Lance Price is better placed than most to write about ‘spin’ in politics, having worked as a BBC political reporter and as Alastair Campbell’s deputy in Downing Street.
Lance Price is better placed than most to write about ‘spin’ in politics, having worked as a BBC political reporter and as Alastair Campbell’s deputy in Downing Street.
In August 1997, Price was on duty for the BBC the weekend that the story of Robin Cook’s affair broke. In Where Power Lies he describes the ‘unusually rich array’ of other stories in the papers to choose from that weekend. A juicy item in the Sunday Times stated that Chris Patten, Governor of Hong Kong, could be prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act. Price says he telephoned Peter Mandelson, then de facto information minister, who confirmed it ‘off the record’. The BBC duly ran the item.
Within 24 hours the story was exposed as one of a number of bogus news items invented by Mandelson and Campbell to get the Cook story off the headlines. Which leads one to question why, shortly afterwards, Price eagerly acccepted the chance to work for Campbell in Downing Street.
For someone who was a senior press officer for Tony Blair when New Labour spin was at its height, there are disappointingly few personal revelations. If Price was ever tempted to pour even the smallest vial of hemlock into a lobby correspondent’s ear, he doesn’t confess here.
Price’s thesis is that spin and cynicism has destroyed all trust in the political process. Yet reading his account of relations between Downing Street and the media from Lloyd George to Gordon Brown, one is struck not by how worse things are today, but how they have always been the same.
Witness the man Price says is entitled to be called the first Number 10 spin doctor more than half a century before the term was invented: William Sutherland, known as ‘Bronco Bill.’ He worked for Lloyd George and quickly earned a ‘reputation for rumbustious intriguing’.
‘Bronco Bill’s’ successor, Geoffrey Shakespeare, had simple advice for ‘quashing’ hostile hacks. ‘If the Press are constantly attacking, you go for them in a big way, in public of course. Hit them as hard as you possibly can.’
For Sutherland read Damian McBride; for Shakespeare read Alastair Campbell.
After describing how Campbell’s attempt to dominate the political news agenda ended in spectacular failure, Price concludes with a call to ‘shed more light on the murky places’ where politicians deal with media — then concedes it won’t make a scrap of difference. ‘Neither side has anything to fear,’ he says. ‘After all, the relationship between a dog and a lamp post is no different whether the lamp is lit or not.’ Quite.
Where Price takes an analytical approach, former Labour general secretary Peter Watt’s book, Inside Out, is a deeply personal, emotional and at times comical account of how he was made a fall guy for Labour funding scandals.
Watt has the schoolboyish look of a political ingénu. And he is out of his depth as the pressure mounts with the threat of Labour bankruptcy bearing down on his slight frame and vicious infighting between Blair and Brown.
Watt comes close to breaking down. He goes to the pub and gets ‘smashed’; he seeks refuge in Westminster cathedral; his wife Vilma threatens to divorce him: ‘I sat on the kitchen worktop and fixed myself a Coke and Pisco — a Chilean drink that does pretty much what its name suggests.’ Watt’s book is a thinly disguised act of revenge on the man he blames for his downfall: Gordon Brown.
When Watt is forced to resign over controversial Labour donations via a third party by the businessman David Abrahams, Brown promises to support him. Watt says that 24 hours later, he listened to the radio as Brown effectively denounced him as a ‘criminal’ in a press conference. ‘Why didn’t he just call the Met Police?’ says an indignant Watt.
Which explains why the book is littered with insulting stories about Brown. Watt’s wife says Brown is ‘bonkers’ after he sulks at a Downing Street dinner. Watt revels in quoting Douglas Alexander’s now famous damning observation: ‘The truth is, we’ve spent ten years working with this guy and we don’t actually like him.’
He also expresses his shock on discovering that the insecure and secretive Brown had his own ‘fund with no name’ of £50,000 to pay for private polls, with records kept in an old exercise book.
Typical of the sleaze that has given modern politicians such a bad name, you might say. Yes, but much smaller, relatively speaking, and less scandalous than Lloyd George’s slush fund from his sale of peerages for £100,000 and more — £2 million at today’s rates. When New Labour tried something similar to Lloyd George, it was exposed. By the press.
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