Back in 1980, when Hugo Young handed me a carbon-smudged account of his latest
lunch with Margaret Thatcher, I thought that this was how all newspaper
business was done. To a newcomer in the Sunday Times parliamentary team, as
I then was, the passing down of such information seemed a sensible
commonplace. Senior editors and writers would take bread and wine with the
Prime Minister: their juniors would receive a written account of what had
gone on.
This first glimpse of a “Hugo Young Paper” was useful, if not especially
revelatory. In the early years of the Thatcher government it was not easy to
get a grip on what was going on. Even in the Cabinet, few knew. The Prime
Minister’s views on how to save the British economy were described by her
colleagues on a scale between “dry” and “deranged” – depending on which
newspapers one read or which minister could be persuaded to share a few
words. As to Thatcher’s view of her candid friends, “wet” was the word most
often attributed: “feeble-minded appeasers” was a phrase heard sometimes
too.
What did Thatcher herself have to say? Over the Times boardroom dining table
on July 9, 1980, Young had asked the Prime Minister some pertinent questions
about Soviets, trades unions and other objects of suspicion. He had received
from her some answers and typed them out for the rest of us, faintly for
those at the bottom of the list for “carbons” but legible for all practical
purpose. Was she “out to lunch” or merely lunching? We could read and decide
for ourselves. The results, while not dramatic, did have the benefit of
being direct. As for the process, it did not seem surprising to someone who
had recently arrived in newspapers from an Oxford college, an oil company
and the BBC.
This report of Thatcher’s “galleon-like” lunchtime appearance – her
“confident” answers and “softly-softly-catchee-monkey” promises of action –
was, however, the last Hugo Young paper I ever personally received. Perhaps
I should not have had it at all. Perhaps I had it only because Thatcher had
referred to an unwelcome report of mine from a few months before, written
after I had heard her then Treasury Chief Secretary, John Biffen, promising
“three years of unparalleled austerity” to a Saturday morning seminar.
“Biffenry is one of my problems”, Young had reported her saying at the
lunch: “his speeches are marvellous but these phrases keep coming out”.
Whatever the reason, I never saw another example until opening this edited
collection of them, which has been patiently assembled by Ion Trewin since
the author’s death in 2003. Of course, I had long since discovered that the
circulation of such accounts was not normal newspaper procedure. Journalists
jealously guard their treasure, prime ministerial treasure most of all. Hugo
Young was, in this respect and much else, an exceptional man.
The literature of Fleet Street is long on the subject of political lunching,
but short on what happens when the lunches are over. Journalists make very
different uses of their access to our leaders – for pleasure, for malice,
for stories, for good relations that might bring future stories. Newspaper
editors invite politicians to sing for their soufflés to a selected audience
in their dining rooms. Individual reporters lure lone dissidents to corner
tables at the trattoria. Systematic recording of political conversations is
less common than outsiders may think. The circulation of such records – even
to a very restricted circle – is even rarer.
Occasionally, I tried it myself. For various reasons the practice never
lasted. Two years after my single “Hugo Young Paper”, I began twenty years
at The Times, ten of them as Editor. On a daily paper, there was always
something more pressing after lunch than the need to remember and write. The
next day’s issue was always everything. Weeks after a lunch I could
sometimes ask a colleague to confirm what a minister or civil servant,
archbishop or Middle Eastern monarch, had told us over the coffee and
chocolates. Sometimes I could refer to my own notes. But most of the time it
was enough that a political lunch generated an argument in the taxi back to
the office, a story the next day, a leader or a column in the ensuing days,
and could then evaporate – at much the same speed as a glass of Times
brandy, poured in the hope of loosening tongues but, at a time of increasing
professional sobriety, left mostly undisturbed.
To some of us, the making of any record would have broken journalism’s muddy
“off the record” rules. This selection from the Hugo Young Papers was
painstakingly “cleared” by Young’s surviving fellow lunchers – and we do not
know how much we are missing as a result. Henry Kissinger said he had
neither any recollection of what Young had written nor any objection to it.
Others may have been less generous. Even as the text now stands, it is a
significant document by a single-minded man who loved good political stories
– but loved information and analysis even more. Before writing his columns,
Hugo Young recorded these first lightly connected fragments, both for
himself and for others, a mass of the facts beneath the iceberg’s tip that
appeared under his name in print.
This gentle, inspiring journalist, with his donnish gaze and Catholic
conviction, was born in Sheffield in 1938. He had been a Balliol law
student, and briefly a reporter in his Yorkshire home, then quickly removed
from the roughest daily fray. His form of art was the weekly political
column, first for the Sunday Times and afterwards for the Guardian. The
columnists of the 1970s and early 80s, when newspapers were smaller and
opinion less profuse, held a privileged place – and none used that privilege
in a more consistent and organized manner than he.
