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- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
A Daily Mail Political Book of the Year "Michael Cockerell is the master" – Laura Kuenssberg "A triumph" – Alan Johnson "My political book of the year" – Iain Dale "The master chronicler of our political age" – Nick Robinson "Endlessly compelling" – Emily Maitlis "Excellent" – New European "Riveting" – Tony Rennell, Daily Mail Book of the Year "The David Attenborough of the political animal kingdom" – Rory Bremner "Richly entertaining" – Steve Richards "Brimming with priceless indiscretions" – Mail on Sunday "The Holbein of the televisual political portrait" – Professor Peter Hennessy *** Our political leaders spend their careers spinning their images and polishing their achievements; Michael Cockerell has spent his professional life stripping off the gloss. Over fifty years, he has gained unrivalled access to the secret chambers of Westminster and Whitehall. Here, he reveals in illuminating and often hilarious stories what our top politicians are really like behind the mask. Drawing on his unique experience of having filmed all the past ten Prime Ministers, Cockerell tells how he manages to lull some of the wariest people in the land into candour, and shows how questions of sex are never far from the surface in Westminster. Amongst much else, he recounts: how Margaret Thatcher flirted with him on screen but attacked him by name in the Commons; how Tony Blair said he would willingly 'pay the blood price' in Iraq; how David Cameron learned from Enoch Powell always to make a big speech on a full bladder – and how Boris Johnson admitted to doubts about his ability to be Prime Minister. Funny, riveting and above all revealing, Unmasking Our Leaders is an absorbing insight into half a century of British politics.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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A DAILY MAIL POLITICAL BOOK OF THE YEAR
“Brimming with priceless indiscretions”
MAIL ON SUNDAY
“The most delightful, absorbing and thoroughly entertaining book about politics you will ever read. A triumph.”
ALAN JOHNSON
“Brilliant … As enthralling a history of modern British politics as you will find anywhere … Richly stuffed with anecdotes and gags and as compelling as a Jack Reacher thriller, though with fewer dead bodies … In this funny, riveting and utterly illuminating book, Cockerell doesn’t just reveal what our politicians are really like, but offers great insights into the wider nature of the human condition.”
ROGER ALTON, FORMER EDITOR, THE OBSERVER
“I am hugely excited by Michael Cockerell’s book. His remarkable access to the great and the good gives him endlessly compelling insights into our leaders and what it is to wield power.”
EMILY MAITLIS
“Michael Cockerell is the Holbein of the televisual political portrait. I have been nagging him for years to write this book. It was worth the wait – and how.”
PROFESSOR PETER HENNESSY
“From the man whose camera captured them, and whose questions revealed them, comes the compelling tale of politicians’ relationship with television, from Churchill’s secret screen test to this day. Stuffed with intimate anecdotes and scattered with decades of his own scoops, Michael Cockerell reminds us why he is the master.”
LAURA KUENSSBERG
“Hugely entertaining and revealing – my political book of the year”
IAIN DALE
“Michael Cockerell is the David Attenborough of the political animal kingdom – endlessly fascinated and fascinating.”
RORY BREMNER
“The master chronicler of our political age tells the story behind the stories of those who’ve held power in Britain.”
NICK ROBINSON
“From Harold Wilson to Boris Johnson, Michael Cockerell has known them all, and done more than any political journalist to go beyond the caricatures. This richly entertaining memoir casts fresh light on what he made of them… and what they made of him.”
STEVE RICHARDS
“Michael Cockerell is the Prime Minister of the political documentary”
MATT CHORLEY, THE TIMES
“Peppered with enough funny stories, juicy quotes and tantalising insights to make it as captivating as Cockerell’s celebrated documentaries”
LONDON BUSINESS MATTERS
“Michael Cockerell is a legend in my book”
PAUL BRAND, ITV NEWS
“Riveting … Written with panache and acumen”
TONY RENNELL, DAILY MAIL
UNMASKING OUR LEADERS
CONFESSIONS OF A POLITICAL DOCUMENTARY-MAKER
MICHAEL COCKERELL
To my wonderful wife, Anna Lloyd, who never misses a trick.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
YOU MAKE THEM APPEAR HUMAN
Some years ago, I thought of a deceptively simple question to ask a would-be Prime Minister: ‘Do you have any doubts about your ability to fulfil the role of Prime Minister?’ Over the years nine of them replied.
The first was Harold Wilson, the northern-born son of an industrial chemist. At the age of forty-eight, he became the youngest Prime Minister of the twentieth century up till then. ‘I have no doubt it is a gruelling job,’ said Wilson. ‘The Prime Minister is finally responsible for all policy. But he can’t know all the detail, and I’d be a fool if I tried. And I’d take good care that somebody in the Cabinet did and he can tell it me when it’s needed.’
Ted Heath was the bachelor Prime Minister who was the Tories’ first working-class leader. He answered the question about whether he had any doubts with a two-letter word: ‘No.’
Labour’s Jim Callaghan, who left school at sixteen and is still the only man to have held all four great offices of state – Chancellor, Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary and PM – told me: 2‘I’m going to be very arrogant. I had no doubts at all about my capacity to be Prime Minister of this country – and I took it on with complete confidence.’
I put the question to Margaret Thatcher on the eve of her becoming Britain’s first female Prime Minister: ‘Well, I look at some of the other people who’ve held the job, and I really…’ – she paused – ‘Of course you have doubts. Of course you have doubts. And you’re tremendously aware of the responsibility. But I haven’t just come to this out of the blue. In British politics you don’t just go from the bottom to the top, you climb your way up the ladder.’
