The Gatekeeper

If you want people to know what you are doing and saying beyond the Westminster village, you need to get on television. The easiest way to do this is with a speech, visit, or TV interview – and preferably all three. A good, strong picture of your boss on the evening news hammering home your message is basically ‘bingo’. But bingo is not as easy as it sounds. Think of all the times you have seen a politician standing in a faded room behind a podium looking dull and sounding duller and you have gone to bed not remembering a thing he or she said.

What is required to deliver bingo is careful planning. First, an announcement that encapsulates the overall message and is bullet-proof – or, in other words, a message that stands up under scrutiny. Then you also want a picture that reinforces that message, say, David smiling with school children, visiting a hospital or standing in front of a tank. All the better if this can occur on a day which does not become hijacked by a completely different story emerging from left field.

Out on the road with a pack of journalists, you are at the mercy of the weather – literal, metaphysical, and political – not to mention the hazards inherent in being ‘on tour’. The road is navigated by the ops team, ours run by the legendary and fiercely loyal Liz Sugg. Their duty is to deliver the candidate, ideally with dignity intact, to their next appearance, and the appearance after that. Missed trains, cancelled helicopters, broken-down cars, and harassment from angry members of the public are pretty commonplace delays. In our case, this list soon includes angry chickens (sent by the Mirror) and butlers carrying silver platters.

It is our job, as the core team, to pull the various strands together. The strategy, the policies, the comms plan, the ops schedule. Write the manifesto. Decide what David is going to do and say each day, and for what purpose.

This won’t be my first general election campaign by any means. That was Major in 1997, when my role was to write rebuttals to news stories about Europe at 5 a.m., ahead of the daily press conference. Next, driving around the beautiful Cotswold villages, pregnant with my second child, I helped David win his Witney seat for the first time in the summer of 2001. By 2005 I was back in CCHQ supporting Michael Howard. But I have never been at the heart of a campaign.

This is new.

WE GO INTO FULL election-planning mode before Christmas 2009. Every Sunday night, David, George, Steve, Ed, Andy, and I sit in David’s study in North Kensington, with its sharp ochre velvet chairs and reindeer carpets moulting onto our clothes, working through the detailed plans for the week ahead and discussing strategy. We complement each other as a group and like each other a lot as people. And although we dive into all of the elements of strategy, policy, planning, and comms, each of us know what particular ‘value’ it is we bring. Steve is the blue-sky thinker, Andy is the comms whiz. George is the strategist, propelling us forward with new ideas and challenging us. Ed and I keep everything moving in tandem. And David is the decision taker, and our leader.

We are not without our differences. Steve’s liberal, radical conservatism doesn’t always gel with Andy’s more traditional variant. Andy comes to politics from the sharp end. He deliberates like a tabloid editor: What would his readers think? He is not keen on lofty ideas dreamt up in Westminster. He worked as a journalist since leaving school and rose under the Murdochs as one of their golden children. When later we decide to include Michael Gove, whose brilliant, creative political mind we hope will add to the proceedings, the meetings begin to appear in The Spectator, which is unfortunate.

The aim is to start the year with a bang. Articles are being written, videos recorded, and – despite some opposition – a poster campaign is in preparation. George is especially keen on this, as he believes posters speak of confidence. If done right, a poster presents a memorable image that conveys a message clearly and succinctly to the electorate.

However, no one can agree what the images should be, and we are running out of time. We cover the office floor with drafts, burning through image after image. Of course, everyone has their own pet idea – even though we have been told categorically not to try to be amateur creatives ourselves and leave this to the professionals, it’s too irresistible. Even my dad is emailing ideas.

David heads down to his home in Dean, in Oxfordshire, for the beginning of his winter break. Realising we still have a lot to sort, he calls us down to the country for a meeting. It is a few days before Christmas and the weather has changed for the worse. I wake up to see inches of snow outside my window in London. I ring our ops genius, Liz, and suggest we move the meeting to Oxford. This is an easy place for those of us in London to get to and it’s only forty minutes from David’s constituency home. But David is resolute. He will cook us lunch in Dean.

