Hacks and Politicians: Are they condemned to sink together?

Politicians and hacks, Hacks and politicians.
Has it ever been this bad?

Perhaps it's time to speak out. Let me see. We have one senior member of the cabinet who keeps, obsessively, cuttings about himself and is endlessly ringing up editors to complain about their political reporters. This minister, you may know who I mean, pretends to be high-minded about the press, perfectly pleasant in interviews but endlessly banging on about the dignity of politicians - always says he never leaks, all that - but everyone knows he has a little clique of favoured hacks, I think we can mention the Mirror and a certain London newspaper in particular - people whom he briefs privately in his ministerial offices, and who in turn spin their stories in his favour and against his so-called colleagues. Nothing new in that. The trouble is, everyone knows you-know-who is a schemer. Everyone knows he really thinks the prime minister is useless - including the prime minister. Then there is - another senior member of the cabinet - who keeps up a staunchly holier than thou image in public, playing up his trade union roots, exaggerates his accent, glares at hacks, but who is happy to relax over a whisky - rather a lot of whiskies with businessmen and toffs and string-pullers in private. You know who I mean. He's the prime minister's protective shield against half the Labour movement, the man who stops the plotters. That's perhaps why he is so powerful. Hates chattering class journalists, and loathes, under past and present editors, the New Statesman. Who else? The desperate woman minister, who secretly adores one of her cabinet colleagues - himself locked in a loveless marriage - and who can't understand why reform is so very hard to achieve. The plotters with the man who would be king, the one who claims to be the beating heart of the government, meeting and feeding little diary items to their tame hacks, from certain louch premises in Soho. The sneering loudmouth, probably a repressed homosexual, who is keeping some very interesting diaries indeed - will he dare publish them when he's eventually fired - certainly used to spy on his colleagues. Speaking of diaries, let's mention the newspaper diary hack turned Labour MP - an example, if ever there was one, of how inflated journalistic reputations can parachute you into the Commons. And of course above them all, the prime minister, who pretends to be aloof about the press, reputation on the slide, health problems always downplayed, but knows very well what's really going on, with his tireless press secretary. He gives the hacks briefings but they are bloody useless. Meanwhile, you know, all of the cabinet whinge about their terrible press. They hate some of the cartoons, they find the stories they read a mix of fantasy and malice, and the sketch-writers are merely impertinent. They may have been elected but somehow it seems that a swathe of the media don't accept, even now, their right to govern. Press intrusion is the other thing MPs talk about, endlessly - even the Tories in opposition find it hard, though at least one very senior front-bencher has been able to conduct a series of affairs including one with the wife of a conniving colleague, who hoped it would win him promotion. Kept that out the papers, just...

Well, you've probably guessed - I hope so - that I am describing old Labour, indeed the post-war administration of Mr Clement Attlee, rather than the current administration of Mr Tony Blair. The keeper of newspaper cuttings and whinger to editors is Herbert Morrison, grandfather of Peter Mandelson. The trade unionist who relaxes with rich chaps over the odd whisky and hates sneering lefty journalists is Ernie Bevin. The woman minister, who will later kill herself, is Ellen Wilkinson, struggling to reform the schooling system. The plotters meeting in Soho are the admirers of Nye Bevan, holed up in the Gay Hussar. The loudmouth diary keeper is Hugh Dalton, soon be to be fired for leaking part of the budget - and yes, he certainly will publish those diaries in due course. The diary hack is the ex-William Hickey man Tom Driberg. The prime minister is Attlee, at which point most of the parallels diverge into meaninglessness. But now it has a halo round it, generally known as the great post-war Labour government, sanctified by time and custom in the manner of Queen Victoria or Mr Alan Watkins, it is easy to forget how bitterly those ministers struggled with a press they regarded as biased, unfair, prurient and essentially hostile to the democratically elected government of the nation. Did they go for easy headlines without focussing on the detail and follow through? Look at the history of their nationalisations. It wasn't just Labour, of course; the politician struggling to keep his affairs out of the papers was the then Tory deputy leader Anthony Eden. Things were different, of course they were. There was the old Lobby system and its culture of secrecy, there was far more social deference than there is today - which was why, in the succeeding government it was possible to keep the gravity of Churchill's illness out of the papers for so long, entirely contrary to what a free society should expect. Adultery was common but divorce - even blameless divorce - could finish a political career. As for gay politicians, of course, disgrace and prison were waiting. Changed days. But my point is a simple one, which is that most of the time, outside grave national emergencies, wars and fleeting political honeymoons, the press and the politicians have been - not at war, but in a state of raw mutual tension.