John Major, the son of a circus performer who left school age fifteen and took over from Margaret Thatcher, said: ‘I didn’t know whether I could do the job. I wasn’t expecting it yet. But when you walk through the door of No. 10 Downing Street, reality walks in with you.’
Tony Blair, not short of charisma and self-confidence, said: ‘The one thing I am quite sure about is that I’d do the job to the best of my ability whilst people wanted me to do it. And I’ve got a feeling that if you have a strong idea of what you want to do and believe in pushing it through, then you are in inverted commas “a dictator” – if you are not, then you are weak. You know – you pays your money and you takes your choice.’
The Eton-and Oxford-educated David Cameron, who was to become the youngest PM in nearly two centuries, said: ‘Look, if I had major doubts I wouldn’t have put myself forward to lead my party in the first place. You have to be absolutely ready to take the difficult and big decisions you would have to take as 3Prime Minister, including sending troops to war. And I decided I was ready for that.’
The vicar’s daughter Theresa May said: ‘I don’t tour the TV studios. I don’t gossip over lunch. I don’t drink in Parliament’s bars. I don’t wear my heart on my sleeve. I just get on with the job in front of me. My pitch is very simple: I’m Theresa May, and I’m the best person to be Prime Minister.’
When I asked Boris Johnson, then Mayor of London, if he had any doubts about his ability to fulfil the role of Prime Minister, he replied: ‘I think people who don’t have doubts or anxieties about their ability to do things probably have something terrifyingly awry. You know, we all have worries and insecurities. And I think it’s a very tough job being Prime Minister. Obviously, if the ball were to come loose from the back of a scrum – which it won’t – it would be a great, great thing to have a crack at.’
Working in television for over half a century, I have been lucky enough to make films about all the past twelve Prime Ministers – from the Eton-and Balliol-educated classics scholar Harold Macmillan to Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, the classics scholar educated at Eton and Balliol. I have also specialised in making candid profiles of many of our other top politicians who never quite made it to the top of the greasy pole – including Barbara Castle, Enoch Powell, Roy Jenkins and Denis Healey, as well as the libidinous Alan Clark.
I remember a conversation I had with the late Professor Bob Mackenzie in my early days at the BBC. The LSE academic who doubled as a TV presenter and interviewer said to me: 4‘Imagine what it would be like if there were videos of Gladstone and Disraeli.’ That set me thinking: we well know what the two grand old men looked like, and we know a great deal of what they did. But what were they really like? What were their voices, their accents, their body language, their loves and hates, what made them tick, how would they have answered reporters’ questions? It inspired me to try to make a shelf-ful of films about our Prime Ministers and other leading modern politicians.
I have three criteria in choosing what some people call my victims and I call my subjects. They need to be or have been at the top of politics; they have to know where the bodies are buried and be prepared to talk candidly; and they have to have what Denis Healey famously called ‘a hinterland’ – an existence beyond politics. They had to be interesting enough to fill an hour of television. This book is the stories of these politicians who come in all shapes and sizes. It will tell who they are or were and what they are or were really like on and off camera. It is also a behind-the-scenes account of making the films about them and the coups and cock-ups that happen. It is a story of a life in political television – and of filming round the world, being imprisoned in Africa and nearly killed in the Middle East.
The book will also tell the tragi-comic inside story of the battles for control over the years between the politicians and the broadcasters, and how the two sides have become increasingly savvy and sophisticated, with each accusing the other of dirty tricks and fake news. And it will reveal how I have managed to lull some of the wariest people in the land into candour.
One of the techniques I have always used is to show the 5politicians clips of their earlier lives and film their reactions as they watch themselves. It can be very revealing. Most politicians have strong views about television, but they rarely get the chance to watch it. I go to great lengths to find footage of them that they may well never have seen. It really opens them up. They are fascinated looking at their younger incarnations, surprised at their voices, which nearly always sound rather posher then than they do now. And the clips prompt long-buried memories of the way they once were. Sometimes they laugh, and on occasion, like with the old bruiser Denis Healey, they cry.
I remember Ken Clarke saying to me: ‘How do you want me to play this?’
I said: ‘I’ll show you film that we have dug up of your early days in politics and some more recent, and I want you to react naturally to what you see.’
‘You mean you want me to sit here and shout at the television like I do at home?’ asked Clarke.
‘You’ve got it in one,’ I replied.
The politicians tend to get so engrossed in watching themselves that they almost forget they are being filmed and I am able unobtrusively to chip in with questions. After one profile was broadcast, Labour’s fabled spin doctor Peter Mandelson glid (or whatever the past tense of glide is) up to me at a party and said: ‘You do the most important thing you can do for a politician.’
‘What’s that, Peter?’ I asked.
‘You make them appear human.’ He then glid away, just as I was about to say: ‘Might be difficult with you, Peter.’ But the 6Prince of Darkness had dematerialised – leaving only the faintest whiff of sulphur. His of course was a spin doctor’s take on my films. I don’t make politicians appear human; I try to bring out their human side, which is often masked in conventional TV interviews featuring two men in suits drowning each other out.
CHAPTER 2
THE ROAD TO LIME GROVE
So how did it all start for me? I always wanted to work in television – if I couldn’t be a professional cricketer – and I have been fascinated by politics since I was a boy. My father, who became a professor, had worked in naval intelligence during the war. He learned Japanese and did a spell with the codebreakers at Bletchley Park. My mother was a novelist who also wrote plays – one of which was censored by the Lord Chamberlain for being too risqué. They were faithful Labour voters, and we would often discuss politics as I grew up; there was always lively discussion around the dining table with my three younger siblings and the various creative types who would come to dine.
