From Bevan to Blair

Geoffrey Goodman

Description

For more than half a century Geoffrey Goodman was one of Fleet Street's foremost political and industrial reporters. This book is his record of what it was like to work at the heart of British politics. Taking us through the years that followed the end of World War II up to the present day, he offers a compelling story of the characters and events that shaped British political history.



Goodman's portraits include many of the political giants of the twentieth century. As a close friend of the great socialist Aneurin Bevan, he is able to reveal the philosophy and drive of the man who. Goodman also offers a behind-the-scenes account of Labour Prime Ministers Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, and brings to light new reasons why Wilson suspected the security agencies of trying to destabilise his government.



Other portraits include Michael Foot, Harold Macmillan, Edward Heath, Willie Whitelaw, Margaret Thatcher, Rupert Murdoch and Hugh Cudlipp.
Acknowledgements

Preface

1. 1945: Footsteps in the dark

2. Early life: Buttonholes and cornerstones

3. The 1930s: The devil’s decade

4. The war years: My university of life

5. Postwar world: Civvy street, Fleet Street

6. Aneurin Bevan: From NHS to The Bomb

7. The 1960s: Postwar interregnum

8. Harold Wilson: White heat and The Sun

9. In place of courage: Journalism in decline?

10. The long march: Dropping in on China in the Cultural Revolution

11. Prepare for revolution: In Britain?

12. 1973-4: For all our tomorrows

13. Inside the Whale: A journalist in Whitehall

14. Jim Callaghan takes over: ‘Too late at 64’?

15. Return of the Native: Back to the Mirror

16. A nation in discontent: Nothing at the end of the rainbow

17. 1979: The curtain falls, enter Margaret Thatcher

18. Maxwelliana: Cap’n Bob and his slippery decks

19. Conclusion: A funny old world

References

Index

Sujets

• Media Studies
• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Journalism
• Media

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 septembre 2003
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781849642286
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

From Bevan to Blair

Fifty Years’ Reporting from the Political Front Line

Geoffrey Goodman

P Pluto Press LONDON • STERLING, VIRGINIA

First published 2003 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 20166-2012, USA

www.plutobooks.com

Copyright © Geoffrey Goodman 2003

The right of Geoffrey Goodman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 7453 2178 X hardback

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Goodman, Geoffrey. From Bevan to Blair : fifty years’ reporting from the political front line / Geoffrey Goodman. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0–7453–2178–X (hardback) 1. Goodman, Geoffrey. 2. Journalists––Great Britain––Biography. I. Title. PN5123.G59A3 2003 070.92––dc21

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2003012125

Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services, Fortescue, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG, England Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Towcester, England Printed and bound in the European Union by Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne, England

Contents

Acknowledgements Preface

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19

1945: Footsteps in the Dark

Early Life: Buttonholes and Cornerstones

The 1930s: The Devil’s Decade

The War Years: My University of Life

Postwar World: Civvy Street, Fleet Street

Aneurin Bevan: From NHS to The Bomb

The 1960s: Postwar Interregnum Harold Wilson: White Heat and theSun In Place of Courage: Journalism in Decline

The Long March: Dropping in on China in the Cultural Revolution

Prepare for Revolution: In Britain?

1973–4: For All Our Tomorrows

Inside the Whale: A Journalist in Whitehall

Jim Callaghan Takes Over: ‘Too Late at 64’?

