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 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 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.” ’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 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 .

As the government spokesman William Clark seems to have been as frantically busy as his counterparts today. His diary records extremely long working days and nights. Weekends spent on the phone, endless meals and meetings with individual correspondents. There’s no doubt Clark spent more of his effort with than the tabloids but his tactics of giving and withholding information, cajolery, persuasion and menace find fascinating resonance in Alastair Campbell’s memoir of the Blair years.

I can’t resist two other small vignettes from the supposedly more innocent, and less aggressive 1950s. The first about personal smears (often thought to be a particularly unpleasant feature of today’s political life). During the Suez military campaign Anthony Nutting, a minister of state at the Foreign Office resigned in protest at the policy, to the obvious embarrassment of the Government. It was suggested to William Clark that he quietly tell the press that the Minister had probably been unduly influenced by his American mistress. (The British government had, of course, fallen out with the US administration over

3 the Suez adventure). To his credit Clark refused to do this. On another occasion the press secretary was less restrained. He encountered Winston Churchill’s son Randolph, a journalist on the Evening Standard at a party, and Churchill started attacking one of Clark’s friends, the diary records “I said he really must stop ….Randolph took a lurching swing at me, I hit him in the chest and he, being drunk, collapsed”. Imagine the furore if this scene occurred today. In the 21st century only the Deputy Prime Minister can take a swing at anyone and then certainly not a journalist!

However - if we jump forward 20 years from the mid 1950s to 1974 we find another Downing Street official literally squaring up to a member of the press. On this occasion it was my esteemed colleague, Lord Donoghue, then just plain Bernard Donoghue, and head of PM ’s policy unit. Donoghue’s Downing Street diaries, published in 2005, record continuous and personal hostility between the media and Number 10. One example from 1974 “I wanted to take the chief reporter, a very creepy man, into a corner and work him over a little. I felt furious at their gutter behavior and really would have belted him into the ground. Fortunately (the PM’s press secretary) restrained me”.

1974 was the beginning of Harold Wilson’s second administration. When his Labour Government had first been elected 10 years earlier Wilson was greeted, much like Tony Blair in 1997, as a vigorous breath of fresh air. His political skills and energetic message were widely admired after several years of apparently ineffectual Conservative government, which the media had done much to lampoon. This was the 1960s the era of the iconic TV programme “that was the week that was”. Broadcasting satire had been well and truly launched. Prime Minister , once dubbed “super Mac”, had become an out of touch old man who, during the Christine Keeler sex scandal which undermined his cabinet, had admitted he did not live much among young people, and his short lived successor Alec Douglas Home was constantly caricatured as the premier who only understood economics by using matchsticks. But by the mid 1970s it was Harold Wilson’s turn to be the target of the cyclical disillusion which seems to me the dominant, recurring feature of relations between politics and the media over the last half century.

At the start of his first term of office Harold Wilson had, as his biographer Ben Pimlott describes been the first Prime Minister to enjoy giving personal attention to the press, “he took the media more seriously than had any predecessor” writes Pimlott. “For the most part he took great trouble to fraternize with news men and was justifiably proud of his ability to do so. He frequently recalled that before the war he’d once been offered a job on the Guardian…”Wilson attended press parties, dispensed drinks called everyone by his christian name and flattered with amazing skill.” In the short run it was very effective. However the problem with all this personal contact and warmth was that when things went wrong the animosity on both sides was equally personal. As the political editor of the Financial Times put it at the time “as soon as political difficulties began to arise it was clear that both sides were in an intolerable position”!

By 1974 Wilson was a tired old story and his good coverage had already been badly damaged by a number of bitter incidents. Again to quote Ben Pimlott “Wilson’s relations with the press, once so unnaturally good, became unfairly and unnaturally bad, even allowing for the newspapers’ anti- Labour bias.” Cynicism had replaced enthusiasm. The cyclical disillusion had set in.

