Never let it be said that editors of Tribune have no influence. We learned this week that Chris Mullin, who edited this paper in the early 1980s, played a part in David Cameron’s decision to deprive most of his ministers of their official motor cars. As a result, many of the poor darlings are going to have to travel by bus or tube.
Apparently it was Mullin’s very funny account of his long struggle with the Whitehall machine to get rid of his ministerial car which put the idea in Cameron’s head. The story is recounted in hilarious detail in his diary of his time as a junior minister, A View from the Foothills.
Mullin – who insisted that he didn’t need a car – eventually won his battle, but only after an enormous expenditure of ministerial time. But is it not strange that a former Tribune editor should turn out to have had more impact on a Tory-led Government than on a Labour one?
I have to say, however, that the idea of ministers riding on the tube appeals to me. I reckon that some of our recent Labour ministers might not have found themselves so out of touch with the voters (as most of our aspiring party leaders now say they were) if they had had to sit, or more likely stand, next to those very voters every morning and evening.
I recall a day just after Labour’s unexpected defeat in the 1970 general election, before the new House of Commons assembled. A few of us hacks were hanging around in the Strangers’ Bar at Westminster, when who should blow in but Bill Rodgers (later one of the SDP Gang of Four) who had just lost his job at the Treasury.
He was bursting with indignation, after travelling in from his home in north London on the tube. “I say”, he bleated, “do you know how much it costs to get from Kentish Town nowadays?”
“Yes, you silly bugger”, we said, although perhaps not in precisely those words. “And the fact that you don’t is one of the reasons why you are out of a job.”
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One of the saddest things about getting old (although it doesn’t make me sad all the time; just sometimes) is the increasing frequency with which one’s friends die off. Two of my very oldest and dearest friends died this month, within a few days of each other. Their funerals took place – alas, on the same day – earlier this week.
The first to go was Alan Watkins, the gloriously individualistic political columnist of the Independent on Sunday and before that of the Observer.
When I first met him, he was writing the Crossbencher column in the old, Beaverbrook-owned Sunday Express. I was an industrial reporter on the Daily Express. It is hard to credit now, but Crossbencher was an extremely influential column then.
I got to know him better when we shared an office in New York, he for the Sunday and me for the Daily.
He used to get very angry with the somewhat peremptory cables he got from John Junor, his imperious editor, and would draft furious and highly insulting replies.
I reckon I must have saved his job several times by persuading him not to send these exquisitely-worded missives.
We became real friends when we both ended up at Westminster. I used to tease him that his once-a-week piece wasn’t a real job and that he couldn’t claim to be a proper journalist because he’d never worked on a daily newspaper. He took it all in good part, and would shake his head sadly and say: “You work too hard, Ian.”
But Alan was very far from lazy – although, like a true gentleman, he liked to pretend that he was.
He put in a great deal of work on his weekly column, which was why it was so well informed. And he occupied the time left over by producing a prodigious number of beautifully-written books.
My favourite was the last, called A Short Walk Down Fleet Street. Strangely, all the walks he described somehow ended up at El Vino’s, the rather posh wine bar he preferred to the pubs.
The other sad death was of Bridget Clements, for more than 50 years the wife of Dick Clements, Tribune’s editor for more than 20 of those years. As I said at her funeral, the cross she had to bear was that she was the grand-daughter of Ramsay MacDonald, a man reviled by most of her friends and all of her husband’s friends as the betrayer of the labour movement in 1931.
But she carried it off admirably, without betraying either her grandfather or her own principles. She managed this thanks to her personal dignity and to the extraordinary serenity which was central to her personality. I feel sure that her calmness in a crisis must have saved Dick – and therefore Tribune – from implosion many times over.
She was a lovely person, a good socialist who was in many ways the mother-figure of the Labour left. What’s more, she was a superb cook, a skilled gardener, a brilliant watercolourist and an accomplished photographer. And beautiful, too.
