I never dream about the Lobby Room, perched high on a turreted tower on the Houses of Parliament. Which is odd, considering how many afternoons I once spent there for the Downing Street briefing, promptly at four o’clock. I do often dream about missed deadlines, the absence of red telephone boxes in which to file on wet high streets, and more recently of dodgy wifi connections on the laptop. It’s just retrospective anxiety, which I rarely felt at the time. But when awake, I have also been anxious lately about the Lobby as an institution. Just look what’s happening under Donald Trump to the White House press corps, of which I was also once a member: entrenched hostility and a mutual collapse of trust that has seen AP excluded from the West Wing for insisting on calling the Gulf of Mexico by its proper name. Were relations, are they, ever as bad in SW1? The answer seems to be yes and no.
I joined the Lobby in 1976 as the No 4 in genial Ian Aitken’s Guardian team. It was about the time that men (plus The Observer’s Nora Beloff ) were promoted from “political correspondent” to “political editor”. Fleet Street’s now-rampant title inflation was first invoked to get round Jim Callaghan’s pay policy: £6 per week plus 1 per cent, unless you got promoted. I remained “political staff ”. Genuinely promoted in 1977 was clever Peter Jay to become Britain’s US ambassador, a move that provoked outrage because he was Callaghan’s son-in-law. I was present but not part of the informal chat with the No 10 spokesman, level-headed Tom McCaffrey, after the afternoon Lobby – the “dark lobby”, as colleagues now call it – when Tom must have disparaged the outgoing ambassador to justify his removal. “Ex Envoy Was Effete Snob” shouted the final editions (those were the days) of both (ditto) London evening papers. Coincidence? Impossible.
So there was a who-said-what Lobby row. But there are always Lobby rows. Re-reading its history since lobby reporters first emerged in the 1870s (initially looked down on as mere gossips by gallery men with seats to report the real proceedings), I see the rows remain much the same: access, attribution, official lies versus the Lobby’s pursuit of stories that No 10 regards as trivia, false or merely an inconvenient distraction. Also rows over rules and procedures, sometimes petty. Before my time, Ian Aitken was reprimanded for wearing a corduroy jacket in the Lobby – by a colleague, not by No 10. Off the record, old boy, the complainant was the Daily Worker/Morning Star man.
The twice-daily briefings – at 11am in No 10 to the right of the big black door, at 4pm at Lobby Room – were supposed not to exist, under government rule. An open secret that did not disguise the Tannoyed announcement that “Red Mantle” or “Blue Mantle” would meet shortly. In those days, the Opposition leader met the Lobby on Thursdays to discuss the coming week’s Commons business. At that time, Blue Mantle was Margaret Thatcher, though the practice was dropped when Ginger Mantle – Neil Kinnock – decided he wasn’t getting much out of an increasingly partisan Fleet Street. As a cheerful backbencher, happy to oblige with a quote or a song in the cosy press bar (long defunct), Kinnock had been popular with the press. Much less so in Maggie’s post-Falklands heyday, as he struggled with Arthur Scargill’s 1984–85 strike.
By then, of course, Bernard Ingham was the No 10 spokesman. Thatcher had purged the cabinet’s Tory “wets” in the early 80s and Michael Foot was elected Labour leader. Ingham had been a Guardian labour reporter before joining Whitehall, a press officer for Tony Benn and Barbara Castle before being picked – a stranger to her – by Thatcher. He admired Castle (not Benn) as a brave reformer but not as the skillful politician Thatcher would prove to be. The 74-day Falklands crisis saw the Lobby – like the Commons – largely united. Not so, monetarism and de-industrialisation, union reform and closure of coal mines, apartheid, Europe, the British rebate and growing Euro-scepticism, etc. As a professional bluff Yorkshireman, Ingham defended Thatcher’s policies and actions robustly – as he was paid to do – though I never assumed that he privately voted for them.
Until the 80s, the Lobby as an institution stayed much as it had evolved in the economic crisis of the inter-war years, the first collective No 10 Lobby briefing being during the General Strike of 1926, repeated during the financial crash and fall of the second Labour government of 1929-31. George Steward was then appointed as the original Ingham with the Lobby leading the innovation, according to Andrew Sparrow’s excellent Obscure Scribblers. Daily non-attributable briefings were established and the Lobby had become the dominant media player. Under John Reith’s legacy, the BBC’s news was docile until Suez (Eden’s press secretary William Clark resigned over the deception) and the arrival of upstart ITN made TV assert its new power. During the 1936 abdication and pre-war appeasement, the Lobby – and their editors – had connived in suppression of the facts. Neville Chamberlain himself orchestrated his staff ’s news management. Wartime discipline held after 1945 when taciturn Clem Attlee was indifferent to the press and Churchill too grand to bother, as Anthony Eden was not.
