BYERS: HIS STRUGGLE WITH TRUTH
Andrew Gimson on the strange history of
Stephen Byers, who has become the master of the non-denial denial
COMPARED with the unfathomable chaos of his later life, there is a limpid simplicity to the episode in which Stephen Byers first leapt to national attention. It happened in a far-off era, all of five years ago, when the Labour party was still in opposition and was desperate to convince voters that it would never again kowtow to the trade unions. Mr Byers showed a brilliant ability to get this message across. It is not too much to say, with the benefit of hindsight, that a peculiar kind of genius started to manifest itself in him at this time. Neither his obscurity, nor his less than sparkling talents as an orator, nor his almost total lack of experience at this level of politics held him back.
In his capacity as shadow employment spokesman, and also as a 'moderniser' who was said to 'have the ear of Tony Blair', he accepted an invitation to dine with four lobby correspondents at the Seafood Restaurant in Blackpool during the TUC conference in September 1996. He told them that Labour was on the point of breaking its links with the unions, and if the unions responded with a 'summer of discontent' after the party had won the general election, there was a contingency plan to hold a ballot of the entire Labour membership on cutting the union link,
This was fighting talk, and when he heard that the journalists were going to print the story, Mr Byers denied that he had ever said any such thing. His first denials appeared before the correspondents, from the Times, Telegraph, Mirror and Express, had even had time to publish their accounts —
that is to say before he could have read what they thought he had said. Hence the rather curious wording of his statement: 'I understand four political journalists are running a story based on a conversation I had with them. I said nothing to justify the ludicrous stories they are running tonight.' The journalists stood by their 'ludicrous' stories. Mr Byers said that they deserved 'the Booker Prize for fiction'.
Tony Blair's office issued an instant denial: 'These stories have no foundation at all. No such proposal is even under discussion.' But delegates to the TUC conference were in an uproar and union leaders were furious. The train drivers' leader, Lew Adams, said, 'If these reports are true, it's political suicide. The Labour party cannot deny its parenthood.' John Edmonds, the general secretary of the GMB union, made a suggestion that many who have since found it impossible to establish who said what at a meeting with Mr Byers, will heartily endorse: 'Stephen Byers should carry a black-box recorder so that after each accident we can all analyse exactly what happened.'
Mr Byers continued to dismiss the stories as 'misleading' and 'exaggerated', yet within hours he also refused to rule out the possibility that the links between Labour and the unions would be broken in five years' time. The story was out, and the more the trade unions protested, the more the general public believed that Labour must indeed have decided to dump the unions. The issue had, with bewildering speed, moved far beyond the pettifogging matter of what Mr Byers did or did not say over the Muscadet in the Seafood Restaurant. Anyone who tried to hold it there would not simply find themselves unable to obtain definitive proof — the journalists had, after all, written their accounts from notes jotted down from memory after the dinner — they would also find themselves stranded way behind the pace of events, like soldiers still trying to secure a feature that had lost all relevance to the unfolding campaign.
The columnist Robert Harris suggested a term for what Mr Byers had done: 'It was in the offices of the Washington Post during the Watergate era that the phenomenon known as "the non-denial denial" was first identified. This is, essentially, an on-therecord statement, usually made by a politician, repudiating a journalist's story, but in such a way as to leave open the possibility that it is actually true.' Harris said that it was time to salute, in Mr Byers, a new exponent of the NDD, and one in whose
hands it was 'a much more sophisticat ed art form' than it had been in the Nixon White House. One might add that by lying about telling the truth Mr Byers had debased, indeed rendered unrealistic, the whole idea of a politi cian giving a straight answer.
In March 2000 BMW announced that it was selling Rover. Mr Byers was by then Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, and claimed that this came to him as a bolt from the blue. Professor Joachim Milberg, the head of BMW, said that, on the contrary, he had warned Mr Byers in a telephone conversation on 20 December the previous year that Rover was in 'serious trouble' and might be sold. Mr Byers vehemently denied this, but was accused of 'doctoring' the account he gave of their discussions by making it seem that in December the Germans were warning him about the future of only one Rover model, the R30, not the whole Longbridge plant. Mr Byers modified his story several times, which had the effect of muddying the waters so completely that it became impossible to distinguish mendacity from incompetence, incompetence from confusion, or confusion from the bril liant use of log of war' tactics. Nobody knew any more what the argument was about. Night after night Mr Byers was said to be 'embroiled in deepening controversy', but somehow he was never forced to resign. He was said to be excellent at giving the people he met the impression that he agreed with them, but he was also observed to be markedly less bright than some of his civil servants.
In July 2000 the government rejected a proposal from the Commons trade and industry select committee, in its report into the Rover affair, that ministerial telephone calls be subject to 'electronic recording'. Had such a system been in operation, it would have been possible to see exactly what Professor Milberg had said to Mr Byers on 20 December 1999. But the DTI told the committee: We believe the current mechanisms for recording ministerial telephone calls are adequate for normal purposes.' The current mechanism is for the minister's private secretary to listen in and make a note.
And so to Railtrack. Once again we have a hotly disputed conversation, on this occasion between Mr Byers, now Transport Secretary, and John Robinson, the chairman of Railtrack, on 25 July 2001. Mr Byers says that Mr Robinson said Railtrack would go bust without further injections of public money. Mr Robinson denies this. Mr Byers has come under immense pressure, and has released documents that fail to substantiate his version of events. He claims that this is because Mr Robinson asked for no minutes to be taken of the most sensitive part of the meeting. Mr Robinson says this is nonsense, since it was not the kind of meeting where minutes are taken. There are several subplots, one involving a row about whether Mr Byers threatened Tom Winsor, the rail regulator, and another about the role of Jo Moore, Mr Byers's special adviser, who wrote the notorious memo identifying the attack on the World Trade Center as a chance to 'bury. had news.
The Financial Services Authority is now comparing the chronologies it has requested and received from both Railtrack and the government of the events leading up to the placing by Mr Byers of the company into administration. As a spokesman explained, the FSA wishes to see whether Railtrack obeyed the rules on disclosure that oblige companies to keep the markets informed of any developments which might affect the share price. If I were Mr Byers, I would not like the look of this, but I would also be optimistic that whatever conclusions are reached will not be clear-cut.
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