This week's news on Blair biography.
-
Where are Ed Miliband’s outriders?
17 MayNew Statesman
Despite recent successes, the Labour leader lacks cheerleaders in the party, in parliament, and in the press.Aides in the office of the leader of the opposition have a definite spring in their step. The Labour Party has a double-digit lead in the polls, having gained more than 800 council seats and 30 councils in the local elections. Ed Miliband is now less unpopular than David Cameron, according to the latest polls, and his positions on austerity and phone-hacking have been vindicated by events, dear boy, events.
So, where are the Ed-ites? Where are the cheerleaders for Miliband in the party, in parliament, in the press? As even his closest advisers reluctantly acknowledge, he continues to lack outriders.
The ideal outrider for the Labour leader, of course, would be his big brother, David. The elder Miliband, however, continues to rule out a return to the shadow cabinet, saying he prefers life “on the front line, not the front bench”. It is an odd position. Why not do both?
Then again, if, as James Macintyre and I reported in our 2011 biography of the younger Miliband, David hasn’t fully forgiven Ed for daring to stand against him for the Labour leadership, the former’s decision to stay on the back benches makes some sense.
But blood relations notwithstanding, the wider point still applies. Ed lacks loyalists, people who would die in a ditch for him. Consider the Labour high command’s reaction to the serialisation of our biography in the Mail on Sunday last June. It was left to Charles Falconer, the former lord chancellor, card-carrying Blairite (and former flatmate of the ex-prime minister!) and high-profile supporter of David Miliband’s leadership bid, to take to the airwaves in defence of the Labour leader.
Alone in the dark
Falconer is a serious political figure and a strong media performer but he can’t, by any stretch of the imagination, be considered an Ed-ite. So where were the Ed-ites? Where was the Labour front bench?
“The responsibility lies with the shadow cabinet,” a former Labour cabinet minister told me at the time. “If I were Ed, my eyes would be swivelling to Douglas Alexander, Yvette Cooper and Caroline Flint. Why haven’t they come out to defend him?”
Little has changed over the past year. Despite the abolition of shadow cabinet elections, just eight out of the 24 MPs in Miliband’s current shadow cabinet gave him their first preference in the party leadership election in 2010. None of the big jobs – deputy leader, shadow chancellor, home affairs, foreign affairs, health, education – is held by an Ed-ite.
What about the party’s elder statesmen? The younger Miliband’s “big beasts” are, basically, Neil Kinnock and Roy Hattersley, both of whom are eloquent, passionate and principled politicians but are also indelibly associated in voters’ minds with the 1992 election defeat.
Most members of the last Labour cabinet, after all, threw their weight behind the elder, not the younger, Miliband, including Alistair Darling, Jack Straw, Tessa Jowell, Alan Johnson and Andrew Adonis (who has just been appointed by the Labour leader as an adviser on industrial strategy). Just four members of Gordon Brown’s cabinet backed Ed over David: Peter Hain, Hilary Benn, John Denham and Sadiq Khan. Two years on, Denham and Hain have quit the shadow cabinet, while Benn and Khan are said to be “brassed off” at their leader’s failure to empower or promote them.
Aides of the Labour leader like to draw an analogy with Margaret Thatcher’s spell in opposition in the late 1970s: an inexperienced, underrated leader trying to smash the political and economic consensus and take her party back to government in the space of a single term.
But if Miliband wants to be Thatcher, where is his Keith Joseph? His Airey Neave? Which think tanks can he call on for ideological support? The Tory leader had Ralph Harris’s Institute of Economic Affairs, Madsen Pirie’s Adam Smith Institute and, most important of all, Alfred Sherman’s Centre for Policy Studies.
It is not as if the Labour leader is unaware of this particular, and pressing, problem. Miliband has been heard wistfully telling friends: “I guess I am my own outrider.”
A close ally of his offers the following defence: “The challenge we had from the start was keeping everyone together, because we’d won by such a small margin. It would have been inappropriate to try to create a vanguard within the party,” he says.
Peace of the graveyard
Miliband sees himself as a unifier, as a leader who transcends factions, gangs and groupuscules. “You could say that Ed is ‘faction-blind’,” says an irritated shadow cabinet minister. He doesn’t mean it as a compliment. In politics as in the playground, factions matter.
