Getting Out Alive: News, Sport and Politics at the BBC

by Roger Mosey

  So there was no row over auto-erotic asphyxiation, but I was the direct cause of another furore. One morning in the April of 1996 I was coming into Broadcasting House a little later than usual, walking up Regent Street listening to Sue MacGregor interviewing Brian Mawhinney, the chairman of the Conservative Party. He was doing the standard defence of the government ahead of the local elections, arguing that the party had been down in the polls before, as in the late 1980s, but had bounced back in the subsequent general election. ‘But you only did that by getting rid of Margaret Thatcher,’ I muttered to myself as I went through the doors of the building. By this stage of my editorship, presenters were reconciled to me dropping ideas for questions and comments into their ears via their headphones as they were conducting interviews. So by the time I got to the studio, and Mawhinney was still pursuing the same line, I spoke a suggested question into Sue’s headphones: ‘But you got rid of Mrs Thatcher,’ I said to her. The question came out on air shortly afterwards: ‘In 1990, you did something dramatic. You got rid of the poll tax, you also got rid of Mrs Thatcher – aren’t you going to have to do something as dramatic as that not to lose a lot more seats?’

  By the time the question was put, I had walked the short distance along the corridor to the Today office. I listened transfixed to what happened next.

  Mawhinney: Oh come on, Sue, let’s stay in the real world, can we?

  MacGregor: Well, I hope I’m talking about the real world.

  Mawhinney: What you have just suggested to me, in front of the nation, is that we should dump the Prime Minister. Don’t be ridiculous, Sue, that isn’t even worthy of an answer.

  MacGregor: I wasn’t suggesting you should dump the Prime Minister. I was saying dramatic gestures sometimes work.

  Mawhinney: On the contrary, you drew the parallel with Mrs Thatcher, and that is a ludicrous and indefensible question and if you think I’m annoyed with you it is because that is the kind of smeary question by Today programme presenters which so annoys people who listen to this programme up and down the country.

  Reading the transcript two decades on, I am struck by how well Sue handled what was a raw and angry outburst from a party chairman. But on the morning it happened I had a swirl of emotions: first, guilt at landing Sue in what was bound to be another media storm; second, pride that it was a perfectly good question that would now get lots of publicity for the programme; and third, some doubt about quite how I would explain this to the uncomprehending official complaints apparatus if any process began. ‘That question wasn’t in the briefing notes, no, it was something I thought of in Regent Street.’

  Relations with Conservative ministers otherwise remained civilised. We had a particularly entertaining time whenever Ken Clarke came into our orbit. He would think up good lines during his car journey to the studio from Whitehall, and deliver them on air with professional spontaneity. The Prime Minister, John Major, never showed any antagonism towards us, and the New Year’s Day interview successfully transferred with Jim from WATO to Today. One thing we learned about John Major was that, unlike Mrs Thatcher, he liked to cut things fine. There was none of Mrs Thatcher’s arriving half an hour early and chatting in the green room. Sometimes for live 8.10 interviews, when we were nervous that the eight o’clock pips had gone and there was no sign of the PM, we would discover from Downing Street that he had only just set off. It is true that prime ministerial convoys can move faster than normal traffic, but even so it was risky getting from SW1 to Broadcasting House during the course of the news bulletin. After a number of these episodes, with Major walking into the studio just as the newsreader finished their final story, we decided it must be deliberate to keep the presenter on the edge of his seat. This was confirmed when Humphrys was interviewing Major in Downing Street itself, with me producing, and the Prime Minister strolled into the Cabinet Room while John was reading the introduction to the item. That morning was memorable for underlining just how much in harmony Humphrys and I were about interviews. I was sitting in the radio car in Downing Street, talking as usual into John’s headphones while he did the interview inside the building. ‘Move on,’ I would say, and he went to the next topic; or ‘Ask him that again,’ and John obediently put the question once more to the PM. Afterwards, I complimented John on a good job done with all instructions followed. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘the link from the radio car was distorted. I couldn’t make out a word you said, so I had to guess.’ Years of working together, and coming to trust each other, are what produced those best guesses.

