THE USE AND MISUSE OF THE ACCESS CARD
Sion Simon offers an insider's account of the world of the New Labour lobbyist IMAGINE you are in another place, at the proverbial fashionable Soho cocktail party. The champagne is flowing and countless canapes are slipping down the greedy gul- lets so beloved of the popular press. It is two weeks ago, and Derek Draper is hold- ing court. This is the golden Derek, the lustrous, shining, beautiful boy whose day job as a lobbyist made his fortune while his evening and night-time activities on the fringes of New Labour power made his fame.
He is regaling his companions with news of an impending triumph. The duck is about to be bro- ken. Having been under pres- sure to prove himself after joining the top lobbying firm GPC Market Access, he is on the verge of landing a piece of business so stupendously large that, once again, the doubters and detractors will be proved wrong. He has been courting an American energy firm seeking the right introductions in the UK. At various rendezvous, he tells his breathless audience, he has convinced them that if they want to meet the people who pull the strings in the government, Derek Draper is the man to make the call. He has played these gullible American businessmen like the most mel- lifluent Stradivarius. Any day now they will sign on the dotted line and prove that DD is not the failure as a political consultant that his rivals are beginning to say. I was not there, but this conversation certainly took place.
Of course, the £10,000-a-month new clients Mr Draper was boasting about were no such thing. The new business he was crowing about landing was none other than the undercover Observer team which was to be his undoing. They prompted him into bragging about the friends in high places to whom he could introduce them, the privi- leged access to secret information he could provide, and they transcribed it all for the readers of the Observer. Within a day of publication he was dumped by both GPC Market Access and by the Express, in which had appeared his column which Peter Mandelson denies vetting. Labour's iiber- spin doctor has now denied any notion of `vetting' Draper's column (in an interpreta- tion of events which has surprised Labour insiders), but has weighed into the fray in defence of his friend.
The theme which emerges is not corrup- tion but boasting. Draper said as much himself when he finally emerged, blinking, onto The World at One. And it should be borne in mind that bragging — while offen- sive to the ear and in this case heavy on the pocket — is not subversive in itself. The future of the nation state is not under threat because a likely lad from Chorley with a historical connection to a then back- bench opposition MP claims to be bleeped by people who work for the Prime Minister.
At one of Draper's meetings with the Observer undercover team, on being goaded into more boasting about his influence, he theatrically whipped his pager from its holster and read off a list of minis- terial advisers who had sent messages. Assuming that the messages had really been received, it reveals a touching and amusing aspect of Draper's character.
It is inconceivable that all those people had paged him on that very day — the coin- cidence is too great. Yet Draper's vibrating message-master does go off continually because he has always used the pager as his principal means of communication. If some- body rings you (as they sometimes do) ask- ing for Derek's number, you give them his pager rather than any of his offices. What is touching, in which case, is that over the weeks and months he must have been spe- cially saving all the messages from the peo- ple he considered to be most important, while erasing the hoi polloi. One imagines him sitting alone in the back of a taxi, on his way home from an evening at the Groucho, the Reform or Soho House (his three clubs), silently re-order- ing the list of electronic mes- sages, deleting the Johnny-come-latelys and the hangers-on, saving Liz Lloyd and the Miliband boys, loving- ly stroking Peter Mandelson and Ed Balls.