There is a reason why Thatcher had her Thatcherites, Blair had his Blairites and Cameron has his Cameroons. That John Major could never really call on “Majorites” for support may help explain his failure to silence his army of backbench rebels. Even Brown had his Brownites; in his darkest days in Downing Street, he could always call on the two Eds to go out to bat for him.
Miliband was wise to promote Rachel Reeves and Chuka Umunna to the shadow cabinet in October: they are young, talented MPs who backed him for leader in 2010 and understand his desire for a “new settlement”. But he needs to go much further and faster. In his next big reshuffle, he should consider bringing even more of the newbies who backed him, such as Chi Onwurah, Emma Reynolds and Lisa Nandy, into the shadow cabinet.
Remember, in politics, there is no point having political capital if you don’t spend it. “You can have peace in the party by staying quiet and avoiding confrontation,” says a frustrated front-bench ally of the Labour leader. “But that’s the peace of the graveyard. Ed needs to assert his leadership and promote his own people even if it upsets others in the party.” He adds: “Now is the time to be bold and strike out.”
Miliband can’t afford to relax. Politics works in cycles and he will come under sustained fire again soon enough. He can’t be his own outrider for too much longer.Mehdi Hasan is co-author of “Ed: the Milibands and the Making of a Labour Leader” (Biteback, £9.99)
-
Leveson inquiry: Rebekah Brooks tells of web of influence … and the LOLs
11 MayGuardian.co.uk - Media News
Former Murdoch CEO reveals how David Cameron and Tony Blair cultivated connections with her
Rebekah Brooks's appearance was the Leveson inquiry's big chance to finally get the inside track on the relationship between the former queen of Rupert Murdoch's publishing empire in Britain and three successive prime ministers.
In her first public appearance since appearing before a parliamentary select committee, Brooks was questioned for more than five hours by inquiry counsel Robert Jay QC – with occasional interjections by Lord Justice Leveson – about emails, texts, phone calls, dinners and drinks parties with David Cameron, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and whether they used her as a channel to get to Murdoch.
Cameron's message of support on resignation
Cameron sent her an indirect message of support after she was forced to resign as chief executive of News International last summer. Asked about the claim in an updated biography of the prime minister that he told her to "keep your head up", she confirmed that it was "along those lines". The message, through a mutual contact, was sent days after the revelations that the News of the World had hacked murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler's phone, causing a wave of revulsion in parliament and among the general public.
Cameron was not the only one to reach out: Brooks confirmed she also received messages from George Osborne and Tony Blair. But not from Gordon Brown, who she said was "probably getting the bunting out".
Of the Sun's decision to back the Tories in 2009, Brooks said she was "instrumental" in the decision to dump Labour after 12 years and endorse the Tories with the now notorious front page splash headline on 30 September 2009, "Labour's Lost It'".
The announcement was devastating to Brown, coming just hours after he delivered what was to be his last Labour party conference speech as PM. Brooks revealed that she had plotted the switch as far back as March 2009 when she discussed it with Rupert and James Murdoch. "We were running out of ways to support Mr Brown's government," Brooks said.
She added that she tried, but failed, to warn Brown on the night of the Sun splash to save embarrassing him, as he was due to attend a News International party. Instead she was phoned by an incandescent Peter Mandelson who called her a "chump" (although many in the Westminster village believe this is an inquiry-friendly euphemism). A week or so later Brown was on the phone, and she said he was "incredibly aggressive" towards her.
On Gordon Brown and cystic fibrosis
Brooks told the inquiry that Brown had given her permission to run the front page revelation that his four-month-old son, Fraser, had been diagnosed with cystic fibrosis in 2006.
She denied the story was inappropriate to run, and said she would not have published the story if the Browns had asked her not to.
In lengthy and sometimes testy exchanges with Jay and Lord Justice Leveson she was adamant she knew nothing of Brown's objections until the former prime minister launched a tirade against the paper's decision in July 2011, alleging the Sun had hacked into confidential medical records to clinch the story.
Following Brown's attack, the Sun rounded on the former PM, branding his allegations "false and a smear".
Lord Justice Leveson put it to Brooks that the Sun's pungent reaction may go straight to the heart of his inquiry: "The issue is whether it's part of the culture of the press that actually attack is the best form of defence."
On the contrary, she thought the allegation of hacking was "a terrible accusation for a former prime minister to make of a newspaper without being in possession of the facts" and that justified the "strong tone of the rebuttal in the paper".