I set off with George in Andy’s rather flash three-door convertible. We speed down the motorway talking ten to the dozen and before we know it we have passed Oxford into the Cotswolds, which is covered by mountains of snow. Just after the turn off to Dean there is a steep hill. Andy slows down, carefully steering away from what looks like ice at the side of the road. But halfway down we seem to be in a slide. ‘Watch out!’ shouts George, and before we know it, we have crashed over a wall and into a tree.

There is silence in the car while we take in the situation and establish that no one has been hurt. ‘Fuckin’ hell!’ screams Andy, jumping out to check if his pride and joy has sustained any damage. The situation seems to be: Cotswold wall, 2–Andy’s car, 0.

I call David. ‘Um, hi … Just to say we’ve crashed.’ David doesn’t believe me at first, thinking it is a joke to make him feel bad about dragging us down to Dean. ‘No, we really have.’

David appears minutes later in a four-wheel drive and thick winter boots to help. We stand at the top of the hill, redirecting other members of the team away from the ice to avoid a Cameroon pile-up.

Despite Andy’s preoccupation with his car, we manage to get a lot done. The discussions revolve around the ‘air’ war – which means how we communicate what we propose to do once we’re in government, through speeches, interviews, and visits – and the ‘ground’ war, which is about the party’s operation – knocking on doors, telephone canvassing, handing out leaflets, finding out where our vote is, and, ultimately, on polling day, getting people out to vote. Finally, over a cup of tea, we return to the poster and give the go-ahead to an image of David looking reassuring with the caption: ‘We can’t go on like this. I’ll cut the deficit not the NHS.’

The poster is launched with great fanfare but falls flat. Seeing it on the motorway a few weeks later, I can see the problem straight away. David looks smug and spruced up rather than how we wanted him to look – fresh and trustworthy. We then discover the ad agency has airbrushed the picture. When word of this gets out, we are caught in a frenzy of press criticism. David is accused of being a PR man and a vacuous show pony. This is not how we had wanted to start the year.

THE ARGUMENT ABOUT WHETHER to lead on the economy or social issues remains unresolved. But we must progress with the manifesto.

A manifesto is a tricky thing to get right. It needs to be substantial enough to set out a path for government, but not so long it bores everyone to death. It should say something about what you really plan to do for the country – setting out your direction of travel and main policy offer. It needs to include some big-ticket items, but it also needs to cover all of the main areas, so that no one can accuse you of not caring about their pet subject. Most importantly, the manifesto should aim to appeal to voters – which is not as obvious a point as you may think.

Your manifesto is critical because it’s your mandate for government. And if you are lucky enough to win an election, it will stay with you as a blueprint for your first Queen’s speech, and the one after that, and after that one too. If you have a group of MPs in your party who do not like you, they will be hard-pressed to vote against something that is in this document, because people have voted for them on the basis of it. So, it is worth all the hard work, in the end.

Oliver Letwin oversees our manifesto process, which is a painstaking and at times painful task. It’s really hard to successfully include the wider party in the process while avoiding a free-for-all. The series of policy groups Oliver sets up are popular – in that they are deemed ‘inclusive’ – but ultimately lead to pandemonium. Some of the less desirable policy recommendations leak into the pages of the tabloids. Members become increasingly disenchanted as their proposals are rejected left, right, and centre. All in all, this year’s exercise cannot be deemed a success.

And yet slowly and surely, the manifesto comes together, including a commitment to cut the deficit, boost business, and reform schools and welfare, as well as an ambition to be the greenest government ever. We launch it in Battersea Power Station, hoping the iconic backdrop will speak to reconstruction and a ‘can do’ attitude. The Shadow Cabinet is there in full force. Samantha is there too, heavily pregnant with Florence.

I hold my copy of the manifesto, ‘An Invitation to Join the Government’, and listen to David’s speech. It has been written by Steve and is all about ‘Big Society’ – encouraging people to get involved in their communities. In reality it confuses just about everyone.

