I made my appearance at the Leveson Inquiry into the culture, ethics and practices of the British press on 25 June 2012, when I did my bit in arguing against the statutory regulation of newspapers. I found that the main interest of my questioners, however, was in the relationship between press and politicians and the operation of the Lobby system, of which I had been a part for thirty years.
It was a strange experience giving evidence in the Royal Courts of Justice, with two of my oldest friends and colleagues, Elinor Goodman (former political editor of Channel 4 News and someone with whom I had lunched politicians for years) and George Jones, former political editor of The Daily Telegraph, watching intently from the back of the court. They were on the panel appointed by Lord Justice Leveson to assist him in the inquiry set up in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal.
Even though I was in it for so long, I was not always an unqualified supporter of the Lobby but I have yet to be convinced there is a more effective means of reporting the doings of Westminster and Whitehall. Under the system, reporters chosen by their editors are accredited by the Commons authorities to work in the Palace of Westminster and have access to certain parts of the premises not open to normal mortals apart from MPs and peers. In practice, in the decades I roamed the corridors of Westminster, that meant I could go to the Members’ Lobby – just outside the Commons chamber – after which our institution is named.
If I added up the hours I spent standing in the Lobby – there is only one seat where a reporter is allowed to sit down with an MP – it would come to months, probably years, in total. I loitered there waiting for the right people to come along, or engaging in conversations with ministers and MPs in the hope that something would turn up. We could also stand in the Ways and Means Corridor, which leads into the Lobby, and catch people as they raced through to vote. When the division bell rang we had to hotfoot it out of the Lobby to avoid being trampled by MPs hurrying to join the queue to have their names ticked off.
Being in the Lobby also gave us access to the twice-daily Number 10 briefings by the prime minister’s spokesman. Since the early years of New Labour, those briefings have been taken by civil servants based in Number 10 rather than by political appointees of the government of the day. The morning briefing used to be at Number 10 but is now in the Treasury, and the afternoon one is still in the Lobby room, a place specially designated for us decades ago at the top of a long staircase near the roof of the building.
It was there that the likes of Bernard Ingham, Alastair Campbell, Christopher Meyer and Gus O’Donnell – the latter two under John Major – would arrive at 4 p.m. and tell us what the PM had been up to during the day, and then face generally pretty tough questioning on the stories of the moment. But in those days their responses were not attributable to Downing Street.
As previously mentioned, the rules of the Members’ Lobby were always that conversations you had there with the politicians were, unless they stipulated otherwise, on Lobby terms. That meant you could use the information they had given you but not directly attribute it to them. The same rules applied when you met the politicians in other places, such as lunches, receptions, in the street, or wherever.
It is here that I should explode one myth. Critics of the Lobby have always suggested there is something unusual about that way of doing things. That is, in the favourite word of Bernard Ingham, bunkum. Every branch of journalism – education, crime, business, sport, whatever – has a similar way of operating. Reporters in all specialisms have people they talk to on an off-the-record basis who give them information, which can lead to stories without their fingerprints on them.
But there were quaint additional rules applying to us that those in other areas of journalism would not have had to worry about. I mentioned the seating rule, but there was also a weird one that we were not supposed to take notes while talking to politicians, presumably to prove to them that Lobby terms were fully operational. There was also a good rule that you did not interrupt another journalist talking to another politician unless invited to do so. There is nothing worse than to be following an exclusive line with an MP and to find a colleague barging in and possibly overhearing what you had been talking about.
I loved the Members’ Lobby. I would often go there from the Press Gallery at around 11.30 a.m. and stay for several hours until I really felt I must go back to the office and start writing. MPs who regularly passed through would smile and ask whether I had not got anything better to do, but there was no better place to meet people from all parties. Sometimes they would line up to speak to you if there was good story running.
Today, for many reporters Portcullis House – the new parliamentary building opened in 2001, with its coffee bar, restaurant and cafeteria – has taken over from the Members’ Lobby as the place where they are most likely to run into MPs, as well as their advisers, although for the old-timers it will never be quite the same as the Lobby. That seat I mentioned was apparently where one of my predecessors as political editor, the great David Wood, would sit and be joined by Cabinet ministers, including Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, as they passed through. Legend had it that he picked up the first signals of Macmillan’s impending ‘Night of the Long Knives’, when he sacked a batch of dissident Cabinet ministers, while perched there.
You never quite knew what might come along if you had the patience to wait. Jack Warden, political editor of the Daily Express, and I were standing together in the Lobby on the night of 9 July 1982. Apart from us it was deserted. At about eight in the evening we were approached by a very excited Alan Clark, of diaries fame. He had just come from the back-bench Tory home affairs committee, after which the home secretary, then William Whitelaw, always briefed the officers. ‘Willie’, as Clark called him, had just told them that early that morning a man – whom we were later to discover was called Michael Fagan – had broken into Buckingham Palace and spent ten minutes talking to the Queen in her bedroom.