Jay suggested it was inappropriate to put it on the front page in the first place. "Obviously there's the tragedy of the diagnosis, but emblazoning this on the front page of the Sun is not helping, is it?"
Brooks held her line: "Should I put it back to you that if the Browns had asked me not to run it, I wouldn't have done ... They gave me permission to run it."
On Kinnock, Brown and personal attacks
Brooks denied that politicians lived in fear of a personal attack from the Sun or that this was something the paper "often indulged in".
"I think that Neil Kinnock may feel that about the Sun," she said in reference to the paper's 1992 splash urging the last person to leave Britain to turn out the lights in the event of a Labour victory. "But I'm not sure that the paper has been like that for a while," she added.
Jay refused to drop the point, returning to it repeatedly. "Fear of personal attack and a fear of allegedly holding politicians to account by prying intrusively into their personal lives. That has been part of the metier of the Sun, hasn't it?" he asked.
Brooks said the job of newspapers was to hold people to account and sometimes they might be intrusive but "that is not the policy".
On the editor of the Sun, Dominic Mohan
On Thursday, Jay successfully baited the former News of the World editor Andy Coulson by suggesting that the current editor of the Sun, Dominic Mohan, didn't have a strong personality.
On Friday he lobbed another subtle and unflattering reference to Mohan into the mix, expressing slight incredulity when Brooks said Mohan was party to discussions about the Sun's decision to switch to the Tories in September 2009.
"Was he contributing much to this debate or not?" he asked rather rhetorically of Brooks.
On her relationship with Rupert Murdoch
Brooks confirmed she was "very close" to Rupert Murdoch and that he trusted her implicitly. But she denied that politicians cosied up to her to influence his decision-making.
She also protested that if she had been a "grumpy old man of Fleet Street" nobody would be interested in her relationship with Murdoch, referring to the media's focus on the pair.
Jay put it to her that "in order to get close to Mr Murdoch, in practice they had to get close to you. Would you agree with that?".
"No," said Brooks. She revealed that when she was editor of the Sun, Murdoch would ring frequently.
"Sometimes, it could be every day". But she denied the relationship extended to the rumoured swimming sessions with him or that he had sent a fresh suit to her after she was arrested for the alleged assault of her ex-husband, Ross Kemp. "You need better sources, Mr Jay," she snapped.
She confirmed she went on holidays with the Murdochs to Santorini when David Cameron dropped by.
The inquiry had heard from Rupert Murdoch that the prime minister had been jetted out on his son-in-law Matthew Freud's private plane but he could not recall much about the visit.
Brooks was able to supply some fresh detail. The get-together was to mark the birthday of Elisabeth Murdoch, Freud's wife. Cameron stayed "for an afternoon and an evening" and she was party to one of the discussions with Murdoch which centred on "Europe, because we were in Europe". She added: "It was a very cordial meeting and it went well."
Brooks was also quizzed about Rupert Murdoch's fateful remark that she was his "priority" after flying into London last summer to take control of the escalating phone hacking crisis.
She said she didn't think he meant that. "I wasn't embarrassed at the time because I didn't know that that's what he meant."
On Tony Blair
Brooks met Tony Blair at least 30 times between June 1998 and May 2007, more than any other prime minister during her stewardship of the News of the World and the Sun.
A "few" of these meetings were in the home of Matthew Freud and Elisabeth – one occasion was listed in her diary as taking place in Woodstock – the Freuds once rented a home in the grounds of Blenheim Palace, next to the Oxfordshire village.
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds -
Josh Lacey's top 10 pseudonymous books
11 Maywww.guardian.co.uk
A surprising number of authors choose not to use their real name when they publish their books. Josh Lacey, who has written a series of books under the name Josh Doder, picks his favourite writers with pen names
"When I was wrote my first book, A Dog Called Grk, I was working for this very newspaper, writing and editing reviews for the books pages. I didn't want people to get confused about who I was or what I did, so I thought it would be sensible to have two different names, one for books and the other for journalism. I invented a new name for myself: a pen name, a nom de plume, a pseudonym.
Many other writers have chosen to publish their books under a pseudonym, from canonical novelists such as George Eliot and Joseph Conrad to modern bestsellers such as Lee Child and John le Carré. Writing under another name is liberating; hiding behind a pseudonym allows you to shrug off the restrictions of your gender, your class, your ordinary identity, and become whoever you like.
