Secret life of the adviser: stopping power naps in corridors of power

WHEN you’re a political adviser, media assumes a) you spend your time training politicians to tell lies, b) you share the views of whoever’s employing you, and c) you might be good for a leak.

They also hold you personally responsible.

“How could you LET Head-the-Ball say X?” they will ask.

The adviser gets dangerous pleasure from the flattery implicit in the question, which is that they know YOU would never have told him to say X, because you — of course — are as intelligent/liberal/literate/generally as acceptable as the journalist is.

It’s always tempting, in this situation, to shruggingly hint that X is a moron who doesn’t appreciate or obey the brilliant adviser he has.

The real answer, of course, is that the adviser neither has control over Client X, nor illusions about such control.

Advisers have the jammy job. If a government falls or a spokesman gets the boot, as far as the adviser is concerned, the caravan moves on and another client comes onto the books.

The former clients, on the other hand, have no such options. Politicians removed from office, voluntarily or involuntarily, experience degrees of exclusion ranging from the mildly hurtful to the psychologically crippling.

The first time you’re hired to advise a politician, particularly a minister, you buy in to the illusion of power.

You come up with a brilliant, courageous, innovative idea, interest your minister in it, and start crafting the speech they’ll give to announce the new policy.

It takes a while before you realise that your big idea has to get clinically tested and costed as if it were the new drug in a pharma company’s pipeline.

The minister asks the director-general of the department to “move on this”. The director-general nods gravely and tosses it to someone down the line. It pitches up on the desk of a principal officer, who rolls the eyes. The eye-roll signifies “Oh God, an adviser idea filled with photo-opportunities, spurious by nature, trivial in intent and above all, breathtakingly arrogant in its assumption that none of us thought of it before now.”

Depending on the clout of the minister, the seriousness with which the adviser is taken and the mood of the day, the idea then gets lost or churned through a process of demographic, environmental, economic and operational testing a bit like the way human sewage goes through layers of gravel and stones in a primitive sanitation station.

That’s the process that would begin if, for the sake of argument, an adviser suggested to Eamon Ryan that it would be a great idea to stop Bord na Móna cutting away the biggest and best carbon sink this country has.

If Mr Ryan were to mention the idea at the Cabinet table (which he wouldn’t, because there’s no flies on him) the taoiseach would favour him with a look that would shrivel him down to his sinews, Brian Cowen having bits of bog in his constituency and knowing to the last euro the number of constituents’ salaries implicit therein.

IF an adviser were to put the same notion to Phil Hogan, Fine Gael’s environment spokesman, the process would be quicker. Mr Hogan would favour the adviser with a knowing sideways smile.

You poor so-and-so, the smile would say. Nice try, the smile would say. Forget it, the smile would say.

Another reason big ideas get lost in the wash is that their originators get sucked into areas they never imagined they’d get near.

For example, advisers become conduits for the messages nobody else wants to deliver.

“Would you ever tell yer man to stop saying he predicted things 10 years ago,” one of his colleagues will mutter.

“He didn’t. And it’s driving the rest of us nuts.”

In my time, I’ve been asked by one politician to deliver messages to other politicians as varied as “Your deodorant, assuming you’ve encountered the concept, isn’t working” and “If you think nobody has spotted you playing offside with yer wan, you’re mistaken.”

The smelly or unfaithful politician doesn’t have to be your client.

Politicians know that good news is best delivered up close and personal, whereas bad news is best delivered at a distance, and any adviser will serve that purpose.

Even though their big ideas rarely get implemented in the way they’d like, advisers develop a fierce, even ferocious attachment to the idea and their client alike.

No matter how obscure or hopeless is the politician to whom they are attached, every adviser harbours a secret (and sometimes not-so-secret) belief that their man or woman will someday become leader or even taoiseach and is convinced that promiscuous sharing of information or ideas with another politician’s adviser might get in the way.

That said, advisers do, of course, occasionally get asked to solve an intractable problem another politician’s adviser hasn’t managed to fix. I was once contacted by an adviser who usually treated me with the distant civility you’d use if you met a diseased rat in the garage with the sweeping brush out of your reach.

It was in the middle of a referendum campaign. He had a problem. Or, rather, his employer had a problem.

“He keeps going to sleep,” the adviser said. “He always has,” I pointed out, knowing his client’s attention span would be easily beaten by that of a housefly and the housefly would have the advantage of constant sobriety.

“Yeah, but now everybody can see him. He’s up on platforms facing the audience and when he goes asleep, it’s just awful.”

I said to the adviser what one always says when one doesn’t have a clue: “Leave it with me.” Clumsily putting down the phone, I knocked over a container of pens. Along with the pens, a narrow box tumbled out. It contained a gadget American truckers use to prevent themselves falling asleep at the wheels of their semis.

A yoke like an external hearing aid that gets clipped behind the wearer’s ear, cleverly wired so that when the head tips forward in sleep, it triggers the technology into a ghoulish scream nobody could sleep through.

I’d bought the device years earlier, hoping to persuade the man in my life to use it on long journeys.

The man in my life had looked at me as if I was asking him to wear a puce feather boa and told me what to do with it.

Having accidentally found the solution to the other adviser’s problem, I waited 48 hours (to establish I’d subjected the problem of the sleeping politician to much research and concentrated consideration) before I couriered the gadget over to his office.

The adviser then glued it to his man’s ear, combed his hair over it, and, watching from the wings of a town hall that night, witnessed how successful it was.

The two politicians on either side of the potential sleeper were mystified by the brief train-whistle noises emitted by the left side of his head that evening, but the adviser told them there was something up with the town hall’s sound system.

It wasn’t The West Wing. But it worked.