Return of the Native: Back to theMirror

A Nation in Discontent: Nothing at the End of the Rainbow

1979: The Curtain Falls, Enter Margaret Thatcher

Maxwelliana: Cap’n Bob and his Slippery Decks

Conclusion: A Funny Old World

References Index

vii ix

1 14 29 44 56 71 86 99 114

130 141 158 171 190 206

221 234 250 269

276 277

Acknowledgements

It is hard for me to grasp that this book has been in preparation, in one way or another, for some ten years. Of course, there have been large gaps in my attention to it and, still more, moments when I reflected that the whole thing should be put on a shelf and forgotten. That it was not dumped into the notorious dustbin of history is frankly due, largely, to the persistent encouragement from so many friends and old colleagues who insisted that I must not allow it to be pushed into that hungry maw. It is to them that I turn to express my gratitude – and the hope that the completed product will not disappoint them too much. Their names are too numerous to catalogue here, and I also know that most of them would prefer to remain anonymous, no doubt wisely – albeit below I will make two exceptions to this rule. There are, of course, those to whom I owe an enormous debt of thanks not only for their persistent encouragement but also their sustained practical help. At the head of this list are my wife, Margit, and our children, John and Karen, whose love and support has always been unstinting as well as vital to me. They know full well the sacrifices a journalist’s family is called on to make to keep a newspaperman on the road. To them goes my eternal gratitude. I also want to pay particular tribute to my son John Goodman who compiled the index. Then come my dear friends the McCarthys – Bill and Margaret, Lord and Lady McCarthy of Headington, Oxford. Bill, a distinguished Emeritus Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford, arranged for me to continue a long association with the College, which he originally had inspired some thirty years ago. It was in Oxford at Nuffield, over the years, that much of this book was written. It was there that I received hospitality, a vast amount of intellectual stimulus, support and creative criticism from many friends and Fellows of the College, not least successive Wardens including the current one, Sir Tony Atkinson. I owe them all a great debt. There are also those who stand in the shadows and without whose help and support a construction of this kind could never have been built. In particular I want to mention my former secretary at the Daily Mirror, Mrs June Hoile, whose devoted asssistance played a notable role in the early foundations of this book.

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Then the two notable exceptions I referred to above. First, my dear friend of over fifty years, Leo Abse, whose 29 years as a Labour MP established him as the most distinguished backbench legislator of the twentieth century. Second, to my equally dear friend of half a century, Michael Foot, whose political, professional and personal friendship has been priceless. To all of them – my thanks. I also wish to add the name of Professor Richard Hoggart the distinguished writer whose encouragement and friendship has been an invaluable asset. And finally, beyond the normal routine of acknowledgements I want to dedicate this book to the memory of a number of outstanding journalists whose personal friendship and professional inspiration it has been my privilege and good fortune to enjoy. They are no longer with us but, beyond question, they are woven into the fabric of the story that now unfolds. Their names, in alphabetical order, are: Tom Baistow, James Cameron, Robin (Robert James) Cruickshank, Hugh Cudlipp, Trevor Evans, Harold Hutchinson, Sydney Jacobson, Ian Mackay, Patrick (Paddy) Monkhouse, Laurence Thompson and the cartoonist-exceptional, Vicky (Victor Weisz). All were an integral part of what has contributed to build a work of this character. To all of them and to the unmentioned names, my salutes and profound thanks. Geoffrey Goodman July 2003

Preface

Being a journalist is a kind of alternate for a job in an entire range of semi-skilled, perhaps even unskilled, trades. I am thinking especially of jobs such as the secret intelligence services – incidentally, a much overrated occupation; a bookmaker (much underrated), managing a casino, becoming a politician, which has increasingly developed into a job akin to running a casino; and, to be sure, pretending to be an academic, preferably one occupied with psychology or, maybe still more appropriate, ‘modern communica- tions’. Any one of these trades, in my view, can be regarded as interchangeable with journalism. Come to think of it, you could add a few more – being a beachcomber, a coastguard on a lighthouse overlooking a particularly rugged coastline or island or, if things became really difficult, a brothel keeper. I am quite sure it would be easy to think of other alternates; or perhaps a permutation of various of these splendid categories rolled into one inglorious amalgam of chance, circumstance, fortune and probably ill-luck, much of which is always lurking around. So, briefly, I felt tempted to give this book a title of:

I T ’ S O NLY T OMORROW ’ S F ISH AND C HIPS .

