TREVOR KAVANAGH
The Lobby is doomed. Alastair has sentenced us to a slow death by 'openness and transparency'. Our briefings will soon be accessible to all-corners, thus widening and diluting the stream of questions. So I'd like to use this Diary to provide a glimpse of how it works before it becomes extinct. On Tuesday, as on every weekday morning, we troop into a Downing Street dungeon for what we call the 'Eleven o'Clock'. Tom Kelly, the Prime Minister's Official Spokesman (PMOS), rattles off a few dates for our diaries and after 15 minutes seems set for an early bath. So I ask why Cherie Blair never gives interviews. Tom correctly links this to the revelation that Cherie has chaired a dozen seminars at No. 10 on issues such as health and transport, but insists that her role has no policy implications. But if the Prime Minister's unelected wife is using Britain's hottest political address to hold debates attended by the PM and Cabinet ministers on issues central to Labour's promise of delivery', doesn't that have an impact on policy? And, if so, shouldn't she be accountable? Tom says that this is silly. It is not a story. Michael White of the Guardian suggests that I am motivated by `rascalism', but presses for answers. Alastair, reading the transcript later, is furious. Why didn't we ask about important government announcements, or about murdered Pim Fortuyn? We did. But it seems that Cherie is a sacred cow and not to be tormented by muck-raking hacks. When the Lobby is eviscerated, there will be no opportunities for such questions. We also have a 'Four o'Clock', in a garret high above the Thames, where we are the hosts, with James Hardy of the Mirror in the chair. Has Stephen Byers misled Parliament over Martin Sixsmith again? Absolutely not. What about pharmaceutics tycoon Paul Drayson's second £50,000 donation to Labour after winning that smallpox-vaccine contract? That's a party matter. Is Jonathan Powell involved? Powell does not solicit donations any more. Does the PM have a view on adoption by gay couples? He will decide after examining the arguments.
Wednesday's 'Eleven' leaps into action as it becomes clear that the 'Liar Byers' story has got legs. PMOS job-sharer Godric Smith is in the chair and ITV's John Sergeant demands to know why the embattled/stricken./beleaguered Transport supremo won't do the right thing and apologise for misleading the Commons. Godric, who has the decency to blush, responds in gobbledegook: Byers may have told MPs 14 times that Sixsmith had quit, despite being told that he hadn't by the colourful Permanent Secretary, Sir Richard 'We're all Pmed Mottram, But he was acting in good faith, so it doesn't count. At 3.30 p.m., from my perch above the Speaker's chair, I watch Tony Blair trying to defend this preposterous line at Prime Minis
ter's Question Time. He is scaldingly contemptuous, but even he cannot square this gross discourtesy to the House. By teatime Byers is negotiating a deal with Speaker Martin to let him 'explain' to MPs without actually being dragged before the House.
Thursday. Female Lobby members tuttut irritably as we troop through the big steel gates and wait in the drizzle to be searched for knives and bombs. They are cross with Ann Treneman whose article about us in this morning's Times is even more amusing than David Aaronovitch's in Tuesday's Indie. Ann seems to think that the Lobby is an all-male affair, despite a huge photograph alongside her article showing women sitting happily at the front as Alastair arrives with his Burnley tea mug. Seven women correspondents are present today — and they think that Ann has rather let the side down. The article refers admiringly to the late Anthony Bevins, who denounced our 'insidious laziness' and described the Lobby as a 'crutch for crippled journalism' — without revealing that she was his mistress. The same page carries an interview with Alastair under the unlikely headline: 'I'm not a spin doctor any more'. Tom Kelly is roster PMOS today, and he is under pressure from an uncharacteristically censorious Andrew Marr, who sees Stephen Byers's neglect of parliamentary niceties as being of 'constitutional importance'. His BBC colleague Mark Mardell (the BBC has
30 Lobby correspondents, of whom about six usually turn up for these briefings) pursues this point, asking if it is no longer necessary for a minister who misleads the House, however unintentionally, to put matters right. The questions clatter against Godric's tin shield, but a PMOS is trained to take an eccentric view of the truth. It seems that under New Labour it is OK to mislead the Commons if you don't mean to, even if the facts are being bellowed at you from all sides. It was such Alice in Wonderland logic that enabled Tom and Godric to claim during the Mittalgate saga that the Antilles-based steel conglomerate was a British company, even after the company itself insisted that it was not. At 1.30 p.m. a defiant Byers finally appears in the Commons, makes no apology and departs, apparently without a care in the world. What has he got on Tony Blair? I may be biased, but I doubt that he would have appeared at all but for 48 hours of focused fire from the soon-to-be-tethered Lobby.
Aparticular pleasure for the political hack is to stumble on a tale that the government doesn't want to see in print. Tony Blair would dearly love to stage a referendum on the euro next year. His polling guru tells him that he can win simply by invoking the ugly image of rabid, chalk-striped Tory xenophobes in full cry. Those who want to keep the pound can be pilloried as blinkered 'forces of conservatism'. The euro will be portrayed as the 'cool' alternative. So it was a pleasure on Friday to produce genuinely cool leftie dudes such as Vic Reeves, Rik Maya11, Harry Enfield and JooIs Holland who have put together a £1 million video explaining why they want nothing to do with the wretched euro. Vic Reeves would use it to save on loo rolls. We may now see a stampede of other street-cred celebs with similarly colourful opinions about this daft gamble.
Life for the Lobby hack is not all hard work and little thanks. This week a couple of us escaped to Stoke Poges for the annual fairways joust between the Parliamentary Golf Society and the Diplomats. The course is magnificent — indeed the seventh hole was the inspiration for Augusta's famous twelfth. We are given six new golf balls — Precept 'Extra Spin' (swiftly renamed 'Campbells') — to lose in the lakes and streams. It is customary for MPs and peers to ensure that their excellencies win these events but, in an unforgivable breach of protocol, our side stumbles to victory. Back at the clubhouse, it occurs to me that it must be rare to see a dozen naked envoys and plenipotentiaries sharing a shower with a man from the Sun.
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