That's the idea, anyway. But I soon discovered that, for me, writing under a pseudonym wasn't a good idea at all. I got confused. Readers got even more confused. I realised I had made a terrible mistake. What was I going to do? Eventually I managed to wrestle my identity back again, and now my books are published under the name which is truly mine.
In a few other countries (France, for instance, and Turkey) the Grk books are published under my real name, but they remain under my pseudonym in English. I've often asked my publishers to republish them under my real name. They always nod sagely and say, 'We'll think about it.'
While I'm waiting for them to make up their minds, I console myself with remembering some of my favourite children's books that were originally published under a pseudonym."
Josh Lacey is the author of several books for children, including The Island of Thieves, Bearkeeper and the Grk series (published under the name Joshua Doder). His new book, The Dragonsitter, is published in May.
Buy The Dragonsitter at the Guardian bookshop
1. Tintin in Tibet by Hergé
Georges Remi originally signed his drawings with his initials. He then turned them around and used "RG" instead, which soon morphed into "Hergé". (It makes sense if you pronounce the letters in a French accent.) I've always adored the Tintin books and, without realising what I was doing, borrowed from them when I wrote my own Grk books, the stories of a plucky boy and a little dog travelling around the world, combating injustice and solving mysteries.
2. The Bad Beginning by Lemony Snicket
Daniel Handler has written several novels under his own name, but none of them have achieved the fame and glory of A Series of Unfortunate Events. The 13-book sequence sags a little in the middle, but the first few books are absolutely brilliant, particularly the first of them all, which is a masterpiece of character and comedy. Handler's greatest creation is his narrator, Lemony Snicket, a sad, lonely and utterly charming character whose melancholy tone pervades the series. Handler originally invented the name to hide behind when he baited neo-Nazis over the internet; his delicious mischievousness jumps off every page.
3. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Samuel Langhorne Clemens took his pseudonym from the call of sailors on the Mississippi, shouting out "mark twain", the depth of "two fathoms". I was forced to read the story of Huck Finn at school and hated it. I picked it up again as an adult and fell in love. What could be a better spur to a story than this: "The Widow Douglas she took me for her son, and allowed she would sivilize me; but it was rough living in the house all the time, considering how dismal regular and decent the widow was in all her ways; and so when I couldn't stand it no longer I lit out." All the best children's adventure stories begin in the same way: I was bored at home, tired of domestic life, so I set out to find some excitement...
4. Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
The perplexing games, puns and trickery of Alice in Wonderland begin with the author's name. When Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was thinking of a new name for himself, he took his first two names and translated them into Latin. That gave him "Carolus Lodovicus". He switched them around and translated them back into English, ending up with Lewis Carroll.
5. The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe by Robinson Crusoe
The first readers of Robinson Crusoe's extraordinary adventures believed that they were reading an autobiography: the title page said Mr Crusoe's book was "written by himself" and there were no hints to suggest any editors or ghostwriters had been involved. After 28 years on an island, he had dragged himself back to London and penned his life story. If it works, this is the best possible way to use a pseudonym: nothing stands between the readers and the truth of the story.
6. Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi
Carlo Lorenzini was a journalist and satirist who thought his own best-known work was "childish twaddle", which may have been why he published it under a pseudonym, taking his new name from the village near Florence where he spent his childhood. He didn't like Pinocchio much, inflicting constant pain and humiliation on his fictional character, and had to be persuaded by his publishers to keep writing. The original story is much more rebellious and antagonistic than Disney's version.
7. The Cat in the Hat by Dr Seuss
I once read a biography of Theodore Seuss Geisel and learnt one snippet of biographical information that I've never forgotten. Whenever a journalist asked where he got his ideas, Dr Seuss would reply that he found them on his annual visit to Über Gletch, a small town in the Austrian Alps, where he went each year to get his cuckoo clock repaired. Here's another nice fact about him: Dr Seuss didn't just invent his own name, he made up the name of an imaginary daughter too, and even dedicated one of his books to her.
8. The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E Lockhart
Frankie Landau-Banks is a girl who finds herself confronted by a tricky problem: how can she be a teenager without being an idiot? She's a pupil at an expensive, exclusive American boarding-school, where the girls are expected to be pretty, polite and dumb, and the smartest boys group themselves into a club which forbids entrance to females. If Frankie wants to be liked - or even loved - does she have to hide her intelligence, suffocate her wit and stifle her own imagination? This is a wonderfully funny and clever novel about a teenage girl refusing to obey the rules. Having read it, I discovered that the mysterious E Lockhart is also Emily Jenkins, the author of some excellent picture books.