At Kilburn Grammar School in London, history was the subject I most enjoyed, though I was not keen on religious instruction (RI), as it was then called. But one day the RI teacher, who rejoiced in the name of Aubrey Scrace, came up with a lesson that fascinated me. It was about how the gospels were written. From textual analysis, it was clear three of the disciples had used the same single source, called Q for Quelle, the German for source. But no one had ever seen Q – if indeed it existed. 8I found the whole subject of how history comes to be written riveting; the contents of the Bible not so much.
I was also inspired by my history teacher, Dr Walter Isaacson. A German–Jewish refugee, he was a Renaissance man who knew everything and made history fascinating. I had set my sights on going to Oxford, and he asked what I planned to read. I said politics, philosophy and economics. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You must do a real discipline – like history. You can read PPE books in your spare time.’ I thought that was a rather idealistic notion and managed to get a place at Oxford to read PPE.
I went up to Corpus Christi College after spending the summer at Heidelberg University studying what they called ‘Germanistik’ – a crash course in German language, history and culture. Apart from the fact I had a German girlfriend, I wanted to find out just fourteen years after the war how the country had allowed itself to fall for the Nazis. I didn’t succeed beyond noticing that German is a great language for commands – Achtung! Verboten! Sieg Heil! – yet its people didn’t seem to understand the English concept of a queue.
I arrived at Oxford on the day after the 1959 general election. I vividly recall the freshers’ fair: the Conservative students’ association were exultantly chalking up the results of the Tory landslide as they came in. By contrast, the university Labour club members were a picture of dejection. The first meeting they advertised was to be addressed by an Oxford city Labour councillor called Brian Walden. The subject had been hurriedly changed from ‘Priorities for the new Labour government’ to ‘Labour: psychologically happier in opposition?’
9I was delighted to be surrounded by a new world of politics. I joined all three of the party clubs – Conservative, Labour and Liberal – as they each promised enticing political speakers at their meetings. The victorious Prime Minister Harold Macmillan came up and gave a spellbinding speech at the Oxford Union. He talked very movingly of his contemporaries at Balliol who all signed up when the First World War began. Macmillan was wounded three times in the war, once very badly in the Battle of the Somme. And he said that of the twenty-eight of his Balliol contemporaries who went to the front line, only he and one other survived the war. When the war ended, he declined to go back to Balliol to complete his studies, feeling that Oxford would never be the same again. ‘I was sent down by the Kaiser’ was the way he put it when I saw him at the Union. Little did I know that within a decade I would be married to his granddaughter.
The following week, the star turn was the newly elected Liberal MP, one Jeremy Thorpe. He was a former president of the Union and an oratorical throwback to the Edwardian age – a compelling mix of high politics, wicked wit and merciless mimicry.
My college, Corpus, had a majority of public-school chaps, and we grammar-school boys were regarded as something of an anomaly. I remember particularly an extremely bright public-school product of Winchester called Richard Gott. He told a story of going to dinner the previous year in the college hall: ‘And there was a man wearing a garish blue sweater and no jacket. I was shocked,’ said Gott. ‘I had never consciously met 10someone from grammar school. Did this fellow not realise or innately understand that wearing such attire in the hall was extraordinarily inappropriate? Apparently not.’ Gott went on to have a distinguished career as a journalist and historian specialising in Latin America until he was fingered by The Spectator as a Soviet operative. He resigned as literary editor of The Guardian after admitting he’d accepted travel expenses from the KGB while denying being ‘an agent of influence’ – or what Lenin used to call ‘a useful idiot’.
At Corpus I edited the college magazine. I also played cricket, played the drums in a jazz band and played the field. My politics tutor, Michael Brock, was a wonderfully enthusiastic contemporary historian. His specialist subject was the Liberal Prime Minister H. H. Asquith and his colourful wife Margot, whom he quoted as saying: ‘I hate all journalists – it’s a vile profession. Nothing is sacred; even corpses are copy.’
My great hero was the historian A. J. P. Taylor. Although a don at Magdalen, he gave weekly lectures that were open to all students. He would saunter up to the podium and speak fascinatingly without a note for exactly an hour. AJPT was a contrarian, always challenging the orthodox version. His lectures were so popular that they had to be held in the biggest indoor space in Oxford, the examination schools. They would start at 9 a.m. sharp, on the assumption that many students would be non compos mentis and unable to rise at that early hour.
When I was in my last year at university, my economics tutor asked: ‘What do you plan to do when you go down?’ At the time I was a fan of James Dean, the moody Hollywood star of 11Rebel Without a Cause who had been killed in a car crash six years earlier. I told my tutor I was not planning to do anything, because I would be dead by the time I was twenty-four (as Dean was). ‘Cockerell, you disappoint me,’ he said. ‘I hoped you would have some interesting wasting disease.’ The tutor, Christopher Foster, went on to receive a knighthood as an adviser to successive governments.
When I came down, I wrote to every TV and radio station, every newspaper and magazine, applying for a job. All of them said no. I kept all the letters, remembering the story of the young Disraeli who had been laughed off the stage in his Commons debut. ‘I will sit down now,’ said Dizzy, ‘but one day you will hear me.’ Pretentious? Qui, moi?
The BBC even invented a new channel, and they had big newspaper ads saying, if you have been rejected by the BBC, please apply to BBC 2 as we are looking for people who don’t fit the usual mould. Clearly, I thought, that’s aimed at me; but once again I didn’t even get an interview. It looked as if the Beeb and I were not destined for each other.
