Andrew Mackay and the old ways of doing politics

In observing the behaviour of my current (and soon to be ex) MP Andrew Mackay I have found him to be an interesting case study in the old ways of practising politics. His actions in a couple of respects were acceptable and worked for politicians 20 or 30 years ago but completely fail to take into account how the modern political world works.

The first one is how he behaved during and directly after his now infamous public meeting in Bracknell in May last year. I blogged about it extensively at the time as I was one of the attendees and asked some of the questions. The 200-odd audience of constituents was overwhelmingly hostile to him, I estimated 85% or more were againt him and wanted him to stand down. The interesting thing from the perspective of "old politics" though was the way he tried to media manage the event. There was an attempt to prevent video cameras from being taken into the hall where the meeting was to take place. I witnessed this first hand where one of the officials tried to physically bar someone from taking one in with him. However the chap argued quite forcefully that he was serving a public duty by recording it for all the constituents who for one reason or another were unable to make it to the meeting. I backed him up as did others also queuing up and eventually the official relented. I know that at least two other video cameras ended up in the hall as I have seen the footage.

Straight after the meeting, Mr Mackay being interviewed by the media insisted that 75% or more of the meeting had been with him. That was completely untrue. Nobody who had just been in the hall could possibly have agreed with that statement. You can watch the clip here:

The gentleman who interrupts Mackay was spot on which was embarrassing for him. However it got much worse for him because of the footage from inside the meeting that was being uploaded from various sources within an hour of the meeting ending. Also a number of people who attended the meeting (including myself) were blogging about it within hours.

What Mackay was trying to do was media manage a public meeting in a way that might have worked 20 or 30 years ago but was completely inadequate for one where video cameras can be cheaply and easily used by members of the public and there is a channel available to them to distribute them across the country (and the globe) within a few minutes of them getting home. He clearly thought that if he could just stick to his line that the meeting was largely with him then he could hold onto his job.

We now know that David Cameron called him the next morning and left him in no doubt that his position was untenable. Mr Cameron fully understands how the new world works and I expect the decision took him a few minutes at most. Rumour has it that he had watched one of the video recordings of the event.

I knew it was all over for Mr Mackay as soon as I saw the above TV clip. It was just too easy to prove that he was totally misrepresenting the mood of the meeting. It's the technology that did for him.

The second occurrence that makes it clear Mr Mackay is still practising politics in the old way is something that happened last week. He has accepted a position with a political lobbying firm. It has been reported that he will earn a six-figure salary and the statement from the company who will employ him makes it clear that they expect him to be able to wield influence within David Cameron's inner circle.

Andrew Mackay was one of the worst offenders in the MPs expenses scandal. Out of the more than 300 MPs who had to pay money back, the amount he was judged to have wrongly claimed was over £30,000 (and his wife a similar amount) which puts him third in the list of worst offenders. Against this backdrop, to go straight from being an MP to work for a lobbying firm earning the sort of money most people can only dream of specifically because of his perceived influence with the man the bookies have odds on to be our next Prime Minister leaves a very nasty taste in the mouth.

What makes it worse for Mackay is that the announcement came two days after David Cameron made a speech railing against the secretive lobbying industry and vowing to clean things up:

"We all know how it works. The lunches, the hospitality, the quiet word in your ear, the ex-ministers and ex-advisers for hire, helping big business find the right way to get its way. In this party, we believe in competition, not cronyism.

"So we must be the party that sorts all this out. Today it is a £2bn industry that has a huge presence in parliament. The Hansard Society has estimated that some MPs are approached over 100 times a week by lobbyists.

"I believe that secret corporate lobbying, like the expenses scandal, goes to the heart of why people are so fed up with politics. It arouses people's worst fears and suspicions about how our political system works."

That is a damning indictment of what Mackay (and the firm employing him) expects to be able to do straight after the election. Yet in the public utterances from my MP on the subject there appears to be no recognition of the reality of how badly he is coming across and how inappropriate it is for him to be making huge amounts of money from the influence he clearly thinks he still has (although I think his new employers might be in for a shock on that front).

These are two prime example of how an old political fixer has come unstuck for completely failing to understand the modern political landscape and how MPs need to behave in the age of YouTube and blogging and following the expenses scandal.

Mr Mackay's successors would do well to take note.