Fagan had scaled the walls round the palace and somehow got up a drainpipe to the Queen’s private apartments. The Queen, showing amazing sangfroid – a word used by Clark to us – quietly pushed an alarm button when Fagan had asked for a cigarette. There were many more details but Jack and I needed to get to our offices. We ran back along the committee corridor and told our near-disbelieving offices about the story. Sadly I did not make the first edition, which had gone by the time I got back, but Jack was able to catch his. It was yet another reminder to me of how important it was for reporters those days to be in that Lobby. You never quite knew what you were going to hear next. But so many of the big stories of our times started there.
In my evidence to Leveson, however, I said that I had observed the virtual disintegration of the old-style Lobby system that had been in operation when I first went to Westminster in 1973. In those days, the briefings from Number 10 were completely non-attributable, and there were all manner of mysterious briefings. Long before I became a Lobby reporter I used to take a sly look at the Lobby noticeboard. On Thursdays, the leader of the Commons would give a briefing after the Number 10 gathering at 4.15 p.m., and the leader of the Opposition at 5.15 p.m., in their office behind the speaker’s chair. But they were supposed to be secret. So during a Tory government, the message would go up on the board ‘Blue Mantle, 4.15’ and ‘Red Mantle, 5.15’.
The Lobby itself was happy to maintain this mystique. It suited journalists who had a ready-made source of news and a set of confidentiality rules that allowed them to hide the fact that stories could occasionally drop into their laps. But it also played into the hands of the government of the day, making it far easier for it to control the flow of news. It was at one these afternoon briefings where Bernard Ingham famously referred to John Biffen, a veteran Cabinet minister who was in dispute with Margaret Thatcher at the time, as ‘semi-detached’. For a Number 10 spokesman to be using a Lobby meeting to attack a member of the Government was a very good story but the Lobby had to go through all sorts of contortions to avoid saying who did it.
My qualified support for the Lobby was because I did not enjoy the institutionalized secrecy surrounding it. As I told Leveson, I shed no tears at all when the system became more and more transparent from the end of the 1980s – thanks in big part to the likes of Tony Bevins (who took The Independent out of the system for a time with The Guardian following) and Alastair Campbell (who as a former journalist vowed to change the system when Labour returned to power in 1997). The arrival of the 24-hour news cycle and digital round-the-clock journalism, as well as the increasing use of social media outlets like Twitter – which I would say has become my fastest source of news in recent years – has helped to break down the old barriers.
Boycotting those Lobby meetings was a brave, even foolhardy, move because it denied The Independent and The Guardian an important source of information: the Downing Street view. Those of us who attended soon found ourselves being asked by those who had chosen not to what had gone on. We filled them in because it was in our interests that they succeeded. They soon returned.
So in 2002 the old-style morning briefing was replaced by a press conference at which the prime minister’s press spokesman gave the daily line on issues. There was no longer any doubt where the story was coming from. The Masonic-style barriers were gone. (Talking of freemasonry, there were persistent rumours that one of the Commons lodges used to meet in the Lobby room when the Commons was not sitting.)
That does not mean that politicians have suddenly stopped talking non-attributably to journalists. This book is full of stories that could not have come to me in any other way, and it is the same for journalists in every other sphere. As I said under questioning at Leveson: ‘You will get more out of a politician off the record than you will on, and that is always going to be the case.’ I recorded that I had often said to young reporters who came back to the office and reported a conversation with an MP: ‘Yes, but what did he tell you off the record?’ That would invariably be more interesting.
I did have qualms sometimes about allowing an MP to attack another in their own party under the cloak of anonymity. For example, an MP might say: ‘Jack Smith is useless – we all know that.’ I used to treat each case on its merits, but most of the time I would use the information with the rationale that if an MP was prepared to say that about a member of their own party and see it in print, that in itself said something about the state of relations and added value to the story.
The other brickbat thrown at the Lobby by those who have never worked there is that somehow it is a club where we all stuck together and wrote the same story. I have acknowledged all through this book that there were times when we would indeed consult together and decide upon the best line on a story. If the story was around generally, there was no problem with that.
And there were times when the Lobby, working collectively, was an active life force. It was always amusing to see the bewilderment and annoyance of foreign correspondents on some papers – but not, I hasten to say, The Times, where there was greater maturity about these matters – when the Lobby landed with the prime minister of the day on their patch, and proceeded to run amok. They didn’t really understand that for our few hours on their territory, we were seeing whatever the story was in their neck of the woods through the domestic prism. They hated it when these ignorant so-and-sos from London breezed in, grabbed the story, and got the front-page articles they had been struggling to get in the paper for months.
