Rentoul’s Banned List, something of an existential crisis. Which makes the timing of Theresa May’s speech all the more damaging, given that she showed with some level of detail and verve why she’d like to be in No10 and what she’d want to achieve.

And yet, there is so much for the current incumbents in Downing Street to live for, so many reasons to do what it takes to survive. After all, you never know when the next Massive External Event will come along. And perhaps Plan A will eventually come up trumps. Stranger things have happened.

* = Apologies to those with a purist approach to government for the odd Godfather reference in this piece, but if you can’t compare politics to the mafia when it comes to an attempt to whack the boss, when can you?

Of Swimming, Subsidies and Civil Servants

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 10:40:00 +0000

Dominic Lawson’s excellent article in today’s Independent asks why the state ‘subsidy’ which allows our major national museums and galleries to be open free of charge to the public is considered more important than the right to free swimming for children and pensioners scrapped by the Coalition.

His article also repeats the complaint by the increasingly-luminous Labour MP, Tristram Hunt, that the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery in his constituency and other regional collections face unfair competition from their no more impressive national counterparts because of the free admission subsidy enjoyed by the latter.

These are good points and an important debate, but it’s worth looking back at the context of the Labour government’s original decision to underwrite free admission to the national collections in 2001, when I was the Treasury civil servant responsible for - amongst other things - VAT policy.

At that time, those museums and galleries who had traditionally been free of charge - and their patrons - were putting huge pressure on the Government about their VAT bills. Because they did not charge for admission, they were not conducting a business for VAT purposes, and could not therefore reclaim the VAT incurred in running their buildings: heating, upkeep, etc.

They proposed various wheezes to get around their VAT bills, all totally illegal under UK or European VAT law, but ultimately they kept coming back to the obvious solution: charging for entry, and running themselves as businesses. And let’s not kid ourselves, there were many finance directors of those museums and galleries who were quite happy to see that as the solution and take a fiver a head from the adult tourists pouring through their doors each year.

Tony Blair and then Culture Secretary Chris Smith were determined not to have that happen, and after a particularly difficult meeting at No10 with the great arts patron Sir Dennis Mahon (still fighting the same battles from beyond the grave according to Dominic Lawson’s article), the terse instruction came through by email from D.Miliband (then a No.10 Spad) to E.Miliband (then a No.11 Spad): “Get this sorted.”

It wasn’t often Brown’s Treasury was given orders on tax policy by Blair’s Downing Street, but this was one such occasion. So after discussing it with Paymaster General Dawn Primarolo, Ed Miliband called me in, and - despite me telling him and Dawn the 16 different reasons we couldn’t legally do what Dennis Mahon & co. were proposing - Ed kept smiling out of one corner of his mouth, and said: “You’ve got to find a way…We need you to find a way.”

The trouble was that trying to force a solution in this area was hugely risky at a time when Brussels VAT Commissioner Herr Fritz Bolkenstein was itching for an excuse to open a wide-ranging inquiry into all the ways in which the UK VAT system ‘illegally’ diverged from EC VAT rules, particularly where new ’reliefs’ had been introduced which were not protected by the UK’s original accession treaties from back when we introduced VAT in 1973.

The perennial fear was that an inquiry into one new VAT relief could easily spill into the European Court of Justice examining all the other ones we’d introduced or extended over the years since 1973, and for example ruling illegal our (extended) VAT zero rates for children’s clothes and shoes. So when I sat down with two brilliant Customs and Excise civil servants, David Ogilvie and Judith Warner, it wasn’t far off trying to defuse a bomb inside an ammunition dump.

However, without going into all the dull intricacies of the special provisions of Sections 33 and 34 of the VAT Act 1994* which allow for VAT rebate schemes for certain ring-fenced groups of bodies providing certain qualifying non-business services as a result of the funding they receive from central government (believe me, you don’t want me to), we were able to find a convoluted way of refunding a prescribed group of museums and galleries their VAT bills.

That’s why when the “Section 33A Refund Scheme for National Museums and Galleries” was announced in 2001, it was tightly-ringfenced to those bodies who were in receipt of DCMS funding due to the status of their collections, hence why it could not be extended to the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, but equally why it could not be legally-challenged by Herr Bolkenstein or by the French or Italian tourist industries.

So I hope that answers Tristram Hunt’s question (albeit not in a way that will satisfy him). It does not answer Dominic Lawson’s point about why free tours round the Tate are considered worthier of subsidy than free swimming for pensioners, but I hope it explains the background to the current arrangements.

And ahead of my appearance at the Public Administration Select Committee tomorrow morning, who have called me to come and answer questions about “The Future of the Civil Service”, it’s a useful illustration that - 9 times out of 10 - when civil servants are told: ”We want this done”, they will do their best to find a way.

One footnote:

* Over the last two years, I’ve read about No10’s plans to devolve responsibility to local authorities to discharge certain services, and open up competition with private providers at local level, and we’ve recently heard that George Osborne is examining similar proposals from Michael Heseltine for the Budget. Whenever I’ve read those reports, I’ve thought: “Hmm, I hope someone’s thought about the implications of that for Section 33”, which is the provision that allows Local Authorities to claim VAT refunds on their spending under certain, very prescribed circumstances. If they haven’t and they’re about to mess around with those arrangements, I’d suggest an urgent word with David Ogilvie and Judith Warner, wherever they are these days!

Extreme Lenting 2013

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 12:38:45 +0000

“Tell me why”, Neil Young sang, “is it hard to make arrangements with yourself?”

Why do we find it so hard to give things up, even for a temporary period, and not just things to which we are chemically addicted, but even bad habits or over-indulgences?

This week, now that the amateurs behind ‘Dry January’ have concluded their warm-up act, the professionals will take the stage: millions of Catholics in Britain and Ireland attempting to give up one of their main pleasures for the 46-day duration of Lent.

Whether they will succeed or not depends in part on what psychological strategy they adopt when deciding what to give up. Some, especially couples, will use the buddy system – giving up something together, and policing each others’ adherence. Others will introduce an element of competition, betting a friend to see whose resolve can last longest.

For me, the best strategy is to ask someone who knows you well what they are certain you could not give up for 46 days. Once they’ve got the abuse out of the way (‘being a tosser’, etc.), you usually get some on-the-money suggestions, from booze to swearing.

The desire to show a good friend that they don’t know you as well as they think is a powerful motivator. And having surprised many of them last year by succeeding in giving up alcohol for the duration, I requested an even more stretching challenge this time round.

One friend suggested Arsenal, but I’m not sure that would be a sufficient hardship this season. Then another friend, watching me tuck into a chicken curry the other night, stated with total confidence that I could not give up meat for 46 days.

Now there’s a challenge.

I’m the guy who goes to J Sheekey or Livebait and orders the steak. When forced to attend a management away-day at the Jamyang Buddhist retreat centre in Kennington yesterday, I smuggled in a packet of ham to have with the ‘lunch’ provided. When Hitler’s food-taster confirmed last week that he was a strict vegetarian, I nodded as though a great riddle had been solved. I like meat a lot.

So not only did I tell my friend I accepted the challenge and would give up eating the beasts of the field for 46 days, but – like Houdini adding a few extra padlocks – I added the other staples of my diet, betting I could go without wheat and potatoes for the duration as well.

Pasta, pastry, bread, chips, crisps, mash, and my beloved lager – all forsaken – along with chicken, beef, lamb, pork, and whatever they’re putting in the frozen lasagne this week.

Tonight will be my carnival (from the Latin ‘carne vale’ – farewell to meat), spaghettival and lagerval all in one – a last feast before the fast.

Usually at this stage, I’d be expected to point you towards my Just Giving page and ask for sponsorship, but – unlike Bob Geldof – I don’t want your fockin’ money.

If you care to support my efforts, I’d ask you to do something much more important: go and sign up to the ‘Enough Food for Everyone….IF’ campaign via CAFOD here, or for all the heathens out there, via the IF website direct.

Because I haven’t just chosen meat, wheat and ‘tatoes because they’re the staples of my diet, but because they’re symbolic of the problems being highlighted by the IF campaign:

Meat because, in many countries in the developing world, land that would be used by small farmers to grow food for their communities is being seized from them to make way for the big agricultural corporations, who will use the land for export crops, for the manufacture of biofuels or for grazing livestock, all for the benefit of motorists and meat-eaters in more prosperous countries;

Wheat because, along with other seeds and grains, trade in them is increasingly controlled by a small number of massive multinationals, able to manipulate markets, if necessary by withholding stocks, and ensure that only those large-scale farmers in their supply chains are supplied with the seeds and grains that they need; and

Potatoes because, almost 170 years on from the famine that devastated Ireland, we are still seeing countries today which are exporting food even as their own people go hungry; countries like Zambia, with the third worst rate of hunger in the world, lauded by the World Bank for its openness to multinationals growing food for export, while avoiding tax on their profits.

Shady land-deals and tax-evasion by multi-nationals; the squeezing-out of small farmers from fair access to land, credit, seeds and markets; and the misuse of land that should be growing food for local communities – these are some of the key root causes of hunger in the developing world that the IF campaign seeks to tackle, and is asking George Osborne and David Cameron to take action on in the March Budget and the June G8 summit.

My Lent fasting won’t make any difference to those problems, but the hole I’ll feel in my stomach each lunchtime at work will remind me why I’m there. If you’d like to play your part, please sign up at the links above.

Why Did The Grid Wither?

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 15:03:21 +0000

Having argued yesterday that the demise of the grid system explains a lot of the problems the Government has been having, as well as the oddly stoical response of Steve Hilton, I’m going to consider today the possible rationale for that demise.

Let’s remember that, in the early days of this Government, it leaked like an old church roof. Michael Gove was almost destroyed by leaks in his first months at Education, and just 10 days after the Coalition was formed, we saw the unprecedented leaking of the entire Queen’s Speech to the intrepid Sunday pairing of Paddy Hennessy and Vincent Moss.

The leaking of that period was mostly blamed on disgruntled, Labour-friendly civil servants, although – in my experience and the experience of most people with leaky roofs – the more drips there are, the heavier the flow gets and the more diverse the sources.

If you’re a brand new Minister or special adviser, keen to build relationships with the media, nothing is more tempting than leaking the odd titbit that you’ve seen in a Cabinet paper, especially if you’re in Coalition and owe no party loyalty to the Minister concerned, and if you know those ubiquitous ‘Whitehall moles’ are going to get the blame.

Now, in that context - if you’re Steve Hilton or Andy Coulson in May 2010 - do you view the existence of an ‘Upcoming Business’ document detailing every Government announcement for the next fortnight as a helpful tool for good government, or as a massive hole in your defence against leaks?

Do you regard the grid traditionally circulated across Government (minus the accompanying detailed document) as a helpful device to ensure Departments and Ministers know the plan for each day, or as an invitation for untrustworthy colleagues to sit down over a pint with journalists and try and work out what ‘Forest Management Consultation’ might mean (Erm, a posthumous knighthood for Brian Clough?)

