Series 4 – Episode 6

This programme contains some strong language.

Tickel's dead!

I need to have the e-mail. I'll do it.

Are you for the chop, Mrs Murray?

Ha-ha(!) Very funny!

Quiet Batpeople on every fucking paper!

What are you doing at my computer?!

I'm bringing down Mannion by leaking an e-mail.

Mr Tickel's medical records were illegally acquired.

I have decided to stand down as leader.

The Guardian have received an e-mail from Fergus

with all of our comments about Mr Tickel underneath.

You were supposed to redact it, send the top e-mail,

not the whole fucking exchange!

If a government can't leak, do you know what happens?

Dark shit builds up.

What the fuck is going on? There's going to be an inquiry.

And then it bursts!

This is an inquiry into the death of Mr Douglas Tickel,

and the practice and culture of the dissemination of confidential information

between political parties and the public media.

Mr Weir.

Thank you, Lord Goolding.

Our first witness today is, er, is Mr Stewart Pearson.

No, it's... It's fine.

Er, yeah, um, I, Stewart Pearson, do sincerely declare and affirm

that the evidence I shall give will be the truth, the whole truth,

and, and nothing but, er, the truth.

On page 235 of your witness statement,

you describe yourself as the, the human router in government.

Can you, er, can you explain what you meant by that?

Um, I'm a-a router

in the sense that I control the governmental, informational

ingestion and egestion process.

Mr Pearson just to clarify -

your job is to make sure that the public perception

of your government's programme is a positive one. Is that fair?

It's not about perception. Yeah?

I believe in government as a transceiver, hm?

Transceiver.

Yeah, it's really important, sure, to give out a strong signal,

but to be effective, you've got to listen for an echo.

Could you possibly speak in plain English?

I'm sorry, I-I thought I was.

So what IS clear is that you are an important man, Mr Pearson.

I'm just a lad from Leeds with a lust for life, yeah?

There's an African proverb that's stuck with me, yeah?

"If you think you're too small to make a difference,

"you've never spent a night with a mosquito."

So...part of your job...

is to make sure that the government's message gets across clearly?

Is that right?

That's correct.

And despite the sarcasm marinating that question, I'm very successful in that endeavour.

No, there was no sarcasm intended at all, Mr Pearson.

Sorry, I must have misread your...face.

Does your job intrude on your home life?

No.

No, when I close the front door, I...

I'm no longer Stewart Pearson.

When you, when you...

I mean, when I...when I close it from the...from the inside.

You know, when I close it from the outside then I...

then I very much AM Stewart Pearson.

So who are you at home?

Er, I'm a husband,

I'm a...pardon me, a lover,

I'm a carpenter, I'm a cook, I'm a flautist.

A-a..? A flautist.

Right. I play the flute.

And I dabble on the Irish bodhran.

Erm, and would you like to express any remorse for Mr Tickel's death?

What would you like to say to his family?

Er, I would like to offer them maximum respect, you know?

And maximum remorse.

And maximum assurance that Mr Tickel did not die in vain.

We're here. You know?

How can we make the government and the media inclusive without being intrusive? Yeah...

And if we can answer that,

at least we can make sure there are no more Mr Tickels.

I mean that...I mean that not in the sense of, you know,

wiping out the Tickel family name.

I mean it in the sense that nothing like this will ever happen again.

Hello, Mr Pearson. Hi.

Tab 28 in your bundle there, page 263...

..a paper that you presented in 2006, The Iconography of Consensus.

Would you care to summarise the argument you present there?

Sure, yeah, the main thrust... Bearing in mind Lord Goolding's desire for plainness and clarity.

Right. OK.

Er, I hypothesise that...

Sorry.

I say...

..that the design structure for a parliamentary democracy

should be that of the Pompidou Centre.

Morally and structurally explicit and open,

a porous membrane.

Maybe just a little bit plainer, Mr Pearson.

People...

should know, er...

..what politicians are doing.

Brilliant.

Thanks.

Government should be porous?

Yes. But not leaking?

Come on. If someone is determined to leak information,

there's nothing that anyone can do about that.

So as Director of Communications,

you are unable to prevent sensitive material

being communicated to journalists?

If someone chokes on a packet of crisps, do you issue an arrest warrant for Gary Lineker?

Is it fair to say that you have in fact changed nothing,

and government communications carries on exactly as they did before, by leaks and whispers?

No, it is not fair to say that.

In fact, as you disapprove and condemn these practices,

are they not more covert and more hidden and more secret than ever before?

I think that is also an unreasonable assertion.

In spite of your desire to create a political Pompidou Centre,

haven't you created the opposite, Centrepoint?

Everybody sees it looming over them, but nobody has any idea what happens inside.

I think there's some kind of club on the top floor.

So, Mr Pearson, have you identified the source of the leak...

No. ..of Mr Tickel's records?

No. Have you ever leaked yourself?

No.

No, I was, I was over that pre-Britpop.

Do you have any idea where the leak might have come from?

Well, you know, if this was CSI Miami,

I guess we'd be looking for the person who had the most to gain from the leak being made public.

Well, er, despite your shirt, this ISN'T CSI Miami.

Who do you think would benefit most from the leak?

Well, I guess I'd be sending David Caruso knocking on the door of Mr Malcolm Tucker.

Can I ask you, how would you describe yourself?

Er, I'm a media strategist.

