I have one further postscript to our famous lunch. I have learnt recently that in September 1983 – a few days before the Labour conference and two weeks before the fateful Conservative conference in Blackpool – Margaret van Hattem returned to her Commons office after lunch bubbling with excitement and telling her then boss, Peter Riddell, that she needed a private word. She had picked up exclusive news of the whole Parkinson saga – the affair and the baby – that was shortly to surface. Riddell went down to the FT head office that afternoon and retold the story that Margaret had uncovered. The line from on high was that this was ‘not an FT story’ and it was not run, denying Margaret another scoop. We know not where she discovered the story. One possibility, of course, is that Parkinson, who clearly liked her, handed her the story in order to get it out in what he hoped would be as respectable as possible a way, but it is more likely that it came from a Government official. The story came out during the Labour conference, leaving Margaret ruing the FT command’s lofty decision.
Parkinson stayed on the back-benches, serving his time during the 1983 parliament, and Thatcher brought him back in her 1987 victory reshuffle. But Parkinson’s career had peaked early and was never to recover. When Thatcher was forced out in 1990, Parkinson was the only minister to resign with his stricken heroine, refusing to serve alongside the ministers who had helped to bring her down.
He went to the Lords but was to perform one last service to the party. In the wake of the Tory electoral defeat in 1997, he returned to his old post as party chairman for a year to help steady his party’s nerves. It was during this period that the Conservatives instituted the reform of electing its future leaders by a vote of the membership rather than of MPs, a move that was to ensure the election of Iain Duncan Smith over Kenneth Clarke in 2001. Thereafter Parkinson devoted his life to business and golf. Like me, he would play occasionally for the Parliamentary Golf Society and I had several enjoyable rounds with him as he reminisced amusingly about ‘Margaret and Denis’.
Dangerous Travelling with Thatcher
The hacks were getting restless. We had been travelling all over the country with Margaret Thatcher in the press bus following her own ‘Battle Bus’. We had been listening to the same speech, or variants of it, for days on end. We kept asking her press minders to let us see her and get some new material from her. We were getting fed up. A visit to a Harry Ramsden chip shop up in Yorkshire had been our highlight of the week so far.
Then they relented. Without any warning we were told on Friday, 27 May 1983 that we were heading to Newbury Racecourse in Berkshire, where the Prime Minister would be available for our questions. We had nagged them into submission.
It was worth it. The Prime Minister used the occasion to ask for an ‘unusually large’ majority on 9 June to give her the opportunity to play an even bigger role on the world stage. It was the eve of her departure to the United States for a summit of world leaders at Williamsburg in Virginia, and she pointed out that, apart from Pierre Trudeau of Canada, she had been in power for longer than any of the other leaders she would be meeting. ‘Already one feels oneself taking a more forceful leadership role because of the combination of one’s own style and one’s own experience,’ she said in reply to a question from The Times while standing on a hastily erected platform.
For the travelling pack, starved of a decent story for weeks, this was gold dust. ‘She’s done Britain. Now Thatcher wants to conquer the world!’ shouted an excited colleague, preparing his spiel for his news desk. But we were out in the middle of a racecourse and there were no phones. What to do?
I often tell this story to my younger colleagues who cannot imagine the life of a reporter before the advent of the mobile phone, or e-mails for that matter. We took a decision. Thatcher was heading back to London. We asked our driver to take us along the M4 to Reading and drop us off so that we could find phones. He agreed but decreed that we would be given half an hour and no more. If we had not returned to the bus he would have to leave us behind.
He pulled up in the centre of Reading and twenty of us raced off the bus in different directions to look for the nearest phone box. I knew Reading and ran fast to the station, found a phone and got on to a copy-taker, pleading with him to type as fast as possible because I’d had a long week and wanted to get home. It was only after I’d finished that I asked him to put me through to the news desk so that I could tell them about the story I had filed. I raced back to the bus and was one of only a handful that made it. The rest had to get the train back to London. What days they were!
I got one of my favourite datelines the next morning. On the front page, ‘Philip Webster, Newbury’ recorded that the Prime Minister had asked for a big majority to give her the authority ‘to play an increasingly prominent role in world affairs’, adding that she saw no dangers in a landslide. ‘We have to win by a large enough majority to hold the Parliament for five years. There is so much at stake internationally.’ She was using the ‘royal we’. ‘Thatcher hopes for greater world role’ was the headline. Virtually all my colleagues got similar front-page treatment and made it home, one way or another, happy.
I was with Thatcher throughout both the 1983 and 1987 elections. To the outside observer she was always heading for landslide victories in both. But she had her ‘wobbly’ moments. I remembered how, on the Thursday before her 1987 election victory, she and her press and policy team had been totally distracted out on the road. True, there had been a couple of polls showing Labour improving but what we did not know – until a future Times editor, Peter Stothard, revealed it in The Times after the election – was that there had been an almighty wobble when Thatcher’s own internal research showed that the gap was narrowing sharply. It led to the resurfacing of angry Cabinet recriminations dating back to the Westland affair (when ministers fought over whether the Americans or Europeans should rescue an ailing helicopter company), a reworking of the campaign and her final speeches, and a victory that most would have predicted from the start. In Tory folklore it became known as ‘Wobbly Thursday’.
The 1983 campaign had been largely uneventful till the end. On the last Sunday night before polling, there was a strange event at Wembley Conference Centre when sports stars and show business performers joined 2,500 young people in what I called ‘an adoring display of allegiance’. This was the infamous occasion when Kenny Everett appeared on stage and suggested bombing Russia as well as ‘kicking Michael Foot’s sticks away’.
Just as a world summit fell conveniently for her in 1983, another did in 1987. Two days before polling, we all landed in Venice, where helpful pictures of Thatcher on the world stage again, dining with President Reagan, would have pleased the Tory image-makers. Fellow leaders even agreed to keep the agenda tight so that she could get back for her final campaigning. One of our colleagues, who had arrived before the rest of us, had discovered that the leaders were using bullet-proof gondolas – I am not jesting – for their trips along the canals, so a security story was there for the taking.
It was good sometimes to see history being made, and I was with Thatcher in Lille, northern France, on 20 January 1986, when she and President Mitterrand gave the go-ahead to the building of the Channel Tunnel. Both of them remarked that they were fulfilling an idea first suggested by Napoleon and held out the hope that one day there would be a road link as well.
I was with Thatcher again, in Washington in late 1989, when once more huge international events were mingling with her political troubles at home. She met the first President Bush at Camp David – to talk about the implications for the world of the fall of the Berlin Wall and other developments in Eastern Europe – the day after giving an interview to my boss, Robin Oakley, in which, rather than responding to concerns among Tory MPs about her leadership, she said she had no intention of giving up the party leadership