And the reality is, for all its success as an organisational tool under New Labour, the grid and the ‘Upcoming Business’ document were the source of many a leak. A whole journalistic phrasebook exists because of it: “busting the grid” or “a bit of gridology”, all code for using the headlines in the grid to decipher an upcoming announcement.

So an enterprising journalist might be told by a friendly adviser that there’s an interesting line in the grid saying: “Trains: Alcohol”. He or she does a bit of Googling to see what the IPPR, the BMA, the Police Federation or others have been recommending. They then call the Home Office late on a Friday and say:

“Hi, I’ve had a briefing about this trains and booze story for next week, which is all fine – we’re probably going to splash it – and I’ve got all the quotes I need, but I’m a bit unclear which of your Ministers is making the statement – is it the boss or one of the juniors? Ah, OK. And the only other thing I’m unclear about is will there be options in the document, or is it just the main proposal? Ah, OK. And what’s the official way you’d like that worded so we don’t set any hares running? Ah, fine. Let me get that down. Thanks very much.”

Now of course it isn’t always as easy as all that. But over the New Labour years, many a story was fleshed out and stood up from a couple of words in the grid, let alone the several paragraphs of detail found in the ‘Upcoming Business’ document.

So, going back to Hilton and Coulson, you can absolutely see why one of the first things they did on entering Downing Street – upon facing a string of damaging leaks – was to reduce the number of people allowed to attend the grid meetings, reduce the copy list for the ‘Upcoming Business’ document, and both restrict and delay the circulation of the grid across Whitehall.

Nevertheless, in an unsuccessful effort to solve one problem (the leaks continued anyway, witness Budget 2012), they created another, far bigger problem, losing the control that the grid offered them over the government machine, perhaps before they’d realised its importance in that respect.

I can imagine why Hilton stopped attending the grid meetings; not just because they were Coulson’s show, but because once you haven’t got all the right people round the table, they cease to be of any value.

Every government faces leaks; they’re annoying, but they’re rarely fatally damaging. What is fatal is the government losing grip over what it’s announcing, how, when, and most importantly why. If the price you pay for that grip is the occasional unscheduled Sunday paper splash, it’s worth every penny.

Whither the Grid?

Sun, 13 Jan 2013 11:33:07 +0000

There was one passage in The Sunday Times’ expose of Steve Hilton’s Stanford lecture which told me everything about the problems the Government is currently facing. According to the report, Hilton dramatically produced a 1-foot high bundle of paper for his audience representing 4 days worth of documents circulated to Cabinet committees. He then said:

“It just shows you the scale of what you’re up against in trying to control these things. The idea that a couple of political advisers read through all this and spot things are bad, things that are contradictory, is just inconceivable.”

And he’s right, which is precisely why a system has been in place since 1997 which means they don’t have to. The ‘grid system’ initiated by New Labour - transferred from their 1997 election campaign - is commonly considered to be a news management tool, with a series of announcements plotted to dominate each day’s coverage and provide occasional cover to bury bad news.

However, its far more important role was doing precisely what Hilton says is impossible: giving political advisers an easily-digestable paper (no more than 20-30 pages long) containing the key elements of every government announcement or external news item coming up for the next fortnight.

The ‘grid’ itself was simply an aide-memoire version of this longer document, with each announcement arranged in order of importance and general subject area for each of the next fourteen days on two A4 sheets of paper, with the emerging grids for the next two months added on to give a longer-term view.

This ‘Upcoming Business’ document would be circulated by No10’s Strategic Communications Unit each Thursday evening, and would then form the basis of a Friday morning meeting to go through each item in the grid line-by-line.

At different times under the Labour government, these meetings were chaired by Alastair Campbell, Ed Miliband (as Cabinet Office minister) and Jeremy Heywood (as PPS to Gordon Brown). They were attended by every member of the No10 Policy Unit (responsible for shadowing different departments), all key Communications staff, and all the key civil servants in the PM’s private office.

As the cast-list suggests, behind the Cabinet meetings, these were the most important meetings of the week in Downing Street. Upcoming announcements by other departments would be challenged, more information sought, and - because each item would get at least two airings before it was due to be announced - it was (to quote Hilton) “inconceivable” that something would be announced without No10 knowing about it, let alone something that they didn’t agree with.

Take a hypothetical example of how it would work: DEFRA submit an item for the grid one week which simply says they’ll be consulting on options for the rationalisation and improved management of the state-owned forest estate; and they plan to announce this in 10 days time. A couple of curious people round the table say: ‘What’s this about?’ and tell the DEFRA policy shadow to find out more information, and get a copy of the consultation paper.

Next Friday, there’s a lot more detail in the document about the proposal, which DEFRA now plan to announce in 3 days time, at which point everyone around the table says: “Hold on a minute, they want to privatise the forests?! Get it out of the grid, and set up a meeting asap for the PM and the Secretary of State to discuss it. But tell them under no circumstances is this going ahead next week, and if they’ve briefed any Sunday papers, they’d better un-brief it sharpish or we’ll dump all over it.”

So my question is - if what Steve Hilton told his students at Stanford is true - what on earth has happened to the No10 grid system? It’s clearly not working as it once did, as is occasionally obvious from the confusion over what’s being announced and when, the clashes between different good announcements, and the waste of other good announcements on days when bad news is sure to dominate.

Losing the civil servant master of the grid, Paul Brown MBE - who retired early in the Coalition - would have been a blow, but I’m sure his replacement(s) are just as thorough when it comes to making sure the Upcoming Business document is both exhaustive but digestible. My guess is that the apparent failure of the grid system is much less to do with the quality of the civil service legwork going into it, but about the importance accorded it by the No10 political machine.

Here are two straws in the wind which may support that theory:

1. One of Craig Oliver’s first acts as Director of Communications in No10 was to alter the structure of the grid so the week started on a Sunday not on a Monday. A tiny but significant change, because what it revealed was a mindset that the grid was just a news management tool, and news management for each week starts with what’s in the Sunday papers and who’s going on Marr. Whereas the old system - when the week started when Parliament was sitting - reflected a mindset that the grid was chiefly about controlling government business and announcements, not controlling the media; and

2. I was chatting before Christmas to two relatively young, junior members of Downing Street staff - very bright, pleasant, energetic types - and I asked them in passing: “Who’s chairing the grid meetings these days?” After all, based on past history, it could be Craig Oliver, Francis Maude or Chris Martin (David Cameron’s current PPS). Or based on seniority in today’s No10, it could be Andrew Cooper, Ed Llewellyn or even George Osborne. One of them answered: “I’m not sure”. The other answered: “I don’t know if we still do grid meetings”. Now, as I say, they were junior, but the idea that what used to be the second most important meeting of the week in Downing Street is now one that is barely on the radar of two members of No10 staff seems deeply worrying to me.

We’re forever being told that David Cameron, George Osborne and their teams are devotees of Tony Blair’s style of government, but if they have genuinely ditched or downgraded the key mechanism by which his Downing Street managed the business of government, it is a shocking blindspot in their devotion, and one that needs correcting. Sharpish.

The Unemployment Figures: A Taxman's View

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 11:14:20 +0000

I’m a great believer in the old adage that if you want to know what’s really happening to the economy, ask the taxman. So when I met one of my old pals from HMRC recently, I asked him what was going on with unemployment. Why are the recent figures so good when other economic data is so weak, and when the Job Programme doesn’t seem to be doing anything? This is what he said:

So imagine you’re some bloke on disability benefits or JSA, but you also sit and mind your sister’s flower stall a couple of hours each day and drive a mini-cab on a Friday night to get some extra cash, but most of the time you’re just sat at home or in the pub. Then you get told you need to do 3 weeks’ unpaid work in Tesco to see whether you’re fit for work, so you can’t earn your cash or sit in the pub. So what are you going to do? You’ll tell the Job Centre it’s alright, I’ve managed to get some part-time work and carry on as normal. They lose their benefits but get tax credits instead, so there’s not a lot of net gain for the Revenue. And they’re not doing any work that they weren’t doing before so there’s no benefit for GDP. So all round, it’s good for the unemployment figures, but not much else.

I’ve no idea how accurate or typical that scenario is, but I thought it was an interesting perspective, and it would explain a few things.

Paradise Regained or Damnation Postponed?

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 17:39:24 +0000

I got that Autumn Statement totally wrong. Besides the prospect of no further micro-tinkering with the tax system – which everyone could forecast – my other confident predictions were as follows:

1. George Osborne would suck up the terrible numbers on growth and borrowing, accept he would miss his fiscal targets, get all the bad news out of the way, write it off as a rubbish year, and play the long game; and

2. He wouldn’t do any big ticket measures on the grounds there is no point wasting good announcements on a bad news day, or doing anything controversial to compound that bad news.

On both counts, I was totally wrong.

He couldn’t do much about the bad growth forecasts, but he’s pulled out all the stops to make the deficit and debt figures less dire, including some accounting tricks which would impress Derren Brown let alone Gordon, and as a result has stayed on the same golf course as his fiscal targets.

And he’s made a valiant, and potentially successful, effort to wipe the numbers off the news with some very big ticket announcements on infrastructure, fuel duty, personal allowances and business taxes, paid for by some massive plus column dei ex machina (£3.5bn from the 4G spectrum sale in Year 1; £3.1bn from the Swiss Government in Year 2; and £2.4bn from his fellow Ministers’ budgets in Year 3), coupled with the ongoing war of accretion against welfare recipients.

Is it all credible? The genius of today’s statement (or the foolishness, depending on your perspective) is that we won’t know for months. These aren’t measures which will unravel by the weekend like the last Budget, and they’ve been carefully chosen with that in mind.

So we could look back and say this was the day when George Osborne restored his strategic reputation and put himself back on the path to No10 with a brilliantly-designed set of measures to get on top of the worst set of numbers he ever had to face.

Or we could look back and say this was the day he departed from reality, missed the chance to draw a line under his annus horribilis, and thus guaranteed that when the numbers are even worse next time, and his credibility is exhausted, it’ll be Goodnight Gideon.

Which will it be? I’m not predicting anything after today. Except this.

If George Osborne goes down, Robert Chote is going with him. Why? For me, the most significant line in the whole Autumn Statement document – because it will be the first big test of its credibility – is at Paragraph 2.43: “Following…independent analysis of the likely valuation of [4G] spectrum receipts by the OBR, the receipts will be reflected…at £3.5 billion.”

That £3.5 billion – not a rough projection but a figure now banked in the public finances – is what allowed the Chancellor to say that borrowing was falling this year; it’s what allowed him to do a billion quid of fiscal loosening for each of the following 3 years and claim that the package was fiscally-neutral overall. It’s a hell of a bet, and it’s Chote who made it.

We’ll find out in March if he was right or not.

"Is Little Nell dead?" - Not on this evidence.

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 16:37:51 +0000

For a policy geek like me, who spent 3 years in charge of policy on alcohol duties, hearing that the Government was publishing proposals on a Minimum Unit Price (MUP) today felt like being part of the mob at New York Harbour waiting for the arrival of the final chapters of The Old Curiosity Shop to see if Little Nell had died.

