In late 2003 I was appointed Chancellor elect of York University, which the Sunday Times recently named as University of the Year. For someone who went as a student with one A-level and caused a fair amount of trouble when I was there, I was both amazed and flattered to be asked to take on the role.
Unlike most students I haven’t remained in close contact with many of my friends at York, with the exception of Marianne Geary, a girl from Northern Ireland. We’ve always enjoyed each other’s company and she’s very perceptive about me and what drives me. Just a few days after I left the BBC, I received an e-mail from Marianne telling me that Keith, her husband, had cancer and was about to have a kidney removed. At a time when I was feeling pretty sorry for myself it was a real awakening. By comparison, what was I making such a fuss about? Thankfully, it looks like Keith will make a full recovery.
When I left York after three incredibly stimulating years I wasn’t sure what to do, so I went back to work in regional newspapers. My girlfriend Christine, who became my wife in 1975, was going to Newcastle University to do a one-year course to train as a probation officer, and it so happened that John Rees, my former editor on the Slough Evening Mail, was now the editor of the Journal in Newcastle. I wrote to him and he immediately offered me a job.
Going back to local journalism was a terrible mistake. Just as I had had to unlearn being a pop journalist when I went to university, so I was expected to forget all I had learnt while there and be a pop journalist once again. I hated the experience. I wasn’t the slightest bit interested in what some jumped-up councillor thought, nor was I prepared to create stones simply because someone said they were true when it was quite clear they were bullshit. The only good thing about the six months I spent on the Journal was that I met some people there who were to play a significant part in my future life. One was Peter McHugh, the industrial correspondent on the paper at the time, who later worked with me at TV-am and is now in charge of GMTV. The second was Nick Evans, who was doing a similar job to me on the regional evening paper, the Evening Chronicle.
Nick is a very close friend who always claims that he was the better reporter of the two of us, and it is certainly true that his shorthand was better than mine. Much later in life, Nick became famous when he wrote his first book, The Horse Whisperer, which became an international bestseller and was turned into a film starring Robert Redford. Nick played a big part in getting me my first job in television and later we worked together running a programme at London Weekend Television.
While in Newcastle I decided I didn’t want to be a journalist any more – I wanted to do something more useful in society; so I got a job as a campaign organizer for Wandsworth Council for Community Relations. This meant Christine and me leaving Newcastle, which we both liked (even though I disliked my job), and moving to London, where she became a probation officer, also in Wandsworth. One day I was at home decorating our flat when she brought home a fellow probation officer, a very attractive girl called Sue Howes. Seven years later, after both our marriages had failed, Sue and I became an item, and still are.
My job involved organizing campaigns in the field of race relations. The Borough of Wandsworth had been a centre for both Asian and West Indian immigration in the 1960s and 1970s and the Community Relations Council was an organization that sought to bring representatives of the different ethnic minority communities together. I’m not sure anyone was really quite sure what a Community Relations Council was supposed to do, but my boss there, a man called Charles Boxer, believed that we should be a campaigning organization influencing local and national policy in the field of race. He employed me to set up campaigns and to get him, the organization, and the campaigns plenty of press publicity, which is exactly what I did.
I worked at WCCR for close on two years and discovered something profound: that no one, at any level, had solutions to some of the problems we identified. Worse still, neither did we – although of course we pretended we did by blaming the Government or the local council or claiming that more money would sort out all the problems. I had given up regional journalism because I thought it was superficial. Now I had found exactly the same thing in another area.
From this I began to recognize what I still believe today to be a fundamental difficulty in the relationship between pressure groups, media, and politics. Politicians are incapable of saying ‘We don’t know the solution to this’, or even ‘We don’t think there is a solution’. If they did, they would be portrayed as weak or incompetent by the media. Pressure groups and opposition politicians play the same game by demanding that ‘Something must be done’, while politicians in power resort to saying ‘Something is being done’. The whole process is damaging to media, politics, and the public understanding of the issues of the day.
Not that this growing understanding of the limitations of politics deterred me from following an ambition of mine that had developed in the years in Slough and afterwards: to be a politician. While I was at WCCR the opportunity arose for me to become the Labour Party’s candidate for the Greater London Council election in Putney, one of four constituencies in the Borough of Wandsworth. The GLC was elected through the same constituencies as local MPs, so being the GLC candidate for Putney was quite a big deal.
I was nominated by one of the Labour branches in Battersea, where I was a member of the Party and where my friend Mark Mildred was also a member. I knew Mark, a successful lawyer who had worked on personal injury cases like Thalidomide, because his wife Sarah Rackham worked with me at WCCR. He put my name forward. Quite why Putney Labour Party wanted me I was never sure, but I was selected as their candidate for the 1977 GLC election. At that time Putney was a Labour seat both in Parliament and the GLC, but it was always going to be difficult to hang on to it.
The problem was that the Labour Government at the time, led by Jim Callaghan, was incredibly unpopular, so my chances of holding the seat seemed slim. And so it proved. I turned a Labour majority of 4,000 into a Conservative majority of 7,000, a massive 17 per cent swing to the Conservatives. At the General Election two years later David Mellor, whom I had met and liked while I was active in Putney, also won the parliamentary seat for the Conservatives. During the GLC election I had met Ken Livingstone, who was organizing a left-wing grouping of potential GLC councillors. I joined his group, as he never ceases to remind me, but it was all in vain as very few of us won. Four years later he did the same thing again and became the Labour leader of the GLC, but by then my political ambitions had disappeared.
I often think how different my life might have been if I had won in April 1977. I would have become a full-time GLC councillor, and probably gone on to be a Labour MP, and would never have gone into the television industry. I have to say I am eternally grateful that I lost that election. I’ve seen too many people I really like go into politics only to find it frustrating and unrewarding.
A couple of months before the election I had resigned from WCCR, frustrated by all I had found in the race relations industry, which in those days was racked by the politics of race. On 20 May 1977 I celebrated my thirtieth birthday unemployed, having just turned a reasonably good Labour seat into a safe Conservative one. I was depressed and unsure of the future. I had always been ambitious and believed I would be a success in life, yet here I was with very little to show. I spent my birthday sitting on a log on Wandsworth Common asking myself ‘Whatever happened to me?’
And then, just four months later, my life changed for ever.
It was my friend from Newcastle, Nick Evans, who told me that there was a researcher’s job going at London Weekend Television on Weekend World, ITV’s prestigious but little watched current affairs show that was broadcast on Sunday lunchtimes. Nick had left Newcastle soon after me to become a researcher on Weekend World and had rapidly been promoted