Invitation Only

14 April

 

• The Labour campaign almost goes off the rails.

 

• Ed Miliband narrowly avoids causing offence to black and ethnic minority voters.

 

• Attempts to control and restrict the media are stepped up.

 

• The new leader may have to rethink the balance between transparency and control.

 

 

LABOUR NARROWLY avoided making the headlines for the wrong reasons on the day the Conservatives launched their manifesto. ‘I hope he hurries up – I need to go to the toilet’ said a tall man in a dirty boiler suit. He was one of around 80 ‘extras’ at the Brush Traction factory on the outskirts of Loughborough who had been corralled outside to await the arrival of the Labour leader. The Leicestershire factory refurbishes and repaints old railway engines for reuse on the freight network – and such a transformation was there for all to see with a ‘before’ and ‘after’ display in the factory yard. A makeshift stage had been built, astutely enough, in front of the shiny rolling stock from where Ed Miliband would speak, and not beside an old decaying British Rail diesel nearby – though no doubt Conservatives would have drawn an analogy that far from being New Labour, Miliband was simply putting a contemporary gloss on old statist ideas.

‘We have been here 20 minutes. I didn’t come to work to see him!’ said an older man in an equally dirty boiler suit. His name was Don and I encouraged him to ask a question to compensate for his long wait. ‘I have nothing to ask him – I don’t think anything of him’, was his curt response.

It looked like all this not-so-eager anticipation would be over when a helicopter was spotted making a descent and landing in an adjacent field. Was this hubris after what was seen as a successful manifesto launch? The snappers darted to the wire fence around the factory, got their zoom lenses attached in – well, a flash – but soon confirmed it wasn’t Ed ­Miliband at all. The night before I had chatted to a senior media executive who had been mulling over whether broadcasters had done enough to introduce voters to the idea that the Labour leader could become the next prime minister. Had they simply bought the line from most newspapers that he wasn’t up to the job and it couldn’t happen? Would voters wake up on 8 May and say ‘how the hell did that come about?’ And I wondered if the police and security services had suddenly embarked on a similar thought process.

The Labour bus containing Ed Miliband arrived at Brush Traction flanked by two sturdy armoured vehicles whose occupants, never mind the cars, looked like they could withstand a nuclear blast. And there was already security on the ground well before the Labour’s entourage arrived.

Soon the restless audience had a chance to hear from Ed Miliband and ask questions. The media had infiltrated the sea of boiler suits, mostly to get a response to the policies in the Conservative manifesto, and he and his press team were satisfied with his answers. Perhaps too satisfied.

We decamped to make the journey to Leicester, a city where more than half the population is from an ethnic minority background. Where better then for the national launch of the party’s black and ethnic minority manifesto? Sky News had agreed to provide pool camera coverage even though the event might get less media than it deserved, clashing, as it did, with the main manifesto launch by the party’s prime opponents. Then
en route I got a call. The pool camera had been well – pulled.

Party strategists in London had apparently taken the view that the first event had worked so well, then why risk anything else going wrong? The closer they appeared to power, the tighter the control they wanted to exert. There was to be no media access – except for the black and ethnic minority press. So I resolved that my key task was to get in. The suspicion was there might be someone at the event – organised by the resourceful and sometimes controversial Leicester East MP Keith Vaz – that Ed ­Miliband didn’t want to be seen with. Or that he was likely to face hostile questioning.

When we arrived, we couldn’t fail to notice that a massive billboard had been erected beside the venue, declaring that Leicester welcomed Ed Miliband. His face was beaming benevolently from it like a dictator of a Central Asian republic. But we, on the other hand, were not welcome. Two Labour press officers and two security personnel guarded the locked entrance and barred our way. I was under instructions if they did not relent to ‘Crick’ Miliband. We had beat him to the community centre venue, so when he alighted from his vehicle I would then become a pale imitation of the determined, but always affable and engaging, Channel 4 political correspondent Michael Crick, stick a microphone under the opposition leader’s nose and ask why they were launching their policies for ethnic minorities in secret.

I decided to start the process early and we began filming our refusal to be admitted. We sought to get answers for our barring on tape from the usually highly-capable Labour Press officer Anna Wright, whose slight frame concealed a steely and tribal determination. The health and education manifesto launches hadn’t just been restricted to the specialist press so was Labour now ghettoising ethnic minorities, I ventured? I kept getting a stock answer – ‘It’s an ethnic minority event’.