Having driven through my own seemingly radical reform of the alcohol tax system in 2002, introducing Progressive Beer Duty (a halving of the duty rate paid by small brewers), and seen the explosion in British microbreweries that followed in the decade since, I imagined the civil servants sweating all morning over the impact of these changes.

And as I said on Twitter this morning, the questions for me were how on earth the Government could enforce a MUP except through taxation, but what the consequences would be for Britain’s drinks industry and consumption habits if it did attempt to impose a 45 pence minimum of excise duty (or duty plus VAT) per unit of alcohol sold?

Opening the consultation document earlier, I was giddy with excitement and trepidation about how they’d solved this conundrum: how could they enforce the MUP except through means that would cause political, industry and consumer chaos. And the answer is: Ummm, they haven’t.

There was not a word about enforcement of the MUP (or the related ban on multi-buy offers) in the main consultation document, but turn to ‘Impact Assessment A’, and we find the following extraordinary ‘interim assumptions’:

In the 350-odd licensing authorities in England and Wales, on average responsible for almost 500 licensed premises each, it is intended that there will be ONE individual (either local government, police or trading standards – yet to be determined which) spending 2 hours per week enforcing the new rules. The total cost of enforcement is therefore estimated to be circa £500,000 per year.

For the MUP, we then get this line:

“Enforcement authorities will need to check product prices against the MUP and would only expect to do so when there has been a representation to the enforcing authority which suggests that premises may be in breach of their licence conditions. We expect that enforcement officers will only choose to check alcohol products that are considered to be very low cost and random sample products if necessary.”

Similarly, for multi-buy products, we get this:

“Enforcement authorities would need to check that products or promotions falling within the scope of the ban had been removed. We expect that enforcement officers will only choose to do so where there has been a representation to the enforcing authority which suggests that a premises may be in breach of their licensing conditions, although they may also choose to randomly sample products or promotions if necessary.”

So let’s get this straight. The enforcement of this major flagship reform depends on people complaining to their local authority that the off licence at the end of the street is selling alcohol at below 45p per unit, or selling packs of six lagers at a discount price compared to the cost of six on their own.

Does anyone spot a flaw in that plan? If the same off licence had a reputation for selling booze or cigarettes to under-age kids, then not only would the offence be clear cut to most locals, but the chances of them being reported would be reasonably good.

But the idea that shopkeepers who have the temerity to offer their wares at discount prices will routinely be dobbed in by their customers (or indeed fellow shopkeepers) is right up there with the notion that homeowners should report builders and plumbers who offer them a cash price for a job.

Of course, the big supermarkets and off licence chains won’t have much choice but to comply because their prices are centrally set; and most pubs, clubs and restaurants won’t be affected; but according to the Home Office’s own consultation document, that leaves at least 56,149 small and micro-sized off-trade premises where the Government is relying on some form of citizen-led enforcement.

As a result of these measures, those places might take down the signs in their windows offering six cans of Stella for a fiver so as not to attract the attention of any passing busybodies, but does anyone think that means the offers themselves will disappear? Especially for locals who’ve been using those same off licences and corner shops, and enjoying those deals, for years.

In fact, given the big supermarkets will no longer be able to offer large discount prices and multi-buy offers, those small shops should see an increase in business – the same shops which are (compared to the necessarily stringent standards of a Tesco or Sainsbury’s) less choosy about the age of those they sell to, what time they start or stop serving booze, and whether they serve people who are already hammered.

In short, the enforcement regime set out today will not work, and could prove a tad counter-productive. Now the government surely aren’t stupid. Whoever wrote that impact assessment must have realised it sounded hopelessly detached from reality. So what’s the real game?

I come back to what I said at the outset. The only way this policy can be sensibly enforced is through taxation. The only way it can be made secure from legal challenge on competition grounds is through taxation. The only way it will ever be introduced in practice is through taxation. As for the explanations given in ‘Impact Assessment A’ as to why it’s not being done through taxation, they are so thin that a more cynical man would think they were designed to be overcome.*

So I’m prepared to predict that either today’s measures (the MUP and multi-buy ban specifically) are introduced as proposed, and then widely-ignored by half the population, like the laws on littering or seat-belts in the back seat. Or more likely, the Government will conclude that, after due consideration and consultation, they’ve decided to implement it through taxation.

And, at that point, for the reasons described in my earlier blog on this subject, all hell with break loose.

* For example, we’re told that “a rise in alcohol duty would affect all types of alcohol products, including the most expensive products” whereas “a MUP is intended to specifically target the sale of cheap alcohol products”. Erm, a minimum duty rate (or duty plus VAT rate) of 45p per unit would make not a blind bit of difference to the price of “the most expensive products”, whereas it would jack up the price of all reasonably-priced beer and cider and cheaper bottles of wine. We’re also told that “there is no requirement for retailers to pass through higher duties into prices, so higher duties will not automatically raise the price of cheap alcohol”. Erm, the Home Office can pull the other one if they’re arguing retailers would be able or willing to absorb a 45p per unit duty rate, rather than passing it on to consumers.

Downing Street Does Need New People

Sun, 04 Nov 2012 23:58:53 +0000

The two most important civil servants in No10 are the PM’s Official Spokesman and the PM’s Principal Private Secretary. One runs his press office; the other runs his private office. Put another way, one controls what the PM thinks, says and does publicly; the other controls his diary and the work he does behind closed doors.

If those two offices are not run fluently and coherently, Downing Street cannot function, and the PM cannot govern effectively. There are of course one or two other things and people which affect the successful functioning of the government, but unless you have excellent individuals in the roles of PMOS and PPS, the battle is already lost.

So even though the news has gone largely unreported, it’s hugely important that Jean-Christophe Gray – widely known as JC Gray* – has been appointed as the new PMOS, in which role he will give twice-daily official briefings to the Parliamentary press, speaking ex cathedra on behalf of David Cameron and the Government.

It’s an immensely tough role, in which you’re never more than one misplaced phrase or unintended admission away from causing a media storm. Too many of those and you won’t last long, but go in the other direction – know nothing, say nothing, refuse to confirm the truth or even answer your phone – and you will lose all respect and trust. That’s fine if you just want to get through each day, but not if you want to help the PM survive when he’s next at the epicentre of a shitquake.

JC will not be fazed by difficult days, having managed the Treasury press office during tough periods under Alistair Darling and George Osborne. But more importantly, he has two key characteristics that will stand him in good stead:

He’s got integrity. When he was working in Gordon Brown’s private office and I was the Treasury’s head of communications, JC told me that he’d struck up a friendship with a journalist and was planning to invite her round for dinner. Was this OK? When I next saw him, he looked like someone had shot his dog. How did the date go? “Well, it was going really well,” he said, “but then she started talking about the pressure she was under at work, having to find out what was happening with council tax revaluation, and asked whether that had crossed my desk…..So I asked her to leave.” You did what?! “Well I was very nice about it, but I said it was best we left it there.” I may be wrong, but that kind of reaction is not the mark of a man who would ever mislead a journalist or deny something he knew to be true.

He’s also a professional. He’ll get flustered on occasions but he’ll never shirk his job, let the pressures get to him, or be flippant about the power he holds. On the day of Budget 2011, I made my annual ‘mystery shopper’ call to the Treasury press office, and hit the jackpot, being referred to JC himself. Affecting a suitable accent, I said I was the beer correspondent for the Huddersfield Examiner, and was furious about the abolition of tax relief for Mathers’ Black Beer (a pre-cursor of the bigger and more damaging changes HMRC slipped past the keeper in Budget 2012). JC corpsed. I could hear him desperately stifling the giggles as I thundered on – with genuine conviction – about the impact on local brewing heritage. “Are ya laffin, lad?” I asked. He composed himself, and gave a beautifully-crafted and sensitively-phrased explanation for the change. Almost as impressive as his recovery and his answer was the fact that he handled the call himself; a less consummate professional would have thought it was beneath him, and referred it to HMRC.

But – as well-suited as JC may be for the role – there’s a more important issue to address about his appointment. It continues a remarkable recent hegemony over the PMOS and PPS roles by individuals who have graduated from senior roles either in the Chancellor’s private office or the Treasury press office, or in JC’s case, both.

The current PPS – appointed earlier this year – is Chris Martin, a former Treasury head of communications. For the previous 13 years, the role of PPS had been held by graduates of Ken Clarke’s or Gordon Brown’s Treasury private office: Jeremy Heywood (twice), Ivan Rogers, Tom Scholar and James Bowler. The exception in that period was Oliver Robbins, but he was as central to Gordon Brown’s Treasury operation as any of the others.

As for the PMOS, the hegemony is more short-lived but now seemingly entrenched. Since 2007, the role has gone from Michael ‘The Sheik’ Ellam to Steve ‘Jonatton Yeah?’ Field, both former Treasury heads of communication and masters of the PMOS art, and now to JC Gray. The exception in that period was Simon Lewis, a rare outsider, who served for less than a year at the tail-end of the Labour government.

There is one way to look at all this.

You could argue that, since the Treasury has traditionally had the pick of the best fast stream recruits to the Home Civil Service and the best of those will usually end up in the most important Treasury positions, then their further ascendance to the top jobs in No10 is simply a case of cream rising to the top.

You could also argue that there is no better training for those No10 jobs than their equivalent posts in the Treasury, and that the preference for Treasury types reflects the current centrality of the economy to No10’s work. Whereas with Ivan Rogers, Ollie Robbins and Jeremy Heywood, Tony Blair was poaching Gordon Brown’s talent, it is now a case of No10’s chief strategist, George Osborne, recommending people he knows are up to the job.

But there’s another way to look at it.

If, every time there’s a vacancy in the PMOS or PPS roles, No10 continues drawing on the same narrow field of Treasury candidates, all themselves drawing on similar working experiences, you do risk ending up with a certain homogeneity in the way that the jobs are approached.

And like all narrow gene pools, the effects are multiplied the longer the cycle is unbroken. Given that interviewers tend to select the candidate who most resembles themselves, the fact that most of the individuals I’ve mentioned recruited each other at various points reinforces that trend, as does the fact that they all came through the same brutal selection process to become fast stream civil servants in the first place.

Again, given that these individuals are generally the best and brightest Whitehall has to offer, you might argue this is no bad thing. And having myself benefited from this process, I’m hardly in a position to criticise it. However, like all the others, I’m white, male and heterosexual, with a degree from Oxbridge. When I was appointed as the Treasury’s head of communications in 2003, all seven people involved in my interview process (bar Edinburgh-educated Gordon) were the same.

The Treasury recently completed its 2012 recruitment process for new ‘policy advisers’, specifying the minimum requirement of a 2:1 degree. The blurb says: “We want to do everything we can to ensure that we reflect the society we serve”, but while the recruitment forms, tests and interviews will be daunting to many candidates, they’ll be routine to many others from entrance applications to grammar school, private school or Oxbridge.