At first I thought I could make my money on the horses. But I soon understood why horses don’t bet on people. After months out of work, I at last found a job as an editorial assistant at a magazine for Social Democratic parties across the world – like the British and Australian Labour Parties or the German SDP. My task was to produce a fortnightly digest of what the parties and their leaders were doing and saying.
From an office above a greengrocer’s in St John’s Wood High Street near Lord’s Cricket Ground, I would go through masses 12of newspapers that were sent daily from all over the world. I was looking for articles and speeches, translating some of them myself from French and German publications and sending other likely-looking pieces in languages I didn’t know to local translators who lived among the sea of European émigrés in that part of London. I would sometimes get into hot water for including pieces questioning the British Labour Party’s policy on immigration and whether Harold Wilson’s sanctions on Rhodesia were tough enough after its unilateral declaration of independence. At annual conferences, I met party leaders like Harold Wilson, Willy Brandt, François Mitterrand and Olof Palme.
I was learning a great deal about how political leaders around the world operated, and I became fascinated by the politics of newly independent African countries. In 1966, I managed to get a three-month trial contract to work as a radio producer with the BBC’s African service. It broadcast on shortwave from Bush House in London to Africa. My boss was an inspirational figure called Dorothy Grenfell Williams. She was a wonderfully innovative programme-maker who believed life was meant to be fun. Though she insisted we all had to be scrupulously impartial, to be boring was a cardinal sin.
Dorothy was always looking for mischief and was a contrast in almost every way to the head of the African service. He was an old colonial type of South African origin called Eliot Watrous. Described as a reactionary by his sons, his first job at the colonial office was to write anti-communist propaganda for broadcast to Malaya. He saw me as a dangerous Trot because of 13my previous job and my long hair, and he said I should be kept off the air because my voice didn’t sound right. Happily, Dorothy thought differently. I was made a producer as she set up a new daily radio programme called Good Morning Africa, which mixed news reporting, features and pop music. It was a world away from the stuffy, old-fashioned programmes for expats, like Calling Sierra Leone – and it was an immediate success.
I was greatly enjoying myself at Bush House, working with people from all over the world broadcasting in some fifty languages. It was like a mini-United Nations, with a top-class subsidised canteen which produced a range of exotic foods each day. So tempting was it that an impoverished young lawyer would often come to lunch from the nearby law courts in the Strand. He was called Derry Irvine and was later to become Tony Blair’s impossibly grand Lord High Everything Else.
But in 1968, I decided to give television one more try and was given a three-month attachment to BBC TV current affairs at the fabled Lime Grove Studios. Lime Grove was where factual television in Britain really began. It was a converted old film studio in West London’s Shepherd’s Bush, which the BBC had bought from J. Arthur Rank in 1949. On arrival there, I discovered a ramshackle building that resembled an East German detention centre, with a labyrinth of corridors and a series of black-painted exterior iron staircases. Lime Grove was where Panorama and many other great TV current affairs programmes were born. It was also where successive Prime Ministers sought to come to terms with the cameras – with varying degrees of success and pain. The studios had also witnessed many a bloody 14battle between politicians and broadcasters. Though I couldn’t know it at the time, some future battles would involve programmes I was to make.
Lime Grove seemed to me the ideal vantage point for witnessing at first hand what our political leaders were really like and moving towards my ambition to become a TV political reporter.
CHAPTER 3
OLD DOGS, NEW TRICKS
Our political leaders spend their careers spinning their images and polishing their achievements; I’ve spent my professional life stripping off the gloss. The way television has developed is central to my work. The small screen has transformed the art of political communication, and every modern Prime Minister has loved, hated or feared television – some have done all three.
I have made programmes about how our political leaders and their spin doctors have sought to use the media to their advantage – from Boris Johnson all the way back to his great hero Winston Churchill. The grand old man was the subject of Johnson’s last book, which pointedly showed how Churchill the journalist-turned-politician modelled his career on that of our current Prime Minister (or vice versa).
Winston Churchill returned to No. 10 in 1951, ousting Labour’s Clement Attlee, Britain’s first post-war Prime Minister. Neither man had any time for television. Attlee took the view that it would have been better if TV had never been invented: 16it was, he said, nothing more than an idiot’s lantern that would turn politicians into entertainers. For his part, Churchill said: ‘Television is a tuppenny ha’penny Punch and Judy show. Making speeches is difficult enough; it would be intolerable if one also had to consider how one would appear, what one would look like all over the land.’
For his first two years back in Downing Street, the PM reacted to the TV cameras in the manner of a seventeenth-century aristocrat who did not want the vulgar mob to stare at him. He would either walk straight past the cameras or put his hand over the lens if they came too close. Churchill was never interviewed on television. His first broadcasting officer was one John Profumo. Supposedly in charge of radio, Profumo later told me he visited the US during the 1952 presidential election and came back dazzled by what he had seen. It was, he wrote to the party chairman on his return, ‘absolutely essential to get all our people on all the programmes we can: my view is that television is the real thing’.
Churchill was unconvinced. And he was at first strongly opposed to the televising of the new Queen Elizabeth’s coronation. But the monarch herself and her husband were in favour. The huge success of the coronation broadcast with its record-high audience helped persuade the PM he could no longer ignore television; it was not going to go away.
