Inside Story: Politics, Intrigue and Treachery from Thatcher to Brexit. Philip Webster
missed a thing. If he knew he had failed to get correctly the words of an important intervention he would slip next door to Hansard and check them out when he left the gallery. Most of us were scared to do that.
Gordon had an instinct that told him precisely when something significant was about to be said. He taught me the importance of listening and understanding remarks as they were being said. The best shorthand note in the world would not help if you had not really listened to what was being uttered. I learnt much from him.
The task of the team was to fill at least a full page every day, eight columns of pretty small print, with coverage of Question Time and the main debates. It was essential reading for MPs, who would let you know if they felt they had deserved to be covered and somehow were not. Tapes were not allowed in the Press Gallery until much later on, so you really had to be able to cover speeches verbatim to avoid questions being asked about your abilities. My own first front-page story in The Times was a report of the maiden speech in the Lords of the Prince of Wales – another frightening experience because he spoke at length, head down looking at his notes, and very fast.
It was a tough school in The Times Room, as it was known throughout the Palace of Westminster. Reporters whose shorthand notes sometimes failed under the pressure were told in no uncertain terms that they needed to up their game. I got in because the reporter I replaced was not fast enough with his notes; he went on to a highly successful career elsewhere.
Accuracy and clean copy were absolute musts. Grammarians today are divided on the split infinitive. There was no such doubt in the mind of our beloved leader, Alan Wood. If we committed the crime of writing, for example, ‘The minister promised to quickly follow up the MP’s complaint’, or failed to correct the MP who had committed this abuse of the language, the cry of ‘Split infinitive!’ would disturb the comparative silence in which we worked.
These were pre-computer days and we used typewriters for writing our stories. For a handful of us the job also involved travelling down to the office each night and overseeing our page or pages as they were prepared by the compositors, and then taking a page proof back to the office for later-edition changes. In another room upstairs in the Commons, we had an operator who would type our copy into a tickertape transmitting machine. It would come out as code in an inch-wide paper tape with holes punched in it. This would then be fed back into the machine and transmitted to head office in ‘takes’, where it would be set in type.
In those days The Times was regarded as providing a sort of mini-Hansard. When Hansard was overstretched with its coverage of every word that was spoken in Parliament – including in the plethora of standing committees – it was not averse to asking if we could step into the breach in our spare time and earn a little extra cash. I once did a full day for The Times, then took over for Hansard at 10 p.m. and worked through the night, and then had a couple of hours’ sleep before covering a morning standing committee. Crazy times.
By the 1980s, however, the way newspapers covered Parliament and politics was fast changing. Apart from the big set pieces, there was much less interest in events inside the chamber than in what was going on outside in the lobbies. The three comfortable Thatcher election victories also meant that Parliament appeared to matter less, with few critical late-night votes. None of us who were there would forget Michael Heseltine seizing the mace in 1976 and brandishing it at Labour left-wingers singing ‘The Red Flag’ after winning a vote to nationalize the aircraft and shipbuilding industries.
But in later years the rules were changed and reporters were allowed to take tape-recorders into the gallery. Ministers and MPs started handing out their speeches in advance, to be checked against delivery, and governments aimed their big announcements at the early evening news rather than saving them for the winding-up speech in the Commons.
Soon the parliamentary teams of all papers that had them were being swiftly reduced, much to the chagrin of MPs with an increasing sense of grievance that they were not appreciated. As the age of spin took over, journalists and their papers took more note of what was going to be said tomorrow rather than what had just been said today.
In those days, The Times Room at the Commons was right next door to Hansard, just a few yards from the Commons gallery, but our premises were later colonized by Hansard and we had to move upstairs to a room that had previously been the television lounge. The Times still inhabits that room.
In those early days we would often run into MPs right outside our door as they went into the Hansard office to run the rule over their words and hand across to them papers or books from which they had quoted in their speeches.
As reporters we had MPs whom we liked to report, and those we feared. Harold Wilson was fluent but impossibly fast at times. Enoch Powell was slow but spoke in lengthy, well-constructed sentences, which had to be transcribed in full for them to make sense. Miss a subclause and you were in serious trouble, reporting the opposite of what he meant. He spoke without notes. Michael Foot was always a good turn, funny, and with plenty of pauses for effect to give the writing arm a rest.
There were back-benchers like the Scottish MP John Mackintosh, who died tragically young at forty-eight, and Brian Walden, who went on to become a frontline broadcaster, who could make wonderfully fluent speeches without looking at a note.
The chamber would quickly fill when the names Powell or Foot went up on the annunciators telling MPs and the Press Gallery who had just risen to speak. There are no modern-day equivalents.
The Times defied gravity in the period 1978–9. What other paper in the world could cease publishing for a year – the year of all years when Margaret Thatcher became Britain’s first woman prime minister – and come back stronger? Perhaps only The Thunderer (the nickname for The Times dating from the nineteenth century) could have done it.
The Times, The Sunday Times and the supplements were taken off the streets during a fierce industrial dispute between management and printers, leaving readers to pine for their return and take other papers while they waited. Their loyalty was tested to the full. Month after month, they waited. And in the end they were rewarded for their patience.
To understand how this all happened the reader needs to be reminded of the circumstances of the time. The disappearance of The Times from the news stands took place during a time of extraordinary industrial disharmony.
James Callaghan, who became prime minister after a Labour leadership election when Harold Wilson suddenly stood down in March 1976, had a miserable period in charge. Wilson had led Labour to a three-seat majority in October 1974 but by March 1977 that advantage had gone because of by-election defeats. Faced with a motion of no confidence that would have brought him down, Callaghan negotiated a deal – the Lib–Lab Pact – with David Steel, leader of the Liberals. Steel’s party would keep the Government in power in return for concessions on policy.
It was an unhappy time and the pact was torn up in September 1978. At that time it looked certain that Callaghan would call a general election but he confounded us all. Appearing at the Trades Union Congress (TUC) conference where he was expected to name the day, Callaghan dashed expectations. ‘There was I waiting at the church,’ he sang. He wrongly attributed the song to Marie Lloyd; it was by music-hall star Vesta Victoria. Whatever, the message was clear and a surprise: no election.
He must have regretted that decision more than any other. As the Times dispute reached a climax, Britain was entering what became known as the Winter of Discontent. Shakespeare’s opening line from Richard III was used to describe the period of widespread public strikes by unions opposing the five per cent pay cap set by the Government in a departure from its voluntary social contract with the unions.
Strikes by gravediggers, refuse collectors and health workers led to delays in funerals, rubbish piling up in the streets and hospitals doing emergency operations only. It gave the impression of a Britain in chaos and made Thatcher’s election in May 1979 a foregone