Iain Dale: Standing for Parliament was a 'humiliating experience'

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0:38Hello and welcome to Coffeehouse Shots. I'm James Heal and I'm joined today by Tim Shipman, the political editor of The Spectator, and Ian Dale, the broadcaster who has just published his memoirs, Have I Said Too Much? Now, Ian, great to have you on today. You've obviously had a number of different broadcasting and political experiences in your career. Just as a quick one, you've done lots of political books as well. I think dozens of titles you've edited. I just wondered if your thoughts on Andy Burnham coming in, Britain's 59th Prime Minister, and also Keir Starmer's legacy as well. Well, I suspect, like you, like Tim, I'm always quite excited when there's a new Prime Minister.

1:12Now, it's got a little bit boring in the last few years, it has to be said. But I'm still, because Andy Burnham, I think, is a very different type of politician to those that have immediately preceded him. And the fact is, we don't know what he's going to do. And I just hope that he does. I don't know that he does. And look, he's a great communicator. He's a brilliant salesman. But I keep saying a brilliant salesman has to have a good product to sell. And none of us really know what that product is.

1:36James Heale: The danger is it's QVC and there's some cheap sofa that's being overpriced. Well, we will soon find out. He talks a good game. And I think in modern day politics, that is important. Keir Starman never did. I mean, if you think about him at Prime Minister's Questions, if he was on a sticky wicket, all he could ever say was, 14 wasted years and it just got really boring and I think even his own side got bored by it and that was I think one of the reasons why they got rid of him. I won't tell you lessons from you on this just an excuse to roll that one out. Your impression's about as good as mine.

2:11James Heale: It's been two days since he left. It's been very popular with the listeners I have to say. Yes you need to work on the Burnham one. One of the things that comes out from your book is you talk several times about going for Tory candidate selection so you're selected for North Norfolk in 2005, you try again for 2010, you then have a sort of wonderful kind of charge against the incoming fire for 2024. I mean, how have Tory selections changed, given how much of sort of, Kim Bainock is making this about her change party, how much have you seen them change in the 20 years? I'm not sure they have changed particularly.

2:41I think it was really in the early 2000s that they changed dramatically when Theresa May instituted new systems and selection committees weren't allowed to ask you about your family, whether you were married, that the wife never appeared on the stage, which had been the case in previous years. But I don't think they've changed that much since then. I think Kemmy Baden-Ock is absolutely right to make it more rigorous. There were far too many people getting through that process that should never have been within a mile of being selected. Name six of them, Ian. Well, I can name a lot more than six.

3:17James Heale: Any of them close friends or colleagues of ours? Well, would you like to give me some suggested names and I'll give you my view? Not at all. Well, let's go for Seb Payne because Seb was a very popular nearly man last time. No, Seb is a great guy and he will get there. But I think it's quite difficult because there are so many reasons not to run for Parliament now. And the merger of Anne Whittacombe is another one to add to the list. If you were considering, if you're say you're 40 years old, you're in a successful career, you've got children and your wife says to you, or the other way around. Why would you do this?

3:51I mean, Anne Woodicum could be you.

3:53James Heale: Why did you want to do it, Ian? Because you had this amazing, you know, successful publishing career. You've been a very successful broadcaster. And yet it seems it's still this itch that you wanted to scratch, even until quite recently. I mean, what is it about it? Because once you've got the political virus, it's almost impossible to get rid of it. Well, I've got the political virus. I don't ever tend to stand for a lecture. No, but you've never... You've got a different kind of virus. you never really wanted to be or I don't think you ever wanted to be a politician well I did from quite an early age and I thought I got rid of it I thought LBC gave me all of the things that politics used to give me and it did in many ways but then 2024 came along and it seemed ideal like my local seed came up I'd never thought of going for it and then was persuaded to possibly against my better judgment and then of course it all all collapsed around my ears i mean looking back on it now it seems like a bobby ewing dream from dallas which james you're too young to understand that but i've read about it you have you right james knows everything that's ever happened okay and the dates at which and obviously it was a humiliating i found it a humiliating experience and everyone said well why do you feel humiliated for those who don't know there were some old comments about your home yeah i said i didn't i said on my podcast i didn't like living in sandwich was and I'd rather live anywhere else which the Liberal Democrats discovered these comments and rather stupidly I thought put them out well they sent them to the local conservative office before I'd been selected.