In 1954, the Tories’ newly appointed television adviser, Winifred Crum Ewing, persuaded Churchill to have a TV screen test in 10 Downing Street. She and the camera team were instructed 17to keep the whole proceedings absolutely confidential. And for over thirty years they succeeded in keeping the secret, until my producer, Sally Doganis, and I made a programme called TV and No. 10. Sally went to see the elderly Mrs Crum Ewing in hospital and was delighted to learn she had a copy of the screen test under her bed at home. She gave the keys to her house to Sally, who unearthed two large cans of film labelled ‘Churchill’.
When we managed to find a machine that would play the near-obsolete format, we feared the worst while hoping for the best. Churchill, wearing a black jacket and spotted bow tie, sat at his desk with a microphone rigged above him. He growled: ‘I have come here not to talk to you and certainly not to spread the tale all over the place, but just to enable me to see what are the conditions under which this thing they call Tee Vee is going to make its way in the world.’
Churchill’s contempt comes over strongly: he makes ‘this thing they call Tee Vee’ sound like a communicable sexual disease. ‘I am sorry to have to descend to this level,’ the PM continued, ‘but we all have to keep pace with modern improvements, and therefore I have consented to come and have this exhibition made. Which is for one person only to judge what is to be done with this. And I am that person.’ Here Churchill spreads his arms out wide: ‘There is no other in this business.’
He then read out an extract from one of his speeches and ended by reciting a poem which he had learned forty years earlier from Punch: 18
Beside the water in St James’s Park,
I stretched myself to rest by this old tree,
But can’t for all the cackle squeak and squawk,
Of these ’ere ducks and such like blooming poultry,
These fowls have nowt to do but fill themselves with buns,
Thrown to them by blooming nuns.
Sally and I were thrilled by the unseen screen test. Mrs Crum Ewing told us she had laid on a special showing of the film for the Prime Minister at his country home. Churchill hated it, saying, ‘I should never have appeared on television.’ It may be he was taken aback by his octogenarian looks. In fact, he comes over very powerfully in the film. His bulldog face matches the shape of the television screen, his voice is resonant and his eyes sparkle. But the Prime Minister ordered Mrs Crum Ewing to destroy the offending screen test. To her credit, Mrs Crum Ewing felt the film was a historic document and defied the PM’s orders.
Television was not for him, said Churchill, who stuck to his belief that it had no part to play in the coverage of politics. Surprisingly, his view was shared at Alexandra Palace, where BBC television news started. There was no political editor, but E. R. (Teddy) Thompson was ‘parliamentary correspondent’ – the BBC hierarchy thought the word ‘political’ was itself too political, and it wanted to be above politics.
How things have changed. These days, the Prime Minister and leading politicians are all over the bulletins, and BBC Westminster at Millbank, where I worked for many years, is a huge 19processing plant for political news. But seventy years ago, both No. 10 and the television broadcasters were feeling their way in the gloom.
Churchill was succeeded by Sir Anthony Eden, whose problem was not so much that he thought he was terrific on TV (though he did) but that he saw television as essentially a kind of megaphone for the government. He sought to use TV to promote his controversial Suez invasion. But his press secretary, William Clark, told me that Eden claimed ‘those communists at the BBC’ were trying to bring him down and they would purposely shine the studio lights in his eyes during a broadcast, so Eden couldn’t read his script. The PM had a blazing row with the BBC and ordered Clark to find ways of taking over the Corporation. It didn’t happen.
After less than two years as Prime Minister, Eden was forced to resign and make way for an older man. Harold Macmillan had first appeared on television in 1953, making a Conservative party-political broadcast as Housing Minister. It took the form of a completely rehearsed interview of Macmillan with his cod questioner, the Tory MP Bill Deedes. They spent eight hours rehearsing in the Lime Grove Studio until they were wordperfect. Before the broadcast went out live, Deedes told me: ‘The producer said we should have a rest, so we went downstairs to the basement in Lime Grove, and we were put into a couple of bunks, just to sleep under a blanket for half an hour. And Macmillan muttered in the dark, “This reminds me very much of the trenches. It’s like the night before you go over the top.”’
Quite an analogy from a war-wounded veteran of the Somme.
20When Macmillan saw a telerecording of the broadcast, he told a BBC producer: ‘I don’t think I look very good on that thing, and I don’t want to have any more to do with it.’ But once in No. 10, everything changed.
Macmillan told me that on the night he became Prime Minister, he took his Chief Whip, Ted Heath, out for a celebratory dinner at The Turf, an exclusive gentlemen’s club in St James’s. ‘Unhappily the news was obtained by some source,’ said Macmillan, ‘and as we came out our way was barred by the usual paraphernalia of press and television, to which I had not yet become accustomed. I thought my guest and I were entitled to a bottle of champagne and some game pie. But the food, the drink and above all the place were seized upon with avidity as the symbols of a new reactionary regime.’
It was a graphic reminder that from now on the PM would always be on parade and would have to come to terms with a media that he neither liked nor trusted.
‘Coming into a television studio is like entering a twentieth-century torture chamber,’ said Macmillan. ‘Television has introduced a new dimension into politics and some of us don’t quite know what to make of it. But we old dogs have to learn new tricks.’ He told me that when he first saw himself on television: ‘I presented the appearance of a corpse looking out of a window.’ And he talked about the difficulties he had when he first went into the TV studio to make a broadcast direct to camera: ‘People of my age were brought up on the hustings, where something comes back to you from the audience all the time. Now with television it is like playing lawn tennis and there isn’t anybody 21to hit the ball back from the other side of the net – nothing comes back. It took me a long time to learn. I think I got a bit better at it. I remember being told there will be 12 million people watching tonight. And I said to myself no, no, two or three people – you are talking to two people. It’s a conversation, not a speech.’
