Special advisers: best not seen or heard

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/blog/2014/dec/22/special-advisers-spads-theresa-may

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At a time when youthful coalition special advisers are again making mischief and self-damaging headlines, it’s hard to recall that in the role’s Whitehall infancy such people used to be grey beards, eminent economists such as Tommy Balogh and Nicholas Kaldor, the two Hungarian eggheads who advised Harold Wilson’s Labour government in the 60s.

It’s not that Balogh and Kaldor, who were part of the Fabian Labour elite’s effort to raise sluggish rates of economic growth, were averse to controversy or hostile headlines – they were often attacked by MPs and the press as sinister foreign intellectuals, labels as unpopular then as now. But it was mostly about policy (they invented something called selective employment tax to subsidise manufacturing jobs by taxing service jobs), and done on a higher plane than whether or not the pair would turn out to canvass in a byelection – as happened this week to Theresa May’s special advisers, Nick Timothy and Stephen Parkinson, struck off the Tory candidates’ list for insubordination.

That’s another sign of changing times, the frenetic 24/7 nature of media-driven politics. Byelections are always a dangerous popularity test for any government, but until the past decade prime ministers – opposition leaders, too – kept a sensible, even lofty distance from the prospect of triumph or (as in Ukip’s win at Rochester and Strood) disaster at the voters’ hands.

But Nick Watt’s story of the latest spat involving Home Office spads (B and K were never “spads”!) should not detract from the value of the 60s innovation in terms of improving the way Whitehall does its business. Spads are the oil that greases the hinge between the impartial advice given – at least in theory – to ministers by the civil service and the input of the minister’s own party, conflicting interested parties, sometimes the wider public and press too.

They think overtly political thoughts about policy options – “is that good for us as well as the country?” and “will this excellent idea blow up in our faces if leaked prematurely to the Daily Brute?” They articulate partisan angles that civil servants would never dream of spouting at the office. They are a busy secretary of state’s eyes and ears in Whitehall, his or her gofer in all sorts of ways.

Some also bring Kaldoresque outside knowledge to bear on tricky issues – it is not all teenage wannabe MPs getting work experience straight out of Oxbridge. It is no surprise, for example, that Gordon Brown’s righthand woman, ex-Warburg banker Shriti Vadera, has just been appointed chair of Santander UK. Spaniards don’t give those jobs to teenagers.

Don’t take my word for it. The excellent Institute for Government, which resides just off the Mall and across St James’s Park from Downing Street, has plenty of analysis explaining their work – quality matters more than quantity, says the IfG. UCL’s Constitution Unit offers plenty too: try this on the familiar problem of the “revolving door”.

Yes, I know the coalition came into power promising to cut the 71 publicly funded spads they denounced as excessive when Labour left office, and was found last week to have increased the number to 101. Experts said the government would regret its 2010 pledge – and it did. Nick Clegg is said to have 20 to keep him abreast of what the Tories are up to (Jesus only needed 12, say the wits), but the more usual number per department – except No 10 and the Treasury - is two or three.

Was there a spad in Yes, Minister? That gentle satire is so long ago, I can’t remember. In Peter Capaldi’s Malcolm Tucker there certainly was in The Thick of It. The foul-mouthed Alastair Campbell parody was the heart of that heartless show, the spin doctor who ordered elected ministers around and manipulated government for partisan and personal goals.

Is it like that in real life? I would once have said so with greater confidence than I do after reading Damian McBride’s extraordinary memoir, Power Trip. It charts a clever working class boy’s career from north London to the civil service (via Cambridge where he started punch-ups on the football field), then to Gordon Brown’s side as his ultra-loyal spad practising the spin doctor’s dark arts with ruthless intelligence. Smarter than most of the Treasury mandarins, I suspect. He seems to have run rings around them.

Not a comfortable read and, of course, it all ended in grief when “Mad Dog” McBride’s career was blown out of the water in 2009 and his top media contacts ratted on him. And that’s one of the lessons of spad-dom. As David Cameron’s disgraced media chief Andy Coulson (appointed against strong advice from the Guardian) ruefully noted when he quit, you lose your usefulness when you become the story.

Most spads lead quiet lives, working very hard for up to 100 hours a week on the same salary they were earning before they joined Whitehall (ie often quite modest, that’s the rule) and doing what most of them are there to do: advise their boss on the political dimensions of the policies with which they grapple and resist the plentiful temptations of mischief.

I know a bit about this because one of our sons was a spad during five years of the Blair-Brown era. Though we worked in the same world, we never talked shop on family occasions and I’m not aware that anyone ever suggested we did. I only saw his name in the papers once and that was just in passing. “Don’t talk to the press unless you have to,” has always been my advice to anyone who asks.

Of course, some spads are there to specialise in media handling. In a 24/7 full-on environment it’s very necessary in high-profile departments like the Treasury or the Home Office, which can explode at any moment, as Defra does only rarely. Where it goes wrong is when a media spad is too pro-active, too partisan and sometimes too good – ie like Damian.

Like Charlie Whelan before him – Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell too, to be even-handed – McBride couldn’t resist the chance of promoting his hero, Brown, and doing down Tony Blair. You don’t have to get involved in dodgy briefings – plenty of newspapers don’t, but others do. Sometimes they are the same ones that scream loudest about government feuds that are chiefly being conducted and amplified by unauthorised (semi-authorised?) proxies like Mad Dog.

That was clearly the problem when Michael Gove, Cameron’s loyal satrap, had a series of run-ins with Theresa May, conducted by spads who eventually left under a cloud, taking Gove into exile with them – sacrificed as education secretary by his pal Dave for being too partisan and divisive on schools. Tory activists loved Gove, the wider public had well-founded doubts.

And that’s the other lesson: the secretary of state has to be in charge of his/her team and stop them going off the reservation. I have no idea whether Liam Fox’s unofficial spad – he was ubiquitous, but never appointed – Adam Werrity, cultivated personal publicity (I suspect not). But his conduct cost both men their jobs – not the first or last such implosion.

Jeremy Hunt’s spad, Adam Smith, was good at his job, so the Guardian’s Tom Clark (himself an ex-spad) wrote here. But his evidence to the Leveson inquiry about his intimate dealing with Camp Murdoch over the BSkyB takeover was pretty damning. Hunt was lucky to survive, but cautious enough to have covered his bases when it mattered.

Politics is a risky enough business without own goals from the team, as Theresa May is again being reminded.