5:21Yeah they should have let you stand and then yeah quite that's what I would have done but I mean I'm now I've just turned 64 so it's not going to happen again. You're not giving it another world? No absolutely not ever. I think that's something interesting in that isn't it I think you're both political animals but different times I mean Ian you seem much more ideological. In the 1980s, you were meeting Margaret Thatcher. You were part of a really interesting bit in the book where you talk about the Dockland Labour scheme and abolishing that. And that basically led to the flourishing of Britain's book.

5:47I'm not sure that's going to encourage anyone to read the book when you mention that chapter. But it was the sort of thing where I conducted a lobbying campaign to persuade the Thatcher government to get rid of this piece of iniquitous trade union legislation. I mean, it gave Dockers jobs for life. If their company went bust, they were transferred to another company, whether that company wanted them or not. So stupid things like that. And at the end of it, when we got rid of it, I thought if I never achieve anything else in my life, I'll have done some good here. And I know I have because hundreds of thousands of jobs have been created in those ports, which would never have been allowed to come, have that still existed.

6:20One of the reasons you've been a success in your career is being an innovator. And there's an interesting bit where you talk about, is it 10 Doughty Street, the old broadcaster? 18 Doughty Street. 18 Doughty Street, sorry. It's basically a forerunner for kind of LVC and GB News in some ways, whereas you, a bunch of other people like Tim Montgomery setting up political broadcasting, why did that not take off at that time and now 15 years on it seems...

6:40James Heale: And those of us working on newspapers in those days, what on earth are these chaps up to? This is completely bananas. This was 2006. Blogging had only just become a thing. I suppose in some ways maybe my reputation by being one of the leading political bloggers and if you have first mover advantage, you get a certain reputation. Well, there were three of you, weren't there, at the time? Tim Montgomery and Dona Blaney were the other two. And Stephen Shakespeare, the founder of YouGov, he funded it. And it was at least 10 years ahead of its time. But, of course, smartphones didn't exist in those days.

7:16So Tim Montgomery, he kept saying, we need to do short clips for people to watch. And I kept saying, no, no, no, if we're going to do TV, we have to do proper TV, sort of long-form programmes. He was absolutely right, and I was completely wrong. And we had an audience, I would say, it's probably no more than the hundreds. Although the number of people that since then said to me, oh, I used to watch you on 18 Doughty Street. I'm thinking, yeah, if you did.

7:38James Heale: It's like the number of people who went to the 1966 World Cup final, which is about nine and a half million people. Exactly right. So it only lasted, I think, just over a year. And Stefan then decided he wanted to start politics home and move into websites rather than broadcast. And it is a shame because if it had continued, I think it could have become very successful, but it would have taken quite a lot of time and eating up a hell of a lot of money. Why do you think blogging just doesn't seem to be as big a thing as it was 15 years ago? Well, because it's been overtaken. Blogging, when it first started, was great because up until that point, I mean, I'd got a website, but I didn't know how to add things to the website.

8:16Somebody who knew about sort of coding had to add it all. And then when I was shown what a blog was when I was on a visit to Washington, I instantly got how important it would become because you could literally just type it in, press a button, and up it went on the internet. And this was an absolute revelation. And I would post five or six things a day, quite a lot of pressure to deliver content, but they wouldn't necessarily be long bits. I would write about politics. I uncovered, I was the first one to write about Charles Kennedy being possibly deposed by the Liberal Democrats. So I broke some stories.

8:49But of course, people like Tim regarded bloggers like us as rather saddos, failed journalists who were sitting in their bedrooms.

8:54James Heale: Well, until we wanted to make names for ourselves. and we weren't allowed to do that when I was reporting at the Daily Mail. So up went the blogs, which Paul Dacre never looked at because he was still getting things printed out on sheets of paper. At which point we all started tweeting and blogging. That's where Shippers Unbound came from because I was no longer bound by the news desk of the Daily Mail. And I remember being approached by your former colleague James Forsyth when he was political editor of The Spectator saying, would I come and blog on The Spectator website? I thought, why would I want to do that?

9:24I've got a readership that is more than the circulation of the independent. And shall we say the money on offer wasn't very attractive? Something's never changed.

9:33James Heale: And just going back to that era, in terms of the money, I mean, Paul Staines kind of helped you all make money, didn't he? He kind of came up with a way of getting advertising to a lot of you. Yeah, he formed Message Space, which is still going. I don't remember getting particularly rich out of that, if I'm honest. Well, maybe Paul did and you didn't. Story of my life. One of the things you talk about in the book as well is kind of in the Brexit era, LBC becoming really big. And I mean, we did have talk radio in this country and you've had things like the Jimmy Young show was obviously famously the choice of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.

