I asked Shipman on Twitter the status (not the name) of his source. He didn’t reply (he has a busy Twitter feed; perhaps he didn’t see my question), so I rang Rudd herself.
She told me that she had repeatedly asked to be given the legal advice, including on two occasions approaching attorney general Geoffrey Cox.
She was told again and again that she would be given it. When she was not, her private office told her that Downing Street senior adviser Dominic Cummings had intervened to ensure she was not shown it.
Rudd did tell me that on the eve of her resignation, she was told “that they would set up a reading room the following week to see part of that advice. I had no confidence that would take place given that I had been promised it so many times and had not received it.”
It remains the case that the claim made by Shipman’s government source that Rudd had been “given every opportunity to see the legal advice” was wholly untrue.
“I have no comeback. I can’t challenge them,” says Rudd. “There is no individual for me to take on. It feels dishonest.”
This brings us to the major problem with Shipman’s decision to share with his 130,000 Twitter followers a venomous remark made by an unnamed person accusing Rudd of dishonesty.
Had the comment been made on the record by an official government spokesperson Shipman would have been well within his rights.
The spokesperson would have been accountable for her or his allegation against Rudd. He or she could have been identified and questioned about it.
Instead Shipman allowed an unknown Whitehall figure to label Rudd a liar, while granting him or her complete impunity.
Put another way, he allowed his Twitter account to be used as a vehicle for someone unknown to smear a prominent public figure as dishonest.
When I put this point to Tim Shipman yesterday, he replied that he had “cooperated” with Amber Rudd to publish the details of her resignation, and had “prominently included her accusation that she had asked to see the government’s legal advice and been denied this access”.
However, he added, “the nature of the story was such that [her request to see the legal advice had] to be kept secret until the Saturday evening” which meant that it was “impossible” for him to approach Downing Street to ask about her accusation.
He added: “I was in no way smearing her, but I was providing a right of reply, which I would do before publication except in the circumstances described.”
“People can draw their own conclusions about the origin of the anonymous quotes which now pepper the 24-hour news cycle. Government spin doctors have always hidden behind anonymity to make negative points about their opponents and enemies. Reporters have a duty to tell the public what the government’s position is. They are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.”
However, it is notable that Shipman operated a double standard. Amber Rudd gave her account of the circumstances leading up to her resignation on the record and in her own name. By contrast Shipman allowed a mysterious government source to make defamatory allegations that Rudd had been dishonest behind a cloak of anonymity.
This modus operandi, which allow pro-government narratives to enter the public domain unmediated by proper interrogation, has become routine among political reporters since Johnson and his Vote Leave media team entered Downing Street.
Hammond and Yellowhammer
An unpleasant and vicious example concerns the Downing Street smear campaign mounted against former chancellor of the exchequer, Philip Hammond.
This started on 18 August after Sunday Times news reporter Ros Urwin published the leaked Yellowhammer dossier setting out the painful short-term disruption that would confront Britain in the event of a no-deal Brexit.
This story was embarrassing for Downing Street because it undermined its core strategy – threatening a No Deal Brexit.
The government hit back, saying Yellowhammer was an “old document”. This false claim was made first by Michael Gove, minister in charge of Brexit preparations, and later by Tory chairman James Cleverly.
At this point ‘a senior Number 10 source’ went into action alongside Gove, briefing journalists that the Yellowhammer dossier was out of date.
But this ‘source’ added the vicious twist that it had been “deliberately leaked by a former minister to influence discussions with EU leaders”.
The Downing Street source was saying, in so many words, that a minister in the Theresa May government had kept a copy of the Yellowhammer document and then leaked it.
The result was that most of the following day’s newspapers did not focus on the Yellowhammer disclosures about the dangers of a No Deal Brexit.
Instead most turned Yellowhammer into a whodunnit – which of May’s ministers had been the leaker?
For instance The Times headline read “Boris Johnson accuses ex-ministers over Brexit chaos leaks”.
The Daily Telegraph’s read “No-deal leak blamed on Hammond’s Remainers”.
Boris Johnson’s Downing Street media machine had thus achieved a double success. It had distracted attention away from the real story, namely that No Deal Brexit carried real dangers of economic disruption and civil disorder.
And at the same time, it had smeared political opponents.
Most newspapers dutifully pointed the finger at Hammond. The Daily Mail (for which I write a political column) reported: “A No 10 source blamed former frontbenchers led by Philip Hammond.”
The source was quoted as saying: “[The Yellowhammer dossier] has been deliberately leaked by a former minister in an attempt to influence discussions with EU leaders.”
This was a brilliantly successful if cynical media operation. But it soon became apparent that the leaked document was dated 2 August, nine days after the Boris Johnson government had entered office.
It was therefore mysterious how a member of the May government could have leaked Yellowhammer to the Sunday Times. The leak had occurred on Johnson’s watch, not May’s.
Hammond accordingly wrote to Johnson asking that Downing Street “withdraw these allegations which question our integrity, acknowledge that no former Minister could have leaked this document, and apologise for the misleading briefing from No. 10”.
Well over a month has passed since Hammond sent that letter. When I checked on Sunday with his office, I was told that the prime minister hadn’t replied.
No newspaper has yet written a story about the failure of Johnson to reply to Hammond’s letter. I expect that political journalists don’t want to upset valuable Downing Street sources.
