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

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Source ISBN: 9780008201333

Ebook Edition © September 2016 ISBN: 9780008201340

Version: 2017-08-23

Dedication

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

Contents

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

Introduction

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.

It was a position that gave me ready access to politicians of all parties and I got to know them well, including four prime ministers, any number of Cabinet ministers and countless back-benchers, as well as the hundreds of officials and advisers who support the ministers and their shadow ministers in their jobs.

It was a role that gave me the opportunity to travel the world – a rough calculation puts my total air miles in the service of The Times at close to the million mark – as well as a seat in the Commons Press Gallery at every significant event. I was there the night Michael Heseltine brandished the mace, the night the Callaghan government fell, the day Sir Geoffrey Howe brought down Margaret Thatcher, the days she and Tony Blair said farewell, the night MPs voted for war in Iraq, and for every Budget and autumn statement for forty years.

Occasionally it was a role 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. They had not expected to win, and secretly many had probably hoped they would not. Many who had voted to leave wondered what they had done. Some recanted on the airwaves within hours. It was too late. Out was out.

In the days that followed, British politics descended into a form of insanity. The two men who had led the campaign to leave, Boris Johnson (the former London mayor) and Michael Gove, killed each other’s chances of leading their party – the latter accused of committing an act of treachery without parallel in modern political history; Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, was pushed to the brink of resigning from his party; Farage stood down in triumph, his job done; and for a few days it looked as if the country was running without a government or opposition.

Andrea Leadsom, the energy minister who became the main Brexit candidate as Johnson and Gove fell away, was chosen by MPs to go into a run-off with Theresa May. But then she stunned an already shell-shocked Westminster by suddenly withdrawing only an hour after May formally launched her campaign, leaving the home secretary the victor without the need for an election by party members. After starting her own campaign, Leadsom had suffered a torrid weekend, fiercely criticized by the Conservative press and MPs after claims that she had exaggerated her CV, questions over her tax return, and an interview with The Times in which she appeared to suggest that as a mother she had an advantage over the childless May.

The rest of Europe, and much of the world, looked on in horror and amazement. The Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, not known for hyperbole, suggested: ‘England has collapsed politically, monetarily, constitutionally and economically.’

The bloodletting was by no means over, and the twists and turns in this fast-moving epic continued. First May called in Osborne and told him she needed a new chancellor after using her leadership campaign to distance herself from his economic stance. As the principal architect of ‘Project Fear’, the name given to the torrent of gruesome economic warnings that emanated from the Treasury during the campaign, and which was felt to have backfired, he harboured little hope of surviving.

Then she revived Johnson’s tottering career by making him foreign secretary. She had texted him expressing sympathy on the morning when he had been suddenly deserted by Gove. Boris claimed to be ‘humbled’ and his elevation surprised him and most of the political world, which had started to write him off.

The next morning May called in Gove, with whom she had sharply clashed in government, and sacked him as well in what friends called an ‘impeccably polite’ exchange. So Boris was in the Cabinet for the first time and Gove, who had struck him down just days earlier, was out.

Nicky Morgan, the education secretary who had made the mistake of backing Gove, was shown the door as well. The speed of events was startling and May, having watched a fortnight of political assassinations, proved to be a brutal axe-woman when her time came. In just forty-eight hours the old guard had retired from the fray, with Cameron and Osborne spotted having coffee in a Notting Hill cafe, and the new regime was in place.

Until 2016, Harold Macmillan’s ‘Night of the Long Knives’ in 1962, when the then prime minister ejected seven ministers from his Cabinet, was deemed the most ferocious exercise in prime ministerial power in history. No longer. May culled Cameron’s team and sent nine of them to the back-benches. Cabinet executions are normally done by telephone. But May looked them in the eye as she did it. Her aides said it was a matter of courtesy, but some of the victims wished they had not been put through the ordeal. She even gave Gove a lecture in loyalty as she despatched him. May had shown herself to be fearless and not a leader to be messed with. But her Commons majority is tiny and one day she may regret making so many enemies in one fell swoop.

The nervous breakdown that gripped Westminster overshadowed the gravity of the decision that Britain had taken and the mess that the departed leaders had left for others to clear up. Yes, Britain now had a new prime minister. But this was of much less significance than what else had happened. After forty-three years, the United Kingdom was cut adrift from the organization with which it had always lived uneasily but which, until the referendum dawned, people had seemed prepared to accept.

Now we were on the outside, and the nation was in shock, most not having expected the outcome even if they voted for it. The pound slumped to its lowest level in a generation, firms voiced doubts about investing here, young people marched on Parliament complaining that their futures had been compromised by what they called the lies of the ‘Leave’ campaign, and Osborne was forced to drop his plan to take the economy into surplus by 2020. At the same time, there was a disturbing rise in racially motivated attacks, with Polish and other migrants saying they no longer felt welcome.