IT IS AN EARLY Easter in 2010. I roam round the garden of my sister’s house in the country, hiding eggs ahead of the traditional hunt. I feel strangely detached, like I am simply going through the motions of family life. I know that in just a few hours, this normality will be suspended for a while. On Tuesday, Gordon Brown will go to Buckingham Palace to ask the Queen to dissolve Parliament, and thereby officially fire the starting gun. We will then move onto full election footing, with its gruelling schedule of early morning starts, long days, and late nights.

We have already left our offices in Norman Shaw to join the rest of the party team in CCHQ at Millbank, where we are packed into the open-plan office like sardines. The place smells of takeaway pizza and unshowered bodies. I feel excited and a bit apprehensive. We have been anticipating this moment for years, and now that it has come, win or lose, the end of our years in opposition is in sight.

My last night with the family will be Sunday night. From Monday, the core team will decamp to a hotel in London for the duration of the campaign, so that we will able to conduct our punishing schedule with no distractions from family or friends (although on weekends we will be allowed home). It is a terrible wrench to part from my children, but I know I would be up too early and back too late to see them anyway.

This is a long-standing but rather hushed-up election tradition. Michael Howard and his team stayed at the luxurious Mandarin Oriental in Knightsbridge for the 2005 campaign. We know anything like that is completely out of the question now. How can you fight an election on austerity from the Mandarin Oriental? Andrew Feldman books us in to the Park Plaza, a monolithic building of darkness that dominates the roundabout across Westminster Bridge. The place is a labyrinth of orange carpets, dark hallways, and tiny rooms, many of which face onto an internal well seemingly designed to house the entire pigeon population of London. I discover this depressing view of the pigeon sanctuary is not something I share with my more illustrious colleagues, who have palatial, river-facing rooms. They seem more positive about the hotel, strangely enough. I cannot get away from the sensation that someone has died somewhere along my corridor.

We are used to working together as a tightly-knit team, but you can’t run an election campaign by committee, especially if the members don’t always agree. And David cannot lead the campaign himself: he’s our front man. So, the idea is that George does it, though in reality he was never going to manage the day-to-day work. We need him out campaigning too. So, there is a gap – a large gap. We will learn our lesson and fill this in 2015 with Lynton Crosby. But in 2010 we go ahead with Andy and Steve as co-managers. Despite their differences in style and politics, they put themselves in a small office in the centre of CCHQ in a show of joint decision-taking. It is less an office and more a ‘pod’, really, which quickly earns it the ironic nickname ‘the love pod’. It is from this loveless pod that our 2010 election campaign is orchestrated. There is neither window, nor air, nor anything healthy at all in the pod – just two very tired men surviving on adrenaline.

Soon the routine is set. The media team gather at 5.30 a.m., ahead of the 6 a.m. broadcasts. My first meeting of the day with key members of the team – David, George, Steve, Andy and Ed – is at 6.30 at CCHQ. Also joining us are Liz, Stephen Gilbert, who oversees the campaign on the ground, and Rupert Harrison, who has taken over from Matt Hancock as George’s chief of staff now that Matt is himself standing for Parliament. We go through the main points, which have emerged from earlier meetings: which story we want to fly, which story we want to kill, what Labour are up to.

By 8 a.m. at the latest we set off on the campaign trail. Most days we try to get back to London for the evening, so we can discuss the day’s events and the state of play over dinner in the hotel and watch the news. Occasionally, we stay out on the road and spend the night in a hotel.

Each day involves a series of visits to target seats, with a speech and interviews planned at each stop. Getting to them requires one form of transport or another, sometimes of the winged variety. We have a plane in the 2010 and 2015 election campaigns, which David calls ‘Con Air’. The team and I sit up at the front with David. Sometimes journalists are at the back, filing their stories as we go, but mostly the press is taken round the country on a large bus.

The election bus is home to teams from each of the main national broadcasters: BBC, ITV, and Sky, as well as a representative from the Press Association and sometimes Bloomberg. A random selection of journalists from other outlets are out on the road with us for each day too. This needs careful handling by our press and ops teams. You are dealing with the most high-maintenance, low-pain-threshold, easily bored, unsympathetic, and ever hungry group of people in the world. There’s a lot of ringing their mate on the Labour bus to compare who’s getting the best pictures and, god forbid, better food. The scary thing is that your fate is largely in these people’s hands. How they interpret your day will be how the public sees it. It feels a lot like a one-way relationship: all give from us, all take from them. But ultimately, we have something they need – access to the campaign – and they have something we need – press attention.