It was a description offered to me many years ago by a brilliantly perceptive colleague on theDaily Mirror(dear long-dead Len Jackson), who, after my outburst of outrage and frustration at the way a piece of mine had been mishandled in the paper that day, once reminded me: ‘Just remember, old chap,’ he solemnly consoled, ‘it’ll all be forgotten in a couple of days when the paper is being used to wrap up six-penn’orth of fish and chips. It’s only tomorrow’s fish and chips we are talking about …’ They were the days when almost all fish and chip shops used newspaper pages to wrap round their delectable cod and two-penn’orth of chips. Sadly, in my nostalgia, I fear that this crude but workmanlike practice has faded from our clean-food culture. Fish and chips are no longer wrapped in yesterday’s newspapers, though, who knows, perhaps in some remote corner the heritage continues. So the original title of this book has taken on fresh tokenism.

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At any rate I am not sure why I ever regarded my range of skills, or lack of them, as qualifying me to become a newspaperman. Maybe it was pure romanticism. Perhaps I saw too many cheap films as a kid. More likely there was nothing better to do in the days when I was beginning to consider the forbidding prospect of a lifetime at work. I well remember the retirement speech made by an oldNews Chroniclecolleague, a great Parliamentary reporter of that paper (those were days when every national morning paper had its own reporter in the press gallery of the House of Commons) – E. Clepham Palmer (‘Cleph’). Upon receiving the beneficent retirement gesture from the Cadburys, who then owned the paper, Cleph observed in his dry, drawn-out East Anglian tones:

It’s been a wonderful life. It’s paid my mortgage, helped educate my children, kept me in food, drink, tobacco and clothing; assisted me to see something of the world at someone else’s expense and has provided me with a platform to address the nation at large ... what other job would have provided me with such an opportunity? What other form of work could have given an unskilled labourer, which is what I am, such good fortune?

Dear Cleph meant every word of that as he retreated to somewhere in his old native heath to enjoy the fruits of retirement from the Cocoa Press. He was not alone with such sentiments about the advantages of being in the newspaper trade. Ian Mackay was another labourer in that vineyard. The Great Bohunkus, as he was affection- ately labelled by his chums, would frequently reflect on his good fortune. As a young boy in Wick he started working life at the age of 14 humping coal for a local merchant at twooldpennies a day. He got up at 6 am every morning to qualify in the grime trade before he dusted his hands and landed a job as a messenger boy for a local paper. That was how Mackay started along the road to becoming one of the outstanding diarists and essayists to grace Fleet Street in the twentieth century. He died, aged 54, still full of zest and brilliance, at the peak of his form, a pure Mozart of journalism, and still amazed at his good fortune at being able to spend his later life reading books and absorbing knowledge about the world, then writing about all this – subsidised, as he was fond of observing, by Mr Cadbury’s bars of milk chocolate. It is not a bad way of avoiding work, though some people have clearly discovered still better methods. Not that there was much

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money in the trade in those days – unlike modern media cash registers. Most of the best journalists of my time seemed to end up with a mere handful of loose change and large debts, which they could scarcely understand, let alone pay off. All that has changed. The modern generation of Media men and women are very well paid – at least by comparison – and some are among the more privileged earning groups in society. So they should be: the job is far more demanding than it ever was as well as demanding far greater skills of invention.

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So why this book? Why bother with yet another kind of memoir about a trade that has had its over-share of nostalgic inner reflection? I have only one strong reason – I believe the picture I am presenting here is different. This story is a picture reflection of the century we have just left behind: a reflection of life for a working-class, under- educated, certainly under-privileged boy who, through the Depression years and the Second World War, somehow found a pathway into journalism and political life. The interweaving of life as a journalist and its contact with political power is a fascinating reflection of power throughout the ages. It always has been – though arguably more so today than ever. Northcliffe would be amazed if he returned to his old scene to witness how his own Citizen Kane role during the first two decades of the twentieth century has been dwarfed by contemporary moguls of media power. The book is also a testimony to a generation, my generation, the children born in the wake of the First World War. It is, of course, the experience through one eye: an eye that has seen an extraordinary transformation at every level across the spectrum of time. It encapsulates the story of an ordinary child of the century, born and reared in a north of England working-class home of Jewish immigrants from Russia and Poland. There were no privileges except those bestowed from the natural ferment of a home, encompassing a large family, which generated turbulent spirits that erupted naturally from the insecurity and uncertainties of immigrant life. I count all this not as a disadvantage but as a privilege, a huge gain, since it contained the stimulus, the vibrancy, the drive to establish roots and identity. It was a fight to survive from unpromising beginnings. There are, of course, wider considerations that the book will try to reflect. I grew up in the slipstream of vast political and social

