A senior Labour party figure made a covert call to Nick Robinson, offering him a role as Ed Miliband’s spin doctor, the BBC’s political editor has claimed.

In his year-long journal of events leading up to Britain’s 2015 general election, Election Notebook: The Inside Story of the Battle Over Britain’s Future and My Personal Battle to Report It, Robinson describes the call coming through in the summer of 2014 on “a rather bad mobile line” from a Labour contact making a rather surprising offer.

“The party knows it has a problem and is determined to fix it,” the Labour figure told Robinson, saying there were concerns about Miliband’s “presentational difficulties”.

“The leader needs advice, and it has to come from someone with sufficient stature to ensure he’ll listen to it.”



Robinson writes in Election Notebook, published on 11 June and serialised in the Mail on Sunday, that he initially struggled to work out what the caller was getting at, until “it began to dawn on me that I had misheard”.

“I was being asked whether I would consider taking on the job of spin doctor, with a role at No 10 to follow, naturally. That’s right – me,” he said. “For the rest of the conversation I had to resist the urge to roar with laughter and inquire whether the caller had got the wrong number,” Robinson reports.

The offer from a senior Labour figure, which Robinson says he thought might have been made without Miliband’s knowledge, will come as a particular surprise as Robinson is a former president of the Oxford University Conservative Association.

He had been criticised by Labour after reporting some of the party’s uncomfortable moments during the general election campaign.

Robinson confirmed that Miliband had said he wanted to “weaponise” the NHS as an election issue, a phrase that came up in a meeting with BBC executives. It was a quote that would come back to haunt the Labour leader in several exchanges at prime minister’s questions.

Robinson also reported a damaging comparison made by Labour aides about Miliband speaking out about tax avoidance. Robinson said Labour saw it as a “Milly Dowler moment”, when Miliband had spoken out about the hacking of the murdered schoolgirl’s mobile phone by tabloid reporters.

Robinson later clarified that it had not been a direct quote from any aide in particular, but Labour’s spokesman furiously denied any of the aides had used the phrase.

Robinson was previously rumoured to have been approached to work for the Tories. Both Craig Oliver, David Cameron’s communications chief, and the now ex-Labour leader’s spin doctor Tom Baldwin, are former journalists, for the BBC and the Times respectively

Robinson writes that he wasn’t tempted by the Labour offer. “I politely expressed my thanks for being considered and explained I remained committed to journalism (just as I did when the papers reported a long time ago that I’d been approached to work for ‘the other side’,” he says.

The broadcaster, whose book also describes his battle to cover the election while being treated for a cancerous tumour on his lung, has not spoken publicly about the offer before, but says he could not resist telling his staff and his wife about the “extraordinary” approach.

“I have no idea whether this approach was made with Ed Miliband’s knowledge or, as is more likely, by someone freelancing to try to be helpful, but as I walk down Whitehall, I phone my wife and say: ‘You’ll never guess what’,” he writes.

The BBC editor also reports getting equal amounts of criticism from both Labour and Conservative spin doctors for his coverage of the election campaign. “Every broadcast and tweet is followed by a stream of complaints that I’ve ignored this or not emphasised that,” he writes.

Robinson reports once having to reproach the No 10 communications chief, telling Oliver he could not know in advance about his analysis and he would have to “watch the News at Ten like everyone else”.