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Toby Young

Toby Young is the author of How to Lose Friends & Alienate People (2001) andThe Sound of No Hands Clapping (2006). In addition to being a freelance journalist, he is leading the efforts of a parent group in West London to set up a state secondary school. To learn more about that project, visit the school's website on www.westlondonfreeschool.co.uk. Toby's personal website iswww.nosacredcows.co.uk and he tweets under the name of Toadmeister.

Newsnight: 

The real news is the gossip in the green room

 

By Toby Young Politics Last updated: May 26th, 2010

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I appeared on Newsnight last night to debate Ed Balls about free schools. (You can watch it again here. My segment starts at the 22 min 10 sec mark.) There’s no fee for doing Newsnight, but it’s not something I’d ever turn down because the drinks in the green room afterwards are so much fun. This is where you get to hear all the news that’s not fit to print – what’s really going on behind closed doors but which doesn’t make it into the programme either because it’s too “inside” or because it isn’t possible to stand up.

So without revealing my sources, let me give you some of the headlines.

By far the juiciest bit of gossip is that on the evening of Monday, May 10, after the first talks had taken place between Labour and the Lib Dems, Paddy Ashdown frantically tried to get in touch with Tony Blair in the hope of persuading him to broker a deal. He eventually reached him by telephone at 3am on Tuesday morning only to be told that he thought it wasn’t in Labour’s interest to remain in office. “We need to go into Opposition,” he told the former Lib Dem leader.

This means that when Ashdown appeared on the Today programme on Tuesday morning he must have known that the chances of a Lib-Lab deal were remote, particularly as other senior Labour figures had echoed Blair’s line at this point, including John Reid and David Blunkett. Nevertheless, he spoke enthusiastically about a “progressive coalition”, maintaining that it was still a real possibility. Clearly, he was trying to give the impression that a Lib-Lab pact was still a live proposition in order to apply pressure to the Tory negotiating team in the hope of getting them to agree to as many Lib Dem policies as possible. Judging from the final coalition agreement, the strategy worked.

Another tidbit to emerge from the Newsnight green room was that the real flies in the ointment during the negotiations between Labour and the Lib Dems were the leadership candidates in the Labour negotiation team – Ed Balls and Ed Milliband. While Andrew Adonis and Peter Mandelson were actively seeking an agreement, the two Eds were clearly just going through the motions. Presumably, this is what David Laws meant when he told the BBC “half of the Labour negotiating team gave the impression of wanting things to work, half gave the impression of not being so committed, in terms of body language and response. They seemed to be looking for problems not solutions.”

Why was this? My theory is that they recognised that winning the next general election would be much more difficult for a newly-elected Labour leader if the Party was fighting as an incumbent than if it was fighting it from the opposition benches. Like Blair, the two Eds recognised that Labour’s chances of winning the next election would be enhanced after a period in opposition.

We’ve heard most of this before, of course, but another revelation last night is that Andrew Adonis has been commissioned to write a book about the five-day period that elapsed between Brown losing the election and David Cameron becoming Prime Minister. Working title is ‘Five Days that Shook The World’. (A better title would be ‘Five Days is a Long Time in Politics’.) Given that Adonis has now stepped down from the Shadow Cabinet and has almost certainly permanently retired from the political fray, my hunch is he’s going to be very indiscreet. He’s reportedly furious that the two Eds torpedoed the coalition talks, having longed dreamed about an alliance of Labour and the Lib Dems. I predict he’ll exact a horrible revenge in his forthcoming memoir.