Pagers, BlackBerrys And The PM's Email: Westminster Has Long Grappled With New Technology
4 min read
Senior Government’s use of WhatsApp to discuss high level decisions, and all the associated accountability issues, has been a major talking point of 2023.
But while the platform is new, MPs having trouble grappling with new technologies making their way into official communications are far from it. Before smartphones, there was once a time when Westminster was bedevilled by pagers.
Pagers – a pocket sized device that allowed individuals to quickly receive voice messages in the form of digital text – were among the ways a new wave of MPs were given their instructions from whips and superiors in 1997. All of the key political players had them at the time, including Tony Blair, his director of communications Alistair Campbell.
Gisela Stuart, who served as a minister in Blair’s government, remembers the chaos that could ensue when the use of parliamentary pagers was common.
“The funniest anecdote with a pager was the Second Reading of the Finance Bill – so arguably the most important vote – on the same evening England were playing a qualifying match for the World Cup," she told PoliticsHome.
"Ahead of the expected vote at 10.30pm, a message went out saying the vote will be after extra time or penalty shootouts, whichever is later.
“And it kind of put things into perspective. Which was more important, the second reading of the Finance Bill, which gives legal force to the budget, or football? It was clearly the football."
Stuart also recalled pagers regularly malfunctioned and resulted in her receiving numerous messages from Labour and Conservative MPs which were not intended for her.
"Of course, if numbers [on the pager] got garbled, messages could end up being sent out to the wrong person,” she said.
“My favourite, which I never managed to work out who it was meant for, was one which said: ‘and by the way, I don’t snore’.”
More recently ministers have been accused of being flippant with their use of language and criticisms levelled at colleagues over WhatsApp, but according to Blair’s former political secretary John McTernan, a similar tone has long echoed around Westminster, there’s just less of a record of it with older technologies.
“I imagine if you ever got hold of all the pager traffic they’d be as revealing as the WhatsApp traffic for the Covid inquiry,” told PoliticsHome.
"The thing about communication in politics is it is hard. If it wasn't hard, you wouldn't have to employ professionals. And the idea that the new channels make it easier to communicate is only true in terms of the means, not the end."
Former Labour minister Margaret Hodge said a pager mishap once caused her to miss a crucial opportunity to grill prime minister Blair in the Commons.
"Suddenly my pager goes off. It's my 15-year-old daughter at home, who is supposed to be revising for GCSEs, saying ‘mum, ring home, panic," she told PoliticsHome.
Hodge dashed out of the chamber to phone home, fearing that her house could be on fire or some other emergency, only to find that all her daughter was worried about was whether she had remembered to make sure her pager was on silent so it would not loudly go off behind Blair during a big moment at PMQs.
But while MPs were busy keeping their pagers under control, the political establishment was otherwise slow on adopting other technologies. When Blair reportedly switched to email in 2003 in a bid to try and engage with the public ahead of the general election two years later, only two-thirds of MPs had an email address, and were regularly using them for campaigning.
"New Labour's so-called spin machine was widely reported to be at the cutting edge of change, carving out a new role for strategic communications in politics. But the sad reality is that the person supposed to be directing that communications strategy was in the dark ages when it came to technology," Blair’s former communications director Campbell told The Guardian in 2006.
He told the paper that he didn’t use a computer during his entire time working for Blair in Downing Street. “This was not any old decade of course, but the one in which computer technology advanced further and faster than during any period in our history," he said.
Even when email became more commonplace and portable there were drawbacks for those working in Blair's administration. McTernan said staff were banned from using a BlackBerry as they were told they were “hackable”.
In a pre-smartphone Westminster gossiping on the whole took place the old fashioned way: in person.
Former cabinet minister Ben Bradshaw, who served under Gordon Brown and Blair, recalled that much of the contact between the press and MPs was "physical".
"The lobby was much busier then, journalists would tend to mill around in the lobby,” he said.
“The lobby is almost double in size but devoid of journalists these days."
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