Summary:
I begin in 1985, already fluent in the language of Westminster whispers and late-night plotting, when Sarah Hyde walks into my carefully managed world like a wrecking ball in a silk blouse. I am a rising Labour strategist in the long winter of Thatcher’s rule, obsessed with message discipline, image, and the arithmetic of power. She is a caustic, brilliant reporter at The Guardian, allergic to euphemism and instinctively distrustful of everything I represent.
Our story unfolds as my private confession, written in hindsight across the long arc from the mid-eighties to the Labour landslide of 1997. It is my attempt, finally, to strip away the spin from my own life. I speak directly from the smoky committee rooms, the windowless campaign offices, the cheap hotel bars after defeats, the high-ceilinged drawing rooms after victories, and the beds we share while trying to manage the story of a country that no longer believes in stories.
Against the backdrop of Thatcher’s Britain, the miners’ strike echoes through every speech and every editorial, even as both parties reposition for the post-industrial future. As her government battles unions, reshapes the economy, and hardens a whole nation’s sense of class and grievance, Sarah and I play our own quieter war. She hunts the truth. I manufacture it. We collide on picket lines, at party conferences, in late-night off-the-record briefings where we should be enemies and instead become something far more dangerous to each other.
Each chapter tracks a turning point in both British politics and in our bond. The bitter aftermath of the miners’ defeat. Labour’s attempts to modernise under new leadership. The television age of politics, when image begins to matter as much as conviction. The slow erosion of Thatcher’s authority and the leadership battles that follow her fall. The creeping sense, through scandal after scandal, that politics has become one long performance and that I am its stage manager.
Through all this, Sarah and I slide from adversaries to reluctant allies to fully accomplice. The line between professional contact and personal obsession blurs almost from the start. Our first long arguments are half interview, half flirtation. Our first kiss comes immediately after a vicious row about whether my party has sold out its soul. From there, intimacy and strategy intertwine. Sex becomes another arena where control and surrender are negotiated, where confessions are teased out, where loyalties are tested.
We design narratives together. I feed her, carefully at first, the stories that help my side and harm my enemies. She challenges, bargains, and occasionally bites back. Soon we are co-writing the subtext of an entire era: which scandals ignite and which die in a single column inch; which rumours are buried in exchange for something more useful later; who is destroyed in the press and who is miraculously redeemed. Our pillow talk mixes polling figures with private fears. Our arguments about ethics frequently end with both of us in bed, trying to take back in flesh what we have just given away in principle.
Yet we maintain one rule that neither of us ever breaks. There are stories that could end me: the murky finances, the borderline-legal arrangements, the private weaknesses that my enemies would weaponise without a second thought. There are choices she makes that could destroy her reputation as a serious journalist: the sources betrayed for my sake, the inconvenient truths she blunts, the quiet ways in which she becomes a mouthpiece for someone she once despised. We know each other’s worst vulnerabilities. We will use everything else as leverage, but we will never annihilate the other.
Over the years we nearly break that promise. As Labour struggles, tears itself apart, and slowly rebuilds, we find ourselves on opposite sides of particular battles. Sarah’s editors push her toward stories that would make my life impossible. My colleagues push me toward tactics that would smear her as biased, compromised, or worse. There is a moment when I give her a leak so perfectly crafted and so poisonous that it almost forces her to choose between me and every principle she has ever claimed to hold. There is another when she buries evidence that would save innocent people great harm, simply because exposing it would cripple my project at a crucial point. The cost of every act draws blood from somewhere.
The book follows real historical markers not as background decoration, but as pressure points on our relationship. Miners picketing in the cold as we debate class and loyalty. The ideological convulsions inside Labour as it tries to adapt to a Britain re-shaped by privatisation and financialisation, while we wrangle over whether compromise is survival or betrayal. The poll tax protests, Thatcher’s downfall, and the bruising leadership contests that follow: each moment intensifies my hunger to win and Sarah’s unease at what winning requires.
As the 1990s dawn and the party inches toward a modernised, media-savvy identity, I finally occupy the role I was built for: the indispensable architect of message, the quiet operator behind the leaders who stand at lecterns and promise a new dawn. The closer we get to power, the higher the price of any misstep. An ill-timed article from Sarah could derail a whole strategy. A careless spin from me could implicate her in something she cannot defend professionally. We begin to plan more meticulously together, writing not only headlines but also silences. What is not printed becomes as important as what is.
Our private life mirrors this escalation. The sex grows more urgent, more knotted with fear and triumph. Vulnerability is rationed. Arguments are fiercer, because any disagreement now carries career-ending potential. We are both in too deep, not just in love, but in shared guilt. If she is exposed as the strategist’s lover and covert collaborator, she loses the moral authority she has spent a decade building. If I am unmasked as a man whose closest confidante is someone ostensibly holding us to account, my reputation as a brilliant, ruthless operator evaporates into ridicule and suspicion.
By the time the Labour landslide of 1997 arrives, the country sees a glossy, disciplined machine sweeping aside nearly two decades of Conservative rule. My colleagues congratulate themselves on message discipline and voter targeting. Journalists, including Sarah’s peers, toast the great democratic correction in London bars. In public, it looks like triumph and renewal. In private, I am writing this confession, wrestling with a single question: at what point did we stop pretending we were on opposite sides of the game?
We marry not as a happy-ever-after reward, but as a recognition of what we have already become. Partners in crime. Two people who have lied for each other, corrupted each other, and protected each other with a ferocity that surprises us both. Our union is both a compromise and a declaration: we choose each other fully, knowing exactly how compromised we already are.
The book does not ask the reader to admire me. It does not ask them to absolve Sarah. It invites them instead into the intoxicating, corrosive intimacy that forms when a strategist and a journalist decide, secretly, to align. It is about how politics in Thatcher’s Britain and beyond teaches you that truth is negotiable, that loyalty is a tradable asset, and that love can survive only if it learns to live with shared corruption.
In this first-person narrative, I peel back the layers of spin I once wrapped around myself so expertly. I show, scene by scene, how public narratives are built, how scandals are manufactured or suffocated, how ideals are chipped away in committee rooms, and how two people who should have been adversaries learn to weaponise their connection. The tone is confessional and often yearning, but also cold when it needs to be. I admit where I lied, to others and to myself. I admit what it cost to win.
Spin, Secrets, and Sarah Hyde is not the story I would have told in a briefing note or an after-dinner speech. It is the story I tell when I finally stop performing, when the lights of the television studios have gone out, when the election night balloons have gone limp, and I am alone with the only person whose judgment I fear more than the electorate’s. Hers.
