Inside Story: Politics, Intrigue and Treachery from Thatcher to Brexit. Philip Webster
off in Oman – where he went off to the desert to see the sultan, on his way between Mumbai, India, and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia – Downing Street officials announced that he was taking legal action against the New Statesman & Society and Scallywag over the allegations about his private life. Clare Latimer also took action.
News that the New Statesman had repeated rumours that had appeared in the satirical magazine the previous month reached Major and his team very late the previous night in Bombay. It meant little sleep for him or the travelling press, who raced around for most of the early hours looking for comments, and in the paper of 29 January, I chronicled the events in Major’s extraordinary thirty-hour day.
All of us were up at around 5 a.m. on the Thursday, after at the most three hours of sleep. The decision to sue was taken on the plane to Muscat and announced by Gus O’Donnell, the PM’s press secretary, on arrival. Returning from the overpowering heat of the desert, Major staged a press conference and took the inevitable questions from UK reporters who were not too interested in the news of orders received from the Omani Government.
At 6 p.m. that night we put down in Riyadh, where Major had six hours of talks with King Fahd and other ministers. At midnight we were told that British Aerospace was to supply forty-eight Tornado aircraft to Saudi Arabia in what was Britain’s second-biggest defence contract. Both the libel and Tornado stories were spread across the front page of The Times. In the early hours of Friday we then got on the plane for Heathrow. A long day in our lives.
Fast-forward nine years and an angry and relieved Clare Latimer voiced her satisfaction that the ‘shabby truth’ had come out at last. She spoke of her pleasure that the real ‘other woman’ in Major’s life had identified herself, sparing herself the fate, as The Times reported, of becoming a footnote in the history of Conservative sleaze in the 1990s. ‘The world will now hopefully believe I did not hop into bed with John Major,’ she said.
There were other spin-offs from our sensational revelation that Saturday. As Tom Baldwin and I had predicted, Currie was not best pleased. From her hideaway she spoke of the hurt she felt at his describing his shame over the affair. ‘He was not very ashamed of it at the time I can tell you. I think I’m slightly indignant about that remark.’
And for the Kremlinologists of Westminster – those of us who enjoyed analysing every word and gesture from politicians to divine their motives and feelings – it threw some light on Major’s decisions not to bring back Currie to the Government from which she had resigned as health minister in 1988 over remarks about salmonella in eggs.
In her diaries she claimed Major had told her shortly before he became prime minister in 1990 that she might become housing minister in the reshuffle that followed his win. But no offer came.
Then, after Major’s victory in 1992, we watched on reshuffle day as Currie marched happily up Downing Street. We expected her to get a Cabinet job but Major offered her the post of prisons minister under Kenneth Clarke, the home secretary. But their relations were not good when Clarke was her boss at health and she refused, and walked down Downing Street, this time less happily.
In 1991 she had written in the diaries: ‘He did not keep his promise to me … that hurt so terribly. I think I’d like the man to know exactly what he did last winter and how I felt, preferably not when the knowledge can do any damage, but he won’t always be prime minister and it won’t always matter.’
It was, indeed, a prophetic entry, and it was another eleven years before she did the deed.
1970s: Scary Days in the Commons Gallery
It was 1973 and the call came from the editor, William Rees-Mogg, in mid-afternoon. William, the first of my nine editors at The Times, wanted a team of reporters to stay on into the night to cover verbatim President Nixon’s address to the American nation. The Watergate Scandal was in full swing and this was Nixon’s attempt to give to the American people his side of the story that was eventually to finish him.
It was a terrifying request. The plan was that the fastest shorthand writers on The Times parliamentary staff would, in relays, take down every word of the president’s broadcast, dictate immediately to a team of copy-takers, and a special edition of the paper would be printed in the early hours, proving yet again that The Times was the paper of record. I’m not sure anyone on the team possessed a tape-recorder and they would have been of no use anyway. The aim was to have the paper out within minutes of the president finishing and that allowed no time for listening to recordings.
I had only been on the paper for a few weeks, but I had arrived armed with fast shorthand, a prerequisite to being a Press Gallery reporter for The Times, or any other paper that claimed to be reporting the proceedings of Parliament. I had managed to get up to 140 words a minute on one of the pioneering full-year journalism courses at Harlow in Essex, followed by night school once I started working full-time at the Eastern Daily Press (based in Norwich), which had sponsored my course at Harlow.
So I was swiftly told by the head of the parliamentary team, Alan Wood, that I had been chosen for this ‘honour’, as he put it. The editor had commanded and we would deliver. We strengthened our team with a reporter, Ian Church, who had moved from The Times to Hansard, the official report of Parliament.
However strong your shorthand, covering the president of the United States delivering an address full of names that might have been familiar to scholars of Watergate but which were not easy to comprehend in the early hours of the morning after a full day’s work, was a scary task. Nixon began talking at around 2 a.m. our time. We reported him in five-minute ‘takes’ each, dictating immediately to a copy-taker the second our stint ended, then making ourselves ready for another five-minute spell twenty minutes later.
It was nightmarish but somehow we got out something that passed for a verbatim report. The special edition of the paper published at around 4 a.m. and we got our ‘hero-grams’ from the editor the next day. The colleague who drove me home, a lovely man called Bernard Withers, was convinced that we – or at least he – would be sacked the next day for missing out some words. I’m sure we did miss some but no one complained.
Young reporters today would probably find that story bewildering. If it happened now, there would be a way of taping the words and transmitting them automatically. But the one piece of advice I have always given to young people starting in the business is to learn shorthand, because there is no substitute for it. Throughout my career I have used shorthand when interviewing leading figures – it takes much less time to write up an interview if you don’t have to spend your time replaying tapes – and to take down words from politicians on television and radio.
The reporting of Parliament has changed so much since I started. When I joined The Times in February 1973, I was one of a team of twelve whose role was to report the proceedings in both Houses of Parliament. That was three times the size of the Lobby team. Now papers have sketch-writers to chronicle parliamentary events, but no reporters dedicated solely to covering the debates of MPs and peers.
There were eight or nine reporters, a couple of editors and an office chief on the team. Two were allocated to the Lords for a week in every month. Two stayed on late each night until the House rose; they were called ‘the victims’. For a few years we covered the European Parliament, one of us going each month for a week in Strasbourg or Luxembourg. I had decent French, so was fortunate to be a regular.
One of the Nixon team was Gordon Wellman, a great man whose son John also worked for The Times. From my first day in the Commons, Gordon was my so-called ‘victim partner’, which meant that we worked together on the late shift and did the monthly Lords stint together. He was a hilarious colleague who delighted in regaling us with some of the greatest intros of all time. His favourite was one by the Guardian writer Norman Shrapnel, who once began a sketch with the words: ‘In scenes reminiscent of Colonel Nasser’s funeral …’
He had been reporting in the gallery since the Second World