10:05But it wasn't maybe the same extent as Rush Limbaugh in America. But it seems that with kind of James O 'Brien, who you credit quite a lot for the success of LBC, that's really become a big thing over the last 10 years or so. Yeah, he, in a way, pioneered the viral clip. And certainly because, obviously, he was so trenchantly a Remainer, wouldn't brook any argument on it, and did his sort of monologues at the beginning of the show. So they started putting those on Facebook. And it got to the point, it wasn't just him, but he was the driver of it, I think, because the mid-morning slot is a good one for that sort of thing.

10:42and we got to the point where our demographic in the 18 to 24 age group which the BBC constantly try to get that age group and constantly fail we had a higher market penetration than capital radio and I think we still do and that's been extremely powerful so I mean when I started LBC in 2010 we We had one person doing website, social media, everything. Now we have 30 or 40. And I mean, it's the same as the Spectator. You've got people doing all of this now, which you never would have done in 2010. So it's become a really important part of what we do. But it has changed things in a way because we as presenters are expected to provide content.

11:29And of course, the digital people are going to want to have really controversial content. I remember some years ago, my producer said in my ear at the beginning of an hour, oh, Digital want you to have a rant on this. And I exploded and I said, I'm perfectly capable of having a rant, but we're not the fucking Daily Mail, I said. One of the things, of course, is what you're quite well known for is Politicos, you know, the bookstore. And then obviously they went to the Bike Back. Lots of publishing. I mean, my favourite book you've published, I think, is Damien McBride's Power Trip. That's my favourite one as well.

12:02Oh, I do. I really, yeah. Hat trick. Well, what makes, broadly, a great political book? You've obviously got to have relevance and accuracy and good writing, but what do you make you think that's a great classic? Well, it's got to be more or less the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It's got to be real. There are so many political memoirs that it's just a work of fiction about the author. They want to portray themselves in the best light. And look, having just written an autobiography, let me tell you, you think, should I put that in? Should I leave that bit out? And obviously you can't put everything in.

12:37So have you said too much, Ian? That is the question. How much have you said? I did an interview with Roger Bolton on his Media Confidential podcast yesterday. And he said, I've never read a book like this. I mean, I can't believe some of the things that you said. And I said to him, well, what? Well, about sex. And I said, well, I just felt it was important to put in stuff about every aspect of my life. And yes, I mean, I did leave a lot of, I edited that chapter quite substantially, although you wouldn't know it. And I just thought, I want today's younger generation to understand what it was like to be gay in the 80s and 90s.

13:16Because very, very different from today. So I have been relatively explicit about things I've got up to in that field. But he kept saying, I've never read an autobiography like this. And I'm thinking, God, have I really said too much? and people tend to just go on about all the wonderful things they've done and yes I've put things in, things I've been successful in I mean I wouldn't be sitting here if I hadn't been successful in some things but I've also been very detailed about things where I've made terrible misjudgments and I've failed

13:46James Heale: One of your perhaps less successful enterprises Ian was your time campaign managing David Davis Now can I stop you right there because I was never David Davis's campaign manager and if I had been there might have been a different result Andrew Mitchell was David Davis' campaign manager. Let's get this straight, Tim. One accuracy on Spectator Podcasts. You were Chief of Staff, weren't you? I was Chief of Staff. It was not a roaring success. And I remember sitting in the Daily Mail office when Andrew Mitchell was phoning up one of my colleagues and shouting and screaming at him because we hadn't written things as supportive as he might have hoped for.

14:18James Heale: Because that always works, doesn't it? It always works, yes. My colleague James Chapman, as Benedict Brogan, the then political editor, said to DD, has very, very good shorthand. and all the swear words have been written out in full, should he wish to contest any of it. But what went wrong? I mean, it looked like his for the taking at one stage. I mean, the timing was not ideal. Michael Howard had tried to sort of engineer it for David Cameron by staying on for longer. And then there was that, you know, a couple of speeches that didn't work out. Well, I do go into this in exhaustive detail in the book.

14:53Quite a lot of things went wrong. that there was an assumption that he would win whatever the circumstances. And I remember meeting at Derek Conway's house, and this would have been before the 2005 election, and there was a feeling then that Michael Howard might try and engineer it for either Osborne or Cameron. And David's view was, well, we don't care what the rules are, we'll win anyway. And I do remember thinking at the time, really? And I remember Graham Brady saying, and there was about 12 MPs at this dinner, and Graham Brady said well why don't we just trigger a leadership contest and I will start it off but David said no absolutely in retrospect that might have been the clever thing to do just have it earlier we'll never know but there was a degree of arrogance about the campaign where Andrew in particular was accused of bullying MPs basically saying well of course if you don't support David you won't get a shadow ministerial position I've never quite established how extensive if that was, but a lot of people were saying it.

