One should be wary, as a general rule, of making general rules based on personal experience. This is a general rule I’ve made, admittedly, on the basis of personal experience, which I’m aware is problematic, but there you go. I always think of the time, at school, when a bunch of my fellow 14-year-olds had declared an armistice, and were having a late-night conversation about matters of personal experimentation of which a 14-year-old is normally loath to speak. The guilty and personal was revealed as healthy and universal, and comradely good feeling rose. In time, one boy made a terrible mistake. ‘Guys?’ he said. ‘You know when you do that thing with your thumb?’ And of course nobody did. Because nobody else did that thing with their thumb. I mean, Christ, who does? The freak.
This is my caveat. But still. Guys? You know when you go to party conferences, and you aren’t remotely interested in meeting politicians? I don’t think this is a thumb situation. I think it’s pretty universal. I mean, you know, maybe not; maybe most attendees stand there with a notebook, ticking off the MP for Grockleshire West like a particularly perverse breed of trainspotter. I might just not know. It’s different being a hack, I appreciate that. The big guns of your industry are all milling around, and if you’ve any professional ambition at all it’s surely going to be more attractive speaking to them than to, say, Eric Pickles.
But I don’t think that’s all it is. I really don’t. As a gossip diarist, I moved in various worlds. My status radar, I think, was quite finely attuned. At a film industry party, for instance, as a hack you’re at the bottom. At a business event, you’re so far down you might as well be a waiter. Literary events are more complex because real authors are such stammering self-loathing weirdos, but although the press pack might be having a far better time, they’re still only ever going to want to have sex with each other. In the music industry, hack status has been on the rise for a few years and you’re now on a par with a lowly A&R man, or a third-rank cocaine dealer. But in politics? In politics you’re a star.
The order of precedence, at a party conference, I’d say goes as follows. 1. Members of the very inner Cabinet (or their shadow equivalents). 2. Editors, media bosses and journalist superstars. 3. The spouses and unelected bruisers of the first category. 4 High-profile journalists, visiting celebrities, elder statesmen and other Cabinet ministers. 5. Other journalists, government ministers, people you dimly recognise from the Sky News paper review. 6. The great mass of miscellaneous MPs, flunkeys, wonks, delegates, lunatics and caterers.
Does that seem fair? Or am I blinkered by personal prejudice? Again, I don’t think so. They’re all about status, these gatherings. Those at the top create a buzz as they drift around the hall. There are exceptions — prominent backbenchers of the Dorries, Mench and Watson variety will be doing that this year, and I stood next to Ed Miliband on a staircase mere hours after the most thrilling fratricide in political history and failed to notice for almost four minutes — but for the most part power is a thing you can see with the naked eye. And you see it, invariably, in the wrong place.
It’s not healthy for journalists to be treated like rock stars, and it’s not healthy for MPs to feel like guests at their own feasts. Why we have ended up here, I could not say. Yes, hacks get on telly more than MPs these days, but that’s more symptom than cause, because they have far more to say and are better at saying it. Westminster today is where debates happen last, and worst.
I suspect the great media parties of conferences will be like deserts this year, if they happen at all, but only time will tell us whether the burst of confidence MPs seemed to gain over phone-hacking will translate into anything more than showboating bluster. They say the new intake of MPs is unusually impressive this time, but I gather they invariably say this, and are invariably wrong. Still, here’s hoping. We’ll see. Thumbs up.
•••
So I’m slouching past the Home Office, with my customary poor posture, and on the pavement I see something shining. I swoop down and grab it and …bloody hell. It looks like a diamond. And a massive one. What to do?
‘Hand it in!’ I hear you cry. But really? Would you? Really? Even if you’d just had your house decorated? Must have been insured. They’ve probably written it off. And even if I did give it to the police, how likely was the right person to get it back?
Weird moral quandary. Or perhaps it wasn’t weird, but I just wanted it to be, so as to justify keeping somebody else’s shiny thing. My first step was to tell absolutely everybody about it, so as to be cushioned by group approval. My second was to show it to a jeweller friend, who peered at it for a while, and said ‘chunk of glass’.
At first I felt relief. But now what? Hand it in all the same? What if the person who lost it doesn’t know it was a chunk of glass? What if I do the right thing, and ruin a marriage? This is a curse. Look, have you lost one? Size of a pea. Worth nothing at all. Let me know.
Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.
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