A spectre is sneering at Downing Street – the spectre of cynicism. The shoulder-shrugging ghoul provokes Alastair Campbell to rage against journalists who spread “cynicism about politics”. The sight of its curled lip so infuriates Tony Blair that he denounced “the forces of conservatism, the cynics, the elites, the establishment” to the congregation that gathered at Bournemouth.
The Prime Minister has cause to fret. Pollsters for the Consumers’ Association report that there is hardly a soul left in the land who believes what the government says. The 1997 general election, acclaimed as the most important since the arrival of Thatcherism, marked the lowest turnout in the history of British democracy. Subsequent ballots have proved that the more “scientific” the probes and massages of public opinion by the Mandelsons, Platells and Goulds become, the lower the public’s opinion of politicians falls.
Yet distinguished professors and eminent lobby journalists tell us that politics has always been like this. Harold Wilson was haunted by his public image. Bernard Ingham hustled a willing Fleet Street into worshipping Margaret Thatcher. The powerful have always wanted to control; to be flattered, respected and obeyed. There’s no reason to be more cynical now than we were in the past.
Readers who are tempted to embrace this knowing passivity should consider the following vignette from the Commons. On 26 October, Hilary Benn, the white sheep of his family, asked David Blunkett if he could cost a proposal in the Conservatives’ latest attempt at policy, the “Common Sense Revolution”. The Tories wanted to undermine the black economy by forcing the unemployed to sign on every day. Responsibility for answering the inquiry was passed to Richard Foster, chief executive of the Employment Service, and a civil servant engaged at public expense to maintain his trade’s standards of impartiality. He estimated that implementing this petty piece of viciousness – think of the effect on a jobless man living miles from the nearest dole office – would require 25,000 staff to be hired at a cost of £400 million a year.
Jeff Rooker, Labour’s social security minister, had described daily reporting to minor bureaucrats as “right-wing madness”. The conjecture that Benn fils was obeying orders to find figures that might back him was reinforced two days later when Blunkett revealed that the price of Tory extremism was rising by the minute. “It would cost £540 million a year,” he replied to what looked like another planted question. The money could be far better used to give the workless the “skills necessary to hold down jobs”.
On 9 November, Gordon Brown made his pre-Budget statement. Certifiable lunacy metamorphosed into Third Way prudence. The Chancellor said he had appointed a learned QC to investigate welfare fraud and instructed him to pay particular attention to claimants suspected of – but not lawfully convicted of – working illegally. He wanted to know if it was practicable to force them to sign on every day.
Admittedly, the above tale is hard to beat. What would ministers do if the Tories were to disappear and they had to fill their little heads with brutish ideas of their very own? But although the speed of the U-turn broke every traffic regulation, it is scarcely original to suggest that the Conservative Party is the most influential of the new Labour think-tanks.
The episode might be dismissed as another dismal chapter in an old story, if Liberal Democrats had not noticed a novel twist. Civil servants who vet parliamentary questions in the Commons Tabling Office once refused to allow queries about the expense of opposition plans to go forward. The job of Whitehall was to evaluate the consequences of government policies, so that informed decisions might be made on whether to proceed. If ministers wanted information of which the sole purpose was to discredit their rivals on the Today programme, they had to pay party workers from their own funds to dig the dirt. Now here were the Commons’ authorities turning the Employment Service into a research institute for new Labour. Here was Foster providing an anti-Conservative briefing, and it doesn’t let him off the hook that it has inadvertently become a helpful anti-government primer.
Foster, it transpired, was doing nothing untoward. The arrival of new Labour changed civil servants into political appointees and political appointees into civil servants. Today’s cynicism flows in part from the justified suspicion that tainted information is released not because one aberrant mandarin wants to impress his masters, but as a deliberate act of public policy.
Governments have paid special political advisers from the public purse since the 1970s – a rosy-cheeked Jack Straw was one of the first. They have always been controversial. Their jobs were not filled by fair and open competition. Grumblers asked why the taxpayer should subsidise ministers’ familiars. To meet the many objections, political advisers were placed under strict surveillance. Their one legitimate role was to provide factional advice that the impartial bureaucracy was not, in theory at least, allowed to dispense.
They couldn’t brief MPs – that was the job of the party machine. Nor could they sell the charms of their superiors to the press, or direct civil servants. According to the 1996 model letter of appointment, these and all other activities “likely to give rise to criticism that you are being employed at public expense for purely party political purposes” were forbidden territory.
