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Press Releases
Panorama: Trust Me I'm Gordon ... Not Tony
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Tonight Panorama ( Monday 25 June, 8.30pm, Â鶹ԼÅÄ One) puts Gordon Brown's claim last Friday that he has "at all times ... tried to be straight with the British people" to the test by assessing his record on spin.
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In the run up to becoming Britain's next prime Minister, Mr Brown has signalled his break with spin with a series of comments about rebuilding trust in public life through what he calls a "new politics" and a "more open and honest dialogue".
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The programme broadcasts footage of a Brown spinning operation taking place in private which Mr Brown's media team wanted to prevent being reshown.
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Broadcasters have been unable to obtain permission to show this footage, originally transmitted in 1997, a few months after Mr Brown became Chancellor.
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The film shows his first spin doctor Charlie Whelan leaking details of the Chancellor's plans to strip the Bank of England of its role as regulator of banking insurance and pensions.
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Mr Whelan is shown telling a Â鶹ԼÅÄ journalist: "I shouldn't really have told you this. They'll go mental if they've found out that I've told you."
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Mr Brown is filmed at a private Treasury meeting, telling Mr Whelan: "The story could easily become, if we don't watch, 'Bank Attacks Labour Move'... It is very important that the Bank does not sort of start to sort of get the view across that this has been a sort of bad exercise."
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Mr Whelan replies: "Well, well, [the] thing is we'll make sure that, that people in advance know that isn't the story."
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The footage is from a 1997 fly-on-the-wall documentary, We Are The Treasury, made by Scottish Television, the company for whom Mr Brown and his elder brother John worked as journalists in the Eighties.
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Scottish Television say that the Treasury has a "veto" over the material which Panorama has chosen to ignore.
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A Treasury spokeswoman told Panorama: "You asked whether you need Treasury permission to broadcast these clips and that's a 'Yes'."
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Panorama: "On what basis?"
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Treasury: "My understanding is that you have to have this permission and the answer is 'No'."
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Panorama: "Where has that 'No' come from?"
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Treasury: "From the Treasury."
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STV told Panorama the person they had to contact at the Treasury "for the go ahead" was Damian McBride who is a successor to Mr Whelan and one of Mr Brown's special advisers.
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Panorama reporter John Ware emailed Mr McBride that the Treasury had "told us in terms that the Treasury is not prepared to grant us this permission."
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Mr McBride responds by claiming it would be wrong to characterise the Treasury's position as blocking the use of the footage:
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"You're depicting this in a rather odd way ... it is our long-standing preference that footage taken for one documentary is not used in another because it can cause understandable confusion about when the footage was taken. That is not the same as refusing to grant you permission to use the footage. That is not up to us, given it is STV who own the copyright."
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However, STV again confirmed to Panorama that they had agreed to a Treasury "veto" in 1997 over the re-use of the footage, in return for access to Mr Brown and his team:
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"In exchange for access to make the documentaries in 1997, STV had an agreement with the Treasury allowing them the right to approve the final content and the right to veto or approve any potential ongoing sales. We agreed to this at the time and we intend to honour this agreement now."
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John Ware emailed Mr McBride to say: "STV say we need your permission. Is the Treasury giving permission?"
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Ware told McBride his concern over "confusion" about when the footage was taken " is easily dealt with by onscreen astons" [ie dates].
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Mr McBride replied: "John – I'm not going to be put in the silly position of giving 'permission' which is not ours to give. If STV want to give you the footage, that's up to them."
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He adds: "If they ask our advice, we'll tell them what I've already told you – that we'd prefer it wasn't used," and explains this is "regardless" of Panorama's undertaking to clearly date the material.
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Panorama then told STV that although Mr McBride had said he preferred Panorama did not use the footage, "ultimately" it was up to them.
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STV then told Panorama that for "commercial" reasons they were refusing the request to licence the footage, though this meant forfeiting the usual £690 per minute fee. They said this was unconnected to their agreement with the Treasury.
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However John Ware explains in the Panorama programme this is a "veto which tonight we're going to ignore precisely because of Mr Brown's new commitment to more 'open and honest dialogue'."
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Other programme content:
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The STV footage chimes with recent comments by former Cabinet Secretary Lord Turnbull that Mr Brown exercised Stalinist control over debate because – as yet another Cabinet Secretary put it – he "defies contradiction."
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Panorama plays a clip from a Treasury meeting where the Chancellor is visibly irritated by spending requests from ministerial colleagues and says that he wants to "kill" the debate:
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"I'm really worried about this paper because this is just an invitation for people to open up every spending issue that I think I could have closed down by tomorrow a, a, afternoon... I mean I think I, we could have killed this by just telling people we've been through it all, we've looked at all these options it's just simply not possible."
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As part of his "new politics" to rebuild trust, Mr Brown has also said one of his "first acts as Prime Minister would be to restore power to Parliament in order to build the trust of the British people in our democracy."
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Yet Panorama reveals new figures from the House of Commons Library showing that Mr Brown has voted in only 14.29% of divisions in the last three Parliaments, although the figures for one year (1998/9) are not available.