15:52I think it was quite extensive. Well, I think it was too.

15:55James Heale: Having spoken to some of the people who were receiving it. Yes, but there were several instances during this period where the Westminster lobby acted like a herd, and once one person wrote something, everybody else fell into line. So that's why I say I wasn't wholly sure. My favourite conversation that I recall, now that he has passed, I will share it with the nation. The sadly now departed Derek Conway, who was a bit of a legend in the sort of whips office dark arts. I remember David Willits had come out to support David Davis, but was then on the grounds that David Cameron already had a tame intellectual, who was Oliver Letwin.

16:30James Heale: But late in the day, David Willits thought he might try and switch his support to David Cameron. And I remember meeting Derek Conway somewhere in the House of Commons, and he said, Willits thinks he's going to change, but I've got his wife and children locked in the cellar. he's not fucking changing words to that effect can I just tell everyone that Derek Conway was a Geordie I merely the gruffness with which I speak is the character of the man there is a better anecdote that exact time George Osborne tells it where he said it was a bit like an East German climbing over the Berlin Wall we had him by his arms but you still had his legs because Willis nearly did defect I mean Alan Duncan was another one but I'd tell the story in the book there was a conservative mp called ann main mp forst albans and after the first round of the parliamentary voting where david hadn't done as well as he should have done um nadine doris defected she'd been david's seconder so she went over to cameron i mean how how tight's change but at least she had the guts to come and tell him to his face whereas ann main wrote a little postcard and it landed on my desk that's like dumping someone by text yeah and i I thought, you utter coward.

17:43So I just ripped it up and put it in the bin and never showed David.

17:45James Heale: The other thing that was mildly notorious then for a young, impressionable reporter like me, 21 years ago, was walking around the Conservative Party conference with a couple of buxom young lasses, wearing T-shirts emblazoned with, it's DD for me. And at least one of them was wearing a larger bra than that, I think it's fair to say. What on earth happened there, Ian? That would have been the woman later to become Faye Jones MP. what happened there was David Hart who was the press officer for the campaign he was a, shall we say fairly diminutive guy prematurely balding one of them was his girlfriend well exactly, punched well above his weight in the girlfriend stakes and he came to me one day and said I've got this idea my girlfriend she's had these t-shirts made, it's DD for me so we thought we'd get a couple of them to wear them at the conference and DD can sort of welcome them to the conference or something And I, in my innocence, said, yeah, why not?

18:43So a gay man signed up. It wasn't my idea. There we go. But I did authorise it. But I remember watching that they were sort of standing and there were all those sort of cameras waiting. And David walks in and we hadn't told him about this. And I could see in his eyes that he was completely horrified. Well, I would say he didn't know where to look. But knowing DD, he knew exactly where to look. Well, he didn't have any alternative. I mean, he couldn't have just walked past them. So he had to have this picture of him with his arm around both of them.

19:11James Heale: It became something of a legend. That was about the same time the Daily Mail asked him whether he liked blondes or brunettes and whatever his wife was, he said the opposite, which was not a great moment. And I also remember on the day of the second round of parliamentary voting, I went into Didi's office, which was next door to mine. I never ever knocked. I just walked in and I said, I think you need to think about pulling out. And he said, well, I'm not quite there yet, but can you just draft a statement? So I drafted this, I thought, brilliant statement for him to pull out. And then Andrew Mitchell appeared.

19:48And he walked in. I was leaving the office and Andrew walked in. And so I drafted the statement, went back to go and show David. But the door wouldn't open. Andrew sort of had his foot against it. And he sort of peered around the door and said in a very sort of sneering voice, we're talking about something very private even you can't know about it and that was symptomatic of this thing where anybody that didn't have the letters mp after their name was considered a bit of a second-class citizen i lost my rag at that went back into my office packed my bag and i was going to walk out not for the last time and anyway he then came into the office and i just said you out in the corridor now.

20:30And he walked out into the corridor and I, by his lapels, pinned him up against the wall. I said, you ever talk to me like that again. We're going to have serious problems. Anyway, we went down into the cellar and sorted it out. And we've actually become really good friends since then. He's become a human.