Surprisingly often in the course of twentieth century political history, that tension has been so bad that people have talked of democracy itself being endangered. The bitter row between pro-Eden Conservative loyalists and the BBC during Suez let to the threat, at least, of the national broadcaster being taken under direct government control. The satire boom was accompanied by mumbles from politicians in all parties about how such scabrous, vicious, humiliating stuff was incompatible with proper grown-up politics. Macmillan may have turned up to watch Peter Cook mocking him at the Establishment club; -I say may, I heard this once, perhaps from Jonathan Miller, or perhaps I saw it on late night television while mostly drunk, or perhaps I dreamt it - anyway "may" - key journalistic word, may, probably the most useful word we have - as we all know, means, I have absolutely no idea about this bit but it's too much fun to miss out, as in David Blunkett may return to the cabinet for a third time, informed sources told me in the press gallery bar last night, prime minister may have avian flu caught at the Buckingham Palace reception, and so on. At any rate, Harold Wilson did - not may have - did suck up to Richard Ingrams at the height of Private Eye's political impact, inviting him to Downing Street... but there was a feeling at the time that things had gone too far, the press was too invasive, too impertinent, too close. It's a well worn territory so just a single example that caught my eye recently, from Bernard Dononghue's wonderful Number Ten diaries, rather later-period Wilson this, I3 May I975, "He still thinks of the press all the time. Whenever we meet in the corridors he generally stops to chat about 'isn't the press bloody awful today?' or 'Have you seen that terrible article in the Guardian?'...he actually compares different editions of the same paper to compare ways in which their mistreatment of him alters from day to day." By that stage, Wilson was authorising staff to sue Private Eye, rather than oil up to it, and had tried to offer the press a new regime of openness on official secrets and slackening of contempt of court rules in return for less intrusion on the privacy of individuals... a deal gently refused. But this was the period, remember, of paranoia about Soviet spies in Downing Street, the amazing reign of Marcia Williams, living secretly with one of Fleet Street's most powerful political editors, the era of mutterings about right-wing coups and Joe Haines's suspension of lobby briefings. Relations between politicians and journalists then seemed about as bad as they could get without mutual violence. When Margaret Thatcher first arrived, things seemed very different - her rise to power had been assisted after all by favoured media barons, notably Rupert Murdoch, and favoured editors, none more important than the late Sir David English. In her early heroic era, with Geoffrey Howe's first ferocious budget, the battles with the unions, the Falklands, strife between Number Ten and the media was pretty much along left-right lines; it was the BBC, the Guardian, pinko journalists generally, that got her and indeed Sir Bernard Ingham going. Briefly, very briefly, because I think we all know this history, what then happens is that traditionally conservative papers turn sour, and the great Tory civil war over Europe is fought out in the press, so that by the time John Major arrives, the Tory press is seething with anger and hurt over the great betrayal. He has to cope with the leftish press which feels the Conservatives have been in power too long already, and with the right-wing press which is in open revolt over Europe and Maastricht. Then comes black Wednesday, and press-wise it's all over for him, satirised from both sides, later mocked to political death over the so-called sleaze era. In the Major years, political reporting finds a sadistic edge. The brimming hypocrisy of the Aitkens and the Archers feeds our anger. The blandness of the prime minister drives satirists to distraction. Never forget that he won an election, and governed for six years, but this is the time when political authority collapses. It happened for completely explicable conventional political reasons but to be frank, in my memory as a practitioner, it is also a time when the coverage of politics starts to feel like kicking puppies.

