Wendy: The talent and the tantrums

The Alexander Enigma

WENDY Alexander is one of the outstanding politicians of her generation. In a Scottish Labour group lacking talent and ability in depth, she is exceptional.

She has an intellectual grasp of policy that only the very best of the civil service can match. She has drive and energy. Some politicians might be content to be in office but not in power. Not Alexander.

But there is another Alexander.

The Alexander whose senior officials would refuse to go the extra mile for her because they knew that success would bring little praise, and failure would bring blame and complaints to the Permanent Secretary.

The Alexander for whom a string of senior and experienced civil service press officers refused to work because of her constant, and often unreasonable, demands.

The Alexander who defied a First Minister’s wishes and forced him into a position where he lied for her. And the Alexander who, with just a mobile phone, once managed to bring most of the British political system to a grinding halt.

I had known Alexander since she began her political career as a researcher to George Galloway. When she became a minister under Donald Dewar, she had tried to tempt me back from my job as political editor of the Mirror to work with the then First Minister’s spokesman, David Whitton.

When I did arrive to work for Henry McLeish, as the First Minister’s press secretary, I had heard a lot about Alexander’s style as a minister, but dismissed it as gossip from rivals jealous of her ability and her rapid rise to the Scottish cabinet. I soon discovered that this was a hopelessly naive view.

My first experience of being "Wendied", as it had become known at the executive, came during the crisis over long-term care for the elderly, when the First Minister, at a press conference in early 2001, came as close as he had come to promising to implement the Sutherland report. We were watching the television lunchtime news in Meridian Court, the executive’s Glasgow headquarters. As it was reported, accurately, that older people were about to benefit from the policy, Alexander shouted across a crowded room.

Pointing a finger towards me, she bellowed: "Peter, get on the phone and rebut that now." In my career in journalism I had worked for editors who shouted. I was used to dealing with this kind of behaviour. Unlike a junior civil servant, who would have had to obey, I simply ignored her.

That was Alexander. The next day we had a perfectly reasonable conversation about some policy or other and the matter was forgotten.

If you wanted the talent, the vision and the brilliance - which Scotland badly did need - you also got the volatility, the arrogance and sometimes the utter mayhem which resulted from Sam Galbraith’s announcement that he was stepping down from government.

Galbraith held the environment and sport portfolio, and McLeish wisely decided to reduce the size of his cabinet and to split Galbraith’s responsibilities between existing ministers. He asked my advice on how the media would report the mini-reshuffle, and I told him they would expect quick and decisive decision-making.

If he delayed it would be seen as dithering.

After cabinet, the First Minister emerged from a private one-to-one meeting with Alexander in the upstairs drawing room which also served as his office at Bute House.

He told me that Alexander had agreed to take on the water part of the portfolio, while Ross Finnie, the Liberal Democrat agriculture minister, would have responsibility for the environment.

Neither I nor John McTernan, McLeish’s head of strategy, were present at the meeting. Jonathan Pryce, his principle private secretary and closest civil service aide, had also been excluded . The two politicians, who knew each other well, had been alone.

McLeish told me of the changes. "Is that decisive enough?" he asked. "Great boss. Can I tell the journalists at my briefing?" He said I could. So I went up to the government room at the parliament on the Mound and spelled out the changes to the media.

There were a few questions about the division of responsibility, but by and large the journalists seemed to accept the new line-up. There were even one or two who gave the First Minister credit for reducing the size of the cabinet.

A note of my briefing was always passed around ministers and Alexander must have seen it or heard about it. She clearly thought that McLeish and she had not reached an agreement and was horrified to realise that it had now been officially announced that she had been given the extra responsibility of water.

It was then that British politics almost ground to a halt as Alexander, already under a massive strain because she had been put in charge of Labour’s Scottish general election campaign by Gordon Brown, telephoned everyone she knew to protest.

From Downing Street staffers to a bemused Galbraith to Pat McFadden, a long-time No 10 adviser who was at the time working for the party, they all got frantic calls from a wound-up Alexander, who launched into a diatribe against the First Minister.

ALEXANDER also made a number of further calls to McLeish himself to vent her fury. Executive colleagues who were close to the process at the time told me later that she claimed to have rung Brown at the Treasury and was citing his name in her case against the First Minster. Some believe that Brown never received a call, but that Alexander was using his influence with the First Minister as a lever to get her own way.

It is no exaggeration to say that most of the Scottish executive and a significant part of Whitehall ground to a halt that night. Alexander wreaked havoc via the mobile phone, complaining vociferously that she just could not manage and that she had not agreed with the First Minister to do the job.

Faced with this barrage, the First Minister came to the conclusion that he had to give in to the wishes of his minister, something I do not think he should have done. It considerably undermined his authority.

The next day, Pryce was given the task of drafting a written parliamentary answer which could be quietly released setting out the new portfolio responsibilities.

The fact that Finnie was stated to have responsibility for water was, at first, missed by journalists, though it did not take them long to spot the inconsistencies with what I had told them at my briefing.

