Walter Wolfgang and me…
This article was prompted by an anonymous facebook page alleging that I manhandled Walter Wolfgang out of Labor Party conference in 2005. For those of you who don’t know me, I’m the Town Clerk of a beautiful walled town on the border between England and Scotland — a middle aged bloke in a suit. To be described as a thug isn’t congruent with who I am in my working life today, so it merits some consideration if someone, even if it’s only a Facebook spitepage, thinks I am a thug.
Here are some reflections on what actually happened in 2005, and what that tells us about leadership and owning your own errors. It is a set of circumstances I have wanted to write about for some time, so, I suppose I must give thanks to whoever is behind that spitepage for this opportunity even if their motives were less than generous or honest.
These reflections start a year after Walter Wolfgang acquired celebrity, which fitted him rather too well, like a long anticipated gift that you’d abandoned all hope of receiving. I was standing outside Labour Party Conference in Manchester, in 2006, wearing a hi-viz vest and carrying a personal radio. I was one of the volunteer stewards, manning the entrance used for the media and VIPs. I’ve spent a lot of my working career in customer facing roles, and that’s exactly what stewards did, facing the customers and making conference work, providing directions, and advice while supporting the security operation that is an integral part of every political conference.
Every conference in those days was surrounded by a series of concentric rings of security. Stewards sat on the innermost ring, enabling delegates to feel as if they were being policed by people like them not the local constabulary. I relished the role, enjoying the challenges of making the space safer.
There was an intimate warmth about the role; even the minority of media people who lived down to the image of them as humourless self-important windbags were rewarding to deal with, unconsciously reinforcing stereotypes as they went along. The celebrities could be surprising too; Mick Hucknall was warm, funny, and down to earth. Gordon Brown, relaxed amongst his family, was the exact opposite of all those caricatures of him as stern and angry.
So there I was, nodding to the famous faces, as if they should know me, as if I knew them, when, a scruffy second hand car looking very out of place came up a street ordinarily closed to traffic. It drove past the lines of media people queuing for passes, and pulled up in front of the black gates from which police armoured convoys would periodically emerge. No need to panic. Not a security breach, or a lapse in the ring of steel around the event, just Labour’s newest NEC member being given permission to do what no-one else was allowed to do, and drive up to the closest possible point to the security checks.
Walter Wolfgang was in the car, and there was a curious irony about the way that it was my job, according to his personal assistant, to carry his bags into the conference hotel. Walter was too frail to carry them, and his assistant was too important. In four years of stewarding party conferences, his were the first and only bags I carried. Walter, lest any of us forget, was the people’s candidate, elected to Labour’s ruling body to promote his view of socialism. His bags, I imagine, were no heavier or lighter than anyone else’s. The senior party official who came down to meet him and smooth his journey through the security process was adamant however; if his bags needed carrying, I should carry them.
There was a personal irony to my being required to carry Walter Wolfgang’s bags. A year previously I was one of the stewards who escorted him from the building in Brighton. Walter’s overweening sense of entitlement in 2006 stemmed entirely from the aftermath of that 2005 incident, when the Labour Party was made to look clumsy, out of touch, and hopelessly divided amongst itself.
The removal of Walter Wolfgang in 2005 does more than give me cause to reflect on my troubled relationship with a party that should be, ideologically, closest to my world view. It’s an object lesson in leadership, in how mistakes made by leaders can be transmitted and amplified in good faith by team members to deliver outcomes nothing like the leader’s intentions.
The leaders in this case were not Tony Blair and his team, but the professional Labour Party team, who delegated conference control to volunteers led by managers. I was in a complicated position demanding nuance. As a member of Party Staff who’d volunteered to work at conference, I was expected to be loyal to the organizational leadership, and to be able to see the larger picture about what would reflect well on the party while leading a team of volunteers, looking after the VIP section of the conference centre.
On the morning of the Foreign Policy debate the stewards briefing was more intense than in previous days. Instead of focussing on the inevitable consequences of strict security, the endless debates with individuals about why they couldn’t bring their luggage into the main debating hall, there was a focus on the likelihood of demonstrations. A very senior Labour official briefed the meeting, then the chief steward, who I knew from by-elections and previous conferences, briefed us again. There was a consensus; the likelihood was that any demonstration would be small scale, and would probably focus on the balcony, where visitors sat, not the main hall. In my mind I had a vision of a banner draped over the balcony for the benefit of the TV cameras, or something being thrown. There was a plan, too; I would float from my role in the VIP and training area up to the balcony, and provide support to the team up there.
This all seemed rational; in fact it was couched in the language of risk assessment, of containment, and of our right to maintain an orderly debate for the majority of delegates who wouldn’t be protesting.
The problem was there was no degree of challenge to those assessments. No-one stopped and thought about what the alternatives were. No-one applied the first rule of gaming through responses to a risk, which is to ask ‘If we can figure this out, who else can?’
Looking back there was a certain risk of hubris being at large in the conference arena. The Iraq invasion of 2003 was controversial, ill thought through and bitterly opposed by many within the Labour Party. Almost despite those people, Labour had won another election victory in 2005 and there was no sense, culturally, within the organization, of having anything to apologize for.
Looking back, the insight that we weren’t in the right frame of mind to assess how our actions might look to the outside world is intense and overpowering. What were we thinking, that we could police dissent how we wished and escape criticism? It was foolish, and it was a belief produced and repeated throughout the organization.
These are leadership questions that I couldn’t have answered at the time, but which I know I try to answer now. Who was providing the external input, the critical friendship that might have led us to stop and think about what could possibly go wrong?
