Читать книгу Inside Story: Politics, Intrigue and Treachery from Thatcher to Brexit - Philip Webster, Philip Webster - Страница 15

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 in the next parliament. Indeed, she implied that she would be ready to fight a fifth election ‘by popular acclaim’.

At the time, Tory back-bencher Sir Anthony Meyer had launched the first challenge to her leadership. In Washington we questioned her about that as well as her meeting with Bush, which had resulted in an agreement that the West must maintain its guard because the Cold War was not yet over. She declared that she was not ‘a lame duck’ leader after Sir Anthony had reacted to the Times interview by suggesting it was time for the party to decide whether it wanted ‘a president for life’. Thatcher retorted: ‘I have never regarded myself in that way. I regarded it then, as now, the biggest possible honour to be elected for my constituency and to be prime minister.’

I travelled with Mrs Thatcher again only two months before her removal from office. By then – September 1990 – her caution about the Cold War had gone and – speaking in Prague – she urged the European Community to open its doors to all the countries of Eastern Europe. She got a rapturous reception as she entered the federal assembly chamber and Alexander Dubcek, the father of the Prague Spring in 1968 and in 1990 chairman of the assembly, told her: ‘For us you are not the Iron Lady. You are the Kind Lady.’

She must have wished that her MPs back home appreciated her as much.

How Thatcher Decided Our Fate: Fly On

It was the end of a productive trip as far as the travelling Lobby pack was concerned. A massive demo, one of the biggest Norway had seen, had happened in the centre of the capital the previous night and given us plenty to write home about. There had also been something of a spat between our Prime Minister and her Norwegian counterpart.

We lifted off out of Oslo’s Fornebu Airport on a Friday evening in an RAF VC10, carrying Thatcher, her husband Denis, a few Downing Street officials and us. About forty in all. Only we did not get too far too quickly. Almost as soon as we had got into the air, the plane slowed noticeably and, while the take-off was not aborted, we did not seem to be going very fast. In fact, it seemed as if we were going to return to the airport as the plane laboured.

In a VC10 you sit with your backs to the cockpit and the small first-class cabin is in front of you. At this point the captain, the wonderfully named Squadron Leader Jimmy Jewell, walked urgently through the main cabin and into the first-class territory containing the Prime Minister and her husband. After a minute or so he emerged, returned to the cockpit and within seconds there was a roar of the engines and the plane was up and away and heading for Heathrow. The incident was soon put to one side as we enjoyed the RAF hospitality on the way home, with none of the crew divulging anything about the captain’s visit.

As we landed at Heathrow, however, the picture changed rapidly. Fire engines and ambulances were lining both sides of the runway and as the plane touched down, they followed it along the runway to the VIP suite near Terminal 4. We were ordered to get off the plane as swiftly as possible. The Thatcher party was out within seconds. Within seconds of us leaving the plane, police went on board with sniffer dogs. The aircraft was then towed away to a more remote part of the airport.

By now it was clear something serious was afoot. As we waited in the suite for our luggage to come off the aircraft, we were told the whole story by an official. Just after the plane took off, an anonymous call to a newspaper office in Oslo said a bomb had been put on board. The message was passed on to air traffic control at the military airport and it was quickly flashed to Captain Jimmy Jewell.

We were off the ground when he received it. He decided that he should tell the Prime Minister. After listening to his explanation, and his assurance that the plane had been under watch throughout the trip, she told him: ‘Fly on. We will not bow to terrorism.’ I wrote in a story on the front page the next day that, although it was clear that the warning was taken highly seriously, Mrs Thatcher expressed her total confidence in the security of the plane.

Reflecting on this drama as I drove home from the airport, it occurred to me that I, and everyone else on the plane, literally had our lives in the Prime Minister’s hands after that warning came through. We certainly had no vote over our destiny; indeed, we were not even told that we were under any kind of threat. I wondered whether the crew, had it been on its own and received the call, would have taken the plane down or gone on. Eventually, I decided, it was better not to have known.

The reasons for the concern were obvious because at least some of the demonstrations in Oslo the previous night were inspired by IRA sympathizers. An embarrassed Gro Harlem Brundtland, the Norwegian prime minister, ordered an inquiry into the failure of the police to prevent hundreds of demonstrators forcing their way into the grounds of the 800-year-old castle where Thatcher was to attend a banquet. Brundtland said: ‘Last night was not pleasant for me as a hostess. It was embarrassing and regrettable. I apologized to our guests. A police inquiry has started.’

Asked whether she had been surprised by the strength of public opposition to her, Thatcher said: ‘No. I am used to demonstrations. These looked as if they were very professionally organized.’ It was one of the biggest demos Thatcher had faced since taking office and the rest of the Lobby had Gordon Greig, then political editor of the Daily Mail, to thank for being made aware of it.

We were left at our hotel while the Thatcher party had gone off to the dinner and we had no knowledge that trouble was brewing in what seemed an unlikely place for a big demo. We were thinking about having dinner ourselves but Gordon was tipped off by a security source and he kindly shared the news with us.

The confrontation between Mrs Thatcher and Brundtland – the Norwegian Socialist leader and the only other female prime minister in Europe at the time – had been eagerly awaited in Norway. She delivered what amounted to a public lecture in which she drew attention to the two governments’ differences on acid rain and South Africa and attacked Britain’s attitude to the welfare state and unemployment.

Thatcher had prepared a polite speech for a lunch, telling the people of Tromsø that they sat ‘in the front line of the defence of freedom’. But she sat grim-faced as Brundtland, who had a reputation as the Iron Lady of Nordic politics, lost no time in highlighting the issues which she said marred otherwise smooth relations between the two countries. She made a thinly veiled reference to the North–South divide in Britain. She also said the Norwegian Government was determined to ensure that employment opportunities and social benefits ‘are available to all of our residents’.

Thatcher did not hit back at Brundtland. It was clear that she did not want to raise the political temperature of her visit and probably accepted that the remarks were aimed at her counterpart’s domestic political audience. But she was clearly shaken by the strength of the demonstrations against her.

That was on the Thursday night. But by Friday she was again in no mood for turning.