Philip Webster - Inside Story - Politics, Intrigue and Treachery from Thatcher to Brexit

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2016

Copyright © Philip Webster 2016

Peter Brookes cartoons © Peter Brookes

Photograph in Introduction © Dave Bebber/ The Times

Cover photograph © David Bebber for The Times

While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material reproduced herein, the author and publishers would like to apologise for any omissions and will be pleased to incorporate missing acknowledgements in any future editions.

Philip Webster asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008201333

Ebook Edition © September 2016 ISBN: 9780008201340

Version: 2017-08-23

To my late sister, Kay, for encouraging me to become a journalist, and to Sally, for encouraging me to write this book.

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

A Nervous Breakdown as Britain Votes ‘Out’

John and Edwina: The Liverpool Novel

1970s: Scary Days in the Commons Gallery

Return of The Thunderer

The Iron Lady: Early Lobby Years

How I Upset the Commons by Doing My Job

The Foreign Secretary Who Never Was

Dangerous Travelling with Thatcher

Some Stories Are Just Too Good …

Westland and Wapping Wars

A Horse, A Horse – My Paper for a Horse

The Lobby Lunch

Madrid – and Dominic Lawson’s Star Turn

Thatcher’s Fall, Major’s Arrival – and How the Rugby Team Might Have Saved Her

Kinnock and the White House Stitch-Up

As Thatcher Rules, Labour Battles for Its Soul

Was She Crying? Oh Yes, She Was: Glenys on the West Bank

Held at Gunpoint in the African Bush

Jenkins, Owen, Steel: Third Party Hell

John Smith: Britain’s Lost PM

After 1992, the Deluge

Carrying On up the Khyber

A Day in the Life of a Political Editor

1997: Granita and All That

My Part in Keeping Britain Out of the Euro

Taking a Punt on the 2001 Election

Tony and Gordon: Give Me the Euro, I’ll Give You Britain

The Naked Chancellor

Robin Cook Interrupted My Golf Swing

Our Small Part in Winning the Olympics

The Hand of History on a Snowy Good Friday

Why They Sack – and Why They Regret It

Blair and Gaddafi

Blair and Iraq: A Legacy Damaged Beyond Repair

The Death of David Kelly

My Part in the Fall of Tony Blair

Gordon’s Three Missed Chances to Win

Mandelson Returns as the Wolves Gather

How James Purnell Took His Leave

The Final Coup

Leveson and the Lobby

The Mystery of Michael Portillo

How Michael Howard Handed It to David Cameron

David Miliband Blows It and Balls Falls Out with Brown

Cameron ‘Ate Us Up and Spat Us Out’

How the Grandees Tried to Enlist Alan Johnson

Could Miliband Have Stopped Corbyn?

Uncle Jeremy, the Sea-Green Incorruptible

Our Power-Driven Politicians

The Men Who Followed Delane

Goodbye to All That

Acknowledgements

Index

About the Publisher

Life is full of chances. A chance visit to The Times ’s office at Westminster on a Tuesday in July 1972 led me to an adventure lasting more than four decades which finally ended in January 2015, after my 15,932nd day as an employee of the world’s greatest newspaper. I am lucky to have been part of a small chunk of its 230-year history.

In those days The Times had far more reporters in Parliament than any other paper and gave far more column inches to coverage of parliamentary affairs. Unlike many other papers, it had its own office, known as The Times Room. I walked into The Times Room on that July afternoon during a tour round the House of Commons. I was a subeditor on the Eastern Evening News in Norfolk, and Tuesdays happened to be my day off. I had been to the office of the Commons Official Report, known as Hansard , next door and the editor kindly took me to meet the head of The Times ’s parliamentary staff, Alan Wood. It being a Tuesday, Prime Minister’s Questions were about to happen. In those days it was two fifteen-minute sessions on Tuesday and Thursday. Alan gave me a notebook and took me into the gallery, asking me to have a go at recording the exchanges between Edward Heath and Harold Wilson. I had good shorthand, which Alan could see, but my efforts at reading it back were patchy to say the least. In any case there were no jobs going.

Four months later I received a handwritten letter from Alan telling me a vacancy had arisen and asking if I would be interested. I went down to the Commons again in mid-January. It was again on a Tuesday and my left arm was in a sling after a football injury that Saturday. The cynics in the office smiled to themselves, thinking I had come up with the ultimate alibi for a failed test in the gallery. Fortunately, I’m right-handed.

Alan Wood put me through the same process and, this time, knowing what to expect, I made a good fist of it. He asked me to head down to Printing House Square at Blackfriars, then the home of The Times , where I was interviewed by John Grant, the managing editor. He was at the time president of the National Council for the Training of Journalists (NCTJ) and it helped a lot that I had been on one of the NCTJ’s pioneering full-year courses, and had secured the NCTJ diploma at the end of my training period. He offered me a job and I bit his hand off. It was the biggest decision of my life but it was not at all difficult.

Forty-three years later I have written this account of my career covering politics for The Times . It does not pretend to be a political history of the period. Enough biographies and autobiographies have been written to do that job many times over. But I have found myself at the centre of most of the big stories of the last thirty-five years – the fall of Labour in 1979, the rise and fall of Margaret Thatcher, the emergence and fall of John Major, the rise and fall of Tony Blair and his wars with Gordon Brown, the aftermath of 9/11, the war in Iraq, the fall of Brown, the rise and rise of David Cameron, and the shock election of Jeremy Corbyn. This is my take on some of the big things that happened, and how I covered and unearthed them.

Being a political correspondent of The Times , including eighteen years as its political editor, has given me a ringside seat at the most dramatic political events of the last quarter of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first. Although my predecessors have probably felt the same – and despite having no illusions myself – this to me has seemed like a golden era of political journalism and I am lucky to have been part of it. During all those years I was a member of the Westminster Lobby, whose merits or otherwise I deal with later.