Much of his early experience of appearing on camera was conducted at Heathrow Airport against a background of multi-patterned curtains. It had become the major gateway through which politicians from the PM downwards came and went. ‘Television and jet aeroplanes have made the life of a modern Prime Minister almost impossible,’ Macmillan half-jokingly complained in one speech. ‘Because it is in airports that television chooses to lurk. You go by sea, you go by road, you go by rail – nobody bothers you very much. But if you go by air, there it is – that hot pitiless probing eye. After fourteen hours of travel, you get off the aeroplane wanting only a shave and a bath – oh no, you are cornered. The lights in your eyes, the camera whizzing. You put up your hand to shade your eyes and the next day there you are in the Daily Clarion looking weary, old, worried under a caption that implies you are past it.’
Before Macmillan, no one had heard of a prime ministerial ‘image’. He was the first to try to project one – with the help of prototype spin doctors. He had become Prime Minister with trousers that disgraced his tailor, an unkempt moustache and his teeth in disarray. Within months he was wearing a spruce new suit, the moustache had been trimmed and the apologetic toothy smile had gone. The end-product was an assiduously cultivated 22TV image – of a world statesman, effortlessly in control and reading Trollope in the evenings.
The great cartoonist Vicky hoped to ridicule Macmillan by depicting him as Supermac flying through the air. In fact, the cartoons played into his image of what was called ‘unflappability’ – though that was far from the reality. Macmillan was a highly emotional man who would suffer agonies of nerves and was sometimes physically sick before big speeches or TV performances. But he was a good enough actor to hide impairments in public.
Macmillan was the first incumbent of No. 10 to emerge as a TV persona. His skilful use of the small screen during the 1959 election helped win him a landslide. But he was also the first Prime Minister to discover the fragility of a television image. After losing a series of by-elections and fearing a plot against him, Macmillan panicked and sacked a third of his Cabinet, including his Chancellor, in the Night of the Long Knives. He morphed from Supermac to Mac the Knife. And things only got worse with spy scandals and the Profumo affair. Under the satirical glare of new television programme That Was the Week That Was and the relentless Private Eye, he came to appear like an outmoded Edwardian throwback – fuddy-duddy and out of touch. And he was up against a formidable new opponent, the new Labour leader Harold Wilson, who was determined to present himself as the polar opposite to Macmillan.
CHAPTER 4
THE WILES OF WILSON
The new Labour leader Harold Wilson sought to present himself as everything that Harold Macmillan was not. Wilson was the northern grammar-school boy who had made it to Oxford on his own merits. Macmillan was Eton-educated and married to a duke’s daughter. Wilson suggested that his own family had been so poor that he had to walk barefoot to school. Macmillan responded: ‘If he was barefoot as a boy, it was because even then he was too big for his boots.’ In fact, Wilson was the son of a chemist and a teacher – and always had shoes.
He had become a Cabinet minister under Attlee at the age of thirty-one and grew a moustache just to look older. He had a great talent for equivocation and manoeuvring, which he used to gain the leadership and hold the party together. ‘Mr Wilson has a nimble mind,’ said Macmillan. ‘Sometimes a revolutionary driving the tumbril – sometimes affecting the part of moderate statesmanship.’
Wilson said that Tories like Macmillan and his even more aristocratic successor Lord Home – who renounced his peerage to become Prime Minister as plain Sir Alec Douglas-Home 24– felt they were born to rule. And, so Wilson told me, they had little or no understanding of the contemporary world and the lives of ordinary people. Instead, he said: ‘Labour will create a society in which brains will take precedence over blue blood.’
Wilson sought to play up a modern, classless man-of-the-people image – with a well-publicised love of HP sauce and a carefully preserved Yorkshire accent. He kept the expensive cigars he smoked in private away from the cameras. And he sought to personify the meritocratic future he envisaged for the country, saying: ‘You need men with fire in their bellies and humanity in their hearts to create a dynamic, expanding, confident and above all purposive new Britain.’
In the 1964 general election, Wilson just scraped home, managing to turn the Tories’ 100-seat majority into a Labour lead of just five. Asked how he felt on becoming Prime Minister, he replied: ‘Quite frankly, I feel like a drink.’
The new PM aimed to use two American Presidents as his role models. Like President Franklin Roosevelt, he planned to have ‘fireside chats’, delivering fortnightly reports to the public direct to camera. His second presidential template was John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Aged forty-eight, Wilson was the youngest PM of the century, up till then, and he sought to project himself as the British JFK. He acquired video recordings of President Kennedy’s White House press conferences and studied them closely, seeking to replicate JFK’s charismatic style. ‘What we want’, said Wilson on television, ‘is what President Kennedy had after years of stagnation in America: 100 days of dynamic action.’
25His political secretary, Marcia Williams (later Baroness Falkender), became his image-maker-in-chief. She virtually never gave interviews, but she told me: ‘We realised as you were broadcasting into people’s homes you couldn’t be some stiff, remote figure; you had to be a relaxed figure that people could identify with. To stop Harold gesturing to camera with his fist clenched, which looked rather threatening, we gave him a pipe to smoke during TV interviews. And he would put his left hand on his cheek which showed up his wedding ring. It was Harold the family man, and a subtle contrast with Ted Heath when he became Tory leader, who was of course a bachelor.’