20:45James Heale: Yeah, I mean, Mitch, since he stopped being sort of on the up, became a very entertaining and good company. When he still thought he was on the way up, he was one of the most unbearable human beings in SW1. But yes, he came to the book launch and I did say to him, there are bits of this you're not going to like, but love you really. One of the things I think was interesting, obviously, just talking there about being gay in the 80s and being a Tory as well. And there is a phenomenon of the gay Tory. I think there's been books written about Tory pride and prejudice before. I published that one. Of course.

21:16Well, sorry. I wanted to call it Clear Blue Water. Oh, very. But Michael McManus, the author, vetoed it. What do you think it is? What's the reason for that, do you think? I don't know. It's just that I don't know why the theatre attracts a lot of gay people. I genuinely have always found this a complete mystery. But why did Anne Whittacombe have so many gay male friends? I mean, I said it to her face. I said, you know, you're the biggest fag hag in the Conservative Party. And she roared with laughter. Yes, and I love them all. I mean, not the comments of a bigot, as Peter Tatchell accused her of being.

21:48Well, that leads us on, I think, to a sort of ending question or so, which is, you know, you talk about in the book, There's a very funny story involving egg and chips when you talk about milk. Can you take that through for our listeners? Well, it was when I was candidate in North Norfolk and Anne came up for the day and I'd taken her to Walsingham, which is obviously a Catholic shrine. What else do you do with Anne Whittacombe? We've done a few other things. And she was due to speaker to dinner that evening in North Walsham. So my house was about four miles from North Walsham. So we went back around 6.30 just to freshen up before dinner.

22:17And my partner, John, said to her, is there anything I can get you, Anne? Thinking that she might like a gin and tonic or something. I'd love a plate of egg and chips, John, she said. And he said, but you're having dinner in less than an hour. Well, I know. And then I said, but Anne, you're on Celebrity Fit Club at the moment. Or Celebrity Fat Club, as I used to call it, much to her annoyance. And she said, well, a girl's got to eat.

22:39James Heale: I mean, just talk about her a little bit more broadly, though, because there were some astonishingly unpleasant reactions to her death before people knew how horrendous it had been. But she seemed to attract a remarkable sort of cross-section of admiration as well. She was sort of more real and honest than a lot of people, wasn't she? And that's not a quality that's universal in politics. Well, I think that's why she was so popular. We used to do a theatre show an evening with Anne Whittacombe in regional theatres up and down the country. I think we did 50 or 60 of them. And were you, to coin a phrase, the straight man?

23:08I was, yes. And we developed a routine. I knew what her anecdotes were going to be. So I would sort of bat the ball over the net for her to volley back. And I mean, what people I don't think understood about her is that she had a wonderful sense of humour and a really self-deprecatory sense of humour. And she didn't mind when I would sort of poke fun at her in these evenings. And there was an anecdote I remember she used to tell about when she was at Oxford. And she said, Giles Brandreth tells this anecdote that his wife, Michelle, was in the first room of the corridor. Edwina Curry was in the second and I was in the third.

23:44And he was very glad that he stopped at the first room. Now, it turns out to be a completely apocryphal anecdote, because I think Mary Archer was part of this. She was never at Oxford. But, I mean, she always went on about how clean her novels were. And I discovered a paragraph on page 158 of an act of treachery where it was clear that the two main characters, a Nazi officer in Second World War Paris and this Parisian French girl, that they had had sex. So I used to sort of tease her about that on stage. No, you're completely imagining. It was wooing. And I would then respond, not in my house, it's not.

24:25Audience laughed. So, I mean, there was a lot of slapstick humour in some ways. But people didn't, unless they came to one of the shows, they didn't really see that side of her in public. And she was a woman of conviction, devout religious conviction, something which I never completely understood because I'm not religious. But that explains why she voted against all the different equality legislation, which leads Peter Tatchell to call her a bigot. So I felt, I mean, on the day that her death was announced, I was at home expecting to watch Wimbledon and the World Cup. Nice day off. Then I saw Tatchell's tweet.

24:57Then I heard Adam Bolton's comments. Then I heard Edwina Currie repeating this lie that she wanted to shackle women prisoners in childbirth. Never happened. I thought, I can't let this stand. So I'd already started getting a few media bids. So I came up to London and did virtually every news outlet there is just to try and salvage something of the reputation of her reputation, which others were trashing. I hated every single minute of it. But of course, the more you do of that sort of thing, you then get accused of milking it or profiteering from Anne Whittacombe's death as if I'm going to take appearance fees for that.

25:33And if I did, I'd donate it to one of her charities. So it was a profoundly uncomfortable experience, but I thought it had to be done. Well, thank you for coming on today and talking about home. Thank you, Ian. Thank you, Tim. And thank you for listening.

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