That was the Lobby collective. But there is no more competitive branch of journalism than politics. The fact that we all worked in the same place in offices next door to each other obviously meant that you became close friends with people on rival papers. But your aim was to beat them, and your editor demanded that you beat them. Yes, there was cooperation on running stories but the aim was always to get the one that no one else had got. We lived for exclusives and those who did not get them died for the lack of them. That was how you were judged back in the office.
You always knew when someone had got a cracker of a story. They disappeared, usually from the Commons back to head office. The routine was that the person on late duty would always do a trawl of the Press Gallery offices in early evening to try to get some idea of what the rivals were up to. It was to make sure that we did not miss something that everybody else had got. But if they had an exclusive, they would tell us – as we would tell them – that it would be worth not going to bed too early. And you always knew who had done the exclusive because he or she would not be there. There was sometimes a herd instinct, a temptation to divine what line the rivals were taking on a story in order to avoid awkward late calls from the news desk as the first editions dropped.
I told Leveson that after my forty or so years, I felt the relationship between press and politicians was one of mutual dependence, mistrust and occasional bitterness. I welcomed the disappearance of the deference shown by some journalists to politicians that I had seen in my early days but added that the relationship between press and politicians had grown steadily more confrontational over the years, with politicians complaining that we were far more interested in any shortcomings they had than the good things they had done. They cited the end of straight gallery reporting, which I have described elsewhere, for lowering the esteem in which they and Parliament were held.
There was undoubtedly a sense among the political class generally that we were out to get them, a view that was strengthened by The Telegraph’s brilliant exposure of the expenses scandal. And yet we had to work together – the politicians needed us to spread the word about what they were doing, and we needed them to tell our readers about the issues of the day. I have given a feeling elsewhere in the book about a day in the life of a political editor, but for all political reporters it was a matter of getting to know politicians well enough to get their home phone numbers and feel comfortable about ringing them at weekends or in the evening. So apart from contact in the lobbies, there would be lunches, dinners, drinks parties, interviews.
Inevitably, you would come to know them – and they you – on first-name terms. But that was not cosiness, more politeness. As I told the inquiry, most politicians understand that the journalists with whom they had once lunched convivially might well be predicting or writing about their demise sometime soon.
Politicians carefully chose whom they would lunch with, and journalists were the same. We liked the indiscreet for obvious reasons but the best were the informed. In the lunch partnerships with which I was involved over the decades, we set a high bar. If they came to lunch without a story, or told us nothing of use during the meal, they would not be getting another invitation.
Lunches were fun and it was amazing how the ambitious politician trusted us. They would do down their own colleagues when it came to talking about reshuffles. They would give us a list of the jobs they would like when the moment came. And they relied on us never to let on. We helped to make careers, of that there is no doubt. It was a common practice for the whips to let out the names of MPs they thought were doing well. We would write them up as tips for the top in reshuffle stories and, as if by magic, they would appear in the Government list on reshuffle day.
The Leveson Inquiry was interested in my observation that civil servants also had a big impact on who was promoted and demoted. The mandarins, who were far more indiscreet than people realized, would let slip the names of ministers they thought were performing well or badly. Soon the word was out that X was really not up to it. Sometimes the PM of the day would take note; on others they would ignore.
Another myth to dismantle is the idea that because you were friendly with politicians, that would somehow help them when they were in trouble. I can think of no instance involving myself or anyone else where that was the case. I have friends in all of what were the main three parties before the Lib Dems collapsed, nearly all of them developed through sporting links – playing in the Parliamentary Golf Society, skippering the press football and cricket teams for some thirty years in matches against the parties, and through playing squash at courts close to Parliament. But the idea that any MP, through getting to know journalists, would somehow be protected at a time of trouble is ludicrous beyond words because of the very nature of Westminster.
As I told the Leveson Inquiry, there are a handful whom I have got to know so well that I would consider them friends first, and politicians second. But it is precisely because they are friends, and understand the world as it operates, that they knew that if misfortune befell them – as it did in some cases – I would have had to treat them as if they were somebody I did not even know. At Westminster, friendships are known about and it would very quickly become a matter of some comment if a reporter or paper eased up on someone because they were a friend.
So I would conclude today that the Lobby, more transparent than the one I started in but still with its curiosities and mysteries, is a force for good in our democracy. It must be in the public interest that senior politicians and the media talk to each other, formally and informally. It can only help public understanding of what the Government and its opponents are doing.
The Lobby keeps ministers and their shadows on their toes. If a minister fails, the Lobby is merciless. There have been plenty of scalps over the years. If a policy is flawed the media will be out there killing it. If there was a better way of covering politics, someone would have introduced it by now.