Facing huge economic problems in his second term – this was the time of the first oil price shock – and at home struggles over the European common market and industrial policy - the Prime Minister also faced a unitedly hostile media. Number 10’s battles over policy were exacerbated by angry skirmishes

4 over what we would now call “personality” stories, many featuring Harold Wilson’s volatile political secretary Marcia Williams now Lady Falkender. Marcia Falkender and her family were seen as a melodramatic soap opera in which new twists and turns of supposed corruption and malpractice were daily headlines. Vast amounts of ministerial and official time were apparently absorbed by this damaging saga, as libel suits flew in every direction. Today we have the inside accounts by Joe Haines, Wilson’s press secretary, as well as Bernard Donoghue, head of the policy unit, to confirm a picture where the Prime Minister is convinced there are elaborate media plots against him. The political secretary is passionately reacting to every personal attack and the official machine is engaged trying to rebut a perceived conspiracy of denigration.

One cameo from Donoghue’s 700 page Downing Street diary:

“4 April – an incredible day. From the beginning dominated by newspaper scandals about alleged land speculation involving Marcia.

HW wanted to make a personal commons statement and drafted one. Joe and I thought it was terrible and sent him a memo into cabinet saying it was ‘inviting disaster’/ he came out, and reluctantly agreed. ….Phoned Marcia. Pathetic. In tears. So I arranged to go out and see her, immediately after parliamentary questions… Back to no 10. HW still furious with the press. Discuss a strategy to freeze out the press. PM to attend nothing. Joe to ignore the lobby. Good stories to go to a few decent journalists… Wilson is also convinced we must now have the Privacy Bill… We talked for one and a half hours about this – and about mortgages and interest rates… What a curious day. I have my team here working on high-level government policy. I am away fighting the press and defending the PM’s political secretary”.

Incidentally you will all be aware that recently there has been much criticism of memoirs about Tony Blair’s years in Downing Street which, it’s claimed, have inappropriately and inaccurately exposed “family quarrels” at the heart of government. However, re-reading Haines and Donoghue, and several other accounts of the 1970s, my view is that, like much else, nothing is different, and little is new. Although I must mention that my copy of Ben Pimlott’s authoritative, and analytic, biography of Harold Wilson was inherited from my father Jim Callaghan and contains a good few of his handwritten comments. “Quite untrue” against one assessment of the then Prime Minster’s motives and “Harold’s imagination” against a reference to his, Jim’s, possible resignation from the cabinet. Nonetheless I stick to my view that on the whole “plus ca change”.

It is, as I said, the cyclical nature of good and bad blood between any modern government and the media which is the continuing theme. Eden, Macmillan, Wilson, Blair – even Thatcher – all of them started out in an atmosphere of cordial mutual appreciation and all of them ended their premierships recording their own hostility to the media, and the media, for their part, generally wishing them good riddance.

Margaret Thatcher, the longest serving post war Prime Minister, insulated herself for many years by simply ignoring media comment. Her official spokesman was the redoubtable and his account of Thatcher’s time at No 10 is aptly called “kill the messenger”. Ingham’s recollections are at least as robust in both language and opinion as those of Alastair Campbell and Joe Haines. From the time he was appointed in 1979 Ingham quite openly saw his role as a media manager (although today’s mythology is that this black art was only developed under Tony Blair) “if any Prime Minister was going to need a manager of her relations with the media it was Mrs Thatcher” he wrote…. She was quite

5 simply not interested in the press “she regarded journalism as the haunt of the brittle, the cynical and unreliable…” it was not that she pretended that she didn’t read newspapers; she didn’t read them at all, except the front page of the evening standard which was left on the table outside her study. So far as I could ever tell she watched television news and current affairs only in snatches. And she never ever watched herself on television”. For several years Prime Minister Thatcher’s lofty indifference combined with Bernard Ingham’s skills to give the Conservative Party a pretty successful media image. Although it would, be disingenuous not to say that her policies chimed with those of many newspaper publishers and editors. And Thatcher always judiciously cultivated ideological allies – particularly in the higher echelons of the print media.