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By comparison, the last Conservative Chancellor Ken Clarke voted in 66.89% of divisions between 1993 and 1997 (figures not available for 1996/97).
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Every Shadow Chancellor who has faced Mr Brown has told Panorama that, unique amongst Labour ministers, he has cast aside the normal courtesies between the Government and the opposition that facilitate informed debate.
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Former Shadow Chancellor Michael Portillo tells the programme:
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"Statements sent, in my experience, five minutes before they're delivered, even though they might be 40 pages long ... giving no opportunity whatsoever for the opposition spokesman really to engage with the debate, because everything that comes up is a surprise. And I think it's an indication of his character. He uses everything, every single device in order to win."
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Although Mr Brown's "new politics" has signalled an end to spin, Panorama says that the way his media team spun his pre-budget statement last December – and the way he subsequently announced it – suggested there was a new £36billion capital investment programme to build and refurbish schools, colleges and universities and to supply facilities and equipment.
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On closer analysis there was not, in fact, a penny more for schools than had already been announced by Mr Brown in the budget nine months earlier. The only new money over and above what had already been published or planned was £150million in real terms for colleges and universities.
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Robert Chote, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, says:
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"This sense of always coming up with the largest most flattering sounding number I think just feeds sometimes into this sense of cynicism that you can't really take at face value the exciting announcement that's made to get a good headline on day one, or as often the case in recent years, on day minus one because the Treasury will have spun it before it's been announced.
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"And that does give you a rather misleading picture, and whether it builds up trust in the longer term I think is highly debatable."
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Mr Whelan tells Panorama that trust in the Government has collapsed "because of Tony Blair ... because of the Iraq War, because of the sexed-up dossier, because we went to war on the basis of a lie, and that's where trust has broken down."
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Ware asks him: "When Gordon Brown talks about rebuilding trust in politics.
Is that code for 'Tony Blair is shifty, trust me to tell the truth'?"
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Whelan replies: "Well it's hardly code, is it? It's pretty obvious that what he's saying is that trust has broken down and I'm not Tony Blair and I want to rebuild trust."
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In examining Mr Brown's own record on the truth, Panorama revisits two episodes while Mr Brown was Chancellor in which John Ware says he has displayed a "lawyerly approach in a tight corner " and "tends to obfuscate around the truth as if trying to throw his inquisitors off the scent to the point where once it's said he even lied."
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Ware was referring to Mr Brown's interview on the Today programme in November 1997. He was asked if he knew whether the Formula One tycoon Bernie Ecclestone had donated money to Labour. The Government was about to exempt Formula One from its election promise to ban tobacco advertising.
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Mr Brown had replied: "You'll have to wait and see like I'll have to wait and see ... I've not been told and I certainly don't know what the true position is."
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Mr Brown later insisted: "I did not lie." But Panorama reports the comments of one well-placed source with knowledge of conversations that took place with Mr Brown, that this was not how Number 10 saw it:
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"It was a brazen lie ... We were absolutely gob smacked when we heard Gordon say this on Today. And I remember saying to a senior official in Number Ten:
'That is a very very unwise thing to say given the number of people who know it not to be true' ... I remember thinking: 'What on earth's he said that for?'"
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Panorama asked Mr Brown for a straight "Yes" or "No" answer to the question:
did he know there was a donation from Bernie Ecclestone? His special adviser Damian McBride referred the programme to his answer from this Channel 4 News interview in 2000:
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Q: Did you know that Bernie Ecclestone had given a sizeable donation and did you know it was £1million?
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A: I knew it was a sizeable donation. We did not talk about the details of the finances.
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Panorama points out this is a careful answer which still avoids committing Mr Brown to 'Yes' or 'No' to the key question: did he know if the "sizeable donation" had come from Bernie Ecclestone?
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The programme also examines in detail the leaking of market sensitive details to the Financial Times of Mr Brown's first budget in July 1997. A leak inquiry by the Treasury at the time failed to identify the leaker.
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When John Ware asks Mr Brown's then spin doctor Charlie Whelan if he was responsible for the leak, Whelan replies: "I might well have been, I can't remember to be honest. Probably was me. It could be Ed Balls, it could be me."
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Mr Balls, now Economic Secretary to the Treasury, insisted to Panorama there was no leak.
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Giving an insight into the Brown team's approach to media management, Mr Whelan declares that the terms leaking and briefing are interchangeable.
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Asked by Ware whether he was involved in leaking budget information, Mr Whelan says: "Of course I did. I mean that was my job. I wouldn't call it leaks. You're briefing people what the sort of ... the thinking the Chancellor and what's probably going to be in it."
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Ware asks: "You'd have done that though with the Chancellor's authority?"
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Mr Whelan replies: "Of course, yeah."
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Mr McBride told Panorama that Mr Brown had not leaked the budget and referred the programme to what he had told MPs on the Treasury Select Committee in 1998: "As far as leaks of the Budget were concerned, there is no evidence there were any leaks, and I think the idea that there were is completely wrong."
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Panorama – Trust Me I'm Gordon ... Not Tony, Monday 25 June 2007, 8.30pm, Â鶹ԼÅÄ One
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