UPDATE 22:20: Paul Waugh also has a good post on Mackay and his wife (Julie Kirkbride) this evening where he draws our attention to the pretty devastating verdict (albeit couched in civil-service-ese) of Sir Paul Kennedy in his ruling on both of their appeals regarding their expenses.

I attended Andrew MacKay's meeting and I think his position is now untenable

I attended Andrew MacKay's meeting in Bracknell yesterday along with about 400 other constituents.

It was a very enlightening meeting. Beforehand I was asked by a radio interviewer what I thought and I stated that I felt he should stand down as an MP (as I have blogged about previously) but that I was interested to hear what he had to say.

There was an interesting vignette just before I entered the hall when a local constituent was trying to enter the hall with a camcorder and the man on the door was telling him that this would not be allowed. When both myself and the man queried why the response was that the instructions were to not let anyone in who was going to film it and that the media had been invited to do this. Peter Henley (BBC South's Political Editor) was right behind us and pointed out that the media actually weren't allowed to film inside the hall. I think this was a measure of how concerned Mr MacKay and his supporters were about what was about to transpire. As it turned out, the chap persisted and was eventually allowed to take his camcorder in and filmed the whole thing (I was sitting next to him).

The meeting got off to a shaky start when the Chairmen of the proceedings (David Osborn, former Rector of Bracknell) stated that we could of course expect "transparent honesty" from Mr MacKay and large parts of the audience broke out into derisive laughter. This must have been very embarrassing for a Member of Parliament of 25 years standing.

Mr MacKay gave a 10 minute speech where he outlined what had happened from his perspective. Here are the main points from my contemperaneous notes:

• He apologised "profoundly" for dragging the constituency into the expenses furore.
• He said that he took a "tough line" on MPs expenses. However I noted as wrote this that he voted against transparency last year.
• He said that as he submitted his claims to David Cameron's scrutiny team he had "no knowledge" of what was to come.
• He resigned because he thought he would be a distraction to what the Conservatives are trying to do.
• He said that he did not hide from the media.
• One of his main lines of defence was that he had "voluntarily" submitted his claims to the scrutiny panel and that he had spoken to the Daily Telegraph after his resignation and they said to him that they had not been going to run a story on him about this. He seemed to think that this fact was somehow in his favour. It is worth unpacking this a little bit. His claims that the submission was voluntary seems disingenuous. All Cameron's advisers had to submit them, if he had not done he would have surely been sacked so it was in effect compulsory. Also, just because the DT had not twigged the significance of Mr MacKay and Ms Kirkbride's situation does not seem to me to be any sort of defence.
• He said that he had taken advice from the fees office and they had not pointed out at all that there was any problem. A familiar defence from MPs caught up in this and cuts no ice with the public now. Why didn't HE think it was wrong?
• Finally he announced that he would put himself up for readoption by his local party in order that they could decide if following this scandal they still wanted him to stand but he insisted he would fight to remain as the MP and candidate. At this point, to me it seemed like he was pleading for his political life and it was not an edifying sight.

After this the meeting was opened up to questions/comments from the floor. There were far too many to list here but they were overwhelmingly negative about him and angry. Here is a flavour:

• One person stated that he did not wish to be represented by a thief.
• Another accused him of fraudulent behaviour.
• There were several questions and comments about why he did not live in the constituency. He did not have a good answer for this.
• Several commenters stated that he had damaged or ruined the constituency.
• I asked him how he responded to a poll on the Get Bracknell website where 65% of respondents (out of 628 votes) had said he should step down. His response was that was not the reaction he was getting from other people he had spoken to. I have to say though that the feeling from the hall seemed to me that more than 65% of people were against him.
• A former metropolitan Police Officer read out excerpts from the Green book on parliamentary expenses and concluded that Mr MacKay's actions based on that were fraud.
• One audience member quoted an e-mail exchange he had had with him where on the 12th May Mr MacKay had stated that anyone caught up in the scandal should lose the party whip. This was of course just before Mr MacKay himself got caught up in the scandal. the questioner than said: "So mr macKay, should you lose the whip". For me, this was the question of the night and Mr MacKay was all at sea. He did his best to get out of it and did so by not really answering.

And on, and on it went. There were a few positive comments but most of them still questioned his judgement and went on to say that he had let them down.

One contribution that sticks in my mind was from an elegant lady with a cut glass accent who described herself as dyed in the wool Conservative. She eulogised about how good he had been for Bracknell and that she would vote for him and support him if he wished to stand again but that for the good of the party he should step down because she feared that he had lost the support of the constituency. I felt that this was possibly the most devastating comment of the evening for Mr MacKay.