  For the New Year’s Day interviews, we had a couple that were prerecorded in Downing Street, but at the end of 1995 Jim Naughtie and I were back on the train to Huntingdon for another visit to the Major residence. It was with some flicker of nervousness, because we knew something was up politically. I had bumped into Paddy Ashdown, leader of the Liberal Democrats, outside the studio that morning. I told him we were recording a Major interview later that day, and his diary recounts our subsequent conversation. ‘Look, I can’t tell you why’, he told me, ‘and I cannot give any details, so do not ask me and do not go beating the bushes. But I will share a very private confidence with you. If you interview the Prime Minister today it will look exceedingly silly by tomorrow, because something is going to happen that will change everything. So here’s a tip for you. If you do him today, make sure you get a commitment for him to return if anything big breaks.’ Paddy concluded in his diary: ‘Mosey tried to drag more out of me, but he didn’t succeed.’

  This was, of course, largely useless information and wasn’t a very private confidence at all. I could see no sensible route to beating the bushes, as Paddy had brilliantly put it. You cannot just move a prime ministerial interview or force the PM to come back and do another one. But Jim and I speculated about what the Lib Dems might be up to, and we did try to persuade a puzzled Downing Street that we might seek to add a section to the interview if a new significant story broke, though we had no idea whether anything would.

  Paddy’s bombshell turned out to be the defection to the Liberal Democrats of the senior Conservative MP Emma Nicholson. It was announced just as we arrived back in London clutching our tape of the Major interview. This is not an event where the public will remember what they were doing when they heard the news, but in 1996 it was a damn good story and Paddy was right that it instantly made the Major interview out-of-date. For the first time, the Prime Minister’s New Year interview was bumped from pride of place right after the news into the much less prestigious 8.30 slot – and Ms Nicholson and a live response from a senior Conservative dominated the programme instead. We had made another attempt to get Downing Street to give us a soundbite or two from the PM, but he understandably decided to keep his counsel in Huntingdon even if Paddy had succeeded in making his interview look ‘exceedingly silly’.

  My relationship with Paddy Ashdown was one of the strangest with any politician. He was perpetually cross with us because he didn’t think we gave the Liberal Democrats enough airtime. As an early adopter of email, he would send tirades to me about how unfair it had been that Labour or Conservatives had been on air on a particular subject but his party had not. Many mornings there would be phone calls too, usually from the Liberal Democrats’ chief media handler, Olly Grender. But Saturday mornings were special. If my phone rang at home round about 8.30 I knew it would be Paddy, incensed about the sequence after eight o’clock and either the absence of, or the disrespect towards, the Liberal Democrats. The oddity was that he would usually begin by saying ‘Don’t tell Olly I’ve called you!’ because she, I now know, had instructed him not to do anything unofficially or anything beneath his dignity as party leader. But Paddy ignored that if he was sufficiently irritated by us, and I would get my ten minutes of being told off – or of being implored: ‘Roger, what can we do to get your programme to take us seriously?’ I came to like Paddy, and I missed our Saturday morning chats when I left Today.

  But it was with Labour that we had the close-up view
of the people who were about to move into government. Rod Liddle and I had lunch with a casual Tony Blair in Islington about a month before the death of John Smith in 1994. On the way back to Broadcasting House, Rod said he was worried about trusting a man who, like Blair that day, wore white jeans. When Blair became party leader, Today had his closely guarded bedside phone number – so if there was a major breaking story we could go to him immediately for comment. Most contact was still done through the press office, and via Alastair Campbell, and Blair would come into the studio with Campbell almost weekly during the early part of his leadership. I have never seen a closer relationship between a politician and a spin doctor, or one in which the spin doctor was so obviously an equal. Many press officers fade into the background when their principal is on parade, but that was the last thing that Alastair would do: he was never less than a commanding presence.