When David and I join the bus, we sit in a private part at the back. A black leather seat forms a semicircle, and all the windows in this part of the bus are tinted. I assume it is designed for the use of a boy band on tour. Only instead of being thrown beers and girls, we get the occasional journalist sent back to do the daily interview. We spend hours at a time in the back of the bus, being jolted around, the British countryside speeding by, driven from event to event and stopping at market towns, factories, supermarkets, and new-build housing developments, our progress tracked by twenty-four-hour news. Mornings and lunchtime, Liz throws some food at us, usually of a healthy nature. By late afternoon we are at the chocolate and crisps.

Being out on the road is a risky business at the best of times, and even more so during an election campaign, when the potential for a high-profile disaster is high. A member of the public harassing a politician live on television can define an entire election campaign. Remember a furious Sharon Storer confronting Blair outside a Birmingham hospital in 2001 for failing to give enough support to the NHS? Only worse is the appearance of a member of the public being prevented from harassing a politician – or the politician complaining about it afterwards.

The considered view is that a politician is fair game and should take criticism on the chin. Fortunately, we have already learnt this lesson the hard way. In summer 2008, David did a series of interviews in Newlyn, Cornwall. In the middle of a question a man approached him, gesticulating. ‘Be quiet, we’re doing an interview’, pleaded Gabby Bertin, David’s press secretary, who is a half French, half Croydon girl, and takes no prisoners with her notepad and bright lipstick. The man began yelling even louder. The cameras swivelled round to take in the angry man. ‘I won’t be silenced,’ he yelled. ‘Effing Tory!’ David walked towards the man and shook his hand. ‘Tell me what the problem is, sir,’ he said, calmly. And the man began to regale him with accounts of his inadequate local Tory MP, live on national television.

Even without the gaffes, there is simply the hard graft of travel, which takes its toll – not just the trains, planes, and automobiles themselves, but the difficulty in getting your work done on them. Answering emails, reading your briefs, and making your calls is not easy as the car swerves in and out of the fast lane following the convoy.

Somehow I seem to attract more than my fair share of fiascos on the road, like losing my shoe under an intercity train. I have chosen a well-worn, comfortable pair for the day, but they come loose when I walk, so much so that my right shoe flies off my foot and lands in the gap between the platform and the train. Perched on one leg, I peer down the crack to see it nestled between the rails. I notice at this point that David has moved quite some way up the platform. ‘No, I don’t wish the train to be delayed while the guard fishes it out, thank you very much,’ I say. A delayed train (and lots of angry passengers blaming David) is a far worse fate than a single-shoed aide. After this incident, I never leave home without an extra pair of flats in my handbag.

There are other, more serious encounters. Helicopters seem to be a major culprit. They are beguiling creatures: they can land anywhere and halve your travel time. But they are also extremely dangerous. Returning from a visit, the pilot tells us the wheels are stuck and we cannot land. This, he says, is not really a problem but we cannot go to the heliport at Battersea. We head off instead to Biggin Hill Airport. There is a small runway there. As we approach, we spot a fire engine and ambulance on standby. This is not reassuring. The pilot brings the helicopter down to hover near (but not too near) to the ground. All we have to do is jump out, he explains. There is another pilot waiting to catch us. David makes a respectable exit. Gabby and I – all summer dresses, no tights, and bags galore – fare less well. Our poor pilot now has to fly around to get rid of the fuel before attempting an emergency landing. The firemen hand him a helmet and get the hoses ready. We are told the helicopter will flip round on landing. Thankfully, he manages it.

On another visit, we are due to land in a field. We are nearing the ground when suddenly the pilot pulls back and up at great speed. Hovering above the field, the pilot hammers on the window, shouting at the people down below, though of course they cannot hear. The sight of the hysterical pilot has reduced me to a nervous wreck. I am of little use, busy saying my Hail Marys, so David takes charge. He puts on his earphones and asks the pilot what is the matter. The pilot explains that he had to abort the landing because the farmer has put down a carpet in the field so that David will not get wet feet when he gets out of the helicopter – only the carpet flew up and very nearly got tangled in the propellers. We have barely avoided a blow-up. ‘Wait a moment,’ says David who then rings the team on the ground. The carpet is removed, and we land safely.

