Collateral Damage

Meanwhile, I was putting a tricky question back to London. All of my predecessors, during US election campaigns, would have sought meetings with the two protagonists as they went head to head. But with one of these two candidates, there was the possibility, even the likelihood, that tweets or comments might be made after the meeting, perhaps in exaggerated terms – which might in turn cause problems with the other campaign team, or unwelcome stories in the media. So I reckoned I needed cover from London before making a move. I wrote to the Foreign Office setting out the arguments for and against; leaning towards doing it, but leaving the final call to them. And then I waited. And waited. I checked and was told that the issue was stuck somewhere in the senior levels of the system. Which is where it stayed.

Though this was frustrating, I didn’t really blame London, or agitate for a response. They were in the middle of a horribly close and intense referendum campaign. I guessed they were in a deeply risk-averse mood and really didn’t need this question. What they had done, in not replying, amounted to a soft no. I let it rest.

In amongst all this, the UK was acquiring a new Prime Minister. Theresa May was always the favourite to succeed David Cameron and was handed the role on 13 July by acclamation when her run-off opponent, Andrea Leadsom, pulled out in the wake of some tactless comments about the advantages of her being a mother, in contrast to the childless May. And May immediately appointed a new Foreign Secretary, former mayor of London and prominent Leave advocate Boris Johnson.

I met Boris Johnson in my days as Foreign Office press spokesman. He was at that time the Brussels correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, already a well-known figure for his almost single-handed creation of the ‘Euromyth’: the supposed ambitions of the Brussels bureaucrats to ban prawn cocktail-flavoured crisps, or to harmonise condoms in a one-size-fits-all regulation. He in effect created a new genre of journalism, prompting other editors to demand similar stories from their journalists – and in the view of many, in both politics and the media, played a significant role in poisoning British public attitudes towards the European Union. Chris Patten, the former British EU Commissioner and Conservative Party elder statesman, said of Boris at the time, in an unwitting anticipation of a favourite line of a future American President, that he was ‘one of the greatest exponents of fake journalism’. Johnson himself once said: ‘I was sort of chucking these rocks over the garden wall and I listened to this amazing crash from the greenhouse next door over in England as everything I wrote from Brussels was having this amazing explosive effect on the Tory party.’ All that said, as a participant at briefing sessions, he was straightforward: with me, at least, he asked well-informed questions, listened to the answers, and unlike some of his colleagues, never became querulous if he wasn’t getting the story he wanted: his critics would no doubt say, recalling his firing from The Times for inventing quotes, that that was because he then just made it up.

Johnson’s appointment as Foreign Secretary prompted a lot of surprise. And he was instantly a marked man on the Continent, where, from what I was hearing from around the network, his early encounters with his European counterparts didn’t go well. The reaction to him in Washington was different; there he was welcomed and admired. He visited several times in his two years as Foreign Secretary (before resigning in protest at Theresa May’s handling of Brexit in July 2018). So I saw a lot of him, and the Americans simply liked him. They found him charismatic; they admired his erudition; they laughed at his jokes. One of his visits coincided with an annual reception I gave for the Shakespeare Theatre Company of Washington. Johnson agreed to speak, and then delivered, to a dazzled audience, a speech made up almost entirely of quotations from Shakespeare’s plays. On another occasion I was with him in Boston, where he was seeing US Secretary of State John Kerry, whose home town it was. That evening, we took him briefly to a reception with the local British-American Chamber of Commerce, where he enlivened his impromptu speech by waving a British teabag, lifted from his hotel room, in front of his audience: proof, he asserted, that Boston Tea Party notwithstanding, the British were still big in that town. As we later walked from the reception to a local crab restaurant, we heard, from the opposite pavement, in an unmistakably British accent, the cry: ‘Hey, Boris, you fucker!’ We all tensed: was the Foreign Secretary about to be assaulted? The answer was, on the contrary, that this group of Brits just wanted a selfie with him. Their opening gambit was, we explained to our bemused American secret service detail, a traditional British greeting of amity, employed once the evening was several drinks old. And Johnson of course did the selfie; several more votes notched up.

On a more conventional note, Johnson also delivered the Bentley. Jaguar have a deal with the Foreign Office to provide flag cars for ambassadorial vehicles in most of our biggest posts. The United States is Bentley’s biggest market; and when time was up for the Jaguar in which I was being transported around town, Bentley launched an audacious bid to undercut them for the replacement. It was the deal of the decade. They offered a car that would normally have cost at least three times as much as the Jaguar for a broadly equivalent price, threw in free servicing for its lifespan, and added the bonus that the embassy could keep whatever money we could get for it when it was sold on. I put this back to the Foreign Office for a decision. There were understandable worries that the car would be too showy and would be a bad story in the media. But both Alan Duncan, the minister of state, and the foreign secretary prioritised value for money for the taxpayer, as represented by the Bentley offer. So that’s what we got. When Johnson next visited Washington, he relived his time as motoring correspondent for GQ magazine, ‘testing’ it by driving it around the embassy compound at a healthy pace.