‘Television had one great advantage for the Labour Party,’ Wilson told me: ‘Most of the press were against us, and if the right-wing press were tempted to say about me, “This is a terrible man, he looks like an ogre, his voice is terrible,” then you go on TV and people say, “Oh look, he’s an ordinary chap like the rest of us.”’
But Wilson was far from an ordinary chap: he was a complex self-creation.
The long-serving Labour MP Gerald Kaufman, who was Wilson’s parliamentary press officer in Downing Street from 1965 to 1970, told me: ‘Harold is the only man I know who deliberately acquired a sense of humour. I remember when I first knew him in 1948, I was chairman of the Oxford University Labour Club. And I have to say it, he was an extraordinarily boring speaker. And then suddenly he decided to have a sense of humour: he turned himself into a politician who could make very amusing sharp, witty cracks. He just worked on it, and he did the same 26with television. Harold was the first Prime Minister to realise that on television you don’t have to speak in sentences with a subject, verb and object. He took great care to use language that was clear, direct and uncomplicated.’
From the moment he walked into No. 10, Wilson was determined to do everything he could to ensure that when he called a snap election, he would significantly enlarge his minuscule Commons majority. Week by week he would announce a new plan, initiative or mission. ‘Harold is just moving from emergency to emergency, picking up bright ideas as he goes along,’ a leading member of his kitchen Cabinet, the Housing Minister Dick Crossman, noted in his diary. ‘He jumps from position to position, always brilliantly energetic and opportunist, always moving in zig-zags.’
His plan for fortnightly fireside chats was turned down by the broadcasters. Instead, for his first eighteen months in office, Wilson was ever eager to be interviewed on BBC and ITV current affairs programmes. ‘Harold didn’t go to the TV studios to answer the questions,’ Gerald Kaufman told me. ‘The questions were an irrelevance. He went there to say something. He decided the message he wanted to communicate. And then regardless of the questions that were put to him, he said what he meant to say.’
But to Wilson’s chagrin, TV interviewers were becoming much tougher than the traditionally kid-gloved BBC men. Leading the pack was Robin Day, a former barrister who wore a bow tie and what one comedian called cruel glasses. The forensic Day would not let Wilson get away with not answering the 27question. Having started with a marvellous honeymoon in the media, by 1966 the Prime Minister was becoming convinced that the broadcasters were joining the press in being biased against him. The BBC’s Director-General Hugh Carleton Greene told me: ‘After thirteen years in opposition, Labour leaders had become very close to the BBC. Harold Wilson thought he had money in the bank with us, but when he came to cash his cheque, it bounced.’
The PM called a snap general election for March 1966. Eighteen months earlier, as opposition leader Wilson had made great play of challenging the then Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, to a live head-to-head TV election debate. But Sir Alec said: ‘I’m not particularly attracted by confrontations of personality. If we are not careful, you’ll get a sort of Top of the Pops contest. And you would then get the best actor as leader of the country, and the actor would be prompted by a scriptwriter.’ He turned down flat the invitation to appear in a debate.
But the Conservatives now had a new leader – a grammar-school boy from an unprivileged background like Wilson. Ted Heath was chosen partly because Tory MPs believed he would be a match for Wilson on TV. There was no love lost between the two men. Heath told me: ‘I am sick to death with people who talk about political life in terms of image and imagery. I was against gimmicks. I was against all the cosy pipe smoking and evading every issue. Mr Wilson always seemed to be concerned with some improvisory device to tide him over and in that he was supreme at getting the press on his side.’
In the 1966 election, it was Heath who challenged Wilson to 28a live TV debate. The PM seemed to accept the challenge publicly, but behind the scenes it was rather different. ‘We felt that a confrontation on TV would have given Heath an advantage,’ Marcia Williams told me. ‘Heath was trying to make his leadership stick. Harold was by then a very well-known figure. It would have given Heath a lot of exposure as a potential Prime Minister in a setting that he wanted. Harold’s office would have rubbed off on Heath. We decided that Harold was not going to appear on equal terms with him.’
The problem was that tactically Wilson wanted neither to appear with Heath nor for it to look publicly as if he were refusing to do so. With a piece of characteristically fancy footwork, Wilson managed to stymie the whole project by accusing the BBC, which had enthusiastically promoted the idea of the debate, of supporting the Tories.
Instead, Wilson wanted to conduct a low-key campaign. The image would be of a Prime Minister and his government resolutely tackling the problems they had been bequeathed with calm confidence and efficiency. In two of Labour’s five election broadcasts, the Prime Minister spoke reassuringly to the camera from behind an imposing desk. Wilson later told the Irish Prime Minister Seán Lemass about the image he had wanted to project. ‘Harold Wilson said that a political leader should try to look, particularly on television, like a family doctor,’ Lemass told me. ‘He should come over as a family doctor who inspires trust by his appearance as well as by his soothing words – and whose advice is welcome.’
29It worked. Dr Wilson won by a majority of nearly 100. But as often happens with landslides, things quickly went belly-up. Dick Crossman claimed that within four months of his famous victory, Wilson had ‘gone from catastrophe to catastrophe and suffered the most dramatic decline of any modern Prime Minister’. The economy was on the slide, the trade unions were out of control and the markets believed the pound would crash. From the moment he had stepped into No. 10, Wilson had pledged to protect the value of sterling. He was only too well aware that the previous Labour governments had failed to do so. But in November 1967, Wilson reluctantly gave up the unequal struggle and announced he was devaluing the pound by 14 per cent. He appeared on television for a special broadcast to the nation.