Deference hung on. The “14-day rule”, which banned topical debates on TV if Commons debate was pending, was rescinded only in 1958. As a new boy in 1976, I was still shown a copy of the starchy official Lobby Rules (“do not run after a minister or MP”). But change was coming. Beyond the Fringe, Private Eye and the witty Saturday night show That Was The Week That Was – on the BBC, even – had helped pull down the walls and raise forelocks. So did high jinks in high places, notably the Profumo Affair. Ian Aitken, then of the mighty Daily Express, got Profumo’s 1963 resignation scoop not from the Lobby but from his deputy, nephew of the next PM and future Times editor Charlie Douglas-Home.
The Lobby rarely launched a feeding frenzy
The Lobby could hardly resist joining in, not least because TV viewers and advertisers were starting to eat newspapers for lunch – a process the internet would finish with afternoon tea and dinner. Red-top tabloids were getting friskier and more aggressive, sucking the staid broadsheets into their vortex. With conspicuous exceptions, such as Boris Johnson’s PartyGate, the Lobby rarely launched a feeding frenzy: on Jeremy Thorpe’s love life or Lord Jellicoe’s, Reggie Maudling’s “little pot of money”, or Marcia Falkender’s peerage, the (phoney) Slagheap scandal, and the Daily Mail’s (forged) British Leyland letter furore. But it didn’t stand aside or protect the Establishment – even on occasions when it should have done.
When two mid-Thatcher scandals rocked the government, the old reflexes ensured propriety prevailed. During the 1986 Westland helicopter row that triggered Michael Heseltine’s premeditated resignation, the attorney general – rightly – insisted on a leak inquiry that forced out Leon Brittan (though Ingham put him up to authorising the leak). When Thames TV investigated the SAS’s shooting of three IRA bomb planners on Gibraltar in 1988, Thames – again rightly – defended its reporters in the face of Thatcher’s and half of Fleet Street’s attacks. Would TV bosses show such courage now? Thames’s defiance cost it the franchise. And Norman Tebbit was already denouncing BBC veterans such as Kate Adie and John Simpson as traitors for reporting awkward facts.
When I became political editor at The Guardian in 1989, I inherited a stand-off between Bernard Ingham and a section of the Lobby. In the late Harold Wilson era, the Mirror veteran Joe Haines, No 10’s chippy press chief, had briefly cancelled Lobby meetings. Now four publications, The Independent, The Scotsman, The Economist and the not-to-be-left-out Guardian, refused to attend the Lobby until Ingham agreed to have his briefing attributed to No 10. None of this opaque stuff about “sources”. I can’t remember what triggered the row, just frustration with Ingham perhaps. But it was inspired by Tony Bevins, a born disrupter.
It struck me as a silly battle because it meant we had to ask kind colleagues to tell us what non-attributable Bernard had told them. We could then report that “Downing Street last night told…”. Sensible John Major let even more sensible Gus O’ Donnell, a future cabinet secretary, patch up a compromise by which we could attribute his thoughts to “No 10” or “Downing Street” but no names, please. A slight gain, but since pol corrs were notorious for their use of non-attributed sources – and still are – it wasn’t full transparency.
Truth Social? Twitter? TikTok? The technological tail started to wag the political dog and media in the 80s. Live radio broadcasting of the Commons had let in some daylight, though TV – far more of a change – was resisted until 1989. Breakfast telly offered ministers a gentler platform than Radio 4’s Today, and 24/7 news came with Sky and the BBC in 1989. I remember resisting a pager from which there would be no hiding place from the news desk – futile. How primitive our early mobile phones look now. But email, WhatsApp and smartphones have both liberated and enslaved us on the scrolling treadmill. We didn’t grasp that they would also empower the demons of (mostly) right-wing demagogues and deregulated Fox News.