— 6 —

THE WORM

Grappling with the challenges of the campaign trail is par for the course in a general election. However, the run-up to the 2010 election featured something totally new, at least to us in Britain. It was the first to import the American tradition of the presidential TV debate. The drumbeat calling for a live head-to-head had been going for some time. It was hard to ignore. No one wants to say they won’t face their public. Even if privately we’re wishing the other side would back out, publicly we are saying, ‘Bring it on.’

So, we know a TV debate is coming, but the question is – in what form? The broadcasters think this is up to them to decide; we think otherwise. Which is why we start meeting in secret with Peter Mandelson, to work out what is in both our best interests. I am perhaps overly excited by the covert nature of the operation, involving the infamous Mandelson. Andy tells me to calm down. We creep in the back door of some office block to find Mandy and his team waiting for us. He begins, ‘The broadcasters may think they can tell us what to do …’

In the end, it’s decided that there will be three debates with the three party leaders – Gordon Brown, Nick Clegg, and David Cameron – over three weeks in the final weeks of the campaign. In theory, the first debate will concentrate on domestic affairs, the second on foreign affairs, and the third on the economy, but in practice they will be wide-ranging.

Had we known how much the debates were going to detract from the traditional style of campaign, we might have thought twice before agreeing. Because in 2010, the debates cut a huge hole out of the centre of the short campaign. Where old-style campaigns had been constructed around a daily message deployed at the morning press conference, these new debates made it all about one man’s performance on a weekly show: potential prime ministers, meet The X Factor. The first half of the week was taken up with the rev up, the second half with the come down. A once-steady poll lead could go into freefall based on a single night’s performance; all the years of effort put into building the trust and support of a nation could be lost in a moment. Plus, all the weight of the campaign came to rest on David’s shoulders. This, we quickly realised, was the curse of reality TV.

We set aside time for rehearsals but it isn’t nearly enough. We should have doubled it. At least we had the sense to know we lacked the expertise amongst ourselves to prepare for the debates. We reach across the Atlantic for help from people who do, and are lucky enough to find Bill Knapp and Anita Dunn, who had helped Obama into office in 2008. With their guidance, we get to work.

We start by preparing for what we think of as a slightly more complex – and longer – version of PMQs. Which it is, in a way, but a lot more complicated. It is like deploying an army over a vast landscape. Above all, there is the overall strategy for the battle ahead. The first step is to identify key topics – the ones you know will come up. Because the broadcasters only have time for a few questions, it is not so difficult to work these out.

We imagine the first debate, on domestic affairs, is likely to cover welfare, health, immigration, and maybe education. So, we pick one area, health, to start with. We work out what our strongest points are – the positive story that David has to tell. Next, we address our vulnerabilities – and this needs to be a very honest appraisal, the Americans tell us. What are the most difficult questions that could come up on this topic? What are the best answers? After that, we dig up everything the other side have said about health. What are their strengths and weaknesses? We are building trenches, from which David can mount an offensive but also retreat to safety.

However, while all this is good groundwork, it’s not what wins you the debate. Your key message is the thing you want the ‘folks’ back at home to remember. (We don’t have ‘folks’ in Britain, we tell our American friends. You do now, they say.) To land the key messages you need some good strong lines, which Bill Knapp calls ‘the zingers’. A zinger should speak to your point with absolute clarity. It should be short and focused. Think tweet rather than prose. ‘Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy’ goes down in history as the ultimate debate put-down. In those words, Democratic senator Lloyd Bentsen showed Republican senator Dan Quayle (who had dared invoke President Kennedy) to be arrogant, naive, inexperienced, and out of his depth, having made a bad judgement call in trying to identify himself with Kennedy in the first place. Opponent crushed. Enemy in retreat. That’s a zinger. (Even if George H. W. Bush still went on to win the actual presidential election.)