The Treasury’s standard application form for more senior jobs contains a sequence of three sections for ‘Higher Education’, ‘Subject of Postgraduate Research (if any)’, and ‘Professional Qualifications’. These are not ‘mandatory fields’ but it would take a particularly confident soul to leave them blank and carry on in good heart with the rest of their application, and a particularly wise Treasury manager who would carry on reading it with an open mind.

None of this means the Treasury, and by extension No10, is necessarily recruiting the wrong people to the most important posts, but we do have to ask what they’re missing out on by effectively excluding the vast majority of the civil service, not to mention 99.99% of the entire working population, from the reckoning.

And that matters if you assume, as I do, that there are a huge number of highly intelligent, brilliantly creative, politically astute individuals in Britain, with the same integrity and professionalism as a JC Gray, who would never even get their foot in the Treasury’s door – let alone have the chance to rise to the most senior positions – because they did not go to University, or because they are unable to present themselves as a ‘Treasury type’ at interview.

I grew up with friends who started work in the City without A Levels or degrees in the 1990s; they would make brilliant Treasury advisers on finance or trade, but would never get a look in. I know journalists from my time in government whose only qualification is shorthand but would never have let the pasty tax into the Budget. And, during my period in the education and charity sectors, I’ve met exceptional people who absolutely should be advising on child welfare policy rather than some 21-year old graduate from Peterhouse.

Some of the most important work being done on politics at the moment is by Labour MPs Jon Trickett and Gloria De Piero (see here and here) and Lib Dem activist Louise Shaw (see here and here). From different perspectives, they’re all looking at what kind of people are attracted to a career in politics in the first place, which of them are able to get started, and how those with alternative backgrounds, family lives, emotional needs and income levels (or a simple lack of know-how or contacts) are put off or weeded out.

Jon Trickett has made the point that 91 per cent of those MPs returned at the 2010 election went to University, and of the 9 per cent who did not, we can also note that only the Tories’ Patrick McLoughlin and the excellent Grant Shapps now attend either the Cabinet or Shadow Cabinet. Where is Labour’s next Alan Johnson or the Lib Dems’ next Paddy Ashdown? That is precisely what Jon, Gloria and Louise are looking to change, but it’s an uphill struggle.

By comparison, widening the field of civil servants we recruit to staff our government offices and fill the most important roles in the Treasury and No10 should not be so hard. It just requires the Jeremy Heywoods, Chris Martins and JC Grays of the world to recognise – as I have, with the benefit of some external perspective – that, when the time comes to find their own successors, they need to add some fresh blood to the family.

The Treasury’s ‘policy adviser’ recruitment blurb says: “HM Treasury believes a diverse workforce makes a positive impact on what we can achieve”. Right you are, chaps, let’s see you do something about it.

—————-

* = A now forgotten fact: JC Gray is only called JC Gray because of Gordon Brown’s total inability to say difficult names. He tried several times to get the hang of saying ‘Jean Christophe’ when barking out instructions to the new recruit in his private office, before the solution of using ‘JC’ was suggested to him instead. To avoid confusion, everyone else started referring to Jean Christophe as ‘JC’ as well, and that became his name. There but for the grace of God went we all. Shortly afterwards, another new recruit – the wonderful Rita Patel, now Mrs Phil French – joined the private office, and having been warned about JC’s experience, she was determined not to be similarly re-named. So when Gordon introduced her happily as ‘Ruth’ to a large gathering of external businesspeople on her first day in the job, she shouted at him: “It’s Rita, Chancellor, RITA!” I’d like to say that he coolly replied: “OK Rita, but it’s not Chancellor, it’s Gordon”, but I think he was too taken aback. He never got her name wrong again though.

Pip Monks, "a strong and solid character"

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 15:10:15 +0000

70 years ago today, Philip ‘Pip’ Monks, an old boy of Finchley Catholic Grammar School (FCGS), died in hospital of injuries sustained while preparing for active service in the Royal Tank Corps.

Pip was born in Cricklewood in 1922, and joined FCGS as a 10 year old boy in the Preparatory School. The Albanian records that:

“Although he achieved no outstanding distinction, he was of a strong and solid character, loyal and devoted to his School, popular with his fellows and true to type in all that one would expect from a boy who had nobly played his part in deriving the fullest advantage from his school life.”

In his last year at school, he played cricket for the First XI, and was appointed one of the Assistant Prefects. He also took part in the school’s 1938 football tour of the Rhineland, and was one of those who said farewell to their German hosts looking forward to a return match in London.

After leaving school, Pip followed his father into the Merchant Navy, joining the New Zealand Shipping Company. In 1942, he enlisted in the Royal Tank Corps. Training for the tank regiments was rigorous, and accidents were frequent. In the course of practice manoeuvres in late October, he was badly hurt, succumbing to his injuries a few days later.

Father Parsons, the Head Boy and a number of pupils attended Pip’s funeral and requiem in Kensal Green, where he is buried. His father, Thomas Vernon Monks, was absent at sea on his Merchant Navy duties and unable to attend his son‟s funeral.

Philip is also remembered on a memorial erected at the National Arboretum in Staffordshire by the New Zealand Shipping Companies to mark the hundreds of their employees lost in the war.

And we remember him still with fondness and gratitude at the school today. May He Rest In Peace.

Why Dave needs Artie, Paula & Beverly

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 11:18:00 +0100

Does David Cameron believe in karma? If so, he must wonder whether the current state of his Premiership is some cosmic payback for the events of 5 years ago, when it was Gordon Brown experiencing one ‘worst week ever’ after another, and Cameron leading the gleeful taunts.

The Election that Never Was, the feuding of Gordon’s inner circle, Anthony Seldon’s ‘Blair Unbound’ biography, the Scottish elections fiasco, the ongoing row over ‘British jobs for British workers’, another Foot & Mouth leak from the Pirbright laboratory, the loss of the child benefit discs, David Abrahams’ dodgy donations, the rows over Wendy Alexander’s and Peter Hain’s undeclared donations. Over a two-month period, every time we thought it couldn’t get worse, it got worse, and the demands from the party’s so-called grey beards for someone to ‘get a grip’ grew ever louder..

Now David Cameron must know the feeling. Unfortunately for him, he seems to be lurching into some of the same mistakes which – with the luxury of considerable hindsight – I can see that Gordon made in that period, prolonging the vicious circle of bad headlines and misguided responses.

First, he – like Gordon – is trying to announce his way out of the crisis, going into each Sunday morning and each PMQs with a fresh attempt to get on top of the news agenda with some random, focus group designed announcement. At its very least, this is a waste of potentially good stories and speeches which should be held back until there’s a chance of them being heard; worse, it leads to the bungled announcement of half-baked policies, like the fuel bills balls-up; and worse still, it leads to ridiculous headlines like “Cameron: Now Mug A Hoodie”.

Second, he and his team are fighting forest fires with buckets of sand, when what they need is proper firebreaks, i.e. moments when the pre-existing political news agenda is suspended (or at least turned into a backdrop) while another issue or event comes to the fore. It could be a Budget, a Queen’s Speech, a trip to Washington, a Defence White Paper: anything which obliges the political media to focus their attention elsewhere for a few days, not least – to put it crudely – if they want to get an exclusive preview. So where are the Coalition’s firebreaks? The only one I can see on the horizon is George Osborne’s Autumn Statement on 5th December; that feels a long time away.

Third, and not for the first time, David Cameron is coming across like a one-man band. He is trying to do too much himself, and is over-exposed in the media. Why is he making a crime speech in the first place? Why is he announcing energy policy? These are the acts of a PM who feels a personal pressure – but also a personal responsibility – to turn things around. If he was on good form, this might be an OK thing, but I fear what political insiders view as robust media performances come across to the public as irritable. Plus when the PM takes all the load on himself, the Cabinet switch off and start watching comedy DVDs in first class carriages without thinking about how that looks.

Fourth, the one vital antidote to any temporary mood of crisis is the sense that the person in charge has bigger and more important things to worry about. Obviously the main thing that will determine the next election is the state of the economy and the deficit, but to the extent that the PM projects himself as being “100% focused” on those issues, it tends to be about the next set of jobs and growth figures, or what’s happened with the deficit since the election, not about the really big picture. If I was him, I would immerse myself in the details of the Basel III bank regulations and forecasts of Chinese commodity inventories, and adopt an air – or even better, adopt the reality – of constant concern about what will happen to the world economy in 2014.

Finally, and most importantly, we hear the dread call for “fresh blood” in No10. There are two phrases that every former Gordon Brown staffer got used to hearing when he couldn’t hide his exasperation with them any longer. The first – delivered slowly and usually punctuated with a pounding fist on the back of a chair – was “Too. Many. Mistakes.” The second – delivered in a strangled growl, usually at the person he wanted to murder on the spot – was: “I NEED NEW PEOPLE”.

So it is we hear the demands for David Cameron to get rid of Andrew Cooper and Craig Oliver or rein in Sir Jeremy Heywood, and we can be fairly sure that David Cameron and George Osborne are discussing exactly those issues, not least as they ponder how to fill the gaps that are being left in the communications operation with the departures of Steve Field and Gabby Bertin.

It is always tempting to think that your problems will be solved by hiring new or better people, and that is exactly the route that Gordon went down after his two months from hell in 2007.

Not only did that not work for Gordon, it proved positively damaging, as the new staff struggled to find their feet in an atmosphere of rolling crisis management, and as morale amongst his pre-existing team of civil servants and special advisers collapsed to rock bottom. And if there’s one thing you can’t afford when you’re handling crises, it’s half your people not knowing what they’re supposed to do, and the other half not feeling motivated to do it.

I don’t know whether David Cameron needs new people or not, but I do know this: the people are not the most important thing; it’s the function he gives them, and that brings me to the three people who can save Dave’s Premiership.

If you want to learn about handling crises in government, you shouldn’t watch The West Wing or The Thick Of It; just watch The Larry Sanders Show. Almost every episode tells the story of how a group of people, whatever the dysfunctional behind-the-scenes turmoil, manage to present a successful show at the end of the day. And besides Larry – who is obviously Cameron right down to the luxurious hair – there are 3 individuals who are essential to making every show a success, all with distinct responsibilities, all comparable to roles in Downing Street:

Paula (Janeane Garofalo) is not just the talent-booker; she is the talent – the brains and creativity of the show, but rooted in the real world of what will work and what the audience will like. She is also the show’s strategic planner, spotting problems and filling holes, whether days in advance or minutes before show-time. In No10, she would be in charge of the strategic grid, planning the firebreaks, spotting the opportunities, stopping the screw-ups, and ensuring the talent from elsewhere in the Cabinet gets a chance to shine.

Beverly (Penny Johnson) runs Larry’s life. She manages his time, energy and mood, deciding who he needs to see and what he needs to do. Nobody else has this control, not even Larry’s wives, and it is not shared with anyone. In No10, she would be the PM’s gatekeeper, diary manager and closest confidante, and crucially, she would have the power to tell the civil servants, press officers and advisers who all want a piece of his time and energy when they can and cannot have it.

