Inside Story: Politics, Intrigue and Treachery from Thatcher to Brexit. Philip Webster
As a very green Lobby man in 1981, I once rang him with half a story and, by way of an opening remark, said that I intended to run a story saying something or the other. ‘Then you won’t be needing me,’ said Bernard tartly and the conversation ended. Had I said to him that I had heard a rumour X and would run it if it was true, and only he could tell me whether it was, it would have been different. But in Bernard’s eyes I was trying to get it both ways.
The next time I had a big story to check with him, I played it very differently. Weeks later the great Peter Hennessy, then our Whitehall correspondent, rang me to say he had heard a rumour that Thatcher would announce soon that the old Civil Service Department was going to be wound up, with power transferred to the Prime Minister’s Office and Cabinet Office. I called Bernard and told him what I had heard. Could he possibly stand it up? He told me that, although it would be inconvenient to see the story in The Times the next day, he could not deny it. We splashed on it. Thank you, Bernard. I should interject here that one of the great myths that was allowed to take root was that the era of spin came with the advent of New Labour. Rubbish. Bernard and those who followed him – and some others like Joe Haines, press man for Harold Wilson – could spin with the best of them.
Now here was my editor instructing me not to call the press secretary. When Julian returned to the office, I told him what had happened and we agreed that the editor was in the best position to know and that we should not call because, whatever else he might be able to confirm, Bernard would be unable to stand up any names I put to him, as the ministers themselves clearly had not been told. So I wrote the story predicting that Thatcher would sack two ministers, promote long-time ‘wet’ Peter Walker, make Norman Tebbit party chairman and promote Lord Young of Graffham. I inserted so many details into the piece that it looked as if I had the full Cabinet list in front of me.
I swiftly ran it all past an excited Charlie and we were up and running. The story, when it landed late that evening, brought the usual ‘no comment on Cabinet speculation’ responses from the unfortunate Downing Street press officers on late duty. But by the time of the morning Lobby briefing Bernard was ready to knock down the story and deny that a reshuffle was around the corner.
It was a couple of days later when I got a lovely handwritten note from Charlie. It said: ‘Well done, Phil. Some stories are so good they repel the truth!’ It was a huge relief to hear that the boss was happy, and he had provided me with an all-encompassing excuse for any story I or any other reporter was to get wrong in future. I can only say thirty years later that it was an excuse I never used again.
Whether our story had delayed the Cabinet reconstruction we never knew. But when the Prime Minister finally carried it out in September, it was not of the scale that we had predicted back in June. If I say that we were half-right in our forecasts, that would be being kind to The Times, but one of the two ministers I predicted for the chop was dismissed, Tebbit got the chairmanship and Lord Young was promoted. Crucially, though, Peter Walker did not get a leg-up as we had confidently foretold.
Alan Clark, the diarist, was later to claim that he had been Charlie’s source. But he appears to have got his dates mixed up. In an entry for June 1984 Clark tells of a dinner with Charlie at which they had indeed discussed changes Thatcher might make to her Government. But that was a full year before Charlie had called me. They may have had another discussion but this was not noted in the diaries.
What the entry confirmed, however, was how well aware Charlie was of Thatcher’s thinking. He told Clark of a dinner he had just had with Thatcher at Dorneywood, then the official residence of Willie Whitelaw, the home secretary. Clark wrote: ‘She sat on a sofa with him (Charlie) and drank three Cointreaux and told him she would not bring Cecil (Parkinson, who had to resign in 1983) back into the Government.’ He went on: ‘Charlie says the PM is extremely worried about the succession and that is why she intends to stay on for longer than she would have preferred.’
They then had a lengthy discussion about the inner Cabinet and Clark recounts: ‘I told Charlie how I had put the brakes on David Young (Lord Young of Graffham, who was being considered for promotion).’
All this proved that my editor was at the time well in tune with the thinking of the Prime Minister, who clearly did not mind telling him her thoughts on Cabinet make-up. When he spoke to me that night in June 1985, Charlie was adamant that his informant had seen Thatcher recently. The Clark diaries suggest that he (Charlie) might well have been that informant but was following the rules of the game. Charlie was old school and if his informant was Thatcher he would not have told me. I have always assumed it was.
On the day the story appeared, I spoke to Bernard following the afternoon Lobby meeting up in our eyrie at the top of the building. He was utterly charming and had clearly enjoyed pouring cold water all over my work. But I think he knew how the story had emerged, because he told me he did not think it would do me any harm. Certainly, Bernard would have known better than anyone which of the editors his boss was in the habit of talking to. That, I have since assumed, is why he was so light on me and my story.
The frail-looking table was shaking. Standing on it and addressing his staff was the editor of The Times, Charles Wilson. I thought it was going to collapse. ‘The next edition of The Times will be printed in Tower Hamlets,’ he told us.
It was a Friday evening in New Printing House Square, the paper’s office on Gray’s Inn Road, and we had been told that that night’s paper would not be coming out. Monday’s would, but in another office. I was on Sunday duty. I knew even then what my story would be.
The industrial war of Wapping – which was to change and probably save the newspaper industry – happened right in the middle of the political war over Britain’s helicopter business. In the days leading up to News International’s overnight move during its latest dispute with the print unions, Margaret Thatcher’s Government was convulsed by the Westland crisis.
Westland Helicopters, our last manufacturer, was at the centre of a ferocious rescue bid row. Michael Heseltine, the defence secretary, favoured a European solution integrating Westland and British Aerospace with Italian and French companies. Thatcher and her industry secretary, Leon Brittan, wanted to see Westland merge with Sikorsky, an American company. It was a battle that led to the walkout of Heseltine and the downfall of Brittan, and at one time threatened the future of Thatcher herself.
A letter from Heseltine, stating that Westland would lose European orders if the Sikorsky option was chosen, was referred at Thatcher’s orders to Solicitor General Sir Patrick Mayhew. Mayhew wrote to Heseltine noting ‘material inaccuracies’ in his original claims. It was the disclosure of Mayhew’s letter by an industry department official that provoked uproar because it appeared as if the Government was officially leaking against one of its Cabinet members.
As the row went on, a Cabinet meeting on 9 January 1986 provoked further disagreement over whether the policy of collective responsibility was being followed. Heseltine gathered up his papers and, declaring that he could no longer be a member of the Cabinet, walked out into the street and announced his resignation. It was fantastic theatre for the waiting reporters. It was the beginning of his period of exile that was to result in him challenging Thatcher for the leadership four years later.
The Cabinet secretary held an investigation into the leaking of Mayhew’s letter, which found that Brittan had told an official to leak it. Thatcher was reported later to have asked Brittan four times why he did not tell her. Thatcher’s own future looked shaky as politicians questioned whether she, or at least her press secretary, Bernard Ingham, would have known about the shenanigans over the Mayhew letter.
It was a sensational story, but suddenly something just as astonishing was to take over the lives of journalists and everyone else at The Times. In the edition of Friday, 24 January, I wrote – although I did not know it at the time – the last splash story to be printed from our headquarters in Gray’s Inn Road, where we had been since our move from Printing House Square at Blackfriars eleven years before.
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