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When did Tom Baldwin go left - or was he always there ?  As the new director of strategic communications of the Labour Party, he's convinced Ed Miliband of his credentials. But Tom's career so far flirts with newspapers with very different political agendas. 

It might have started at secondary school. Tom went to Lord Williams's, a comprehensive in Thame, Oxfordshire, where one of his friends was Andrew Hood.  Both went on to study Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford - Tom, following the footsteps of his father to Balliol College, Oxford, and notching up a 2.1. Andrew went on to work for Tony Benn, Robin Cook, Geoff Hoon, before failing to win a constituency to fight as an MP, and moving instead to lobbying.

At Balliol, Tom overlapped with Boris Johnson (they now don't speak), Sheila Watson (who went on to work as a special advisor to Labour ministers) and Stephanie Flanders. David Cameron, Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper were at other colleges.

In 1990, Tom embarked on a career as a scribbler, covering council meetings for the Newbury Weekly News. In the Conservative heartlands of West Berkshire, this was Liberal Democrat peak-time, and Tom talks of "sacrificing his social life to journalism".   An anonymous blogger writes of the period: "He had excellent local political antennae – mostly developed – ahem – in close conversation in convivial environs. [His editor]  used to boast of having to escort him to the washrooms in the morning to get him tidied up ready for reporting duty.  It was obvious that he was left-leaning, which... was rather reassuring and refreshing".

Then it was on to become a lobby correspondent at Westminster for the Johnston Press, serving papers as far apart as The News, Portsmouth, the Sunderland Echo - and the Hartlepool Mail.  This brought him to the attention of Peter Mandelson.

In 1998 our Tom emerged as political editor of The Sunday Telegraph.  It was a hard life, he says. "On a Sunday paper, the political editor works a 36-hour shift every weekend, starting on Friday morning and working through to Saturday night". One can't imagine how he got through it - unless it was with the emerging love of a good woman.  Rebecca Nicolson, his future wife, of the Sissinghurst Nicolsons, was also working at the paper.   Tom's scoop at the Telegraph was a leaked copy of the MacPherson report into the death of Stephen Lawrence - an exclusive which Home Secretary Jack Straw tried and eventually failed to stop with injunctions.

In 1999,  Tom moved to The Times as Deputy Political Editor. Philip Webster, the No 1, professed himself to be delighted (but they moved further apart later when Tom stormed out of a party conference in Bournemouth, after failing to get pieces to write).   On his appointment to The Thunderer, Tom told PR Week: "It is true that this Government has a great desire to control the news agenda.  Alastair Campbell is currently boycotting the Sunday lobby completely. On the other hand, journalists can be too obsessed with political PR people.  Spin doctors can be useful.  Most of the time they give you a 30-page document written in Government-speak and will tell where the interesting bit is.  That's actually very helpful."



When Alastair Campbell arrived to give ­evidence to the 2003 Hutton inquiry into the death of Dr David Kelly, he was, says the Mail, given a good-luck hug by his friend Tom Baldwin.  On the 9th July 2003, Baldwin's bylined story named Kelly as Andrew Gilligan's main source for the BBC Iraq dossier story.

Greg Dyke says of Baldwin: "When I was still running the BBC I once asked Robert Thomson, Baldwin's editor at the Times, why he didn't sack Baldwin, as he wasn't an independent journalist at all but a mouthpiece for Downing Street. He replied: 'He gets good stories,' which missed the whole point. The reason that Baldwin got good stories from Downing Street was that he was [Alastair] Campbell's man; he acted as their messenger."

In 2005, Tom was given a transcript of private remarks made by Today presenter John Humphrys, handed over by Tim Allan, then running his own lobbying firm, Portland, but previously a senior advisor to Tony Blair.  The lead story that resulted was something of a squib, and not long afterwards, Tom embarked on four years as Washington Correspondent, taking Rebecca and their two children with him.

Last year he came back.  To the large Georgian terraced family home in Highbury with a very red door.  And a spell as Chief Reporter for The Times.   Now, however, the direction of travel is explicitly left.     
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