House of Lords

HOUSE OF LORDS Thursday 12th June 2008 Politics and the media - better or worse in the last 50 years By the Rt Hon Baroness Jay of Paddington I am honoured to conclude this distinguished series of lectures organised by the Lord Speaker and Queen Mary’s College, University of London where my old friend Professor Peter Hennessey – has, in my view, done more to enhance our understanding of recent British history than anyone else writing today. It is a particular honour to be introduced by the Lord Speaker, and I would like to pay tribute to Helene Hayman’s energy and imagination in arranging this programme and taking many other initiatives to increase general awareness of the contemporary work of the House of Lords. It is hard to remember that the position of the Lord Speaker is still less than two years old! In this short time Baroness Hayman has done so much to establish an important role in public life, and this occasion which celebrates the 50th anniversary of the first women life peers is a good opportunity to congratulate her. Previous speakers in the series have been experts in their field but I think it would be hard for anyone to claim unrivalled specialist knowledge of my topic – “politics and the media over the last 50 years”. But, no doubt, everyone in the room has strong opinions on the subject, everyone always has! My own opinions have been formed by my personal history. 2008 is the golden jubilee of the Life Peerages Act, it is also the golden jubilee of my arrival at Oxford University where I began a career in student journalism - eventually achieving the glittering prize of deputy to David Dimbleby as editor of the undergraduate magazine “isis”. The late 50s and early 60s were an era of enormous expansion in the media. For example, BBC2 was starting up and, extraordinarily, BBC executives would visit the universities looking for recruits; rather like football managers they went round talent spotting. I was lucky enough to be ‘spotted’ and joined BBC television straight from Oxford. I worked more or less continuously for the corporation for the next 20 years. During most of that time I was employed by the current affairs department, producing and presenting political programmes – some of which like “gallery” have sadly long since disappeared; others such as “panorama” still go on and on. It was an amazingly privileged – if hard working life. I saw every general election up close, met the leading politicians and travelled a great deal covering the stories of the day. An illuminating and vivid education in practical politics. So, when, in the 1990s, I segued, via ITV and the voluntary sector, into another life change as a full time politician I didn’t feel I was entering an unknown and alien world. In short, I have become the proverbial poacher turned gamekeeper – or maybe it’s the other way round. Many of my ex-media colleagues undoubtedly will think so. One other interest to declare - as we say in the House of Lords - I am now a non-executive director of the Independent News & Media company. Frankly it’s sometimes quite chilling to realise, as I reach the end of my career, that I’ve spent over 40 years in journalism and in politics – two of the most reviled occupations in British life. I can only comfort myself that I’ve never been an estate agent! But if I am honest I do recognise that both by training and instinct I am still a commentator. In government this can be a handicap – when I was a minister my special advisor constantly implored me not to refer to the Government as “they”. 1 Nevertheless, in the context of tonight’s discussion, I am happy to be an informed – if not expert – commentator on the symbiotic struggles between politics and the media over the last half century. I use the world ‘struggle’ because that seems to me the most accurate way to characterise this continuing relationship. A struggle on both sides to communicate. From the political perspective a struggle to communicate ideas and policies, to “get a good message across”. For the media a struggle to discover information and probe personal ambitions, as well as political motives. Most importantly, for both sides, it has always been a struggle for power and influence. Better or worse over the last 50 years? Personally, I think much the same; or rather I think there are many similarities between the 1950s and today. There are, certainly differences of scale and scope which have affected contemporary media activity. There also are broader changes in society which make for a very different environment both in the media and politics than when I started work nearly half a century ago. Of course each generation of politicians is convinced that, in their time, relations with the media have reached new, poisonous depths. I’m sure that today Gordon Brown and his ministers feel under unparalleled, sustained personal attack – just as Tony Blair and his team did, a few years ago. Before he left office Tony Blair famously spoke of the “feral media beasts” who hunted in packs to destroy individuals, commenting “there seems no room in modern political coverage for shades of grey only the language of extremes.” Alastair Campbell’s published diaries give an overwhelmingly bleak vision of politics versus the media during the last decade or so. But earlier this year Campbell gave a lecture commemorating the distinguished Daily Mirror editor Hugh Cudlipp and reflected “politicians and journalists both have jobs to do and should try to do them without regarding the other as subhuman”. So tonight I am offering my own reflections, as a politician and a journalist, by looking at some examples from recent history of the interaction between politics and the media. I’m limiting myself to snapshots of Prime Ministers and their governments rather than debates on policies and ideas; after all the media are usually most interested in individuals and their fortunes. As Andrew Marr one of our most senior journalists wrote in his book My Trade: A Short History of British Journalism “what are political stories about? The answer is that political stories, like politics are about power”. I want to try to illustrate my general points that, between politics and the 4th estate, tension is unavoidable, mistrust is commonplace and there is nothing new in the periodic determination of the media to use fair means and foul to sway the course of public events. Let me first go right back to the mid 1950s and the Conservative Government led by Sir Anthony Eden whose premiership ended after the disastrous campaign at the Suez Canal. The inner history of Eden’s ill fated, short administration is now familiar from the volumes of published official papers, and personal memoirs, including, most recently, the lively, if rather poignant, memories of his wife Clarissa, through whose drawing room the Suez Canal famously flowed. Just to recall. Eden had been an enormously successful, long serving Foreign Secretary who finally took over the premiership from Winston Churchill in 1955, after years of frustrated anticipation, only to see his political career swiftly collapse. It’s a story that’s been revisited in the last few months by those who see some contemporary parallels. 2 This evening is not the occasion to discuss personal analogies – fair or otherwise – but those people who today believe that at least in the 50s politicians under fire were spared the relentless scrutiny of the media should look again at the diaries of William Clark – Eden’s press secretary at Number 10 - who finally resigned his post after the Suez debacle. Were ministers 50 years ago immune to the pressure and power of the newspapers and broadcasters? Anthony Eden and his government certainly thought not. William Clark describes the Prime Minister’s attempts to manage, indeed micro manage, the media message with off the record briefings for and against ministerial colleagues and records Eden’s obsessive attention to press comment. Comment which grew increasingly unfavorable as the media became disenchanted with the Prime Minister and rightly highly suspicious of international collusion in the middle east. They badgered incessantly for more and better information and openly questioned military as well as diplomatic strategy. In Downing Street the Prime Minister viewed the increasing demands as personally intrusive, politically unfair and ultimately unpatriotic. Some of Clark’s diary extracts illustrate the atmosphere: “8 August - sudden explosion when Prime Minister saw the evening papers – PM screaming at the foreign secretary over the phone. 9 August – PM blew up over the evening papers. It was a peculiar example of hysteria. August 13 – PM rang up this afternoon to say he noted a growing softness in the provincial press; could I do something about it? August 15 – went to the theatre interrupted by PM ringing up to complain bitterly about a programme the BBC planned to broadcast tomorrow. Could he stop it? I said no or at any rate he should not!” Interestingly, the daily litany of concern, even 50 years ago, is just as much about the electronic as the print media. Enormous amounts of effort are spent preparing TV broadcasts and, again a familiar refrain, the BBC coverage is seen on all sides as politically biased. At one point the Prime Minister rings Clark after a BBC news bulletin to ask the press secretary “are they enemies or just socialists.” Meanwhile, for his part, the Labour Party leader Hugh Gaitskell is protesting angrily that the corporation is blocking opposition attempts to reply to ministerial broadcasts during the Suez crisis.

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