Artie (Rip Torn) has one job: making the whole operation work, and ensuring that when the curtain goes up, the audience sees an entertaining, professional show, and a smiling, relaxed host. He saves Larry from the stuff he doesn’t have to deal with, and deals brutally with anyone trying to undermine Larry or disrupt the show. In No10, he’d be the person who’d ensure everyone else was doing their job and nothing was distracting the PM from doing his. Like it or not, Andrew Mitchell would have been gone in 5 minutes with an Artie in the room.

At present, David Cameron looks to me like he’s in one of those Larry Sanders episodes where the network is trying to make him change his style, or where he feels he needs to bring in new writers, or where he’s worried about some rival presenter stealing his show or being upstaged by one of the guests. Worse still, his Cabinet and many of his officials and advisers are acting like a bunch of Hanks and Phils, worried about their own interests and futures, not about protecting his.

If he wants to shake up his personnel in No10, and he feels that is crucial in order to get out of the current crisis mode, then he first needs to establish what jobs need doing. He needs to create and then fill the roles of an Artie, a Paula and a Beverly, whether that means giving more power to existing staff members or bringing in new people.

In his time in Downing Street, Gordon didn’t have any individual playing any of those roles. Not even Sue Nye enjoyed the exclusive power over his time and energy that a proper Beverly would have, he lacked a consistent Paula figure, and he never came close to establishing an Artie.

If David Cameron sorts out those roles, then things like planning firebreaks, avoiding botched announcements, focusing on the big picture, and getting the rest of the Cabinet to raise their game will become that much easier. And most importantly, it will allow him to get back to presenting himself as a relaxed, confident, natural Prime Minister. With great hair.

Flight 571 - The Miracle in the Andes

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 13:12:00 +0100

On this day, 40 years ago, a rugby team set off from Montevideo in Uruguay for their second tour of Chile. They were accompanied by two dozen friends and family helping to pay for the charter of the Uruguayan Air Force plane.

After bad weather halted their first attempt to cross the Andes, they tried again the next day. Flying in thick cloud above the mountains, the pilots of Flight 571 got their calculations horribly wrong. Descending into what they thought was Chile, they instead emerged in the middle of the mountains.

Both wings were ripped off the plane, and one sliced off the tail. The fuselage crashed up the mountainside, crushing the passengers inside, and came to a halt almost more than 12,000 feet above sea level, in sub-zero temperatures. 12 passengers and crew were killed in the crash and its immediate aftermath. 33 remained alive, some with terrible injuries.

What happened to that group of 33 over the next 3 months became one of the 20th century’s most dramatic and haunting tales of hardship, courage and survival, which is why I will be chronicling the history of those 3 months in real-time on a new Twitter feed.

It is a story of brotherhood tested under the most extraordinary circumstances. There was no one leader. Some individuals who initially rallied the group eventually succumbed to despair. Others overcame deep personal grief to become heroes when the time came to seek rescue.

It is a story of faith. All on board the plane were Catholics, and for many, it was their faith and prayer that sustained their hope, and which enabled them to transform in their minds what the world would describe as cannibalism into a sacred act of sacrifice and communion.

It is above all a story about the triumph of the human spirit; the determination to survive. The group regularly had to deal with the crushing of their hopes: the news coming through via radio that all searches had been called off; the avalanche that claimed the lives of many who had survived the crash. But no matter how bad things got, their sheer will to live triumphed.

I’ve been inspired by the story of the survivors since first reading Piers Paul Read’s classic account ‘Alive’, and later by reading the 2006 first person account by Nando Parrado, ‘Miracle In The Andes’, and much of the material on the Twitter feed will be derived from those sources. If you’re interested in this subject and have not read those books, do get them from Amazon.

Shortly after the remaining survivors were finally rescued, the father of one of those who had not returned wrote an open letter to the newspapers, saying:

“We invite every citizen of our country to spend some minutes in meditation on the immense lesson of solidarity, courage and discipline which has been left to us by these boys in the hope that it will serve us all to overcome our mean egotism and petty ambitions, and our lack of interest for our brothers.”

Amen to that.

Jimmy Saville's Knighthood: The Civil Service Rearguard

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 15:17:14 +0100

I’m going to take a wild guess on something, based on 3 reasonable assumptions and a bit of background knowledge:

1. I don’t think there’s any way The Sun would launch a front page campaign to strip Jimmy Saville of his knighthood - along with a detailed description of the law change required to make it happen - unless No10 had given them some kind of nod that they were sympathetic to the proposal.

2. Hence I don’t think it was any kind of accident or a case of being under-briefed that David Cameron told Daybreak this morning that: “We have in Britain something called the forfeiture committee…that looks at whether honours should be rescinded and I’m sure that they will obviously want to do their jobs.”

3. Equally, I don’t think it was a cock-up that despite the PM’s words, a Cabinet Office spokesman then said that the question did not arise since the knighthood became defunct upon Saville’s death, thus making Cameron look rather foolish - something The Times captures here in its juxtaposition of the two headlines.

So what is going on? Here’s where some background knowledge may be helpful.

The idea of awarding posthumous honours has been around for many years, most notably with the campaign for Bobby Moore to receive the knighthood that many of his surviving 1966 peers received in the years after his death. After all, posthumous honours already exist, but only in cases where members of the armed forces or emergency services are killed while engaged in acts of great bravery.

The last great effort to introduce posthumous honours was led by myself and Ian Austin MP, with the support of Cabinet Office minister Tom Watson in 2008/09.

We seized on the campaign by the Holocaust Educational Trust (HET) to see honours awarded to - excuse the phrase - those British ‘Heroes of the Holocaust’ who had helped Jewish people to escape the concentration camps, usually at great risk to themselves, while working in Britain’s embassies in Germany and Occupied Europe. In many cases, their heroic deeds had gone unknown and unrecognised in their own lifetimes, a classic example of why posthumous honours are required.

To be honest, my own interest in posthumous honours was primarily football-related, thinking about all those managerial legends whose achievements in the game would have undoubtedly brought them knighthoods in today’s honours system, but who had died unrecognised: Herbert Chapman, Jock Stein, Bob Paisley and Brian Clough, to name four obvious candidates.

We were encouraged in our efforts by Gordon, who added his own cause celebre to ours: he felt that British society owed it to Alan Turing to recognise his great service and the appalling way he had been treated, not just by apologising to him in the House of Commons as Gordon did, but by giving him the knighthood that he had deserved in his lifetime.

Usually, if the combined weight of Gordon, Tom, Ian and I wanted something done, we could get it done, but on this occasion, we met an immovable object: the combined strength of the Civil Service and the Palace establishment. They were not having it, not under any circumstances, but once we got them at least to explain their reasoning, it was one of the most memorable policy ding-dongs I ever experienced.

We went back and forth over a period of weeks: they would list 10 reasons why it couldn’t possibly happen; I’d challenge all of them; they’d concede 2 but insist on the remaining 8; I’d challenge again, and so on, like boxers going toe-to-toe seeing who would get exhausted first.

- We cannot impose honours on people who do not have the opportunity to refuse them….But you do it for deceased police officers and soldiers - no-one asks them - and in any case, why not just ask their surviving families?

- We cannot second-guess the judgements made by honours committees in previous years who chose not to honour these individuals….But some of them - like the Holocaust Heroes - died without anyone knowing what they’d done; and some of them - like Chapman and Stein - dropped dead in the middle of their careers; there wasn’t time to honour them.

- We cannot make judgements now based on today’s criteria and standards and apply them retrospectively to previous eras when different criteria and standards applied….If you mean that Alan Turing couldn’t get a knighthood because he was a homosexual, then are you really saying we should stand by that?

- We only have a set number of honours to award each year; if you want to give some to dead people, you’re going to have to exclude deserving living people….Cobblers - just set aside 10 extra honours per year, and choose the most deserving posthumous candidates each time.

- To whom is Her Majesty supposed to make the award?….Are you serious: you already make awards to half the recipients of the Victoria Cross without them physically receiving it - stop being daft.

- How far back are we supposed to go? Do you want to propose that Boadicea is made a Dame?….Again, let’s not be daft. But if you want a cut off point, let’s go back to 1917 when the Honours System as we know it now came into being.

I nearly had them beaten. But ultimately they fell back on two incontrovertible arguments:

- HM The Queen doesn’t want to do it, and if the PM feels so strongly about it, he will need to take it up with her personally (I’m not sure they ever consulted HM The Queen, but were quite happy to use her name anyway); and

- All this is a nonsense anyway, since to be awarded a knighthood is really to be made a member of the Order of the Bath, etc. You cease to be a member when you die; it follows that dead people cannot be made members.

Ultimately, the dismissive way in which the second reason was presented meant that the first would never be challenged; neither Gordon nor any other PM was going to make an eejit of themselves by proposing the change if ’nonsense’ was going to feature in the first line of HM The Queen’s response.

Gordon, Ian and Tom settled for the compromise of creating a special new medal for the ‘Heroes of the Holocaust’, which was duly awarded to several individuals nominated by the HET, and only I was left to fulminate about the establishment rearguard that had denied Jock Stein and Brian Clough their due recognition. Not for the first time, eh, gents?

Now we step into the present day when The Sun launches its campaign on Jimmy Saville at Tory party conference with a nod and a wink from the political team at No10 (I’m assuming). David Cameron, who had the successful experience of leaning on the Honours Forfeiture Committee over Fred Goodwin, spies an easy win on a populist issue, and effectively throws his weight behind The Sun, only to get totally shit-bagged by his own civil servants in the Cabinet Office.

Why? Because they recognise that if they yield to the campaign on Jimmy Saville, then they concede the principle that knighthoods exist after death, and the only real, incontrovertible argument that they had left the last time this was debated would be instantly destroyed. That’s why they’ve leapt straight to that argument in their response this afternoon.

Does any of this matter? Lots of people will rightly say that the PM, civil servants, special advisers and the Palace should have better things to do than bestowing knighthoods on dead people, or indeed withdrawing them. Lots of people will also rightly say it’s another example of how the whole honours system is a discredited anachronism. But, hell, I bet those same people are more likely to have a discussion about it in the pub tonight than George Osborne’s ‘Swap your Tea Breaks for Tax Breaks’ scheme, or whatever it was called.

And there’s another reason it matters. I never saw a civil service rearguard like the one on posthumous honours in 13 years in government, not even over Dawn Primarolo’s VAT cut on tampons (and that was some rearguard I can tell you). And there was something about it which smacked of the Civil Service/Palace establishment saying to the grubby politicos: “Hands off, plebs - this belongs to us: these are our knighthoods; we decide where they go; and we’re not sharing them with any dead codebreakers or bloody football managers.”

And I’m guessing that - if the Civil Service felt strongly about this when it was just a case of a behind closed doors discussion with me about the pros and cons - they must be blooming furious at the idea of being bounced into it by the PM at a political party conference to get a cheap campaign win for News International.