In the end I started to even feel a bit sorry for Mr MacKay. The barage was almost relentless and he cut a diminished figure as the meeting went on. He kept on standing up and replying but many of his responses were simply re-statements of his previous comments and he rarely dealt with the substance of the questions put to him.

However, what sympathy I had with him soon evaporated after the meeting when I saw his contributions on the media. He was trying to claim that the feeling of the meeting was with him and that 75% percent or more of the audience were with him. Clearly, that does not reflect the way I saw the meeting from where I was sitting. Watch this clip from BBC News where Mr MacKay is being interviewed by BBC South's Political Editor Peter Henley:

The gentlemen who interrupts Mr MacKay during the interview is absolutely right. He was misrepresenting the view of the meeting and another voice off camera later on points out that despite calls from the floor, the Chair of the meeting (David Osborn, the former Rector of Bracknell) refused to take a show of hands to gauge support towards the end.

In this piece from Sky News, Victoria Gatenby says that is is disingenuous for him to claim that he had the support of the meeting and that support is ebbing away from him, even amongst Conservative activists and that the feeling is he is unlikely to be reselected:

There has been further reaction to this story across the media and internet.

Here is the BBC News report on the meeting.

John Hicks from Radio Bracknell in a detailed and balanced review of the meeting thinks that the reaction within the hall may have signalled the beginning of the end for Bracknell's MP.

An article in the The Independent about the meeting and its aftermath quotes one of the comments from the floor that I also recall: "I have no wish to be represented by a thief".

This thread on the Conservative Home website (a site for Conservative grassroots activists) demonstrates the depth of Mr MacKay's problems. The majority the more than 40 comments at the end of the blog post are saying that he should stand down or be sacked.

Peter Henley, the BBC South Political Editor (who is an excellent and prodigious user of Twitter) tweeted this morning: "Tories saying MacKay is toast after last night. But spinning that Cameron wants to get in clean skins". He also tweeted to me that he is now off for a holiday. I don't blame him. I bet political editors across the country are totally knackered now!

Another interesting point that I have just read on Liberal Burblings is that according to a clip on "Have I Got News for You" last night, Mr MacKay's wife Julie Kirkbride was challenged on a local radio station 3 years ago that they were double claiming allowances and she put the phone down. This could be the final nail in the coffin of this story because it makes Mr MacKay's defence that he did not know it was wrong look increasingly shaky.

I await with interest what the consequences of last nights meeting and this new relevation will be.

If you wish to contribute to the debate locally, please go to this blog-post on Bracknell Blog and place a comment there.

UPDATE1: I almost forgot that I called into Iain Dale's (Conservative blogger and former PPC) politics phone in show on the internet based Play Radio UK last night. I outlined my feelings from the meeting and also got some interesting information from Iain that the re-adoption meeting is likely to only feature one candidate (Mr MacKay) and that it will be a take it or leave it affair. I had assumed that other candidates would also be put forward but I bow to Mr Dale's greater knowledge on these things than me! The show can be listened to online here. I am on from about 47:00 minutes until about 54:30 although I spend the first minute trying to find a better signal and being accused by Iain and Donal of calling them from the toilet! Scurrilous!

UPDATE2: I have changed the title of the blog post (from "I think Andrew MacKay's position is now untenable" to "I attended Andrew MacKay's meeting and I think his position is now untenable") to make it clear that I attended the meeting as I think this is an important detail.

UPDATE3: Andrew MacKay has now announced that he will stand down as an MP at the next election.

UPDATE4: Here is some footage of the meeting including questions from the audience and answers from Mr MacKay as well as audience reaction. I ask the second set of questions near the start.

Andrew MacKay's meeting in Bracknell

Andrew MacKay has just announced that the public meeting he has called for constituents to be able to cross-examine him about this will be this Friday 22nd May at 7:00pm at the Kerith Centre in Bracknell. It is a ticket only event and you need to call 01344 868286 or e-mail bracknellca@tory.org. The full details and map link are here.

I have managed to order a ticket today so I will be there but what I want to know is why have they gone for a ticket only event? Presumably they were concerned about numbers as Peter Henley indicated to me last week but making it ticket only will surely exclude some people. Andrew MacKay said that he would allow any constituent to ask him questions but it sounds like this might not happen now if more people wish to attend than there are tickets available.