Inside Story: Politics, Intrigue and Treachery from Thatcher to Brexit. Philip Webster
that landed me in the most unexpected, even dangerous, scrapes. But most of it was fun, and if the reader does not get the impression after reading this that I had a very good time I have failed in my task.
It was also a position of huge responsibility, something of which I was well aware and about which I sometimes worried. The political press clearly has an important role in holding politicians to account. But what we write shapes events and makes or breaks careers, including those of party leaders. A few reporters have gone on to work for political parties but the vast majority are not players. Most political correspondents have no allegiance to a party. I never have or will but I have good friends in all the parties. The reader may find this strange, but in the tens of thousands of conversations I had with politicians while I was a senior political correspondent, not one asked me how I voted. I imagine they felt that as an impartial reporter I would have been insulted by the question, but I would have had an answer: I did not vote during those years.
Political correspondents are without doubt an integral part of the political process. It places a severe duty on us to get our stories right, ensuring they are fair, accurate and impartial – the mantra that is drummed into us from our first day in journalism school. When I appeared before the Leveson Inquiry into press standards in 2012, one point I tried to make very firmly was the importance of separating fact and comment in newspaper coverage, a line that has occasionally been blurred in recent years.
What I have tried to do here, having written about all these events as they happened, is to offer a fresh insight on them and reveal, as far as I can without compromising living sources, how stories I wrote at the time came into my hands and influenced events as they unfolded. Sometimes the stories originated from me learning from one source or another that something was brewing, and then nagging the people in a position to know until I was able to write. Sometimes, particularly when the parties started pre-briefing announcements rather than waiting for them to be put to MPs in the Commons – a practice that has infuriated successive speakers – they have come to me without a struggle. There was a time in the early years of New Labour, in government and opposition, when I would be surprised if there was NOT a phone call from Alastair Campbell or his Conservative counterpart when I came off the golf course on a Sunday lunchtime, on what until then had been a day off. On those occasions I would often spend the next few hours in my car, making calls to the office and contacts.
It could be a risky business. In the pages that follow I tell of many occasions when I pushed a story to the limits and spent worrying hours wondering if I would be embarrassed when it appeared.
Britain had eight prime ministers during my years as a reporter at The Times. I worked under nine editors, starting with William Rees-Mogg and finishing under John Witherow. Labour was on its way to power, or in power, for most of my eighteen years as political editor and for obvious reasons those years are covered comprehensively in what follows. I was fortunate that in my time as a junior Lobby man I was assigned the Labour beat when it was in opposition, meaning that I got to know well the men and women, and their aides, who were to become the leading figures in the party as Blair pushed for power, and he and Gordon Brown held sway for thirteen years.
I left Westminster in 2010 and after a four-year period as editor of The Times digital editions, I grabbed John’s offer to become assistant editor (politics) of The Times and to be the first editor of the ‘Red Box’ daily political bulletin and website. It meant I was back reporting on politics in time for the 2014 Scottish referendum and the 2015 general election. I had never been far away, though, and had continued to write about politics in the interim period, so this was another chance in a life of chances that I was not going to pass up.
As I’ve looked through mounds of my cuttings while writing this book, I’ve been struck by just how much I did. I only kept sparse notes of key conversations and cuttings of which I was particularly proud. I have a strong – my friends say nerdish – memory for the minutiae of the major political events in which I was involved, but in my trawl of the files I have come across stories under my byline and trips to the other side of the world which had temporarily gone from the memory.
Political journalism has changed in my years, as I explain later. Television has taken over from the House of Commons as the cockpit of political debate. Power has shifted from Westminster to the television studios, to Europe and to Scotland. But my successors need have no fear. There will always be a need for journalists to work and watch closely as politicians exercise their power.
My story is of one journalist who stuck with the same paper, the one he had always dreamt of working on, and resisted the occasional blandishments of rival editors who told him his career would progress faster if he moved over to them.
This book is about the story behind the stories that ran across the front pages of The Times for four and more decades. There were serious, tragic, sad, dramatic and traumatic moments behind those stories. But chasing them and writing them was a great joy and privilege.
I start with the momentous events of 23 June 2016 that changed all our lives, finished off another prime minister, split the country in two and left British politics in utter turmoil.
A Nervous Breakdown as Britain Votes ‘Out’
A much-diminished David Cameron said an emotional farewell to the twenty-seven other heads of European governments in Brussels on 28 June 2016. It was a sombre occasion for the man who will go down in history as the leader who took Britain out of the European Union, and possibly broke up the United Kingdom. Five days earlier a chastened Cameron, along with George Osborne, his chancellor, watched their dreams turn to dust as Britain voted against their wishes, and the odds, to say goodbye to Brussels.
As the leader who gambled on a referendum that the country was not demanding at the time he announced it, Cameron knew that it was his fault. Within three hours of the final result he stood on the steps of 10 Downing Street and resigned. He was gone three weeks later. Osborne’s chances of succeeding Cameron, already slim because he was felt to have overstated his economic warnings during the referendum campaign, disappeared. He was not a candidate in the leadership election that followed. And his humiliation was not complete.
On the day of the vote, Cameron and his aides, and Osborne, had discussed what would happen if they lost, although at that time they were expecting to win. The chancellor, I was told, said there was a case for Cameron staying on to bring stability, as well as one for him going. Cameron was adamant that he must depart in those circumstances and his aides did not try to dissuade him. He went to bed for a few hours after the result became known; his mind was made up. Twenty days later – after a vicious but truncated leadership election – he was succeeded by Theresa May, who became Britain’s second woman prime minister at the age of fifty-nine.
Within hours she had stamped her authority with a ruthless reshuffle that saw few ministers stay in their jobs, and many of Cameron’s closest allies purged. Osborne was sacked, as was Michael Gove, the justice secretary. The ‘chumocracy’, the name given by detractors to the tight group of friends around Cameron which was reputed to take most government decisions, was brutally slain.
Britain woke up on 24 June, the morning after the referendum, a divided nation. We were a country split between young and old, better off and poor, north and south. The young, rich and parts of the south, particularly London, had voted ‘In’. The old, the angry and disadvantaged, and the north, had voted ‘Out’.
The kingdom was divided, with Scotland and Northern Ireland voting to stay in the EU, England and Wales opting for out. Nicola Sturgeon, leader of the Scottish National Party, said a second referendum on independence was highly likely. Scotland could leave the UK within years, and Brexit, as our departure will forever be known, will be to blame.
Apart from the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), the irrepressible Nigel Farage – whose referendum and victory it was – few of the leaders of the ‘Leave’ campaign offered outward signs of jubilation.