  We sometimes had a glimpse of the difficulty of managing personalities in Labour. One morning when Blair was due in at 8.10 we had also booked Robin Cook, the shadow Foreign Secretary, for an 8.30 slot from an overseas visit he was making. But there was a breaking foreign story that morning that needed to be put to the Leader of the Opposition, given that he was in the studio. We told Blair that we would do that, and he looked bothered. ‘Haven’t you got Robin on later? Can’t you put that to him?’ We explained that we would have to ask both of them, and Blair reluctantly agreed to take one question. Within a minute or so of that being broadcast, the phone in the office rang with an incandescent Robin Cook shouting about why we had trampled all over his foreign affairs brief by putting ‘his’ key question to Tony Blair.

  We used to find John Prescott difficult sometimes, too, and less full of bonhomie than the image he sometimes projects. I recall one morning when he arrived in the studio straight from the train from Hull and discovered that his shaving foam had exploded inside his suitcase. He stood in our office, face like thunder, case open, scraping foam off his best shirts. We thought it best not to make a joke about the froth of politics.

  But it was the Labour spin machine that caused us the real bother. In the 1992 general election there had been a broad balance between the Conservative and Labour press operations. Both were very tough, and it had been as unpleasant being on the wrong end of Chris Patten’s Conservative Central Office as it was being upbraided by Kinnock’s Labour. During the subsequent Major government, there was a wild imbalance. Neither the government nor Conservative Central Office could get a grip on discipline, and the people running both tended to be nice rather than feared. At one point, Today was given its own Conservative spin doctor in the form of Alan Duncan MP, and for a while he would ring the night team at midnight – emulating what was believed to happen with Labour – and demand to know what was in our programme. Our editors would tell him we were not in the business of sharing our running order with anyone at that stage, and he would ring off. Alan subsequently went out for dinner with some senior editors and me, and we had a riotous night of political gossip in Orso’s restaurant that conspicuously failed to increase our fear level of him and his colleagues.

  Labour remained a different matter. I would come in some mornings to find night editors close to tears after a series of unpleasant conversations with junior spin doctors. If Labour thought we were doing a story they didn’t like, they would phone and try to get us to change it. If we had a balance of guests they disapproved of, they began by talking to the output editor, and then sometimes the call would be escalated to me. The threat was often that they would complain to Tony Hall or John Birt or the chairman because of the incompetence or intransigence of the Today team. I would like to think that we never changed anything at their insistence, but it was unpleasant and wearing: the attempt to control, and the inclination to bully, was greater than anything I had experienced before or since. Dealing with a relatively new phenomenon, on this scale at least, we did make mistakes. On occasions, calls from parties – almost always Labour – would end up getting put through to the control room and direct to an editor. They would find themselves being harangued by a party apparatchik while trying to edit a live programme. We soon put a stop to this, and insisted that calls came to me only; often a complaint faded away if the output editor was safeguarded from the ear-bashing.

  The pattern, then, was of lower-level vicious skirmishing but higher-level charm from New Labour, and one memorable weekend encapsulated the latter. I used to socialise with politicians from all parties, and over the years I have been to sport events with Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, Labour, SNP and Plaid Cymru – with the latter a disastrous invitation to watch Wales being hammered at Twickenham by England. On this occasion in 1996, it was Gordon Brown who invited me to go with a crew of people to watch England play Scotland at Wembley in the European Football Championships.

  The night before, we were asked along to a party that Gordon’s wealthy friend Geoffrey Robinson was giving at his flat in Park Lane, and I stood on the terrace, clutching a glass of white wine and overlooking a summery Hyde Park, with some of the folk who would, in a year’s time, be running the country: Gordon himself, John Prescott, and Ed Balls, Gordon’s chief adviser, who brought along his girlfriend, Yvette Cooper, for the match. We met to go to Wembley at a pub near Marylebone, and then the future Chancellor caught a packed train with us up to the stadium, standing in the middle of a bunch of England fans chanting ‘Gordon Brown, Gordon Brown, Gordon Brown’.