Looking back, it was obvious it was going wrong from the moment the conference hall opened. Broadcast organizations who’d shown no interest in the public gallery appeared there as if by magic. Some of my colleagues suspected conspiracy; I suspect they just did the same analysis we did about where and why there’d be a demonstration. The sight of delegates choosing to be in the gallery, not in the main hall, should have given cause for concern. None of that was reflected on, or considered. Instead it contributed to an all pervasive sense that something was going to go wrong, but no-one knew what, or how to deal with it.
Would it have been so bad if one lone voice, raised in the public gallery by a man who couldn’t get elected to attend as a delegate, had been rude about Jack Straw? Probably not, but events unravelled as if that option had not been considered. I’ve never been clear in my own mind if that option was considered but discarded before the stewards were briefed, or if it was never considered. My understanding, now, is that it was probably never considered; my experience of good leaders is that even when options have been discarded they tell their team which options have been discarded andwhy, Those briefings, that morning had nothing of that feel.
At the time two stewards moved in to remove Walter Wolfgang and Steve Forrest, I wasn’t in the gallery. From my position on the landing I could see a TV screen, and could see from the reactions of the audience in the hall that something was happening. I ended up trailing the confusion of stewards and outraged delegates onto the opposite landing, where things got really interesting. Wolfgang and Forrest were in a stairwell, talking to a senior organizer. I was on the landing, between the assembled members of the press and the doors. I remember a camera in my face, getting bored saying ‘please go to the press office’, and fighting the paranoid belief that someone was standing on my foot deliberately to get a reaction. Howver bad I looked, or intransigent, no-one went through that door until I did, relieved of my duties by a press officer and free to organize how we got Walter Wolfgang out of the building.
In a way that I have recognized since I felt totally in control of my tiny part of a situation that was about to career completely out of control because of choices made hours earlier. The decision, at the briefing, to play up to stewards the risk of the party being embarrassed by a demonstration, and the power to exclude those who did make a protest, led directly to those moments where I repeated the same words about the press not being allowed to see what was happening to a camera held by a man who I was closer to physically than was entirely comfortable.
The rest of what followed was chaotic, and clumsy, and hopelessly naive. The decision to rescind Walter Wolfgang’s visitor pass meant he got turned away by police at the gates to the secure conference site, which led to anti terrorism law being cited as the source of the police powers to send him away. Senior Labour politicians, aware both of the poor optics associated with the ejection and the aftermath, sought to put clear water between themselves and the party leadership. Party members, frustrated by the gap between them and the leadership, then embraced a fringe figure like Walter Wolfgang as if he was something more than, in electoral terms, an irrelevancy. He became a useful symbol of how they felt to disengaged party members who had nothing more in common with him than a belief that the party had somehow taken a wrong turning.
Later on in the day, as the attempt to manage the situation grew, I felt an overwhelming sense of the stewards being abandoned. One was disappeared almost immediately, moved to a hotel. I was told to keep my head down. As minor figures like the NEC member from local government denounced the ejection, and plans were hatched to welcome Walter Wolfgang back with open arms, another steward stalked the corridors of the conference centre, passing on messages about which newspapers had approached him, and how he felt cut off from a machine that regarded him as collateral damage. Inevitably, since no-one reached out to him sufficiently, the newspaper stories about him feeling he had done no wrong followed.
I watched, and learned the hard way, that leadership in a crisis includes keeping on board those who may have made mistakes, not least because they can help us understand what we did wrong. Some mistakes are unique, and atypical, but it’s folly of the highest order to assume that we can treat all mistakes like that, and it’s poor leadership to make those who have made mistakes feel as if blame attaches to them for something that arises from the environment and culture they’re working in.
By the next night, the last night of conference, I was happy to settle for a kebab in my bedroom having been warned off the staff party in case my presence was noted. I wouldn’t have been good company anyway as I was deeply concerned about how the problem, as I already thought of it, had occurred.
One year later, in Manchester, I concluded that the insistence on managing the optics for the press, on making the pictures that tell the story look right, had not changed. The conclusion from Brighton was about operational issues; overzealous stewards, poor thinking through of the removal of the visitors accreditation, not about the big issues of how the situation was created, about the culture of a party that could not countenance one lone voice baracking Jack Straw.
Six months after Brighton I was no longer a Labour employee, having negotiated my compromise agreement. I’m not sure I’d ever go back, and certainly not in the current environment. Six months after Manchester I was no longer a councillor. I never want to be one again. Those moments in front of the camera at Brighton, which I was never formally de-briefed on (did I do all right? Did I feel all right?) contributed to those feelings, just as my experience as an impromptu porter at Manchester did. It took years to work through my ambivalence, letting my name go forward to selection panels then withdrawing, or putting myself in positions where I could not stand because of my job. Reflecting on that behaviour convinces me that I was more touched by what happened at Brighton, as much to others as to me, than I wanted to admit.
As someone who studies and tries to learn from leadership, I can’t help but feel that at Brighton, the message communicated to the stewards was that they were disposable, that the show must go on. The lack of any kind of due process was clear and obvious; when the afternoon session commenced and a rousing denunciation of Walter Wolfgang’s exclusion was issued, no-one had asked me what happened. Never mind whether the decisions were right or wrong, or the messages right or wrong, the organization was wrong to leave individuals feeling as if they were not needed or considered. Those are lessons I try to take into my everyday work, but it’s a far cry from the spiteful claims that I was the thug who manhandled Walter Wolfgang out of conference.