As to whether there is a God or not, I feel perhaps inhibited here and now - but there is some kind of cosmic justice, at least in politics. For the bloodlust as we tore into the Tories was whipped up and orchestrated by New Labour by Alastair Campbell, Peter Mandelson and their friends - the very same people coming onto screens now and complaining about how the media's impertinent hounding of their lot. We partly learned it from them. Or in playground terms, please miss, they started it. It was richly prepared for, this reckoning. The fall of David Blunkett, twice, the fall of Peter Mandelson, twice, the fall of Stephen Byers, Ron Davies... these are one-act dramas whose rhythm and smell, the mix of private misdemeanour, press pursuit, high-minded, self-righteous denial, the one day too many of headlines, the furtive back- door early morning visit to Downing Street, the moving personal statement outside, the closing door of the official car for the last time and the silhouette caught in the snapper's flash - all of it hallowed by post-war theatrical convention, and in particular by the resignations and scandals of the Major years. Yes, we'd had it before, Lambton and Profumo, all that. The moralising afterwards, the careers shredded, the inquiries, the new systems to clean up public life. Even the more extreme life-into-theatre examples of today, the television satirical drama about David Blunkett's sex life, or the play, are not quite as novel as some people seem to think; what Peter Cook was doing down in the establishment club, or even Spitting Image on domestic life with the Majors, are ancestral echoes. This is now part of how we do politics in this country. Has nothing changed? And is it a good way of doing our national business?

The case for the prosecution is almost too easy, but let's rehearse it anyway. We journalists ask impossible standards from our politicians, standards at any rate most of us fall far short of. Leading hacks are well paid, generally better paid than the politicians. We have an easier life, and are mostly far less subject to scrutiny. When we are hounded we find it in general very, very horrid and we squeal something awful. Well, it is horrid. It hurts. Rebekka Wade, to be fair, didn’t squeal in public, but she was - as the media commentator Stephen Glover rightly pointed out, given a very easy time in the rest of the press. Had a politician been banged up overnight for attack his or her spouse, would that minister be in office by now? The BBC is slightly outside the conspiracy of mutual silence protecting most of the printed press because we are publicly funded, an identifiable other. If you're on the telly, you're fair game. But when I think of what I know about people across the digitalised virtual Fleet Street, I wonder sometimes at our eye-popping outrage directed at elected people. Could it be, perish the thought, just a tad synthetic just a whiff hypocritical? The defence is that people working in the market, employed by private companies and funded by advertising and sales, should not be judged as elected or public servants are judged, that they occupy a different moral universe. Private sector equals private life. Public sector means public life, in every sense. And while it is true that we have to pay our taxes, and we don't have to buy newspapers, or subscribe to Sky television sports, is that enough of a final defence for this convenient distribution of privilege? In a world in which the private is so influential - lobbying the public sector, analysing it, satirising it, yet depending on it - should people working for a great media empire be treated so very differently from people working in, say the Scottish parliament or the Department for Work and Pensions? There is an uncomfortable question. My answer, let's be clear, is not to have a wild free-for-all, but to say that we should mostly respect people's dignity - everyone needs space around them to live in without public ridicule. And if we don't get the best people going into politics perhaps it's because of what happens to them if they do. And all that.