Or maybe I’m just bitter. But I bet David Cameron and The Sun know the feeling this afternoon. More power to your elbow, chaps - that rearguard is cracking - and they won’t dare plead opposition from HM The Queen in this case.

5 Years On: The Election That Never Was

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 11:06:00 +0100

Preface

Ever since I started writing this blog, I’ve had the date October 6th* in my mind – 5 years on from the election that never was, undoubtedly the worst day of my working life, and a disastrous day for the Labour Party and for Gordon Brown in particular. It’s not the pain of remembering that day that’s been on my mind, but how to write about it without simply giving ‘my side’ of a story that’s already been told more ways than Rashomon; and without telling people things they already know from reading the various contemporary newspaper accounts and subsequent biographies.

Most of all, I’ve wanted to avoid – in a way that others frankly haven’t – talking about this issue just in order to settle scores or stir bad blood. For example, I used to dream of confronting Spencer Livermore over the bare-faced lies he told Steve Richards about events on October 6th 2007, but the benefit of a few years’ perspective has taken the heat out of those feelings, and made me feel: “What’s the point?”. So what I’ve tried to do below – rather than a blow-by-blow account – is simply give some personal reflections on ten key moments and memories from the run-up to that day, the day itself, and the aftermath. Apologies in advance for the length of this blog.

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The Wisdom of White

Many people have argued that at the first hint of newspaper speculation – fuelled by the ever-increasing poll leads of July, August and September – we should have announced that there would under no circumstances be an early election. The truth is that Gordon’s pollsters were telling him this was a unique opportunity: his personal ratings and the Labour poll lead were beyond anything they’d expected, and the strong feeling was that they would never be this good again.

If you’ll forgive the football metaphor, it’s like an away team finding themselves 3-0 up after 10 minutes at Old Trafford. Sit back and defend, and you allow United back into the game. The best option is to keep attacking, get the crowd on United’s back, keep their defence in disarray, and see if you can get another couple of goals. So once the speculation started, the instinct wasn’t to rule out an election, but to keep attacking.

And much as the media later blamed GB and his team for all that, they too were players rather than observers. It suited them because it was an exciting story, but more than that, every journalist had a personal view on whether we should or shouldn’t ‘go for it’. Some on the right thought Cameron was an empty suit and wanted an early election to get rid of him. Some on the left thought we needed longer to win back voters who’d left over Iraq. Some just had skiing holidays booked, and would get their diaries out and say: “I don’t mind what you do, but not before November.”

There was only one journalist I spoke to through that entire period – The Guardian’s Michael White – whose view was simply: “You will regret this speculation. Either way you go, the speculation is bad for you, and you’ve got to stop it. Announce what you’re doing now and stick to it.” He talked about how Jim Callaghan had misjudged things in 1978, and how we risked doing the same. He was spot on.

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“Build up the Young Guys”

Following Gordon’s speech at the start of the Labour conference, we watched the early evening news in his hotel suite in Bournemouth. The previous year in Manchester, I watched the post-speech smile fall from his face as I told him about Cherie Blair’s ‘That’s a lie’ outburst, but a year later, he was beaming. However, I told him we were going to have a problem filling up the rest of the week with anything other than election frenzy – with every news outlet wanting to be the first to make it official, and reading huge amounts into every word emerging from those in the know.

He narrowed his eyes: “Build up the Young Guys. Turn it into a beauty contest about who’ll take over from me. Don’t for God’s sake say I won’t serve a full term, but say ‘Brown doesn’t want to go on forever. Brown will start putting the next generation into all the senior posts, and one of them will become leader.’ Then Cameron can’t use youth against me. We’ll say: ‘They’ve got one young guy in charge, and that guy Osborne, but Labour’s got all the best young talent coming through.’”

I asked him who he wanted me to talk up as potential future leaders when I briefed this out to the media. His eyes narrowed again, and he reeled off surnames like a football manager naming his First XI: “Purnell. Miliband. Kelly. Burnham. Cooper. Balls. Miliband.” I replied: “You’ve already said Miliband” GB: “Both of them.” Me: “Really? You want me to say Ed Miliband?” He looked surprised: “You need to watch Ed Miliband, he’s the one to watch.”

With my Treasury background, I’d found it hard enough to get used to the two Eds being MPs, let alone one of them leading the party. He carried on: “You know you’ll have to choose between them one day. Who will you back?” “I’m closer to Ed Miliband”, I said. “Don’t base it on who you’re close to”, he said, “base it on who you believe in.” That relaxed, confident conversation convinced me first that we were definitely going for the early election; and second, that GB was already planning to hand over to ‘the next generation’ for a post-Olympics election in 2012.

Two hours later, I was back in GB’s suite with the mood totally transformed by The Times’ splash accusing him of plagiarising speeches by John Kerry and others, an occupational hazard when you had the great US consultant Bob Shrum writing for both men. He was fuming over the suggestion that he’d ripped off his ‘moral compass’ language from John Kerry, mainly because he’d first used it in his father’s funeral eulogy. There was no calming him, and he wasted 24 hours defending his integrity rather than thinking about handling the election announcement, a pattern that would repeat itself in 2009 when The Telegraph broke the expenses scandal with a story about his cleaning bills.

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Not One Solitary Seat

Following the Labour conference, the Tories began briefing that even to cut Labour’s majority would be a victory for the Cameron modernisation project, and that the real issue would be whether GB could hold onto those South East marginals that had stayed with Labour in 2005. If not, Blair’s ‘New Labour Coalition’ was dead, and the Tories would win next time round. They knew as well as we did that voters in those marginals were the ones who’d been most hostile to GB before he took over in 2007 (mainly because of taxes) and therefore least impressed by the presentational contrast he offered to Tony Blair, which was going down so well in the rest of the country.

It was when voices from the left started saying the same thing that things became tricky. Martin Kettle wrote a highly critical Guardian column about GB’s prevarication, calling the prospect of an early election an act of “opportunism and no little vanity”. Many left-wing journalists argued in private that if Labour lost even one seat as a result of that ‘vanity’, GB would have to resign. I brought this up at a meeting of the ‘inner circle’, and said surely any working majority for Labour that took us through to a post-Olympics election in 2012 was a triumph compared to where we’d been a year ago? The others round the table looked at me coldly and Ian Austin said: “They’re right – he’d have to resign”.

It seems madness now, but that remained the consensus right up until October 5th when the final decision was made. And this is where the polls were indeed crucial. Every poll that we ever looked at in those weeks – private or public – said that Labour would win a clear majority. When journalists and the Tories later mocked GB, saying: “So you’re saying you didn’t look at the polls, realise you were going to lose, and cancel the election?” he was telling the truth. But the same polls, especially after the Tory conference, said he was going to shed at least a dozen South East (and Midlands) marginals. And once the consensus took hold that a slimmer majority would be a resignation-worthy outcome, that became reason enough not to go for it.

[This is an amended section of my original article after it was pointed out that my memory of this Jonathan Freedland article was entirely wrong!]

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Devil’s Advocates

However, that all seemed a long way off on the weekend of Tory conference (29/30 September), when the inner circle gathered at Chequers for yet another strategy discussion. For most of us, it was our first time there, and Gordon started the day with a tour of the glorious old building. In a way only he could have got away with, Ed Miliband mimicked a Jewish patriarch being shown round his successful grandson’s house: “Nice place you’ve got here, Gordon, nice bit of real estate”.

We sat around the grand dining-table, and Gordon opened things up by saying: “Right, I want to go round and flush out all the reasons why we shouldn’t go for it”. There was silence, eventually broken by Ed Balls: “Well just to play devil’s advocate…..” One after another, those round the table offered desultory arguments against an early election. Douglas: “Voter registration’s going to be a problem – lots of students will be disenfranchised” Ed Miliband: “It’ll be dark before and after work – lots of people will just stay home rather than vote in the dark.”

Gordon called a halt to the discussion, and moved on to all the reasons we should go for it, receiving a much more enthusiastic response. I made my one contribution to the discussion. “Well, from a media perspective, I think we’ve got to think about the reaction if we decide not to go for it now – they’ll absolutely slaughter us.” One of the MPs looked down the table at me and said: “Hold on, the worst possible reason to go for it is what happens if we don’t.” There was a murmur of assent. I remember immediately thinking: “Isn’t that the best possible reason to go for it?”, but I didn’t say it out loud and the moment passed.

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Location is Everything

One of the cardinal rules of political PR is to make sure you’re in direct contact with the person writing the story. That may sound obvious, but too many spindoctors rely on emails or press releases or getting a story on the newswires, when the art of spin is about talking a journalist through your message and the context, preferably face to face so you can be sure they’re actually listening.

One of the worst things a politician can do is make an announcement on a regional visit or a trip overseas when the story will be written out of London: a recipe either to be ignored or – to use a technical term – shit-bagged. In August 2006, George Osborne went to Japan, and announced that he wanted to build one of their magnetic-levitating train lines back in Britain.

I absolutely destroyed him that day: the history of accidents and fires on mag-levs; the fact it wouldn’t have time to get up to top speed on the route Osborne was proposing. I was told by one journalist that Osborne texted him and said: “What’s going on with this story? Why is everyone so down on it?” He said he replied: “You’ve just met the Dog” (Mad Dog – rather than McPoison – was my lobby nickname).

When Osborne made his announcement on Inheritance Tax** at the Tory conference, to be paid for by a new levy on non-doms, it was another chance for me to destroy him, and on my specialist subject too. The sums didn’t come close to adding up, and I was confident it would become another example of a panicky Tory party scoring own goals. But the story was being reported out of Blackpool, by journalists with Tory spindoctors and the cheers of the conference hall in their ears. I couldn’t get a hearing.

The same was true when GB flew to Iraq on 2nd October – on the advice of civil servants who wanted to get a visit in before election purdah began. When the Tories wheeled out John Major to complain about the ‘cynical timing’, a story that should have been covered by the journalists with GB in Iraq became a story written out of Blackpool, with predictable results.

Those two events didn’t feel to me like game-changers in themselves – at least at the time – but they did shift the media momentum, and hardened the poll deficit in those crucial South East marginals. They created the climate for GB to wobble when the moment of decision came.

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Never Play Poker With Ed Balls

After GB’s return from Iraq, the mood had discernibly shifted. People who had previously been arch proponents of the early election had started to play devil’s advocate more frequently and enthusiastically. It didn’t help that some of the MPs GB was listening to were clearly thinking about their own majorities and whether they personally would survive. GB’s pollsters were also – to cover their backs – starting to paint worst case scenarios, all of which ended up with GB resigning after a drastic reduction in Labour’s majority.

Throughout that wobbly week, the only strong dissenting voice belonged to Ed Balls. His mantra was that – whatever the polls said now – Labour would wipe the floor with the Tories during the election campaign. “These guys are amateurs”, he would say of Cameron and Osborne, “They’ve never fought a general election before – they don’t know what it takes. We’ll just say: ‘Are you really going to trust this pair to run the country? Are you going to take that risk?’”