So you would be Stewart Pearson's opposite number?

Er, well, I'd be Stewart Pearson's opposite

in every possible way, I think.

TITTERING You have a lot of control and power over your party, don't you?

Ah-ha!

I wish, yes! Um, no.

I think that that's been overstated.

So this reputation you have as an enforcer,

that's completely misrepresenting you, is it?

It's baloney. Politicians who have to do things that they don't want to do,

such as resign...

er, because they've been caught with their fingers in the till, or, you know,

with their knickers up a flagpole or whatever, they...

sometimes it's very convenient for them to have a bogeyman.

"Malcolm made me do it." Well, I didn't make them do it.

These are people who just find themselves stuck in a room with one exit,

and I simply show them the door.

I've highlighted some quotes.

The Guardian.

"Malcolm Tucker has the physical demeanour and the political instincts

"of a velociraptor."

Yes, The Guardian, the newspaper that hates newspapers.

Telegraph... The Telegr-arse.

"Tucker's writ runs through the lifeblood of Westminster

"like raw alcohol, at once cleansing and corroding."

The Times.

"If you make eye contact with Malcolm Tucker,

"you have spilled his pint."

The Spectator. "Iago with a BlackBerry."

I mean, you're saying these quotes are, what, misguided?

The Spectator...! Um...

No, I'm saying you're taking these out of context, you're not contextualising these.

If you were to put them into a perspective, if you were to place them into the landscape,

you would see that there might be a lot of axes being ground here.

I don't see the difference between what you have just done and a leak, by the way.

The difference is that what I've just read out was not obtained illegally.

How do you know that?

You don't know what confidences have been breached

in order to form these opinions, for that is what they are.

So, you accept leaking as part and parcel of the political media machinery?

Yes, I mean if you didn't have leaking,

the newspapers would just be full of long-lense bikini shots,

and adverts for sheds, and offers to buy three pairs of trousers for a tenner, etcetera.

It's just... It's the way it is. Big deal, no-one dies.

One person did die, Mr Tucker.

Would you tell us how it works? You know, you do me a favour, I do you a favour. Yeah?

And what might you expect in return?

Anything. What?

Well, a Kit-Kat, you might get.

I've had a Kit-Kat, I've had, er, a-a big meal.

Could you give us an example?

Um... Well, yes.

I...

This is The Daily Mirror,

and I could get drummed out of the Magic Circle for showing you this.

Anyway, this is The Daily Mirror...

about the Quiet Batpeople, er, policy of Mrs Nicola Murray.

I was there that day. You can't see me cos I've been cropped out here,

but this information here, I made sure that those notes were in that place,

that they were available, and that the picture editor knew where to find them.

Sorry, I'm just trying to... trying to get this clear.

Was Mrs Murray not the subject of huge derision as a result of this?

Er, no she was a subject of huge derision before this.

LAUGHTER

But it was...

You were, you were trying to undermine the leader of your party?

I was...

Would you say you were a loyal man, Mr Tucker?

I'm loyal, yes. I'm loyal to my party

and I feel that Mrs Murray's policies were turning the party into...

I don't know if you've seen those calendars with pictures of dogs that are dressed up in...

They've got little dresses and hats on?

She was turning my party into that, she was humiliating my party,

so I thought it was absolutely vital

to focus the public's attention onto that.

And yet you maintain that you had great, I don't know, what, respect for Mrs Murray as a person.

Yeah. Yes. She was a great laugh occasionally. Great dancer.

She's got terrific...hair. LAUGHTER

She did a good job at DoSAC.

A much better job than her successor, who, let's not forget,

was playing on a slide when the news of Mr Tickel's death came out.

Thank you, Mr Tucker, we're well versed in the events surrounding the death of Mr Tickel.

So tell me,

the PFI e-mail that led to the...to the resignation of Nicola Murray.

Did you... Did you engineer that?

Mr Tucker? No. No.

No, I didn't.

And, er, the leaking of Mr Tickel's health records?

I mean, do I detect your hand in that, for instance?

No. No, no, no, no, no.

Look, politics is a war, and politicians,

sometimes they lose ideological limbs. Right?

They get media shrapnel right in the face.

Sometimes they get a bullet right in the brain.

Civilians know there is no way that I would ever attack a civilian,

a real person, and especially not somebody

with a history of mental illness.

Because that sort of thing...

makes me queasy.

So you're an ethical...leaker?

I use leaking to show up corruption, to show up hypocrisy,

to show up idiocy.

And also the fourth horseman of the political apocalypse, duplicity.

For instance, Fergus Williams...

He's coming up next, right? Mm-hmm.

This is a guy, he's a member of the junior party in this coalition, right?

This guy has already opened a private channel to Dan Miller,

the Leader of the Opposition,

in order to talk about possibly setting up a coalition with him,

because he knows very well that this coalition government that he is lumbered with

is being torn to pieces, like a bread stick at a picnic.

Mr Tucker, you have just used this inquiry

to commit a leak in front of us!

I've not committed a leak! Everybody in Westminster knows these talks have taken place. Everyone.

You're supposed to be investigating this, discovering this stuff.

Now, you cannot not know what I or anyone else tell you. Right?

You can't not know that. You cannot not know what you now know.

Mr Tucker, are you familiar with the rules of association football?

I understand if you're going to have an affair you'd better take precautions,