However even this golden era didn’t last. Ingham observed what he saw as the declining standards of journalism during the 1980s. He fell out badly with and the Independent who were conducting a campaign against the off the record briefing system for “the lobby”, the group of political journalists who met the press spokesman regularly but in those days couldn’t attribute their reports. Ingham deplored what he saw as hypocritical calls for openness. “The dirtier journalists became - apparently believing that the end of hammering the government, and me, justified the means - the more they presented themselves as members of the independent order of the white knights of veracity. I was intrigued to find myself named as one of those present at a private lunch with TV journalists which aggravated Bernard Ingham hugely. My colleagues and I had clearly been pontificating about our responsibilities and Ingham exploded. “I found it nauseating. I’d had enough before the soup. I told them to stop being so bloody pretentious and precious and admit they were in TV for only one thing: ratings, their audience pulling power, their entertainment value”.

Not surprisingly Mrs Thatcher’s spokesman soon became a story in his own right; variously described as “purveyor of half truths” by the Daily Telegraph”. “The iago of Downing Street” by the Guardian. The officially anonymous press secretary developed a personal reputation, and public profile which again, holds a mirror to more recent history.

By 1990 rising inflation, combined with fierce and widespread opposition to the poll tax, and again, divisions over Europe gave Mrs Thatcher’s enemies in the Conservative Party an easy opportunity. They vociferously pursued their criticisms of her in public and even the Prime Minister acknowledged that to survive she must engage openly with them and their media supporters. To this day the image of Thatcher breaking into a live BBC TV news bulletin from Paris to announce her intention to carry on fighting against the challenge to her leadership is one of the most powerful in post war politics. As we know the fight back was brief and, after 24 hours of ebbing cabinet support, resigned leaving another historic media picture as she drove away from Downing Street in tears. For her stalwart spokesman it ended what he described as the most traumatic week of his life.

Enoch Powell gloomily asserted that all political careers end in failure – if not in tears. Is it as simple as that? Does the last half century demonstrate that ultimately all government’s collapse, and the ever vigilant media are there rightly to expose diminishing authority?

I think the continuous symbiotic struggle is more complex. Undoubtedly the longer one party is in power the more likely it is to confront external threats and internal criticism; to lose the shine of novelty and freshness. I would argue that in all human relationships - institutional as well as personal, familiarity breeds a loss of excitement and some disillusion – if not outright contempt. The relationship between

6 politicians and electorates as well as their media counterparts is no exception. The question for the media is how much they deliberately and artificially seek to promote disillusion with any government, any prime minster, and how much they simply reflect it.

My quick review of 50 years of politics suggests to me that this is a question as properly asked of Anthony Eden’s premiership as of Tony Blair’s, as of Gordon Brown’s. In my view the episodes of intense disillusion have often owed as much to a change of fashion as any objective turn of events or catastrophic decline in the nation’s affairs.

Harold Wilson, 30 years ago, was probably the Prime Minister to suffer the most from a collective change of perception which led directly to a change in his political fortunes. Sparked by a series of sometimes arcane disputes – the details of which are now largely forgotten-Wilson and the media, having been the best of friends, became fierce enemies. In today’s shorthand he went from hero to zero and never recovered popularity or trust. When Wilson finally unexpectedly resigned in march 1976 even his departure was viewed as deeply suspicious – “yet another characteristic confidence trick” wrote one columnist. Talleyrand’s famous comment on the death of a hostile foreign statesman “what does he mean by that” was much quoted.

Perhaps the most obvious difference between then and now is in the sheer volume of commentary and coverage we live with today compared with Harold Wilson’s era. A great deal of that exponential growth in all forms of media over the last decades has been driven by developments in technology, rather than changes in journalism itself.

If I look back to my own early experience at the BBC, more than 40 years ago, the working environment was totally different. As broadcast journalists in the 60s and 70s we battled with comparatively primitive technical systems. For example, it was more through good luck than technical reliability that we could use world wide transmissions by satellite, and I well remember the triumph of broadcasting live from the US Democratic Party convention at Miami beach in 1972. At that time we shot all the interviews we did outside our studios on 16mm film-with separate soundtracks - which then had to be processed in a laboratory. And, of course, we didn’t have mobile phones or email. We produced our programmes at a much slower pace. It simply wasn’t possible, to be as immediate in our reports and commentaries as is expected today.