It was amazing to me that – of all the MPs involved in the decision-making process – only Ed Balls (and to some extent Tom Watson) had any confidence that Labour could increase its lead over the course of a campaign, and was willing to gamble on that outcome. But as I wrote the other day, and as he demonstrated again in 2010 with his call on the economy, Balls has always been good at calculating the odds and knowing when to bet.***

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The Last Words

By Friday 5th October, with Balls away in Yorkshire, the inner circle gathered in Alistair Campbell’s old office facing out onto Downing Street, heard the latest unchanged poll findings from marginal constituencies, and sat waiting for Gordon to announce the inevitable.

You’d have forgiven him for lashing out in almost every direction round the room, and he was clearly angry at those who’d urged him along at every stage and were now counselling caution, but he was grimly quiet. Finally he said: “Right, well, does anyone have anything they want to say?”, like the lawyer of a condemned man hoping someone in the courtroom will produce an alibi. Heads bowed. There was silence.

Finally, Bob Shrum cleared his throat. Bob had been in the dog-house since the party conference plagiarism episode, so I admired him for speaking up. “Well, if the worst comes to the worst, and you only get 3 more years, there’s a lot you can do in 3 years. Jack Kennedy only had 3 years.” Gordon didn’t look up, didn’t look back, and walked out of the room. And that was that.

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Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa, Mea Maxima Culpa

The media handling of the announcement on the Saturday was nothing short of a catastrophe, and made an already disastrous news story into a total clusterf**k. That is all my fault, although – like a bad workman – I’m going to plead some sub-optimal equipment.

First, there was Gordon. His mood was such that even doing one pre-recorded TV interview with Andrew Marr seemed a massive risk. Asking him to do a press conference or a whole round of interviews could have led to a public meltdown which would probably have forced his resignation and an election anyway. Think his post-Mrs Duffy interview with Jeremy Vine times 1,000.

Second, there was the timing. Every Sunday paper was doing a minimum of 4 pages of coverage on the impending election decision, with polls and “will he, won’t he….should he, shouldn’t he” columns. The announcement on the Saturday was going to come as a complete surprise to them, and – depending when it broke – might have meant pages or sections having to be pulped, columns having to be re-written, and so on.

The long-term damage that would have done to No10’s relationship with the Sunday papers would have been huge – potentially irrecoverable – and if there’s one thing I’d always sought to avoid in my job, it was the Sunday papers turning hostile to GB. The Sundays have the resources, the journalists, the columnists, the readership, the competitive impulse, and the influence over the Sunday broadcast media to kill you politically. What’s more, it’s too debilitating for a senior politician and their team to spend every weekend fire-fighting when they should be re-charging for the week ahead.

So this was how it was supposed to work. I arranged with Andrew Marr’s producer, Barney Jones, on the Friday that Andrew would come in the following afternoon and do the pre-record, so Gordon could explain his decision in his own words, and try and look relaxed about it. Nobody in the BBC would be told this was happening until after it had been done, but extracts would be released to all outlets for the Saturday early evening news.

In the meantime, on Saturday morning, I’d tip off the political editors of all the Sundays that an announcement was coming, on the understanding that this go no further than their editor, news editor and lead columnist so they could re-shape their pages, coverage and columns. You might think that is impossibly naive, but those kind of caveated tip-offs are given all the time to newspapers and they tend to respect them, for the obvious reason that they want the same kind of consideration next time round.

Given the Sundays also had to explain at great length how and why the decision had been taken, I also did what I did best, giving them ‘the colour’: who was in the room when; who said what; which room we were in; what GB had for breakfast. That gave me the licence to spin the line that GB’s mood had been moving against an election for some time, even before the Tory conference and the shift in the polls; there were worries about voter registration, people having to vote in the dark, etc. The desultory devil’s advocate lines from Chequers became serious and influential concerns.

Anyway, that was how it was supposed to work. As far as I’ve pieced it together since, one of the Sundays tipped off Andy Coulson, he tipped off the broadcasters, and all hell broke loose. By the time, Marr arrived to do the interview, every camera in the world was outside Downing Street and Adam Boulton, Nick Robinson and co. were spitting tacks down their microphones outside. It created a sense of utter chaos and shambles around what was already a deeply-damaging story, although I’ll maintain to this day that we were right to avoid permanently p***ing off the Sunday papers.

I’ve no doubt that – like LAPD Officer Karl Hettinger, who surrendered his weapon to two thieves in the Onion Field incident in 1963, and saw his partner shot – my bungling of that day will be taught to young PR professionals for years to come as an example of how not to do things. But the more interesting question to ask them is: how would you have handled it?

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Discovering that ‘You’ meant ‘Me’

If you work for someone as driven as Gordon Brown, you accept to some extent that your life will be subsumed to theirs. I was literally at his beck and call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for 6 years. It didn’t matter if I was on holiday, cooking Christmas lunch, at a funeral, or – most grievous of all – watching Arsenal, I’d be expected to drop everything to take his calls, or indeed the media’s if there was a story I had to deal with. And I was fine with that. I had no political ambitions, no personal agenda of my own, and my life was about protecting and promoting Gordon, and – by extension, at least as far as I was concerned – the best interests of the Labour party and the country.

For that reason, I got used – over the years – to hearing a journalist use the word ‘you’ and assuming they meant Gordon. “What are you saying about this?” “How are you reacting?” “What are you thinking about conference?” meant Gordon, and I was merely a conduit for his words and views. So on a daily basis, I’d work out what issue we might have to deal with, I’d talk it through with Gordon, he’d give me ‘the line’, and if I agreed it worked, that would become my script.

On fraught days like the cancelled election, or Alistair Darling’s “We’re all doomed” interview with Decca Aitkenhead, or the exposure of David Abrahams’ dodgy donations, Gordon would be absolutely clear with me and his civil service spokesman what our line was, what the story he wanted written was, and our job – however difficult – was to try and deliver it.

If I’d ever rung a journalist and said: “This is Gordon’s position blah blah blah……but by the way, here’s what I personally think” and said the complete opposite – “It’s all Douglas Alexander’s fault” or “Alistair Darling needs to be sacked” or “David Triesman’s in the frame for this one”, not only would I have been failing to get the story Gordon wanted and incurring his wrath in the process, but the journalist concerned would have stopped regarding me as a reliable conduit for Gordon’s views.

So when two journalists rang me on Sunday 7th October, and said “There’s a lot of flak coming your way” and “People are sticking the boot into you quite hard”, it took me a while to realise ‘you’ didn’t mean Gordon; it meant ‘me’. “Me?” I kept saying, “Me? What have I done?” “Well, accusations that you’re briefing against various people for being responsible, but some people are saying that all the media speculation was your fault, and that you’re as responsible as anyone.” “Me? Are you serious? Who’s saying that?” “Well obviously I can’t say, but how do you want to respond?”

Looking back, I had the worst possible reaction – I didn’t care. I just thought: “Sod ‘em. Idiots. They can say what they like.” The trouble is if you think like that – if you don’t protest the first time you’re falsely accused of friendly fire – then: (a) people think you’re guilty; (b) the real guilty party knows they can do what they like and you’ll get the blame; (c) you start getting the blame for everything no matter how far-fetched; and (d) worst of all, you start to think “I’m as well hung for a sheep as a lamb”, and the accusations start to become self-fulfilling, not least when you’re under attack yourself.

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The Steel in Ed Miliband’s Soul

But as apathetic as I might have been to most of that flak, I’ll always remember that Sunday sadly as the day I fell out with Ed Miliband. I’d known Ed for 8 years. I worked with him on tax policy issues as a civil servant, and when I became Head of Communications at the Treasury in 2003, we’d travelled the world together with Gordon.

Where Ed Balls was a Gladstone – intimidatingly bright, powerful and demanding to work for, Ed Miliband was indeed a Disraeli – his catchphrase was ‘You’re a genius’, he’d wear his intelligence behind a self-deprecating veneer, he’d apologise for making you work late and thank you profusely and genuinely for the work you’d done.

When he called me that Sunday, I told him what a joke it was that I was being accused of briefing against him and others. “But where’s it all coming from, Damian?” he said. “They’ve got all these details of the meetings we had; that must have come from you.” “Of course that stuff’s from me”, I said, “that’s just the colour – that’s harmless, but they’re accusing me of doing the lines blaming you and Douglas and Spencer for the whole thing.” “Well where’s all that coming from, Damian?”

His voice and tone reminded me eerily of Hal the computer in the film 2001. “I don’t know, but it’s not from me – I’d never brief against you.” “I don’t believe you, Damian” he said, “I think you’re lying.” It felt like an ice cold razor had been dragged down my spine. “Ed, for God’s sake, don’t say that. I’d never brief against you.” “That’s the trouble, Damian, I don’t believe that’s true. I think you’re lying.” “Stop saying that, Ed. You can’t accuse me of lying. I’m not going to have that.” “I can’t help it, Damian, I think you’re a liar.” “If you keep saying that, you know we’re finished, I’m not having that.” “I don’t care, Damian, I think we are finished.”

The call ended. I wandered round the Holloway Road in a daze, went into The Hercules pub and downed 3 pints in 10 minutes, then walked down to The Emirates and watched Arsenal beat Sunderland 3-2 to go top of the league. And again, buoyed by booze and Arsenal’s late winner, I had the worst possible reaction to my fallout with Ed Miliband – sod him.

Three years later, after Steve Richards’ biography and radio series on Gordon’s premiership appeared and repeated the accusation that I’d been responsible for the anti-Ed and anti-Douglas briefings that day, I was called up by a Labour MP – not someone who’d been prominently involved in the ‘should we, shouldn’t we’ discussions – who said: “I just want to say sorry, you’re getting it in the neck again for the briefings that day, and it was me who did them, and I’m sorry for that.”

By that stage I didn’t care. In some ways, I’d just had a dose of my own Treasury medicine: I’d been Admiral Bynged – a convenient person to blame, and it wasn’t the guilt that mattered, it was the perception that someone close to Gordon (and to Ed Balls) had tried to pin the blame on Ed Miliband and Douglas, allowing them to get some distance from the sinking ship in No10 and some victim status with Labour MPs.

But – with the benefit of perspective – I have to admire the steeliness in Ed Miliband. It wouldn’t have been easy to tell someone who’d worked loyally for him for 8 years that he was finished with them, and do so in such cold-blooded tones. We saw it again in 2010 when he sacked Nick Brown as Chief Whip. That’s not a man who’d struggle with the difficult personnel decisions you face as Prime Minister, and arguably, that’s not a man who – if he rather than Gordon had been leader in 2007 – would have wobbled when the moment of decision came.

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Post-Script

You might expect the mood in Downing Street the following week to have been dark, but strangely – almost like a hospital ward – there was a determined cheerfulness amongst the staff, and GB (typically when he blamed himself for a screw-up) was sweetness and light to everyone. It was only over the coming weeks when – with the media in a feeding frenzy, PMQs becoming a weekly humiliation, and a run of terrible ill-fortune or incompetent government depending on your perspective (climaxing in HMRC’s loss of the child benefit discs) – that the gloom really set in.