Let me turn to the case for the defence, however. For if there is one lesson I draw from my years of reporting, it is that things at the top are always just a little more lurid, just a little wilder, than was ever said in the papers at the time. I've alluded already to the government of Harold Wilson, when frankly Downing Street was madder and more paranoid than even Private Eye seemed to suspect... though the prime minister was not, so far as anyone could later establish, really working for Moscow. Already politicians were becoming aware that their secret world would eventually spill out into the open through the relatively new sin of keeping and publishing diaries. So far as I can recall, Hugh Dalton was the first sinner in this way - and perhaps other ways too. In an interesting example of the diarist noting the danger with diarists, then eventually publishing the result, Dononghue records the horror of the then cabinet secretary John Hunt when the first draft of the Crossman diaries arrived in Number Ten - appalling, terrible attacks on all the Labour leaders, "Hunt said it would bring the whole system into disrepute and would certainly be disastrous for this government to have its members denigrated in this way. He says B Castle is described as a boring old bag." Dear me. Well, of course, the question is whether we have a right to know, at least after the event, what was really happening, and of course we do. This is not the same as having the right to know in real time, every conversation, though we'll never say no thanks. But as I say, things are generally more shameless than we assumed. Coming right up to date, here is a recent Number Ten diarist, Lance Price, on a yet-to-be-published diarist, Alastair Campbell. Bill Clare of the foreign office has just gone off to work for Liam Fox and they are warned about how much he's overheard. "So far we've laughed it off, but I think it could be quite serious. AC said as a result that life is on the record, so I guess it will now be OK for me to publish my full and frank account of life at Number Ten." Which of course he then did. But Price goes on, "Last weekend, in an Observer interview, TB called for a new moral purpose in Britain. It was totally vacuous and was just made up to give us a good story after two twelve-year-old girls were found to have got themselves pregnant. But it worked..." When you read that, and when I recall just what was said before the Iraq war, and a thousand other examples, my enthusiasm for protecting the dignity of office rather shrivels.

Let's turn, finally, to the most up to date spilling of beans, the new book DC Confidential by the former Washington ambassador, Sir Christopher Meyer, which is so very disobliging about Mr Tony Blair and many of his ministers but particularly, perhaps, the deputy prime minister John Prescott and the foreign secretary Jack Straw. Don't underestimate the shock this has produced inside the system - for former spin- doctors to publish and be damned is one thing, but diplomats, ambassadors - who next? Sir Christopher is of course now chairman of the press complaints commission, as much of an insider in modem media London as he was before in political Washington. He knows, none better, how powerful the media baronies are compared to a fading political court. He knows the value of a ringside seat in the preparation for war. After you've sat there, you can dish ministers, and not worry, if you are supported in the media. Well, this is our version of the balance of powers. But Sir Christopher points me in a final direction. For his case against Blair is not that he was wicked, or conspired to deceive, but simply that he underestimated his own leverage in the Bush camp, and did not spend enough time on the detail of how to deal with post-war Iraq. Having promised after 9-11 that Britain would be with America at the last, as at the first, he was effectively captured by the logic of his own rhetoric. Now these are subtler, more political points than are often made against the government - compared to the lazy, easy, they're all liars and rogues, they're all corrupt stuff - and to my mind vastly more persuasive. We need to spend more time looking at the consequences of badly thought out policy, errors of choice, failures of concentration, and a little less time in a kind of lurid moral cartoon, in which everyone is good or evil, but mostly evil.

It used to be said the Russian political system in the days of the Czars was autocracy tempered by assassination. Sometimes our system looks more like amateurism tempered by humiliation. I think we need to start afresh by being honest about the motivations which drive many people in public life, and being honest about how natural they are, Sex, it seems to me, happens rather a lot. Certainly, where men are concerned it often involves a considerable loss of dignity, and sometimes a failure of judgement. This may be the case among lawyers, fishermen, cheese makers, car workers and editors, as well as politicians. It's time for us to be a little more adult, in the old fashioned wholesome sense of the word, and a little less titteringly prurient. I loathed the fact that David Blunkett's sex life was satirised on television. He is a man of many flaws, and they have brought him down - not us, not the media - his own flaws - but I also think he is a big man. He has suffered more, done more, kept going for longer, than - probably - most of us, all of us here? I don't say the same about every member of the government, it contains little people too, but did we not wince at some of that stuff? Was what we did, in the media, humanly decent? Out there in the country, people are probably a deal more worldly-wise and forgiving than we assume, I just think that on such matters, a little less hyperventilating moralism would go a very long way. We didn't need to know about Prince Charles and that tampax tape and frankly it would have been better - better for us, better for the country, as well as better for him - had we never known.