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upheaval, indeed of revolution. All over the world, following the 1914–18 Great War, there came an earthquake of change. The great melting pot of the twentieth century was being moulded: socialism and communism were being hailed as the ‘New Religion’. Fascism was breeding on the carcase of decaying ancient regimes. When my father returned from the filth, death and destruction of the trenches across the Channel in 1918 and eventually emerged from a recovery unit in an Edinburgh hospital, he went in search of work. Work? Ah, that was another story. He always told me his story with considerable reluctance and a brevity that matched his modest outlook on life. He had emerged alive from the trenches – which surprised him; he had a few dreams and was a great Lloyd-George fan; he wanted to believe that a new world was beckoning. Armed with those hopes, those dreams, he began looking for a job, found one briefly but then joined the long queue of broken dreamers. That was the crucible in which my earliest memories were formed. Growing up in the 1920s and 1930s was an outcrop of that time warp. Yet it was more complex than that. In the immortal phraseology of Maxim Gorky, those years were in fact ‘My University’. In that crucible all future life was shaped, unconsciously but no less real. Feelings, passions, prides, prejudices, rights and wrongs, dreams and poetry – they all emptied into the crucible, shaping my ignorance as well as my knowledge. Such things are not open to choice, they simply happen. Like Everest, they are there, dominating the landscape of one’s life. For those people who grew up at the same time and yet remained outside that kind of ambience, which was essentially a zone of protest and revolt, the world clearly looked very different. Yet among my own contemporaries there were very few who were not involved, at one stage or another, in ‘trouble making’ – politically, socially, or just for the sheer hell of it to break the monotony of orthodoxy. And since we were not protected by wealth, or the kind of class background that, by definition, provided its own immunisation from reality, our options were limited – albeit no less attractive in a negative sort of way. So I came to inherit the socialist dream as part of the accepted litany of any sensible life. Gradually the message grew more sophis- ticated, more complex but also acquired a deeper logic. It was a kind of new, or different, divinity, offering idealised thoughts on the future of mankind and all that. It also provided an avenue of escape from the more conventional themes of organised mysticism and absurdities manifest in routine religious belief as practised in church,

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synagogue or mosque. Aneurin Bevan, whom I came to know so well in later years, once described socialism to me as a ‘natural biological development’. He believed that the species would ultimately come to it in pursuit of its own self-interest rather than routed via pure idealism. Bevan saw this as the ‘civilising process’ – which, I still believe, is what drew so many of my generation to the concept. That indeed was our twentieth-century dream. Even now it is still impossible to predict how influential, or superfluous, that concept may prove to be in fashioning and moulding the illusions of this new twenty-first century. Darwin once observed that it is always easier to prophesy for a million years ahead than for the next fifty. Even so it is a reasonable assumption that many of the features of the new society that is now in embryo will, in fact, come to resemble some of the dreams that we, in our time, allowed to dominate much of our lives. All this and newspapers too … well, it has been frequently claimed that journalism is the ‘first draft of history’: that somewhat presumptuous claim can be placed against my original and, I fear, more modest, sceptical offering – ‘Tomorrow’s fish and chips’. And although it is not the title of this book, I have a feeling at the far end of my mind that the truth might still fit, even if uneasily, somewhere between each.