AND on the third day, Gordon Brown and his Cabinet ascended into Liverpool, where they sitteth in the public gaze to no very great effect. The Government’s grand tour of the provinces yielded little in the way of hoped-for positive headlines, because the media concentrated on how much the event cost, rather than ministers’ virtuous efforts to get closer to the voters.
This is an old trick, and it can be a good one. I used it myself when I discovered (in other words, was leaked) the information that Tony Blair spent £79,000 on his leadership campaign to take control of the Labour Party after John Smith died. This was the figure he declared to the National Executive Committee. There may well have been more, but in any event he spent four times more than his rivals – Margaret Beckett and John Prescott – combined.
Spending always tells you something – in this case, Blair’s determination to annihilate the opposition, no matter what the cost. Literally. In the case of Gordon’s grand tour, it tells us that the media weren’t really interested in his royal progress through the nation, only what it was costing the taxpayer.
The way was led by the Yorkshire Post, which is – pound for pound, as it were – the most successful newspaper user of the Freedom of Information Act. The paper put in an FoI request to West Yorkshire police for the sum spent on security for the Cabinet’s “away day” in Leeds on November 28. The cops duly complied, disclosing expenditure of £137,719.
This seems an awful lot of money for a 24-hour operation – and it doesn’t even include the bill from the Met’s Special Branch. And they don’t come cheap. Overall, not perhaps on the scale of the annual police overtime festival, aka Labour’s annual conference, but the extra moolah must have made life easier for a great many constables in the run-up to Christmas.
Where the YP led, the rest of the media and the Taxpayers’ Alliance – always ready to bash Labour – followed in short order. The BBC, in particular, made a big thing of the cost of Brown’s peripatetic rambles, at the expense of the politics of the story. Not that there was much of that, despite the best efforts of Communities Secretary Hazel Blears. She gamely defended taking the Cabinet to the people, but these events are always too stagey to be convincing. I just wish they wouldn’t do it. It’s embarrassing.
Still, if we are having an inquest, let’s look again at the role of the police. Not in the protection of ministers – and just how many of them actually need protection anyway? – but in the projection of the story. West Yorkshire cops were very quick to come up with that very large, specific figure, gathered over a long, busy Christmas and new year bank holiday. There was no lackadaisical Inspector Frost too busy to fill out time sheets on this occasion. Their timing was first class, just in time to trash Gordon’s gadabout.
The fact that the bill for the Old Bill will be borne by local taxpayers was not lost on the Tories, whose “Shadow Minister for Leeds” (a very small shadow, there being no actual minister for the city), MP Robert Goodwill, denounced the event as a gimmick, which should be funded from Labour Party coffers. His denunciation, along with sharp criticism from the Taxpayers’ Alliance, which has friends and supporters in high right-wing places, completed a sorry backdrop.
Except for one last hit from the cops. West Yorkshire police say they will seek to recover the costs of the Cabinet away-day in Leeds from central government. Oh yes? Through what mechanism? And why now, for the first time? And why volunteer this information, which can only have the effect of giving the story more legs?
I may be unduly Machiavellian, but perhaps Mr Plod is still smarting from the refusal of Home Secretary Jacqui Smith to honour in full last year’s police pay award. And to quote the last verse of that dreadful dirge, “On Ilkla Moor Baht ’At”: “Then we shall have gotten our own back”.
The Tories are obliged to admit that they too have incurred extra police expenditure on jaunts to Yorkshire. “We did something similar in Bradford”, concedes Goodwill. “But our event didn’t cost anywhere near that much.”
I can believe that. Since the Shadow Cabinet is largely composed of C-list non-entities who could not be of the slightest interest to potential terrorists, the degree of security required is, well, limited. Indeed, the good folk of Bradford stand in greater need of protection from wallpaper millionaire heir George Osborne than vice versa.
Interestingly, no one in the media put in an FoI request for the bill for that excursion. Next time “Crew Cameron” go on tour, some public-spirited hack should do so. I doubt that the police will volunteer the information otherwise.
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