John MacKay
‘Notes of a Newsman, Witness to a Changing Scotland’, John MacKay (Luath Press)
‘Five Million Conversations, How Labour lost an election and rediscovered its roots’, Iain Watson (Luath Press)
Read separately, these books will strike most readers as unexpected, even original, in terms of their basic format. Read together, however, these two Luath Press publications turn out to be surprisingly similar. Let me try to explain.
‘Notes of a Newsman’ is the work of a man very familiar to a large proportion of us in contemporary Scotland. Beginning his media career as a cub reporter with the Sunday Post in 1987, John MacKay was recruited by BBC Radio Scotland as a news and sports reporter. A few years later he moved over from BBC Radio to BBC TV and by 1993 had become a regular TV news reporter and presenter. Finally, in 1994, STV made him an offer he couldn’t refuse, and since then, in a variety of roles in STV’s news programmes, including ‘Scotland Today’ and now ‘Scotland Tonight’, he has become one of Scotland’s most familiar TV faces.
MacKay’s book arises directly out of his professional career as a media journalist. Beginning in 1986 and ending in 2015, it is put together from three sources: precisely dated extracts from the detailed work diary he appears to have kept recording every story and activity his career has involved, lengthy transcriptions of his routine on-air and on-view news reporting, commentaries and interviews, and finally much briefer occasional comments, from today’s perspective, on some of the news items focused on in his diary and news reports. That’s it.
There is the odd noting of the difficulties involved in reporting on horrendous incidents such as Piper Alpha or Dunblane or particularly gruesome crimes, and now and again MacKay has a word or two to say about how he felt about the political figures he was interviewing – Michael Portillo, Alex Salmond, Douglas Dewar, Ed Miliband. (None of them impress him as much as my friend Jeremy Smith, professor of English language at Glasgow University). But the stance of the objective reporter is maintained throughout. Anyone expecting to learn anything about John MacKay’s personal life, or even whether he thinks that the changing Scotland he records is changing for the better or the worse, will be disappointed. ‘Notes of a Newsman’ is best described as a book of historical report: this is what made the news between 1986 and the present, and this is how it was reported.
‘Five Million Conversations’ is also the work of a newsman. Iain Watson is a BBC political correspondent who has regularly appeared on such radio and TV programmes as ‘Today’ and ‘Newsnight’. To cover the 2015 general election, the BBC assigned him to the team of reporters who would travel with Ed Miliband and his team throughout the entire election campaign. As a result, he tells us, ‘his book covers all the significant moments in Labour’s campaign’. What he calls its ‘day-by-day’ approach ‘is designed to offer an insight into how political parties try to control their message, their messengers – and those who try to report on both’. Thus readers are offered ‘a front-row seat at the daily dramas of the most closely fought election in two decades’. Watson goes on to claim that his book is ‘a lot more than a campaign diary’, but in terms of format in particular, that is exactly what it is.
The opening chapter, entitled ‘The Accidental Leader’, details Jeremy Corbyn’s rise to the leadership of the Labour Party. Incidentally, it turns out that I share some of the responsibility for this development. (No, I don’t mean by voting for him. My one experience as a political activist was helping Roy Jenkins win the Glasgow Hillhead constituency for the SDP in 1982. The then sitting MP for Islington North was Michael O’Halloran who defected to the new party – thus making it possible for left-wing activists to select Jeremy Corbyn as their constituency Labour candidate in the same year.) But the following 200 pages or so provide a more or less day-by-day account, dramatic or not (opinions will differ), of everything that went on in the Labour campaign between 14 March and 8 May 2015. From 1 April there is effectively an entry (sometimes more than one) for every single day.