Compare Mr Draper's 20 Great Pages I Have Had with the stories which used fre- quently to circulate about the big Tory lobbyists like Tim Bell and Peter Gummer (Lord Chadlington). The most famous anecdote about Bell's pager would always have him interrupting meet- ings to say, 'Excuse me, I have a message from the Prime Minister. I must call her immediately.' His mobile phone would then theatrically appear from nowhere as the Downing Street switchboard •put him straight through to Mrs Thatcher. Further- more, it was always alleged that these char- acters would intercede directly on behalf of their commercial clients with their friends at the highest levels of government. Set against Derek Draper boasting that he has had six pager messages from Liz Lloyd (a junior member of the Downing Street poli- cy unit), it puts the whole affair into per- spective. Too much of the Observer report has been taken at face value. John Prescott, for instance, is included on the list of '17 people who count' with whom Draper is claimed to have described himself as 'inti- mate'. The Deputy Prime Minister is cer- tainly one of the chosen 17, but in only one sense could he be said to be close to Mr Draper: there is nothing so intimate as pro- found loathing. It should also be noted that access and influence are not the same thing. The peo- ple now running the government are mainly drawn from a small group of politi- cians, advisers, lobbyists and journalists who, in different ways and at different times, have been involved over the last decade or so in the development of the New Labour 'project'. A certain portion of the personnel in each of these different professional groups is therefore drawn from the same single, central pool of New Labourites. The different disciplines are not distinct bodies of people. For exam- ple, Roger Liddle, the prime ministerial European and defence policy adviser also caught out by the Observer, used to be a lobbyist before the election. He ran Prima Europe before he, Mr Draper and others sold it to GPC Market Access earlier this year. Before that he wrote a book with Peter Mandelson and a column in the New Statesman, and gave informal advice to Labour; and before that he was a Liberal Democrat. One assumes that when he leaves 10 Downing Street — be that next week or in many years' time — he will continue what business theorists call 'port- folio working', simply shifting the accent from advising government back onto advising companies and the readership of weekly magazines. So it is inevitable that some lobbyists and journalists have many friends in the gov- ernment or vice versa. And it is not only advisers and lobbyists who have conflicts of interest. The Observer contributor Greg Palast, who posed as a businessman to entrap Mr Draper, refers continually in his expose, and has done so in interviews, to the adverse consequences of Britain's lack of a freedom of information act. He has neglected to mention, however, that the company he runs in the USA is a specialist in collating government information obtained under the US Freedom of Infor- mation Act and retailing it to consumer groups and trade unions. As such, he would be Perfectly poised to capitalise were such an act to be introduced to a United King- dom in which he is already ensconced as a Journalist.
Having myself been a Labour appa- ratchik and an in-house lobbyist — that is, Tie employed directly by a company rather than one who sells his services to allcomers ,7". I am on at least polite-small-talk terms „Tilt virtually every political appointee in "re°"ing Street, and most of those in the friends of government, and I count some close make among them. But this does not "akce me influential. It just means that I know some people who are, and even their influence tends to be exaggerated out of all proportion. Very few members indeed of Labour's political policy-making apparatus ever admit to feeling very influential. Quite the reverse. Their previously wide-ranging, fast-moving opposition jobs have been sub- merged beneath an avalanche of govern- ment paper and procedure.
Not only are lobbyists unable to convert their access to such people into influence, it is not even necessary to employ a lobbyist in order to gain entry. No British company with a concern about government policy would have any problem getting in to see ministers or relevant officials. The inter- vention of a lobbyist will, if anything, be more likely to put the minister off. What good political consultants do to earn their money is advise the company on whether they need to see the minister or not, whether they would be better off talking to the top man or to a more junior official with more detailed knowledge, how best to present their case, and so on.
Moreover, when the businessman finally does sit down with the Minister of State for Privatisation, Deregulation and Doing Big Deals with Foreign Companies, his employment of a Labour lobbyist is not going to make the slightest bit of differ- ence. For that, he would need a good case to make which could convince the minister of its merits. This happens a lot, always did so under the Tories, and is the bedrock of legitimate lobbying. Failing that, he may be able to offer the minister something, or threaten him, and change his mind that way. The former is unusual, the latter virtu- ally unheard of, though both do happen. Such relationships, which have nothing to do with political consultants, are the com- monplace of government life.
There is no lesson to be learned from the current furore about black corruption at the heart of government. The concentric circles and revolving doors that are the media, lobbying and political worlds need better regulation. There should be an offi- cial register of lobbyists and a short quar- antine period for special advisers leaving government service. Not that either of these would make a great practical differ- ence, but they would help to set a new tone and develop a culture in which matters of overlapping loyalties and perceived impro- priety were taken more seriously.
But no such measures, no procedures indeed within the bounds of human com- prehension, could legislate for Derek. Anyone who knows Derek would assure you — whatever else they might say that he is unique. It is completely erro- neous to assume that Derek Draper is in some way typical or symbolic of New Labour. If Derek were representative of any large number of the human race, the moral infrastructure of society would col- lapse in chaos. That is his charm. We need people like him to stop us being bored, but not too many. Like Arnold Bennett's `Denry' Machin, the hero of The Card, he is dedicated to the great cause of cheering us all up. The other good news is that we can be certain he will bounce back. As one of his many 'friends' said during the avalanche of schadenfreude that followed his nemesis, 'I won't believe that Derek's finished till I've seen him with a stake through his heart.'
Sion Simon writes a weekly column in the Daily Telegraph.
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