At that stage, much as the current administration must be feeling, it felt that everything that could go wrong was going wrong, GB had lost all credibility with the media and in Parliament, and it was hard to see what would turn it round. And GB himself was deeply wounded: his hard-won reputation for iron will, decisiveness, competence and strategic genius gone overnight.

But I’d like to think that he learned from the experience, and when he had his version of Kennedy’s ’13 Days’ – with the world facing the complete collapse of the banking system and the descent into economic meltdown and anarchy that would have resulted, and every other world leader not just wobbling but panicking – it was Gordon who knew what they all had to do, and had the iron will and decisiveness to persuade them.

If he had gone for the election in 2007 and been forced to resign afterwards with Labour’s majority reduced, he wouldn’t have been there the following year to steer Britain and the world through that crisis. So who’s to say it wasn’t the right decision after all?

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Footnotes:

* October 6th previously marked my favourite political anniversary – the day that betting duty was abolished in 2001 and replaced with a gross profits tax on bookmakers – a reform which saved the British high-street bookmaking industry and stopped betting in this country disappearing exclusively online and offshore. I was the lead official in the Treasury’s tax policy team, although the credit for driving through the reforms sits with my then boss, Alex Gibbs. We managed to bring forward implementation by 3 months from January, and I drafted a press notice which – to save the tabloids a job – included the Top 10 bets that punters would be able to have tax-free between October and Christmas as a result of the earlier start-date: Sol Campbell to score for Arsenal on his return to Spurs; Robbie Williams to get the Christmas No1, etc. The Treasury press office loved it and it was all set to go, but when GB was asked to sign off his quote, the old Presbyterian in him was furious: “What are you doing encouraging gambling? This is the Treasury, not bloody Las Vegas!” The original press notice was scrapped and something that was potentially a very popular announcement with punters was reduced to a bland technical note: GB’s moral compass at work!

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** Famously, GB had two options before his last Budget in 2007: one to cut the basic rate of income tax by abolishing the 10p rate; the other to cut Inheritance Tax by allowing married couples to combine their tax-free allowance. This was where the starter process that I’ve described before could actually work against good decision-making. The income tax proposal was relatively straightforward, whereas every time we looked at the IHT proposal, we came up with new reasons why it might not work: what about recently-widowed individuals, what about war widows, how far back could you go if you wanted to make it retrospective, and how much more would it cost. We ended up convincing ourselves that there was too much risk of it unravelling on the day, whereas the income tax proposal was an easier sell. It was the wrong call and October 2007 might have turned out very differently if we’d made the right one.

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*** I myself was very confident (and frankly a bit excited) about the potential election campaign, having not been involved in one before. One of my most treasured pieces of memorabilia is the ‘treatment’ I wrote for a potential Party Political Broadcast in 2007, which reads as follows (with apologies to The Day Today, which inspired it, and to PR professionals who do this stuff for a living):

“We open with a milkman on his early morning rounds in a wealthy suburban street listening to Classic FM playing ‘I vow to thee my country’. He waves cheerily at a postman walking the other way. The postman starts whistling ‘I vow to thee’.

A Mum takes a parcel from him at her door, and keeps la-la-ing the tune in a lovely melodious voice as she and Dad get the kids ready for school, and climb into the family Range Rover. Dad gets out at the station, humming the tune, and gets on board a gleaming, new train with other commuters.

An orchestra and male voice choir (humming) take up the tune in the background, as we cut to real footage of trains arriving at stations in London, Manchester, Birmingham, Cardiff, Belfast, Glasgow and Edinburgh, suited commuters pouring off the trains to go to work.

The orchestra and choir soaring now, as we cut in quick time across the bright skylines of Britain’s cities, then to construction sites, university students walking and cycling, a gleaming new classroom in a primary school, a hospital room with a doctor and nurse showing a smiling elderly patient a gleaming piece of new equipment, two police officers walking through a crowded shopping centre, etc.

The orchestra and choir slowing and quietening now as we get to the end of the day: smart young city types laughing in a wine bar; a barmaid pulling a pint of beer in a village pub and laughing with the chaps at the bar; a mum and dad taking excited kids into the new Wembley all lit up in front of them; teenagers dancing and shouting at a concert at the 02.

The orchestra and choir going almost silent, replaced by just a single, vaguely familiar baritone voice humming the tune. Households across the country are going to bed: an elderly woman turns the heat up before getting into bed; the Mum we saw earlier looks in on her sleeping kids; the Nurse we saw earlier checks that the elderly patient is asleep in the now dark hospital.

We cut to an old building with all the lights off apart from one window. We move at worm’s eye level through a familiar black door, then up carpeted stairs, down a long corridor, deep red carpets, with one room lit up at the end, and the faint humming of the closing bars of ‘I vow to thee’ growing louder as we move towards the light.

We pan round the door, a sideways shot of Gordon Brown sat at his desk, his red box in front of him, going through papers and signing documents, humming to himself. He finishes the last bar, looks down at the camera, smiles and says: “Good Night”.

Dissolve to black. Captions come up in turn: “He’s working”, “You’re working”, “Britain’s working”, “Don’t let the Tories ruin it”.”

It might just have worked!

The seven basic plots of politics

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 14:50:46 +0100

There are seven basic plots in politics.

Just as in Christopher Booker’s analysis of literature and film, I believe there are seven basic stories being played out in the careers of almost all significant politicians, which repeat themselves endlessly, and have done for centuries:

1. Principled or maverick individual succeeds because of their principled or maverick approach; power changes them, leaving their supporters disappointed.

2. Charismatic would-be king is thwarted by ruthless, unworthy opponents; and ends up exiled and frustrated in life.

3. For years, the heir to the throne yearns restlessly for the crown; finally gets it – at some price; but fortune turns against them.

4. Two individuals rise to power together; but eventually destroy one another, either through blind loyalty or the emergence of distrust.

5. A great individual has one fatal flaw or makes one great mistake which undoes them and damages their reputation.

6. A ruthless leader lives and dies by the sword, destroyed by their own pride and paranoia, and often assassinated by their own protégés.

7. A canny foot-soldier rises to the top, using the mind more than the sword, but is never comfortable with power and is replaced by a more natural born leader.

There are three other plots which exist purely in political fiction:

1. The thwarted and exiled would-be king comes back a wiser, stronger person, takes the crown, and rules successfully.

2. A young rogue with bad habits or fatal flaws corrects their habits and flaws, becomes a changed person, and rules successfully.

3. The principled or maverick individual retains their principled or maverick approach even when they obtain power, and rules successfully.

Of course, all these plots – other than the fictional ones – end in failure, and those politicians who manage to navigate a successful end to their careers are so rare that they don’t warrant a ‘plot’ of their own.

But it’s a useful exercise for politicians to look at that list of standard plots, work out which film they’re in and what fate they’re headed for, and try to change the script. For that reason, I believe every politician should be a film and literature buff – able to recognise a narrative arc when they see one, and have a clear sense of how the story will play out.

That brings me to the film that David Cameron and his entourage watched on the eve of the Conservative party conference a year ago today.

Hamburger Hill.

Whether it was the watching of the film that inspired the naming of the strategy, or the naming of the strategy that inspired the watching of the film, we know – from Allegra Stratton’s fine column written a couple of weeks later – that senior Tories now refer to their economic and deficit strategy as ‘Hamburger Hill’.

For those who have not seen the film, it’s a realistic if formulaic depiction of one squad’s experience during the American assault on Hill 937 near the Laos border in May 1969, and it’s easy to see why it inspired David Cameron.

From his point of view, the parallels are obvious. The hill is a hugely-challenging target with an entrenched enemy, against which the Americans launch a relentless, full-frontal assault. In the film, the squad – despite heavy casualties – retain their morale and camaraderie, and stick to their mission; they rail against the lily-livered critics back home and the media doubting their ability to get the job done; and at the end of the film, exhausted but triumphant, they bask in their hard-won victory.

The trouble is if the Tories look beyond the fictionalised account, they’d have learned that the real Hill 937 battle is viewed as a tactically inept, strategically pointless disaster, encapsulated in the fact that – unmentioned in the film – the Americans surrendered the hill just days after finally capturing it. The unacceptably high casualties from the battle succeeded in turning American public opinion even more firmly against the war, and led the White House to order an end to similar operations. Not exactly the model for economic policy it seems.

Of course, there is an interesting parallel between Vietnam and the current debate about the Government’s economic and deficit strategy.

Just as in Vietnam, many individuals within government and the media are telling themselves that if the Osborne strategy doesn’t seem to be working in terms of delivering economic growth or bringing the deficit down, it’s not that the strategy is the wrong one, it’s just not being implemented fast enough or on a big enough scale. Thus in Vietnam, successive American administrations carried themselves deeper and deeper into the quagmire, at unimaginable cost to their own forces, to American society, and – most of all – to the people of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

If David Cameron is indeed taken by Vietnam films, he could do worse on the eve of his conference next weekend than watch The Fog of War, the brilliant series of interviews with former US Defence Secretary Robert Macnamara charting the descent into the Vietnam quagmire, and hearing his regrets about all the missed opportunities to change course. Unlike Hamburger Hill, that film has the virtue of being the truth.

Incidentally, watching Ed Balls’ speech earlier, I was reminded by his ‘Butch Cameron’ line of an important movie parallel in terms of Labour’s economic strategy.

Two years ago, almost every senior voice in the Labour party – with the exception of the trade union bosses – was telling the party they had two choices: they could either back the Tory economic and deficit strategy 100% in an attempt to neutralise the issue; or they could back the speed of the proposed deficit reduction plan, but disagree with some of the specifics about where the cuts and tax rises should fall.

With either option, Labour would have been damned in 2015. If they backed the pace of deficit reduction and the Osborne plan succeeded, then the Coalition would be able to claim they’d achieved their mission and deserved another term in office, regardless of any disputes about how the deficit had been reduced. But if Labour backed the plan and it failed, the public would tar all parties with the blame, again regardless of any nuances over where the cuts had fallen.

Ed Balls introduced the third choice: opposing the pace of deficit reduction and saying the whole strategy would prove counter-productive. If he was wrong, Labour were damned anyway. If he was right, then they’d have the chance of a hearing with the public. He did the only thing that gave Labour a chance.

It reminded me of the scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid where the posse has the pair trapped on the edge of a ravine. Their only choices are to ‘give’ and go to prison, or ‘fight’ in which case they’d be killed or starved out.

Butch Cassidy introduces the third choice – jumping off the ravine – the most dangerous of all the options but the only one that gives them a chance.

Obviously there was a bit more economic theory at work when Balls defined Labour’s position on the deficit, but I’d like to think there was a bit of the film buff at work as well. Either way, as long as he and Ed Miliband avoid both Bolivia and Plot 4 in my list, they might just succeed.