These posthumous papers are not in themselves a gripping story of events – or
even of a single event, the lunch itself. If Trewin’s selection is a fair
one, Young wrote little of how the subjects of the day rose and fell between
courses, from the smoked salmon to the mints, even less of which topics were
avoided and which were dragged painfully from the reluctant guest. Margaret
Thatcher may have been “galleon-like” but this was a rare use of a purely
descriptive phrase. There is a certain amount of open antipathy to
individuals, for example to the second rank minister, John Patten: “very
pleased with himself, very unrevealing of anything he really thought, a
hard-nosed cocky bugger, with all the necessary outer smoothery”. But most
of the papers are neat summaries under subject headings. EUROPE, SOVIET
RELATIONS, UNITED STATES, THATCHER AND THE FOREIGN OFFICE: from a note of
lunch at the Garrick Club, October 28, 1985, with Malcolm Rifkind “a
proficient young man on the rise . . . in the Thatcher mould but much more
civilised than she is”.
Foraging for my own accounts of similar lunchtimes – many of them with the
same people – I find that the content, as recorded by me, has already been
converted into a narrative. Single facts seem to have been rarely worth
recording. Two facts might sometimes have become a story but, if they did
not, seem mostly to have been forgotten. It is much harder to remember
points without putting them together. Whenever I asked a colleague about a
lunchtime contretemps with some Cabinet dissident, the answer often
contained a shrewd assessment of character, dress and of relative loquacity
before and after drink. Any precise position on policy was much more liable
to be lost. Future historians will be grateful for the availability of raw
data from Hugo Young, recorded almost contemporaneously before the
professional needs of writing his column took over. It is promised that a
full archive will eventually be available.
Good historians will also be wary. Those remarks about Rifkind and Patten show
Hugo Young’s personal likes and dislikes. At lunchtime even the most
open-minded political writers choose their company for pleasure as well as
purpose. These papers show a preference for men of the political centre
which any reader of his published newspaper columns would expect. He avoided
the company of the oleaginous and sleazy and never tasted much of the era’s
oil and sleaze. His most constant lunch companions, as recorded here, were
Chris Patten and Douglas Hurd, liberal internationalists, literate
intellectuals, men as essential to Thatcher as they were unsympathetic to
her.
Even behind the baldest accounts, there is, however, a theme – of how such
men, and many others much less subtle, struggled in the 1980s with the new
direction their party took with such success. A week after the 1980 Thatcher
lunch, the leading “wet”, Jim Prior, tells Young that there is great Cabinet
unity because “she hasn’t really got a friend left in the whole Cabinet”.
There was much wishful thinking in those old lunching days, not least in the
time that Young and others spent with the breakaway “Gang of Four”, David
Owen, Roy Jenkins, Bill Rodgers and Shirley Williams, Labour centrists who
hoped that extremism on both sides would open a new era for their own good
sense. Whether hosting alone or with colleagues, Young eats with the “old
Left” more than the “new Right”. His passion for the cause of Britain’s
progressive integration within Europe does not induce him to break bread
with opponents. I discover here that I am spared a lunch of my own with the
EU Commission President Jacques Santer, on the grounds of being judged
“absolutely unpersuadable” on this issue.
The first half of the book rings more chords than the second. There is less
critical insight into the minds of John Major and Tony Blair. In the
columnist’s early years the country’s top politicians and their media
friends were still grappling with the uncomfortable truth that, as Norman St
John-Stevas tells Young at White’s in May 1986, there were no ministers with
personal followings any more, “no landed interest, no social interest, no
organised commercial or business interest even”. Young suggests, more in
hope than expectation, that even Norman Tebbit, the then authoritarian
favourite of Thatcher, could “disappear without trace”. “Anyone could”,
replies St John-Stevas, who long ago had.
The style of Tebbit and the sterner Thatcherites was never going to please the
punctilious liberal scholar – and behind even the plainest accounts in these
pages, one senses the author wrinkling his nose. Hugo Young enjoyed Wiltons,
White’s and the Garrick. I doubt that he ever ate in “Norman’s Nosherie”,
the café within Conservative Central Office which Norman Tebbit established
in the 1980s, famed for its pinafored waitresses with the double N
embroidered in red italic script on their uniforms.
At the only time that I had lunch there, Young had recently attributed to the
Tory Chairman the view that “no one with a conscience votes Conservative”,
bringing on himself and the Guardian a libel action that could not be
defended. It was an unpleasant occasion, designed both to persuade us that
the Nosherie proprietor was fit to lead the Conservative Party after Mrs
Thatcher’s retirement (one of our columnists had that week suggested that he
was not) and to boast of all the money he was going to take from the
Guardian, cash that would be used to establish a fund for other politicians
of the Right who were beleaguered by the media.
The quote, he said, was a “a total fabrication”. The only uncertainty in his
mind was whether it had been fabricated “by Mr Young or by some anonymous,
unknown liar”. If he had not “tackled” the Guardian, “they would have been
inventing quotes by the Prime Minister next”. His very mention of Hugo
Young’s name, accompanied by bloodhound-baying from chubby young aides, had
been enough to make me take a full record of that particular lunch. But it
was not a habit that ever lasted long.
Ion Trewin, editor
THE HUGO YOUNG PAPERS
Thirty years of British politics – off the record
800pp. Allen Lane. £30.
978 1 84614 054 9
Peter Stothard is Editor of the TLS.