The same is not the case when it comes to money. Here too, it is worth remembering that politicians, including Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson as well as David Blunkett, find themselves living in a world of rich people - those who fund their political parties, who invite them to dinner as trophy guests, who want them to help their business by association - and it's probably a good principle for the small investor that any business needing a politician on the letterhead is to be avoided. The editors they meet are better off. They are surrounded by people with second homes in the country or in Tuscany, or wherever. And though they have a good lifestyle while they are in office, and enviable pension deals, they naturally begin to think, why can't I be rich too? Aren't I important? Aren't I successful? So they are softened up already for the tempting deals, soft loans, cheap shares on the up, all the things that can so easily bring them down. The answer is not to be worldly wise, still less tolerant about this. The membranes between private self-enrichment and cheating the public are too thin - conflict of interest is not a dry phrase, it's what describes the moment before corruption enters the system. It matters very much. So when we ask, has nothing changed, remember that in this area, much has. The rules on disclosure of MPs income and on ministerial behaviour have been tightened and tightened again, so that the behaviour which brought down Mr Blunkett was far less serious than financial scandals in earlier times - the gross corruption of Lloyd George, and the favours that stained the reputation of ministers in the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties, Our systems are tougher now, and that's a very good thing. In Gus O'Donnell, a thoroughly amiable, self-effacing man, I think we may have a cabinet secretary who is a genuine financial puritan and tough as nails. I do hope so, that would be a very good thing too. Journalists' involvement in potential conflict of interest cases and traditional financial scandals, whether it be the Blairs and the Bristol flats story, or the Mandelson home loan story, or Railtrack, or the latest one, has been admirable, and right, whether it makes relations worse with politicians or not.

Must we hang together or hang separately, journalists and politicians? It turns out to be the wrong question. The reputation of politicians in this country has rarely been very high; the toot-tooting, suits you sir, oleaginous press of High Victorian and Edwardian Britain did the nation few favours -it was a time when we lost our industrial edge, over-extended our empire and came briefly close to civil war, before blundering into the great one. Better, surely, the disrespectful, finger-stabbing, questioning press of Georgian and early Victorian times, which returned and has stayed with us for most of the past century. Every few years there is a national debate about the low esteem politics is held in; and yes, we all depend on parliamentary politics to safeguard our liberties. But that's about us all as citizens, not as a professional body. We should behave as journalists towards politicians as we should behave as citizens to them - that is, sceptical, questioning, prepared to challenge, but not sneering, prurient, or seeming to enjoy human tragedy. Journalists have fantastic influence. In the new online, digital multi-channel world, they are going to keep it. We'll share some with bloggers and we will work often with smaller market share, but the hubbub of argument that is our national media will not be displaced or pushed aside, even by its real enemy, which is not politics but entertainment.

Having such influence, indeed power, we have to learn to use it better. We should be a little kinder towards human frailty a little harsher about policy failure, lack of follow-through, because that's what hurts the country more. And the politicians? It wasn't just spin that caused the trouble - spin in the sense of twisting stories. It was the deeper, corrupting belief that daily news management matters most. It doesn't. For years now we have had it, and the result is cynicism - one more target, one more Initiative, one more promise, one more headline. The more impressive-sounding the five year plan, the bigger the disappointment when real life proves trickier and stickier. Daily news management is an addiction that confers status and offers excitement to those doing it, but which has skewed the attention of too many top politicians away from the real grind of carefully thought- through policies, consistently applied and meticulously followed through. Daily news management doesn't matter so much - it is the application of ruthless professionalism to the wrong thing, or at any rate, second-order things. It hasn't even won good headlines or supportive papers, has it? Perhaps the truth is that the news management obsession in government is what happens when too many hacks hop the fence into Whitehall. We don't do politics well. We have short attention spans. We're easily bored. That's why we are journalists. If we stuck to our jobs, and the politicians to their jobs which are in the end more important, perhaps the country would have been a happier, more confident place over the past few years.

What a pompous note to end on! It must be the pulpit. Goodnight.