Long before the phone-hacking scandal attained volcanic proportions, I scarcely knew a journalist in London unastonished to hear that last Christmas, the prime minister dined at the Oxfordshire home of Rebekah Brooks. Even were she Mother Teresa, which some evidence suggests she is not, it was plainly a lapse of judgment for David Cameron to be seen to accept Brooks’s hospitality, as he regularly did.
This was on four counts: 1) The immensely sensitive issue of BSkyB’s future ownership was on the government’s plate, and Brooks is a senior executive of News International. 2) The News of the World phone-hacking scandal was ongoing, and Brooks was a deeply involved party. 3) Brooks’s access to Cameron was bound to feed jealousies elsewhere in the media. 4) The theme of this article: it is doubtful that it is possible, never mind prudent, for a prime minister to indulge active friendship with any journalist, however sincere may be goodwill and affection on both sides.
A quarter of a century ago there was a row when Peregrine Worsthorne, then Sunday Telegraph editor, recycled in print some remarks the Prince of Wales had made to him at a private lunch. Bill Deedes observed sagely as he watched the plaster falling off the ceiling: ‘Journalists are, by their nature, unsuitable confidants for princes.’ The same applies for prime ministers. Of course they should have a regular private dialogue with editors and political scribes, invaluable to both sides. But they should never delude themselves that intimacy is desirable or indeed acceptable.
Were David Cameron to read this, he might be tempted to mutter something about pomposity. Since his elevation, he has behaved with unaltered informality to people he knew beforehand. I suspect he is mildly irritated that some elderly folk like me, having addressed him for years as David, now do so even privately as ‘prime minister’. But that is what he is. It is a little extravagant to liken his circumstances to those of Prince Hal, who sensibly discarded Falstaff on assuming the crown. But when a man or woman achieves the highest office a divide opens which cannot close again until they quit it. My kind are commentators who, whatever our personal admiration and liking for Cameron, must strive objectively to assess his successes, failures and follies in a fashion which sometimes provokes dismay in Downing Street.
The era is gone, thank heavens, in which some newspapers, notably the Times, perceived themselves as a branch of government. For more than a century, a few editors with acceptable table manners, counterparts of Trollope’s Tom Towers, enjoyed an intimacy with prime ministers rooted in the latters’ confidence that they were on the same side.
In Ian Fleming’s 1955 thriller Moonraker, following a nuclear explosion in the North Sea, M tells James Bond that the government will suppress publication of the story. If leaks became dangerous, the prime minister would summon editors and tell them enough of the truth to persuade them to keep quiet. ‘They’ll play along,’ says M confidently. ‘They always do if it’s big enough.’
Not any more, they do not. Rees-Moggery, if I may call it that, is long dead in editors’ offices, though some politicians were slow to get the message. When I ran the Daily Telegraph, my relationship with Margaret Thatcher was sulphurous. In 1986 it proved necessary to sack her daughter Carol during a cull of the former regime’s staff. I supposed, naively, that she would recognise this as a professional necessity — an example of Thatcherism in action — rather than as a personal slight.
But one of our leader-writers, ex-Tory MP Jock Bruce-Gardyne, said disbelievingly: ‘You can’t go around sacking prime ministers’ daughters!’ After a spasm of rage, Thatcher never spoke to me again. A year or two later, I lunched with her press secretary, Bernard Ingham, a chronic complainer about criticisms from the Telegraph. I said: ‘But we repeatedly assert that the Tories are the only party fit to rule.’ Bernard said Thatcher’s response to that was: ‘We don’t want the Telegraph’s support some of the time! We want support we can count upon all of the time!’ Ironclad backing for Tory administrations had been the norm when the paper was owned by the Berry family. It took years for some politicians to recognise that not only the Telegraph but every title now plays by different rules. No newspaper is willing unswervingly to toe a party line. The nicest compliment I received as an editor was passed on by Douglas Hurd, who confided: ‘John Major doesn’t like you, because he says he never knows what you are going to do next.’
I hope that no editor of the present generation enjoys the unqualified trust of Downing Street. It seems right for prime ministers to entertain journalists, but such hospitality must be extended evenhandedly. Favouritism is fatal. Over the past decade or two, the prominence of Murdoch people in prime ministers’ visitors’ books has caused bitter and reasonable resentment elsewhere.
Major, back in the early 1990s, moaned incessantly about the criticism to which he was subjected by Murdoch papers. I asked: ‘So why do you keep inviting Rupert to Chequers, prime minister? He will make his decisions on the basis of cold commercial calculation, uninfluenced in the smallest degree by you giving him a nice lunch.’ Major made no answer, but we both knew the score. He lived in mortal dread of Rupert, as have his successors. Whatever strictures Murdoch titles heap upon Britain’s politicians, they have always been too fearful of the great mogul’s ill-will not to attend his annual London bunfights — and yes, Ed Miliband was at the last one a few weeks ago, alongside David Cameron.
After recent events, however, I suspect that never again will the Murdoch papers hold a British national leader in such thraldom. If past prime ministers did not dare not appease News Corp, in future they will not dare do so, because they know how parliament and the public would respond.
As to private dealings between prime ministers, editors and media bosses, I revert to Bill Deedes. One morning in 1994, I told him that I had been with John Major the previous day, listening to a sustained wail about the failure of everybody, and our writers in particular, to understand his woes. ‘How long were you with him?’ asked Bill. Ninety minutes. ‘Forty-five too long,’ said Bill crisply. ‘No prime minister should have more than 45 minutes for any journalist, however distinguished.’
He was right. All politicians are prone to self-pity in crisis — I would be surprised if David Cameron is not suffering an attack of it this week. But the right audience for howls of anguish about the unfairness of life, politics and the media is a long-suffering wife rather than a journalist, however sympathetic.
We are viscerally indiscreet people. How many journalists, however close to the prime minister, resist whispering to a friend what David said last weekend? Even the grandest visitors to Chequers frequently rehearse elsewhere afterwards every detail of the conversation. That is why no prime minister should say anything to a journalist which he would find it embarrassing to read in print, possibly after being repeated at third- or fourth-hand. Every sensible person observes a distinction between professional ‘friends’ and real ones. Journalists forge many relationships with important people which serve common interests, and sometimes reflect real liking. But such connections are rooted in the demands of our job, and usually atrophy when one or both parties retire into private life.
We do not know whether Cameron’s relationship with Rebekah Brooks developed because they liked each other or be cause he was — initially — an aspiring prime minister, and she one of Britain’s most powerful media executives. But no judgment on their association could ignore that each occupied the position they did. That is why on Cameron’s side the link was as ill advised as hobnobbing socially with Elisabeth Murdoch and Matthew Freud. Such people are players, indeed street-fighters, who always have an agenda.
The prime minister has indicated that one consequence of the phone-hacking scandal is that future dealings between ministers and journalists are likely to be different from, and less intimate than, in the past. Yet no grand self-denying ordinance is needed. All that has been lacking in the past is common sense.
The prime minister should keep talking privately to media folk, but abandon the delusion that even the most exalted are appropriate mates. He is a public figure, 24/7. His every relationship is subject to public scrutiny until such time as he returns to private life, when maybe we can all be friends.