I’ve always enjoyed working hard, so in my days on the Hillingdon Mirror I had a second job at the weekends to earn a bit more money. I worked for a news agency in Guildford called Cassidy and Leigh. If you talk to anyone who has run the newsdesk of a popular national paper they’ll know about Cassidy and Leigh. Our job was to sell stories to them. Cassidy and Leigh were good, hard newsmen, but they also provided frothy stories for the tabloids. Not all these stories had to be 100 per cent true, just as long as the people you were writing about agreed they were. I remember, in particular, that we sold a whole string of stories about a Roman Catholic convent in Godalming whose nuns were terribly publicity conscious and getting headlines like ‘Officiating at the Morning Service’ – with a picture of a nun lying under a car wielding an enormous spanner.
My interest in politics really dates back to that time working on the Hillingdon Mirror. I became the paper’s part-time political reporter and spent a lot of time with local councillors, MPs, and the like. I left the paper in 1969, initially to run the Staines regional office of the Evening Mail, a brand-new evening paper that was being started in Slough, but within a few months I had become its full-time political reporter. I was now a specialist. At that time I shared a flat in Windsor with a photographer called Jeff Wright, whom I had first met at King & Hutchings and who had made the move to the Evening Mail a few months before me. Jeff and I are still close friends.
In my second year at the Evening Mail I began to think about going to university. Although I was told I didn’t need a degree to have a good future as a journalist, I began to become conscious that I hadn’t had much of an education. Someone I knew had got a place at university without the normal qualifications and I began to think about applying myself. I suppose I felt intellectually inferior to those who had been to university and needed to prove to myself, and to others, that I wasn’t. I was also getting more and more interested in politics and wanted to study the subject.
I persuaded the editor of the Slough Evening Mail, John Rees, to give me a reference and set about filling in the appropriate university entrance forms. Much to my surprise I was offered interviews at Lancaster, East Anglia, and York, and then was offered places at all three. Although I only had my one maths A-level, all three were willing to take a chance on me. I chose to go to York because it was a beautiful campus and the people I met at the interview were both challenging and friendly. Twenty years later, after I had made a great deal of money, I decided that the risk the university had taken by offering me a place deserved to be rewarded. As a way of saying thank you, I gave them a quarter of a million pounds, which they used to build an all-weather sports pitch.
Changing from being a reporter on popular newspapers to studying politics required an enormous adjustment that took me at least a year to achieve. For the first time in my life I had to understand what academic study was all about. I remember vividly the first essay I wrote at York. I was asked to ‘Discuss the causes of the English industrial revolution’. I remember reading one chapter of one book, thinking ‘That’s it, cracked that’, and then just repeating what I’d read. It was pointed out to me by my tutor that academia was about collecting a range of opinion and assessing the strengths of different ideas, not just taking the first available option. I was no longer a pop journalist.
Gradually I grew to understand what it was all about and, as an older student who had made a positive decision to go to university, I worked pretty hard compared to most of those around me. In my politics course I tended to specialize in three areas. I wrote my dissertation on the origins of the Cuban revolution, and grew fascinated by the history of the Soviet Union; but the most exciting period came in my final year, 1974, when I was studying American politics. It coincided with the unfolding of the Watergate scandal – Richard Nixon resigned as President just after I had finished the course. The American Politics lecturers decided to abandon their usual course and rearrange the whole year around Watergate, which was a brilliant move as it meant you could study the theoretical base of US politics through what was actually happening during that year. The separation of powers between President, the Senate, and the Congress really meant something when the President was in the process of being impeached. I have been a Watergate groupie ever since, although even now I still don’t fully understand why Nixon’s people decided to burgle the Watergate building in the first place, and I’m not sure anyone else does.
I had long been interested in US politics and at the end of my first year at York spent the entire summer wandering around the United States. I went to the Democratic Party convention in Miami, where I worked briefly on the campaign for George McGovern, the US senator who was to stand for the Democrats in the 1972 presidential election. I then wandered off to find out about the USA. I hitched my way around the country, covering some eight thousand miles. I was on my own, which enabled me to discover America in a way I couldn’t have done by any other means. From Europe we tend to see the USA as California and the Eastern seaboard. By hitching through the Midwest you discover another America.
The Vietnam War was still raging and in town after town in the Midwest there were very few young men in evidence – they were all away at the war. I also travelled down to El Paso in Texas to meet members of our extended family. Both my US cousins had fought in Vietnam, and both had been screwed up by the experience.
Being at York University in the early Seventies was an interesting experience. These were the days of sit-ins and radical action. Having gone to university from a job in which I’d been seen as a bit of a leftie, at York I was seen as a revisionist because I was a Labour Party supporter. The Socialist Workers Party and their like saw me as dangerous because, although I was of the Left, I didn’t agree with them that the true path to change was through revolution. I distinctly remember the leader of the hard Left at York walking into a meeting and apologizing for being late by explaining that he had ‘been out working for the revolution’. All his fans applauded. His name was Peter Hitchens, now a right-wing columnist on the Mail on Sunday. I’m amazed when I discover that there are still Trotskyist organizations active in British universities, egged on by the last of the Trotskyist academics.
Unlike most students I did pretty well financially while at university. As I was 24 I got a full local authority grant and when I arrived at York decided I didn’t want to live on campus but would rent my own house instead. I then rapidly came to the conclusion that it would be cheaper to buy than rent. My dad had just retired and one of his insurance policies had paid out, so I borrowed the lot, paying him a decent rate of interest, and bought a small terraced house in Briggs Street, near the Rowntree factory. I paid the princely sum of £1,200 for the house, got a local authority grant to add on a bathroom, and sold it for £5,000 when I left. When I was in York recently I was fascinated to see similar houses are now selling for £120,000. I wonder where the poor of York can now afford to live.
But my most memorable financial experience at university was my libel action against the local evening paper, the York Evening Press. They had run an article saying that a local printer wouldn’t print a student newspaper because of an article written by me that was claimed to be obscene. While it was true that the printer wouldn’t print the paper it had nothing to do with my article, which was about the California marijuana initiative (an attempt to make the drug legal on the West Coast of the United States). I asked for an apology but the editor of the Evening Press, unaware that he was dealing with a student who had trained as a journalist, refused. So I decided to sue. In the end I got a full apology, all my legal costs, and £250 as an out of court settlement. Given that a full grant in 1974 was just £420, this was a good day: my girlfriend at the time, later my wife, Christine Taylor and I had a good summer in France on the York Evening Press.
There is a postscript to the story. In 2003 I was invited as Director-General of the BBC to be the guest speaker and present the awards at the York Evening Press Annual Business Awards. As DG you get hundreds of similar invites, but this was one I couldn’t resist. Clearly no one at the paper was aware of the history; in my speech I told the whole story. I ended by thanking the Evening Press for making my life at York more comfortable.
Going to York as a mature student completely changed my life; it’s why I’ve always been keen to encourage as many people as possible to go to university, particularly