9. Animal Farm by George Orwell
Eric Blair apparently borrowed his pseudonym from the river in Suffolk and added George for its solid Englishness. I can't imagine Animal Farm was intended as a children's book, but I read it as a child; like a great fable or fairy tale, it speaks to all readers, whatever their age, allowing each of them to find different pleasures.
10. The Storyteller by Saki
This is the story of three kids on a train, whose aunt tells them a dull moral tale to pass the journey. Seeing how bored they are, another passenger takes over the narrative duties and tells a deliciously subversive story about a little girl who is so good that she's given a chestful of medals. A hungry wolf comes past. The girl hides, but her trembling makes the medals clink and clatter. Alerted by the noise, the wolf finds her and gobbles her up. The aunt is furious: "A most improper story to tell to young children! You have undermined the effect of years of careful teaching." Hector Hugh Munro didn't write "The Storyteller" for children, but it is an example to anyone who does.
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds -
Rebekah Brooks says David Cameron sent her message of support indirectly
11 MayGuardian.co.uk - Media News
Former News International chief executive confirms PM sent message via intermediary following her resignation
Rebekah Brooks has confirmed that David Cameron sent her an indirect message of support after she was forced to resign as chief executive of Rupert Murdoch's News International in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal.
Brooks, answering questions at the Leveson inquiry on Friday morning about her relationship with politicians, said the message came via an intermediary.
Robert Jay QC, counsel for the inquiry, asked Brooks about the claim in an updated biography of the Conservative prime minister that he sent her a message to "keep your head up".
She replied: "Along those lines. I don't think they were the exact words."
Pressed by Jay on whether that was the gist of the message, Brooks added: "Yes. It was indirect. It wasn't a direct text message."
Brooks, also a former Sun and News of the World editor, resigned from News International on 15 July 2011 after revelations about the hacking of murdered teenager Milly Dowler's phone led to the closure of the Sunday tabloid.
She told Lord Justice Leveson she did not have access to her News International email account, which was blocked when she resigned. However, she did have a record of the emails and texts on her BlackBerry from a six-week period from June to 17 July 2011.
She said there had been a single email message from David Cameron on the BlackBerry during this period, but it was "compressed" and therefore "there's no content in it".
Brooks also revealed to the inquiry that after her departure from News International she had messages of support from Tony Blair, the chancellor of the exchequer's office, the Home Office and the Foreign Office.
But she said she did not get a message from Gordon Brown, with whom she had fallen out with following the Sun's decision to switch its support to the Tories ahead of the 2010 general election. "No. He was probably getting the bunting out," Brooks quipped.
Asked by Jay if she had received messages of "commiseration" after she left the Murdoch empire, she said: "Some, mainly indirectly."
Pressed on the question, she admitted: "I received some indirect message from No 10, No 11, the Home Office, the Foreign Office." Asked if these were from the secretaries of state and the prime minister, she replied: "And also some people who worked in these offices as well."
Jay continued: "And Labour politicians, how about them?"
"There were very few Labour politicians that sent commiserations," Brooks replied, although she confirmed that Blair was an exception to this.
Brooks told the inquiry she was not embarrassed when Murdoch said she was his "priority" when he flew in to London in July last year to take control of the News of the World phone-hacking crisis.
The inquiry was shown a list of Brooks's contacts with senior politicians taken from diaries, including 30 lunches, dinners and other private meetings with Blair when he was Labour prime minister between 1998 and 2007.
One of these dinners, on 12 June 2006, was at the London home of PR agency owner Matthew Freud and his wife, Elisabeth Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch's daughter.
Brooks had six meetings or phone calls with Brown after he replaced Blair as prime minister, between August 2007 and March 2009.
By March 2009, the Sun was contemplating endorsing the Tories, the inquiry heard. "We were running out of ways to support Mr Brown's government," Brooks said.
She had five meetings with Cameron after he became prime minister, including three visits to Chequers – in June, August and October 2010 – and at Brooks's home on 23 December that year.
The other meeting was at the Conservative party conference on 4 October 2010.
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