Major’s press spokesmen O’Donnell and the diplomat Christopher Meyer were straight-bat civil servants, like Dave Pares, spokesman to Rishi Sunak and now retained by Keir Starmer. Major’s problem was less the press – though often unkind – and more his own EU-divided party. Alastair Campbell, a new hybrid of politico with civil service powers, had to deal with a deeply hostile Tory press after the briefest of Blair honeymoons. He put the twice-daily briefings on the record and later instituted a monthly televised press conference in No 10. Gordon Brown couldn’t manage what Blair so easily did and the practice faded, though David Cameron tried a variation and Boris Johnson spent £2.6million on a press room where Allegra Stratton was destined to become a local version of the White House spokesman. Much postponed, the change never happened after one of Stratton’s rehearsals surfaced with a damning PartyGate joke.
How best for a leader to communicate directly with the voters, avoiding the distorting prism of the mass media? That was No 10’s challenge since Gladstone toured Midlothian by train. Blair, Campbell and Peter Mandelson were much more proactive. You were either for Blair or against or you were “wankers”, by which Campbell meant the liberal but wary Financial Times, BBC, Channel 4 and me. By far the best Lobby politician, Phil Webster of The Times, even kept grumpy Gordon Brown sweet and was duly rewarded with stories by both New Labour camps. I was content to keep my distance as a suspect wanker, though a Blair-ish one. They could all be pretty brutal, though their favourite target was – surprise! – the BBC. As usual.
Public trust was made worse by social media
In retirement, Ingham called it Campbell’s “terrorist regime” in aggressively engaging with individual reporters. Campbell, who as political editor of the Mirror had studied the pugnacious Ingham, would say he copied Bernard. But, despite New Labour’s courtship of the Tory press – initially quite successful – Campbell was dealing with a much more pervasive 24/7 media, no longer analogue, drone warfare rather than traditional artillery. In a more crudely partisan era, his combative personality and deep controversies over Iraq and Europe fuelled the fire. Public trust in both politics and the media was a casualty. Social media would soon make it worse.
The playing field following the Blair years (and after my time) seems to have been calmer, with three exceptions. Andy Coulson, David Cameron’s tabloid press man, fell foul of the News of the World hacking affair. Gordon Brown’s dark alter egos, Charlie Whelan and later Damian McBride, blew up spectacularly after decidedly unsporting briefings against Brown’s enemies, including Blairites. Damian’s memoirs, Power Trip, are not for the squeamish and make Campbell sound like a vicar.
And, of course, there was Boris, a disreputable journalist who despised journalists with the same instrumental cynicism he had deployed in the trade. Johnson boycotted hostile Lobby papers on trips and banned his ministers from enemy programmes such as Newsnight and the Today programme. Unlike the deep divisions, exacerbated by the Brexit battle, that he deployed to win his 2019 election victory, the Covid lockdown was not a crisis of choice. Johnson had already unilaterally relocated the 4pm briefing from the turreted Lobby Room to No 10, an inconvenience to the Lobby and a means of control: journalists had to pass through the security gates and thus could be excluded. At least one such effort was made, but Lobby heavies, including Laura Kuennsberg and Robert Peston, put their foot down. Lee Cain, the renegade Mirror man turned Johnson adviser who was director of comms from 2019-20, is said to have wanted to cancel the four o’clock. In cahoots with Dominic Cummings, another enemy of the Lobby, gossip had it that he tried to have uppity hacks fired.
The lockdown crisis disrupted their campaign, forcing No 10 to declare a truce. Instead, it conscripted the media in disseminating the harsh new rules. Restricted gatherings required Lobby meetings by conference call (later on Teams) and pooled questions. Normally-competitive colleagues pulled together and most agree that the Daily Mail’s Jason Groves, asking pooled questions as Lobby chairman, and James Slack, his predecessor as Mail political editor but by then the prime minister’s spokesman, delivered fair, exemplary service. Then came first Cummings’s Covid rules-breaking trip to Barnard Castle, a Mirror-Guardian scoop, then first hints of PartyGate, courtesy of the Mirror’s Pippa Crerar. The rule-makers had broken the rules while others died obeying them. Among Tory MPs, it helped seal the fate of the rule-breaker in chief. The disrupter had been disrupted, Lobby solidarity prevailed, and the system had survived.
All of which is a storm in a Commons teacup compared with the hurricanes unleashed by Donald Trump. After a tumultuous decade, Westminster has stumbled on two successive PMs who are inexperienced and happy to be uncharismatic: basically both dull and decent. The Lobby has embraced tech-driven change, such as tweeting during briefings. It is enjoying a period of calm, awaiting the next storm.