In the second instalment of our three-part interview with Guernsey Chief Minister Deputy Gavin St Pier, Rosie Allsopp finds out how he successfully navigated 63,000 people through a pandemic
From the outset, the panel of three were clear with islanders that they didn’t have all the answers, though they took the time to answer as many questions from the public as possible. Media briefings took place three times a week at one stage in the crisis and time was regularly set aside to answer questions and concerns from islanders. Deputy St Pier was also very clear that they wouldn’t have all of the answers but he listened and where he couldn’t answer a question there and then, he’d go away and try and come up with a response in time for the next briefing.
It was a strategy that was very much appreciated by islanders. Island Global Research, a company that carried out weekly surveys of people living in Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man taking the ‘temperature’ of islanders and gauging their responses to the way governments in the three jurisdictions were handling the crisis. Guernsey consistently scored highly with the population saying they had faith that their leaders had their best interests at heart and were doing a good job. He says it was an unconscious choice to lead that way.
Clear Communication
“That’s who I am, really. It’s not an approach as such. It wasn’t a conscious choice, it was a reflection of the reality as I saw it. We recognised the need to provide messages of reassurance to the community so that we didn’t experience things like panic buying but also we felt, I felt, that reassurance can only be bought on the back of a very honest dialogue.
“In the context of something that self-evidently was novel, hence the term novel virus, anything that smacked of over-confidence that we had all the right answers and had made all the right decisions would, by definition, lack credibility and be hubristic. When I made those statements I wasn’t consciously thinking about how they would be received by the public. It’s only with hindsight that people have played that back to me.
“To me it makes perfect sense that the public would say: ‘yes, that chimes with us because how could you possibly have all the answers?, How could you possibly expect to make no mistakes because no-one’s ever done this before’.
“I think the only conscious decision we did make with regard to communication was that we decided that we wanted to be consistent and concise. That’s why we have fielded the same team. We’ve looked at other jurisdictions that were fielding different people every day and we could see the difficulties in that. It’s not just about content, it’s about tone and manner as well and we felt that the best way to build that rapport was to be consistent and that meant presenting the team that we did. That was more a reflection of who we are as opposed to a tactic.”
In this together
I tell him that it didn’t feel like a tactic to those of us in the media who attended those briefings, day in, day out. It felt like we were all on a journey together with him leading us, hand on the tiller, calm and steady as we navigated our way through.
“It’s interesting you say that because being on a journey together does describe it. I did feel that. In essence, I suppose that’s Guernsey Together. That sense that as Chairman of the Civil Contingencies Authorities gave me access to information more quickly than it did to most people but the reality is, is we are all on that same journey. I think that sense of shared experience was probably helping to inform the personal style of communication as well. If that’s how it was experienced for you as a recipient, that probably was reflecting how I was feeling it as the person transmitting that information.”
Family man
Those who’ve followed Deputy St Pier’s career as a politician will know that he’s also very much a family man, a devoted husband and father of three. As well as serving the island as our most senior politician, he was also balancing his responsibilities at home. It must have been surreal, signing orders to shut the borders and to compel people to stay in their homes and then going home to cook the dinner and walk the dog. He says his was like any other family when it came to deciding what to do as the situation unfolded.
“We had some decisions to make in relation to the family. At the time all three of my children were off-island so as with everybody else we didn’t know how long it was going to last. Should they come back to the island and if so how quickly and all of those sorts of things. Mixing in those sorts of personal family decisions together with the decisions on behalf of the community was an interesting dynamic.
“I’ve also got my mother living on her own in West Sussex and my father-in-law in a care home in Poole, so thinking about the isolation from them as well and how those things are managed. So in that sense we faced a familiar set of family challenges.”
Did it inform his decision making as a politician?
“Not overtly but I guess in the sense of having empathy and understanding of the issues and the impact of the decisions and how that was going to affect the community I guess, yes, inevitably because in that sense we were all in the same boat. I think that probably helps give some sense of the impact.”
See Friday’s Business Eye for the third and final instalment of our interview with Deputy Gavin St Pier where he discusses the challenges ahead as Guernsey moves out of lockdown and into the unknown.