Johnson seemed fascinated by Donald Trump. When mayor of London, he had once said that a good reason for avoiding New York was the risk of rounding a corner and coming face-to-face with Trump. In most respects they were about as different as two people could be – in their attitude to issues like immigration, and especially in their relationship with the written word: Johnson a prolific writer, Trump famously averse to reading. But they shared a single-minded ruthlessness and political ambition. By the time Johnson became Foreign Secretary, Trump had secured the Republican nomination and was preparing for the Republican Convention and the run-off with Hillary Clinton. I think Johnson, while no supporter of most of the policies Trump was promoting, was intrigued by his success, and in particular by Trump’s use of language: the limited vocabulary, the simplicity of the messaging, the disdain for political correctness, the sometimes incendiary imagery, and the at best intermittent relationship with facts and the truth.

Back to American politics. Presidential nominating conventions date back to the early nineteenth century. Both the major parties hold them, with the formal purpose of selecting their nominees for the presidential election. For much of US history, conventions were murky, heated, even corrupt events at which factions quarrelled and backroom deals were done, sometimes producing unexpected results. Indeed, the term ‘dark horse’ first migrated from the horse racing track, where it was used to describe a horse unknown to the gambling community, into politics at the Democratic Party’s 1844 convention, where the almost unknown James K. Polk emerged as the nominee after delegates had split irretrievably over the front runners. Polk may have been unknown, but he went on to win the election and become the eleventh president. And the 1924 Democratic Convention needed to go through 103 successive votes to decide on a candidate, John W. Davis, who, unlike Polk, lost.

But these proceedings in smoke-filled rooms became increasingly unacceptable to the rank and file of both parties, culminating in the historically disastrous Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968. The United States was deeply divided over the Vietnam war. Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota ran against the war and energised tens of thousands of supporters. Vice President Hubert Humphrey didn’t compete in a single primary, but controlled enough delegates to secure the Democratic nomination. Angry McCarthy supporters joined forces with anti-war demonstrators and confronted the Chicago police outside the convention hall. Riots broke out, and the convention was conducted against a backdrop of tear gas grenades. The Democrats rightly concluded that this couldn’t be allowed to happen again. They adopted, on the recommendation of a commission headed by South Dakota senator George McGovern, a comprehensive primary system in which candidates would be allotted convention delegates based on their performance in the primaries. These delegates were then compelled to vote for ‘their’ candidates. The Republicans adopted a similar system in 1972.

Thanks to these changes, the conventions lost most of their drama. It was still theoretically possible that no candidate would arrive at the convention with an overall majority of delegates, necessitating a ‘brokered convention’ in which delegates could eventually be released from their commitments to vote in specified ways. But in practice, conventions morphed into coronations for the chosen candidates, with a succession of speakers lauding them on prime-time TV in front of, they hoped, tens of millions of viewers.

Whatever the lack of drama, I looked forward to my first and only experience of these unique events. The parties choose the locations carefully, in swing states, hoping to win extra votes by bringing thousands of delegates to key cities, filling the hotels and restaurants and boosting the local economies. The Republicans went first, from 18 to 21 July, in Cleveland, Ohio, in the heart of the Midwest. Hotel prices tend to quadruple during a convention, so my parsimonious political team reserved an Airbnb months in advance. Some British MEPs were attending, so we made a point of inviting them round for tea, to show how we were saving taxpayers money. The house was actually fine; and by chance, it was right next to the open-air venue of the biggest music event of the week – a concert by Lynyrd Skynyrd. Though ticketless, I was able to hear ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ and ‘Free Bird’ with crystal clarity from the balcony of the house.

As for the main event, it was irredeemably strange. We were able to get onto the convention floor, in among all the banners. A succession of senior Republicans, tiny figures on a distant stage, were making speeches, but no one seemed to be paying attention. The speeches, in any case, tended towards repetition, with every peroration acclaiming ‘the next President of the United States – Donald J. Trump!’ All, that is, except Ted Cruz, who managed to get through his fifteen minutes without endorsing, or even mentioning, Trump. Cruz left the stage at a rare clip, to a few scattered boos. Otherwise, the crowd became energised only when Hillary Clinton’s name was mentioned, at which point the whole hall broke into a chant of ‘Lock her up!’ This was commonplace at Trump speeches, as I had seen on television. But now was the first time I had experienced it in the flesh. I looked around me at the clenched fists and angry faces: it felt like genuine mass hatred.