The book’s title references the Labour Party’s belief that victory would be achieved by its army of activists doorstepping millions of voters. On 6 May, the day before polling, Ed Miliband spelled it out: ‘At the start of this campaign I said that we wanted to have four million conversations in four months. And I am so proud that today, on the final day of campaigning, we will top five million conversations’. What 7 May revealed was that five million conversations – however useful as a book title – did not necessarily convert into votes. The book’s subtitle, however, is more of a problem. I’m not convinced that Watson does explain ‘How Labour lost an election and rediscovered its roots’.
Admittedly there is more analysis in this newsman’s account than in John MacKay’s – though to be fair I’d suggest that easily the liveliest of MacKay’s pages are those recording the constant ups and downs of the independence referendum and its reporting. But all the same the vast bulk of Watson’s book too is essentially equally factual: where the campaign went, where the speeches were made, how reactions were reported, who said what, what was discussed, what was decided, what changes were made. ‘Five Million Conversations’ is also at bottom a work of historical record and report.
I’ve no doubt that political buffs will relish every detail of this campaign account – and I’m equally sure that those responsible for running political campaigns in the future in all parties will be looking carefully at it in case there are lessons they might learn. Most readers, however, I suspect will be more selective. For me four points about the Labour campaign stood out. Perhaps as a result of living in Scotland, I had not picked up on how important (and apparently successful) the Tory Party’s warnings had been that a coalition scenario involving Labour and the SNP would mean a government in which a weakly-led Labour Party would be dragged further to the left by a powerful SNP.
According to Watson, Labour strategists were aware that middle England was coming to believe such a scare story – but nonetheless failed utterly to come up with a successful riposte. The Scottish dimension reappeared – perhaps less seriously – over what turned out to be the campaign’s most ludicrous and humiliating moment: the notion of the so-called ‘Edstone’ – the idea of erecting an actual monumental stone on which would be engraved a list of unbreakable Labour promises. Apparently the whole idea owed something to what was seen as the success of the Daily Record’s ‘Vow’ in the final days before the vote in the independence referendum – and even more to Alex Salmond’s subsequent stone at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh on which is etched his words about how ‘rocks will melt with the sun’ before Scottish students have to pay tuition fees….
More significant, however, was the Labour Party’s failure to find an answer to another issue that appears to have come up on all too many occasions in the party’s millions of doorstep conversations: the suggestion that welfare cuts are justified because we all know people who make no effort to earn a living but live comfortably on social security paid for by us. Interestingly, a recent research-based article in the New York Times suggests that this is the very reason that explains the support for policies, not in their own interest, given by poor voters in Republican states. Clearly it’s an attitude of mind that the Labour Party badly needs to find a way of addressing.
Finally, and to my mind still more depressingly, there is Watson’s account of what happened on 30 April. The implication is that this is the day on which, by his answers on ‘Question Time’, Ed Miliband lost the election. The very first question from the audience was about the notorious note the outgoing Labour treasury minister had left on his desk five years ago – ‘there’s no money left’. How then could the Labour Party be trusted with the UK economy? Miliband replied with his stock answer about how Britain would succeed when working people were able to be successful, but the same line of attack was pressed home by another audience member. ‘Do you accept when Labour was last in power, you overspent?’ Miliband’s answer was ‘No, I don’t.’ Chairman David Dimbleby interjected: ‘Even with all the borrowing?’ Ed Miliband again said ‘No’. Attacks from the audience continued: the Labour Party had bankrupted the country, Miliband was lying, and if he couldn’t accept he’d overspent in the last government how could he be trusted not to do it again?
Watson insists that this occasion was a disaster for Miliband and that this was the view of many of his team advisers and supporters. His fatal mistake had been to use the simple word ‘No’ in answering the original question. So what should he have done? Apparently he should have fudged, dodged the question, perhaps lied. Instead he told the truth. It was a lie that government spending caused the financial breakdown in 2008. The fact that Tory Party propagandists, aided by the right-wing press, had persuaded many millions of voters to believe a lie does not make it true.
Both these books are illuminating about how exactly the news media work. But what we learn is not always reassuring.
By Andrew Hook | December 2015