But Wilson went too far. He sought to play down the significance of devaluation and even suggest it was part of his own cunning plan. In the most notorious passage of the broadcast, he said: ‘From now on the pound is worth 14 per cent less in terms of other currencies. This does not mean that the pound here in Britain in your pocket or purse or bank has been devalued.’ In his self-proclaimed role of economics tutor to the populace, the PM was trying to tell people that if they went into the banks or shops the next day, they would still get twenty shillings for every pound they had. But it looked as though he was effectively trying to deny that devaluation had happened. The broadcast was met with rage across the country.
As Wilson’s closest adviser, Marcia Williams stood loyally by him. She told me: ‘It would have been unnerving for the people 30to see their Prime Minister appearing full of woe and foreboding, rather than reassuring them and giving them reason to hope. The leader had to rally the troops.’
The fact was that devaluation represented a crushing political defeat for Wilson. He was well aware that he had broken his private axiom; that King Canute would have done better if the tide was going out. By attempting to present devaluation as a panacea and implying that he had really favoured it all along, the PM had shot a large hole in his own foot. All oppositions seek to prove that governments cannot be trusted and the Tories had spent nearly five years seeking to demolish Wilson’s homespun credibility on television. Now, his own broadcast had done it for them.
It became open season on the Prime Minister. On a topical BBC comedy programme there was a bitter joke: ‘You know how you can always tell someone is lying – there are always unconscious bits of body language that give him away every time he tells a whopper. It might be a nervous tic near his eye or his hand may go up to his face or a vein on his neck may stand out. But what’s the tell-tale body language when Harold Wilson is lying? [Pause] When you see his lips move.’
The PM threatened to sue, and the BBC sent him a letter of apology.
Wilson was widely seen as having devalued himself, and his carefully crafted image as a trusted family doctor had fragmented. After devaluation, Marcia Williams told me: ‘We had three years of public meetings where Harold had been heckled badly, eggs had been thrown as well as tomatoes and flour. He used 31to come home looking absolutely awful. So we had these bad images on television and we were determined to counter them.’
When Wilson called the 1970 general election, he appeared on BBC TV’s Election Forum, which had solicited questions from viewers. Robin Day began the programme saying: ‘This question represents an angry theme running through many of these cards. In view of your past record of lies and broken promises, do you really expect the electorate to place any reliance on your word?’ Wilson calmly turned the question round to say that he hoped to have the opportunity of nailing the lies that had been told about him for the past six years. But while he sounded cool, he looked hot and bothered.
The next day the Daily Telegraph headlined the Prime Minister’s perspiration. His press secretary Joe Haines suspected BBC dirty tricks. He told me: ‘The studio was intolerably hot that day and almost as soon as Harold went on the sweat was running down his face. It looked on television as if he was wriggling under intensely hostile questioning. And it was made much worse when the floor manager of the BBC apologised and said that when Mr Heath had been in the previous day, it had been so cold that she had to send out for a cardigan. Hence conspiracy theory.’
In contrast to Wilson, the Tories’ slogan for their leader was ‘Ted Heath: A Man to Trust’. When the votes were counted, Wilson’s landslide majority was wiped out and the Tories returned to power with a narrow lead. 32
CHAPTER 5
ON THE ROAD
The year 1970 was quite a packed one for me. I was directing films at home and abroad for the nightly programme 24 Hours on BBC 1. When filming, I nearly became a casualty of war in Africa and then in the Middle East. I also made films about the British general election and played cricket for the MCC. And it was the year I married a BBC colleague, Anne Faber, who was Macmillan’s granddaughter, and we had our first child.
At the start of the year, I was sent to Nigeria, Africa’s largest country by population, where the two-and-a-half-year civil war was coming to an end. Even by the standards of such conflicts, the war was an especially brutal affair. It had been triggered by oil-rich eastern Nigeria seceding and declaring itself the independent Republic of Biafra. The federal government, with its massively superior firepower, invaded the rebel state and fighting continued for more than two years – with the rebels accusing the invaders of deploying starvation and genocide as weapons of war. As the conflict was in its last throes, the world’s press descended on Lagos.
34Working as a film director, I was there with the renowned reporter Tom Mangold. We knew it was going to be a hard slog, partly because the Nigerian government hated the BBC for what it called biased reporting and what we called refusing to swallow the increasingly shrill propaganda claims and counterclaims of both sides. When we arrived, the federal government had imposed a ban on journalists travelling out of Lagos to what was left of the self-proclaimed Biafran Republic.
There was a surreal moment when the Nigerian Red Cross called a press conference for hundreds of journalists and camera crews. The organisation’s head took to the platform and announced: ‘The Nigerian Red Cross has called this conference to say that the Nigerian Red Cross has nothing to say to the press at this time.’ He then left the room, refusing to take questions. The cream of the media were reduced to interviewing each other.
We were getting nowhere, and I approached the chief press officer of the Ministry of Information, Sam Epelle. He wore dark glasses and a menacing mien. I said: ‘I am from the BBC, and I wonder if you could help me. We are finding it very difficult to film here or to get any government ministers to speak to us.’
He replied: ‘It will do the BBC good to eat some of its own poison for a change,’ and he walked off.
Despite that we did manage to make a film about life in postwar Lagos. And we had a coup when we exclusively secured film of the commanding officers of each side signing a peace treaty together – in secret. Their dialogue was matchless. The government man said to his opposite number: ‘Hello, old boy. Haven’t seen you since Sandhurst. How are things going?’
35His Biafran counterpart was equally plummy: ‘It’s been a bit of an up and down ride but mustn’t grumble.’ We sent the film back to London, where it led the BBC News.