The main event at conventions is, of course, the speech by the nominee: the showcase moment on prime-time TV. Trump’s speech, late on Thursday night, was dark and grim – and really, really long, finishing around midnight Eastern time. It contained a savage attack on Hillary Clinton – someone who ‘had committed terrible, terrible crimes’ – and it painted a picture of an America that was impoverished and crime-ridden, threatened by terrorism and with its soldiers ‘dying on distant battlefields’. For neutrals, listening to it in the hall while chants of ‘USA, USA!’ rang out, it was an uncomfortable and unsettling experience. Sharp-eared journalists, egged on by Trump’s team, highlighted its similarities to Richard Nixon’s address to the 1968 Republican Convention, delivered at a time when America was genuinely torn apart over Vietnam. In short, it felt excessive and unbalanced; belonging to a different universe from Reagan’s ‘Morning in America’. Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalypse masterpiece, The Road, with its marauding tribes of cannibals roaming a destroyed America, depicted a happier place.

There were two shafts of light in the darkness. The first was a meeting with Chris Christie. I had long wanted to meet the man who had for a while been the Great Hope, the Republican Party’s President-in-waiting. But he was damaged by a troubled second term in New Jersey, and his presidential bid never really left the launch pad. As an old friend of Trump, he declared for him when pulling out of the race. He then did a warm-up for a Trump speech in Florida, and remained on the stage, in camera shot, looking somewhat uncomfortable, while Trump did his piece. As one commentator gleefully noted, Christie looked like he was being held hostage. Social media went wild: ‘Free Chris Christie!’

I didn’t mention this when I saw him. Instead, we talked about his campaign run, his takedown of Marco Rubio and his friendship with Donald Trump. He was generous with his time, smart, insightful and exceptionally funny, not least because he is a gifted mimic. An hour went by in a flash. I saw him several times over the next two years; no meeting in my diary was ever more fun.

And then there was the party of the week. John Kasich, Governor of Ohio, should have been the host of a convention in his home state. But his personal relations with Trump were poor; and as a moderate Republican, I think he couldn’t bring himself to stand on the convention stage and endorse his rival. So he stayed away. Instead, he hosted a party at Cleveland’s main tourist attraction, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. I went an hour early, toured the exhibits, talked to Kasich and attended the party. It was great, though inevitably it was impossible to agree with all of the names on the Hall of Fame inductees list: what were Aerosmith doing there?

While I was away at the convention, the embassy had a Harvey Weinstein moment. A senior embassy colleague received, out of the blue, a phone call. The voice at the other end announced that it was Harvey Weinstein, that he and a group of colleagues were about to set off by private jet from South Africa to London, and that one of their number lacked the necessary visa in his passport, but would want to accompany the rest of them to dinner in London. Could the embassy sort this out and ensure that visa requirements were waived?

The Home Office were consulted. They said, firmly, ‘No’: there were strict criteria for visa waivers and this individual didn’t qualify. The decision was immediately passed back to Weinstein. He exploded. Did we not realise who he was? Didn’t we know he had been a personal friend of successive British Prime Ministers? Did we not care that he had invested tens of millions in the British film industry? My colleague wearily promised to check again, further up the ladder. He did so. The answer was an even more emphatic no. He called Weinstein back to pass on the bad news. Weinstein told him that this would be a career-destroying call, that Weinstein would personally follow up with his friends in London, and that, after Washington, his next job would be the North Pole. My colleague found this disturbing: would Weinstein really go after him? When I got back, he asked me what I thought. I told him not to worry. I think that was a good call.

The Democratic Convention, a week later, was in Philadelphia. We again opted for an Airbnb, this time literally on the wrong side of the railway tracks. The house in which we stayed was modest but clean, but the vacant lot next door was a wilderness of broken bottles and used syringes. I took photographs to offer as evidence of my five-star lifestyle the next time the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee came to Washington. The convention itself was a much more controlled and choreographed affair; much less chanting, much more optimism. It also had better speakers: both Obamas (and Michelle was exceptional), Joe Biden, Bill Clinton. Michael Bloomberg, who ran New York as a Republican, took the stage and tore into Trump: ‘As a New Yorker, I know a con when I see one.’ And unlike the Republican version, it ran to time; the star speakers hit the prime-time TV slots. Even Hillary Clinton, no one’s idea of a sparkling public speaker, did well. The Democrats left feeling good about themselves, and confident about their prospects.

I got by with very little sleep; we all did. Outside the main hall, conventions are an endless rolling party. These are not drinking parties, since the beer tends towards the thin and weak, and the wine towards the undrinkable. Instead, they are festivals of gossip, intrigue and speculation. A keen observer of American politics can learn more in a night than in an average month. Looking back on the two conventions now, however, my overriding question is: what did they matter? Republican choreography was a shambles; Democratic organisation was immaculate. The Republicans portrayed America as a savage, feral place, beset by failure; the Democrats, by contrast, did their ‘hopey-changey stuff’ and were full of optimism. Michelle Obama provided the soundbite of the moment: ‘When they go low, we go high.’ And yet, a few months later, notwithstanding Philadelphia having hosted the Democratic Convention, Hillary Clinton couldn’t even win Pennsylvania.

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