In the print world the number of newspapers and journals dealing with politics has remained pretty static for a generation. Although some formal reporting such as verbatim records of parliamentary debate has disappeared, newspapers today are, usually bigger in bulk than they were. The straight reportage has been squeezed not by lack of space but by editorial decisions. Fewer hard stories more “colour”.

At the same time the digital age has brought the internet and 24 hour news on many broadcast channels. It’s here that the voracious appetite for more and yet more largely unconsidered material has exploded. Instant pictures, instant reaction, instant experts. The breathless “breaking news” has created an atmostphere where “never wrong for long” is the caricatured theme of the revolving bulletins.

All of the air space available today does have to be filled, all of the bloggers have to communicate something, and the expanding features sections of newspapers have to entice their readers. From the politicians’ view point the vast spaces are often filled with what Tony Blair always called “froth” – speculation, personal gossip and uncheckable rumour. For politicians, particularly for those in government, it’s often immensely frustrating and always immensely demanding. A minister can feel literally inundated by the sheer volume and intensity of media demands and coverage.

7 This overwhelming media presence has led to louder calls for media accountability. A concept which the anatomist of Britain Anthony Sampson said was always written in inverted commas in the 1950s. 50 years later it still seems very elusive when applied to journalists, all unelected and, the great majority, privately financed. The real question is does greater size lead to greater influence and power?

In his updated 2004 version of the Anatomy of Britain called more colloquially Who Runs This Place Anthony Sampson redrew his diagram of interlocking circles of influence to give the media the largest circle equalled, interestingly only by the rich. But neither the rich nor the media are at the centre of the diagram - at the centre of incluence in my view being all pervasive does not mean being all powerful. Of course the media today have enormous popular influence but so in the smaller market and different social environment of pre-war Britain did press barons like Lord Northcliffe, founder of the Daily Mail, and Lord Beaverbrook of Express newspapers. Both of whom eventually crossed the line and actually became part of contemporary governments.

In the 21st century we may feel uncomfortable about the undue, unaccountable pressures on elected governments from interviewers, columnists and editors but, make no mistake, the great media panjandrums of the past such as Sir William Haley of The Times and Lord Reith of the BBC always insisted their voices were heard in the corridors of power. And now as then – there can be no objective statistics no benchmarks to measure the relative power of the media impact on politics.

It’s true that perhaps today’s more generalised strident clamour has a different, instinctively disrespectful and personalised tone. More needle; but more power, I am not sure?

It’s obvious that we now live in a less deferential more informal society than before; “tall poppies”, whether they’re footballers, business tycoons or politicians are all liable to be cut down with a certain popular relish. But over 30 years ago I worked in two general elections with Robin Day then the doyen of political interviewers. Sir Robin may have appeared superficially less aggressive than Jeremy Paxman but his questions were just as persistent and he was just as much a performer. As his producer I received at least as many complaints from party officials about fairness, or lack of it, as I later made in reverse from the political side of the fence. Personally I’ve always thought that the often repeated archive film of a minister in the 1950s being asked by a sycophantic journalist whether he had anything further he would like to say was an a-typical caricature-even of its period. Sir Anthony Eden would certainly have thought so.

So I conclude where I began, describing the relationship between politics and the media as symbiotic, and dominated by tension; tension which is usually not creative. I hope my headline sketches of some high and low points from the last half century have convinced at least some of you that, at its core, the relationship has stayed very much the same.

As Mark Twain said so wisely “history doesn’t repeat itself but it does tend to rhyme”.

Books referred to: Between Three Worlds – William Clark The Blair Years – Alastair Campbell My Trade – Andrew Marr Who Runs This Place? – Anthony Sampson Kill the Messenger – Bernard Ingham With Harold Wilson in Downing Street – Bernard Donoghue Harold Wilson – Ben Pimlott

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