The sorry story of the smearing of Philip Hammond is another example of how Boris Johnson’s media operation operates through deceit. How it relies on a compliant media to cooperate with that deceit – even when it knows the allegations are false.
There is an implicit deal. In return for access and information (much of it false) the political media spins a pro-government narrative.
This means that Johnson’s Downing Street can malign political opponents, lie about them and get away with it. But it can do this only because political journalists and editors allow it to.
BBC manipulated by Downing Street
It’s not just the print media which allow themselves to be manipulated by Boris Johnson’s Downing Street.
Take BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg’s reporting of the government’s formal submission to a Scottish court that Boris Johnson would comply with the so-called Benn Act, and so if need be request an extension of membership of the EU on 19 October, supposing no deal had been struck.
Clear enough, you would have thought. But, in the words of Jill Rutter, senior research fellow at The UK in a Changing Europe, a think tank based at King’s College London, the prime minister’s submission “was accompanied at the same time by a breathless tweet thread by the BBC’s political editor, Laura Kuenssberg, reporting [a “senior No. 10 source”] clarifying that message.
“Yes, the government would comply with the ‘narrow’ provisions of the Benn Act – but the source went on to suggest that shadowy MPs were behind the act and that the government had ways of undermining it.
“And thus Number 10 perpetuated the prime ministerial paradox: that Boris Johnson will comply with the Benn Act and yet still leave the EU ‘do or die’, deal or no deal, on 31 October.”
Kuenssberg is therefore open to the criticism that she was being manipulated by Downing Street. Her tweets to her 1.1 million followers meant there were two government positions. One for the courts: that the government would obey the law. One passed on uncritically by the BBC political editor: that it would find a way to get round it. Kuenssberg’s tweets carried with them the implication that Johnson was deliberately deceiving a British court.
This compliance is part of a pattern. Political editors are so pleased to be given ‘insider’ or ‘exclusive’ information that they report it without challenge or question.
In response to these points, a BBC spokesperson yesterday said: “While our journalists always prefer on-the-record quotes, there is a well-established practice in politics of reporting information from unnamed sources to give audiences a greater sense of what is going on in Westminster.
“It should go without saying that reporting comments from anyone, be they source or named individual, is not the same as endorsing those comments. Similarly, taking a single Twitter thread out of context to try to prove a point is disingenuous and does a disservice to your readers.
“Laura Kuenssberg is a fantastic journalist who helps audiences make sense of the Brexit story with her in-depth analysis and expertise.”
Cummings’ communications
Another culprit is ITV News political editor Robert Peston, who regularly preens himself on his special insight into the mind of Boris Johnson’s senior adviser Dominic Cummings.
In a Twitter thread on 25 September, he cited a “senior government source” to the effect that there was a way for Johnson to avoid complying with the Benn Act.
According to Peston’s informant, Johnson “still believes he can lawfully render the Benn Act null and void” by sending a second letter to Brussels that would counteract the first.
Unmitigated nonsense, said legal experts. But the message Downing Street wanted was out there.
This has become a signature technique of the Johnson media machine. Officially no comment. Meanwhile it makes its views known to friendly political editors, who push them without much inspection or analysis out into the public domain.
When I put this point to Robert Peston, he gave a long response which is published separately on openDemocracy.
Jill Rutter, a former director of communications at the Treasury, notes: “That may be how Number 10 wants to operate: to allow the prime minister to look statesmanlike while the dodgier tactics emerge from an unnamed source.
“But this way of operating does the public a big disservice – it allows Downing Street to get its message out without having to take responsibility for it.
“These are not official words. The prime minister does not have to account for them. And there is no way to interrogate the source.”
It’s a classic case of what Johnson once called “having our cake and eating it”. This means that the British media are not just failing to hold him to account. They are not even trying. They are behaving as cheerleaders to the government. They are allowing the prime minister to get away with lies and dishonesty which they would never have permitted to his predecessor, Theresa May, let alone Jeremy Corbyn.
Part of this is paying a price for access. Much is sheer laziness. Broadcasters don’t bother to confront Johnson when he utters lies and falsehoods. One recent example among many: on 29 September Johnson told Andrew Marr that the Conservatives don’t “do deals with other parties”.
The Conservative Party struck a deal worth £1 billion with the Democratic Unionist Party in 2017. Before that, they spent five years in a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. Marr’s failure to challenge Johnson allowed the prime minister to get away with an obvious falsehood.
I have dealt only with the mainstream media in the examples I have given above. I have not looked at The Spectator political editor James Forsyth, who has inherited a position occupied by masters of the craft such as Alan Watkins and Henry Fairlie, Bernard Levin and Ferdie Mount.
Forsyth, like so many others, has recently come to interpret his role – at least in part – as stenographer-in-chief to anonymous Downing Street advisers. Two weeks ago Forsyth made public a 700-word text he had received from a “contact in Number 10” setting out government strategy.
The following day cabinet minister Grant Schapps was asked about Forsyth’s document. He refused. “If you can name the source I’ll certainly engage in it,” he replied. “I am not really into leaked texts… who knows where they are from.”
A classic case of how Downing Street can release helpful talking points into the public domain without being held accountable.
This experiment is now old enough to enlist. Pretty sure that wasn’t something I anticipated.