The 1997 election swept aside the old demarcation lines. The number of special advisers rose from 35 to 72. A £4 million-a-year welfare state was created to support them. The new government pushed an order through the Privy Council, which secretly advises Our Sovereign Lady, Elizabeth Windsor. It decreed, in the tone of a Soviet politburo directive, that the distinction between party and state no longer held in Her Realm.
The council decided that “it would be damaging to the Government’s objectives if the Government Party took a different approach to that of the Government”. Officials and MPs must be “suitably briefed”. To achieve the desired uniformity of view, special advisers were authorised to “liaise with the Party to make sure that Party publicity is factually accurate and consistent with Government policy”.
The cadres of modernity were turned from policy-wonks into cheerleaders. Steve Reardon, head of information at the Department of Social Security, told the House of Commons Select Committee on Public Administration that government press releases, which were once meant to convey uncontentious recitals of fact, were now scrutinised and redrafted by advisers “obsessed” with ordering civil servants to mimic the “tone of the Labour manifesto”. The insubordinate press officer was fired six months after Blair took office.
Joe McCrea, Frank Dobson’s special adviser, whose foul-mouthed bullying of the independent-minded Channel 4 News health correspondent at this year’s Labour conference prompted her colleagues to empty their wine glasses over his shaking frame, revealed that he told “his” civil servants: “You can’t win the political battles of the 21st century with techniques and technology from 30 years ago.” In his recent history of Alastair Campbell’s rise from tabloid hack to unelected deputy prime minister, Peter Oborne repeats McCrea’s Mandelsonian dictum and says that he appeared not to ask if it was the task of a “neutral Civil Service” to win political battles.
But, in truth, it is no longer possible to regard the pronouncements of officials as neutral. The 1992 guidelines for Civil Service information officers instructed them to avoid any statement that might be “liable to misrepresentation as being party political”. They had limited scope to lobby for politicians – they might meet “ill-informed criticism” with briefings for “friendly journalists” and “arrange parliamentary questions” – but the broad thrust was clear enough.
In January, the government declared that it was now “entirely proper [for officials] to describe the policies of a Minister even if this may have the effect of advancing the aims of the political Party in Government”. The old system of bending and occasionally breaking the rules on impartiality was replaced with the new, in which there were no rules at all.
An explosion of puffery has followed. In the two years since its election, new Labour issued almost 20,000 press releases – 80 per cent more than the 1992 Major government. The clampdown on public spending was hidden by interminably announcing and reannouncing “news” of the provision of small amounts of money to fund the New Deal or cut classroom sizes.
Public spending on secret opinion polls to test attitudes on everything from the Royal Armouries in Leeds to Britain’s handful of sporting successes doubled to £1 million a month. The government made its love of gee-whizzery manifest by announcing that it would treble investment in its websites by 2002 (while forgetting to add the controls that might prevent partisan hype being broadcast into homes). A Strategic Communications Unit was established in Downing Street from where easily seduced journalists wrote articles “by Tony Blair” and other ministers for consumption by credulous newspaper readers. The work of special advisers was, the government’s laughable Freedom of Information bill ruled, to be treated henceforth as an official secret.
A simple list of individual initiatives, however, fails to convey the dominance of marketing because, in the new Whitehall, presentation is considered at every stage of policy-making. All civil servants have, in a sense, become potential propagandists. As have MPs, who have been reduced to the role of salesmen, loyally prattling the pitch from head office. (A leaked set of instructions from Conor Ryan, Blunkett’s adviser, showed that he alone had bombarded backbenchers with 84 briefings in two years on what they must think about education policy.)
It may still be paranoid to believe that Whitehall always lies, but you do not brand yourself a conspiracy theorist for thinking that the means are in place to vet and angle all government information.
Only the Liberal Democrats have been interested in scrutinising the growth of a gigantic system of outdoor relief for new Labour public relations, which will one day be the lucky Conservatives’ inheritance. But the small party with its energetic team of researchers finds it hard to keep pace with the stream of dubious figures on police numbers, class sizes and reductions in unemployment. Distortion is easy; exposure, however, is expensive and exhausting.
The pose of flip disbelief is the modern mode. But cynicism blunts outrage and effective protest.
New Labour has been able to get away with rigging the debate between government and the governed not simply because Britain has a Privy Council that can fix the system in secret, rather than a written constitution which might limit power, but because losing your cool is the worst of social errors. Jeremy Paxman’s worldly assertion that all politicians are “lying bastards” perversely licenses mendacity.
It is easier to be cynical than angry, even though cynicism about them allows them to carry on being cynical about us.
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