The matter came to a head when Alexander and McLeish were due at Edinburgh Castle to pose for photographs with the new chairman and deputy of the Scottish Tourist Board, or VisitScotland, Peter Lederer and Mike Cantley.

That morning, the Telegraph’s Scottish political correspondent, Nick Britten, had published a story which claimed that Alexander had had a "tantrum" when the First Minister asked her to take on water. The paper also revealed that a senior civil service press officer had refused to work with her because of her behaviour.

Alexander and McLeish met that morning in Bute House. I was present along with Paul Geoghan, the senior civil service press officer to the First Minister, McTernan and Pryce.

The atmosphere was icy and no-one seemed to want to broach the subject of the potentially embarrassing photo-call ahead. Someone had to tell the politicians what was happening in the outside world. That was my job, so I told Alexander and McLeish about the Telegraph story.

I said that the two politicians were bound to be asked by journalists about the "tantrum". I recommended that Alexander did not attend the press call. She immediately said that it was the First Minister’s call and he agreed she should attend.

As a fallback position we agreed that, if asked, Alexander should say that the reports were just "tittle-tattle". It was pushing the facts pretty far, but it was not a lie. The First Minister would pose for the pictures and then get into his ministerial car parked on the esplanade.

WE ALSO agreed that the two of them would meet after the parliamentary Labour group to make sure they were both singing from the same song-sheet. They failed to do so.

After the photographers had made the four walk back and forth several times, Geoghan called a halt to the photo-call and I ushered the First Minister towards his waiting car.

A group of journalists closed in on him. Instead of a quick "good afternoon" and into the car, he paused as if drawn to them like a moth to a lamp.

Pressed by the assembled pack on the claims that Alexander had refused the job and thrown a tantrum, he told the journalists the stories were "completely untrue".

It was a lie. A lie I am sure he had not deliberately set out to tell, but a lie nonetheless. McLeish probably thought it would help protect Alexander, but it only served to make the journalists more suspicious.

When they asked her if it was true, she stuck to the agreed line that it was "tittle-tattle" and said she was more concerned about tourism recovery in the light of foot-and-mouth outbreak. The differences were glaring.

Geoghan and I went back to George IV Bridge and I fulminated about ministers getting into trouble if they did not take advice.

I made my views known directly to the First Minister on the phone in the car, telling him that he had committed the cardinal sin of lying. For a politician, being evasive was damaging but it was better than lying. I told him that if there were ever any evidence produced by a minister, or perhaps a disgruntled official, that proved he had not told the truth he would be in trouble. It was a lesson he learned for the future. From that day on he was also more willing to take advice from Geoghan and me.

I knew that afternoon when I was due to give a briefing I would be pressed on the detail of Alexander’s position and the differences between what she said and what McLeish had said. I went for a walk to gather my thoughts. I decided that the only way to deal with the questions was to refuse to comment further.

It was one of the most ill-tempered briefings I had done. I was repeatedly asked whether what the FM had said was the official version of events. I stuck to refusing to comment.

An hour or so after the briefing, I took a call from Alexander. She had gone beyond the fury stage to cold calm. She demanded that I further clarify the story to support what, admittedly, was the agreed line: that the First Minister shared her view that these stories were just "tittle-tattle". Alexander was a strong minister with powerful friends like the Chancellor, but I again refused to comply . To do so would have been seen to contradict openly the First Minister and would have made what was already a bad story even worse. Journalists would immediately have smelled a rat and returned to the story with a vengeance.

It was a black moment, caught between two politicians and unwilling to bend to their wishes.

But I took heart from a call from Owen Kelly, the then head of the press office. Kelly, who had tangled with Alexander on behalf of some of the staff who had found it impossible to work with her, was not prone to saying things for the sake of it. "I just want to say that I think you are doing the right thing", he told me.

It was reassuring to know that this was the view of someone senior in the civil service whose judgment I respected.

AS WITH many of the incidents and events, the crisis passed, though not without Alexander’s stock in her own party going down because she had allowed a Lib Dem to take over the vital and potentially controversial subject of water.

But it would be important for the stability of the McLeish regime that this kind of crisis did not happen again. I discussed this with McTernan. The problem directly resulted from two politicians sitting down together without any political advisers or officials and believing that they had agreed something when they had not.

I subsequently discovered from friends in Whitehall that this can happen at the highest levels, including between Tony Blair and Brown. Politicians behave like politicians, hearing what they want to hear, even when engaging with each other. McTernan and I resolved with Pryce that the FM should never be left alone very long with a colleague or that, if he insisted, we made sure we spoke to both sides before we put anything into the public domain.

The next day some of the papers pointed out that I had not backed up McLeish’s version of events. They were right. I had always done everything in my power to present the First Minister and the executive in a positive light. That was my job.

I did a lot for Henry McLeish because I liked him and believed he was pursuing the right policies for Scotland. But I was not going to get into a position where I was lying for him. Or for Wendy Alexander.

© Peter MacMahon 2002