  It was an extraordinary opportunity to see these people close up, and especially in the heightened circumstances of the runup to a general election. As a boy in Bradford, I would have thought I had died and gone to heaven if I had had this degree of contact with prime ministers and chancellors and foreign secretaries. Of course, seeing John Prescott’s exploded shaving foam, or being told off for the eighteenth time by Michael Howard or Paddy Ashdown, tempered this – as did the unpleasantness of some of the encounters with spin doctors. But when the time came to leave Today, my leaving tape – the compilation of kind wishes from friends and colleagues – included recorded contributions from John Major, Paddy Ashdown and Gordon Brown. I was never less than exhausted by the hours that the programme demanded, but the excitement of it always thrilled me and gave me a fresh kick of energy. I’m delighted that Today remains in such good form, and continues to captivate the chattering classes and perform its civic duties, two decades later.

  CHAPTER 7

  RADIO 5 LIVE

  ON 26 OCTOBER 1996 my transfer from Today to become controller of Radio 5 Live was noted in the editorial column of The Independent, edited at the time by Andrew Marr. ‘To those unversed in the way the corporation gives ever larger amounts of money and status to those moving further and further away from the cutting edge of programme production, his is an odd move,’ it said. And there were certainly some Radio 4 aficionados who thought I had gone crackers by leaving the Today programme, especially just before an election, for what was then known as Radio Bloke.

  I had been sounded out about becoming controller of 5 Live earlier in the summer by Tony Hall over a relaxed lunch in Marylebone. Jenny Abramsky had launched the station brilliantly, but was being moved into the role of director of continuous news to create BBC News Online and a television news channel. I didn’t think the idea of moving to 5 Live was terrible – it was intriguing to contemplate running a whole radio service and to add sport to my professional skills, especially after reigniting my love of football during Euro ’96. But the election loomed large in Today thinking, and even though 5 Live had its commitment to news, it was sport that defined it and won the biggest audiences. There was a risk of journalistic marginalisation. I had also been part of a team that saw 5 Live as the competition, and may well have been guilty of saying the odd disobliging thing myself about the upstart channel. I therefore said no to Tony’s overtures, and repeated that to Jenny when she asked me directly whether I would enter the selection process – and I meant it, rather than trying to play the traditional ‘chase me, chase
me’ game favoured by job applicants.

  What changed my mind was a brilliant bit of psychological warfare by Jenny. Just before the final interviews she casually dropped into our conversation that she had mentioned my decision to Will Wyatt, then the all-powerful head of BBC Broadcast. ‘Silly boy,’ she reported him as saying, ‘nobody should turn down a controllership.’ That pulled me up short. Yes, it was a controllership – which was still a venerated thing in the BBC. And I had spent nine years as an editor within Radio 4 so there was a question about what I would do next, and I had thoughts about moving on after the election. I could see that 5 Live was one of the best things on offer, and if I didn’t take it when it was vacant then it would be daft afterwards to wish I had.

  So I put in a late application – and, given that Tony and Jenny had wanted me to do the job, it was not entirely a surprise when I became the recommended candidate. Predictably for someone from news, my pitch was to increase the profile and ambition of its news coverage, but I also wanted to give it a more unified style and tone across the schedule. There were some very odd juxtapositions of content, so at one point the network went from live football into a discussion programme on foreign affairs hosted by the cerebral Paul Reynolds – and Jenny, who had always wanted to be controller of Radio 4, had a somewhat loftier view of Radio Bloke’s speech programming than I did. The editors on the channel still talked of her noisy despair about a programme in the early days of the network that had not given enough attention to the election results of a former Soviet republic.