I had a calculation to make and I am still not sure I made the right one. Instead of publicising Labour’s attempts to control the campaign and restrict scrutiny, I did all I could to gain entry and in the process possibly helped save them from themselves. Partly it was because I was intrigued by what might be going on inside that they didn’t want us to see. So I made a further attempt to gain access by calling a couple of contacts in London who would put more pressure on Miliband’s press chief Bob Roberts to relent. I didn’t know this at the time, but Roberts too could see a media disaster looming, and I was told had already been on to the senior strategists in London who had been refusing steadfastly to open the doors.

Uppermost in their minds had been the need for Ed Miliband to appear prime ministerial, as his personal ratings still lagged behind the actual PM. They were worried that he would be photographed in a garland. And because of the now infamous images of his struggle with a bacon sandwich, they were concerned that he would have to try to consume ‘weird’ food – their word, not mine – so as not to offend his hosts, but would not cope well with this in front of the cameras.

As it transpired Ed Miliband – travelling with Roberts – was far more relaxed about the event than his very senior aides in London. Attempts had been made throughout the campaign to ensure the ‘on the road’ team and those in the London HQ were signing from the same song sheet. Spencer Livermore, as campaign director, had instituted a daily call around 7.30am usually involving Livermore himself, Douglas Alexander and Tom Baldwin at head office and Bob Roberts, Rachel Kinnock, Stewart Wood, and often Miliband himself from some more distant part of the kingdom. Sometimes the cast list expanded, sometimes it contracted. There would be another conference call around lunchtime each day, too. Despite this, tensions were not unknown.

Roberts very rarely overruled the campaign team at the party’s HQ. He has a reasonable manner and could usually use his powers of persuasion to effect change. This time he simply had to ignore their instructions. He knew Labour’s exclusion of the press from an ethnic event – when David Cameron was given the appearance of welcoming all comers to the unveiling of his manifesto in Swindon – would make a stark, and unflattering, contrast. So Roberts called me and told me a pool camera would be allowed in. I then negotiated access for me, and an ITN journalist as well as Sky.

The event was far more impressive than the launch of the previous mini-manifestos. It was a full Keith Vaz production – very much what you would expect from someone about as shy and retiring as an extrovert on speed. He had organised a gospel choir, drummers from the Indian sub-continent and a stellar list of black and ethnic minority politicians through the years from Paul Boateng to Chuka Umunna. Vaz’s 17-year-old daughter took to the stage to declare when she came of age – though ‘as a teenager I have mind of my own’ – she would be voting Labour. He asked if I was going to do a piece to camera – I told him, to his chagrin, that cameras had very nearly been banned. I was subsequently given a lovely gift of sweet meats.

The event should have been a credit to the Labour Party but nearly resulted in very negative publicity. At one stage in denying entry, the press office had cited a breach of ‘fire regulations’ if too many journalists were to go in. Presumably that concern hadn’t extended to covering up fire exit signs in Bury. And it turned out there was plenty of room inside, with no exits blocked.

Labour had lost a by-election in Leicester to the Lib Dems following the Iraq war and would not want once again to drain what was usually a sturdy reservoir of support for the party. But very senior officials in London at the centre of the election campaign had come within a hair’s breadth of being seen to treat voters from ethnic minority backgrounds with less respect and importance than teachers, or those who worked in the NHS – because far from being turned away, the media had been heavily encouraged to cover both the education and health manifestos.

To be transparent with our audience we probably should be honest about the extent of restricted access on a general election campaign – though this had been by far the most serious yet ludicrous example.

The irony was the decision was subsequently taken to redo Ed ­Miliband’s response to the Conservative manifesto – thus negating his clip against the much-loved backdrop of the train factory. The focus was moving further towards the Conservatives’ uncosted commitments in the wake of a snap analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. So I got a call from a sheepish Bob Roberts. He apologised for the initial decision and asked if we would like a new clip of Miliband for the teatime bulletins? I said we would be happy to accommodate it outside the ethnic minority event, so long as he took a full range of questions.

Just as we were awaiting his return, a pensioner in a rather fast motorised scooter came by: ‘Who’s here? Miliband? Oh, I got a thing or two say to him. I am going to vote UKIP this time,’ she snarled. We fully expected him to drive back into a scene reminiscent of his old boss and Gillian Duffy, but then I got another call. Yes, he wanted to do a new interview but he was 20 minutes away and wouldn’t be coming back here. So on a day of narrow escapes, the possibility of an encounter with a real and highly sceptical voter had been avoided.