The Parliamentary Press Gallery is a group of fearless advocates for democratic accountability, but we pick our own chairman in a manner reminiscent of North Korea. I got a tap on the shoulder from my predecessor, Carolyn Quinn, last October. So far as I know, there’s never been an election for the post. Just call me Tim Jong-un.
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My main job as press gallery chairman is to organise a monthly lunch with a senior politician. I couldn’t resist inviting Danny Alexander, the first member of my cricket team to make the cabinet. Introducing him, I say: “Danny used to take wickets with an out-swinger that veered off to the left. But since the coalition was formed he’s made greater use of the one that cuts back to the right. He calls it the ‘Nick Clegg’.” Danny has his own Clegg line. He says he got confused with the deputy PM’s text-speak until he realised OMG meant “On Miriam’s Guidance”. Clegg spinner James McGrory is VERY quick to point out that this is a joke, not a news story.
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The strangest lunch was with Ken Livingstone, 27 years after he first appeared. Too old at 67 for a major campaign? Not a bit of it. Ken tells us his female doctor “almost had an orgasm” when she performed his medical. His minders are rendered speechless. He signs the guestbook: “Ken Livingstone – once and future mayor.” Three weeks later, his career is over.
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I visited the Hay Literary Festival, and it’s not hard to see how Boris Johnson beat him. At one point he makes a reference to “middle England” and a voice cries out from the back, “and WALES!” Boris immediately launches into an anecdote about his first, abortive, run for the Commons: “In 1997 I fought Clwyd South, and Clwyd South fought back.”
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A SpAd calls: “Do you want to know what I’ve got to say, or are you just going to make it up?” I explain that if such things ever did happen, the steady flow of current disasters ensures that even less-reputable colleagues have not had to resort to invention for a very long time.
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There’s a word for this: ‘Omnishambles’. Originally coined in Armando Iannucci’s The Thick of It, I’ve been on a one-man mission to popularise the phrase in Westminster. I first got it in the Mail last July. Then it pops up in Rachel Sylvester’s column in the mouth of a No 10 source, pondering whether the O-word or ‘clusterf***’ – another personal favourite – best describes the government’s plight. Another SpAd calls: “Shippers, are you Rachel’s source?” Within days, Ed Miliband is spouting it in PMQs and the BBC is killing it with overuse. Both James Landale and John Rentoul are good enough to name-check me, but I feel like someone who discovered an edgy band that’s now playing football stadia, and goes around muttering: “I prefer their early stuff.”
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A Sunday newspaper colleague bemoans how all lousy predictions, which once became fish-and-chip wrapping, are now preserved in perpetuity online. “In the old days,” he remembers, “You used to just steal the worst ones from the cuttings library.” I suffer a form of predictionitis when I write a blog arguing that Francis Maude is the most influential Tory politician of his generation. Ten days later, he sparks a national crisis by urging people to hoard petrol in jerry cans in their garage. A woman gets badly burned decanting petrol near a gas hob. I’m embarrassed, but there’s support from a No 10 source: “Which other politician has influenced someone to set fire to themselves?” Gallows humour is still the most resonant form of Westminster wit.
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To Chicago for the G8 and Nato summits. The G8 is at Camp David, but such is Downing Street’s great love of the Lobby that we’re sequestered in a hotel 700 miles away to receive briefings by telephone. As it happens, I make a rather better job of covering the summit in a different time zone than I do the one on my doorstep. First edition is long gone when Barack Obama tells a Nato press conference that David Cameron has gone sightseeing in downtown Chicago. This is big news in the week the PM has been branded an Olympic gold medallist for chillaxing. Sadly, I’m not there to hear it since I am… sightseeing. A Downing Street aide phones their White House oppo and asks for the quotes. “Surely your journalist was at the president’s press conference?” they say. “No,” comes the reply, “he’s on a boat tour.” A combination of Twitter, Reuters and a BlackBerry means I file a 400-word story for final edition. But I feel somewhat sheepish about mocking the PM. Thank God I can’t be voted out by the public…
Tim Shipman is deputy political editor of the Daily Mail and chairman of the Parliamentary Press Gallery
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