On Saturdays I used to work in a shoe shop, first in Ealing and later in Acton. My greatest claim to fame at that time was that I sold Roger Daltrey a pair of plimsolls. We sold cheap shoes but it didn’t stop people complaining. I’ll always remember someone coming back unhappy, not unreasonably, because on getting home and opening the bag they’d found I’d sold them odd shoes – one was a size six, the other a size ten. What was strange was that we never found the matching pair.
While selling shoes, I learnt a lot about how salesmen con the public. If the shoes we were trying to sell were too big we’d explain that it was cool in our basement and that the customer’s feet would expand when they got outside. If they were too small we’d say that they had been walking a lot and that their feet had expanded but that the shoes would be fine once they got home. The biggest scam was selling the shoes for which we got extra commission – the shoes people didn’t want to buy. The trick was to bring the customer the wrong-sized shoes, and then miraculously pull out a pair that fitted perfectly, which just happened to be the pair on which we earned the largest commission.
When it came to leaving school and getting a proper job my mother had always warned me that I would have to ‘buckle down’ and that life wouldn’t be as much fun any more. She was so right; in my first venture into the world of full-time work I became a trainee manager at Marks & Spencer, at the Watford branch in Hertfordshire. I got the job largely because my dad’s brother, my Uncle Len, was a manager at M&S for more than thirty years and he put a word in for me. I started in September 1965, and hated every minute of it; it was purgatory.
In those days, M&S stores were largely managed by cautious public-school boys. Most of the bright people worked in head office, where they controlled almost everything. It was obvious to me that people in the stores were not encouraged to use their own initiative. When, many years later, M&S was in financial difficulties and the company decided to change the way they ran things, they announced that they wanted their managers to act as if they were franchisees. When I read this I nearly wrote to them to tell them that they had no chance of making this work. The people they now wanted to run their stores had either been sacked or had left in desperation over the years. The people they’d retained were those who did what they were told and kept their noses clean. They didn’t seem to understand that you can’t change the fundamental culture of a company merely by announcing that you’ve done so. It’s rather more complicated than that.
I remember being constantly in trouble, almost from the day I arrived at M&S. I set up the all-time broken biscuit record when I worked in the stockroom, got told off for not having my hair cut short enough, was told to stop chatting up the attractive shop girls, and was asked by the manager if I’d had any elocution lessons when I was at school. As a joke, I told him I’d gone to school in Hayes, where no one could even spell elocution, let alone take lessons in it. He didn’t think it was at all funny.
After four months I got the sack. Because I was a management trainee they sent down some bigwig from head office to give me the news. With him came the latest of the Sieff family, who ran M&S. He was learning about human resources as he was fast tracked through the organization. I was shocked to be fired, but also absolutely delighted. They even gave me three months’ money to leave. Years later, when I got a lot of publicity at TV-am, I was interviewed by one journalist and asked if I regretted not going into television earlier in life. My answer was that everyone should start their working life at Marks & Spencer, because it could only get better after that. Soon after the interview, David Frost bumped into Marcus Sieff, the then boss of M&S. Sieff said to him, ‘I see you are employing one of our boys now,’ so clearly someone had noticed.
The four months I spent at M&S had a profound influence on my future direction in life. It certainly prejudiced my views against public-school boys for many years, which, in turn, pushed my political views further in the direction of Labour. It also convinced me that my mother had been wrong. I decided there and then that I would never do a job and be miserable again; if I didn’t like a job in the future I would leave. My dad, horrified that I was out of work, then tried to persuade me to follow him and my eldest brother into the insurance industry, or else try for a job in the local solicitor’s office. I was having none of it. I’d tried work their way. Now it was my turn.
I was determined to find something exciting through which I could express myself. One day, when I was still unemployed, I wandered into the office of a fairly new local newspaper based in Uxbridge called the Hillingdon Mirror and met the editor, Brian Cummins. The paper was a tabloid with a colour picture on the front page; the office was a complete tip. I had a long chat with Brian and told him why I wanted to be a journalist; as I left I remember thinking that I could enjoy life there. A few months later, while I was working in a temporary job, he rang me and offered me a job as a reporter.
Brian was 27 at the time but he seemed old to us youngsters in the office. Not only was he the boss, he had also spent two years in the RAF doing national service. We always used to joke that he’d spent his time learning to fly Sopwith Camels. He was a great man to work for and let us all get on with it. The paper was manned by indentured junior reporters, young kids who had signed up for three years at very little money to learn the business. It was Brian’s job, along with his deputy, Peter Hurst, to teach us.
The newspaper group we all worked for, King & Hutchings of Uxbridge, was so mean they didn’t even supply typewriters; you had to buy your own. I’ve still got mine. Expenses were virtually unheard of, although at a stretch they would pay bus fares, and the entertaining policy was straightforward: don’t, and if you do you won’t be reimbursed. I was always someone who challenged everything and after a couple of years I decided this was exploitation, particularly when we found out that the tele-ad girls earned more money than the indentured journalists. I organized a demonstration of junior reporters. Ray Snoddy, later to be an eminent media journalist on the Financial Times and The Times, was one of those who joined the protest. We demanded to see the top man.
We clearly got the company worried because in the end Mr Larriman agreed to meet us. Now everyone at King & Hutchings believed Mr Larriman was a mythical figure. No one knew him but when middle management talked about him it was in hushed tones. He was only ever known as Mr Larriman: no one knew his first name, let alone used it. He ran the whole newspaper group, ten or twelve prosperous papers stretching right across West London. When we met him we tried to explain that all the indentured juniors, and there must have been forty of us in all, were short of money and needed more. I can remember his reply to this day. He told us there was no point in increasing our wages because we were young and would only spend the money on things like records and portable radios. I think the Sixties youth revolution must have passed Mr Larriman by.
We all pretended we were proper big shot journalists and joined the National Union of Journalists so that we could flash the big NUJ membership card around. Having failed to impress Mr Larriman by organizing the junior journalists, I decided on a different approach and got myself elected as Father of the Chapel – the shop steward for all the journalists working in Uxbridge. I spent the next year or so trying to be a pain to the management.
On the Hillingdon Mirror we were trying to break the mould of local journalism. We didn’t report the local court proceedings much, and we certainly didn’t cover weddings and funerals. As a result we struggled to find enough to fill the paper, and consequently didn’t sell that many copies. We’d spend our days on the road making ‘contact calls’, as Brian Cummins used to call them – trying to find stories. My best friend as a reporter was a tall, good-looking boy called Roy Eldridge, who ended up in the pop music industry. His version of contact calls was different from the rest of us – he ended up having a torrid affair with the woman who ran one of the local residents’ associations. My girlfriend at the time was another reporter on the paper, Christine Webb. One day I was called in by Brian Cummins and told that his boss,