Inside Story: Politics, Intrigue and Treachery from Thatcher to Brexit. Philip Webster

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       1970s: Scary Days in the Commons Gallery

      It was 1973 and the call came from the editor, William Rees-Mogg, in mid-afternoon. William, the first of my nine editors at The Times, wanted a team of reporters to stay on into the night to cover verbatim President Nixon’s address to the American nation. The Watergate Scandal was in full swing and this was Nixon’s attempt to give to the American people his side of the story that was eventually to finish him.

      It was a terrifying request. The plan was that the fastest shorthand writers on The Times parliamentary staff would, in relays, take down every word of the president’s broadcast, dictate immediately to a team of copy-takers, and a special edition of the paper would be printed in the early hours, proving yet again that The Times was the paper of record. I’m not sure anyone on the team possessed a tape-recorder and they would have been of no use anyway. The aim was to have the paper out within minutes of the president finishing and that allowed no time for listening to recordings.

      I had only been on the paper for a few weeks, but I had arrived armed with fast shorthand, a prerequisite to being a Press Gallery reporter for The Times, or any other paper that claimed to be reporting the proceedings of Parliament. I had managed to get up to 140 words a minute on one of the pioneering full-year journalism courses at Harlow in Essex, followed by night school once I started working full-time at the Eastern Daily Press (based in Norwich), which had sponsored my course at Harlow.

      So I was swiftly told by the head of the parliamentary team, Alan Wood, that I had been chosen for this ‘honour’, as he put it. The editor had commanded and we would deliver. We strengthened our team with a reporter, Ian Church, who had moved from The Times to Hansard, the official report of Parliament.

      However strong your shorthand, covering the president of the United States delivering an address full of names that might have been familiar to scholars of Watergate but which were not easy to comprehend in the early hours of the morning after a full day’s work, was a scary task. Nixon began talking at around 2 a.m. our time. We reported him in five-minute ‘takes’ each, dictating immediately to a copy-taker the second our stint ended, then making ourselves ready for another five-minute spell twenty minutes later.

      It was nightmarish but somehow we got out something that passed for a verbatim report. The special edition of the paper published at around 4 a.m. and we got our ‘hero-grams’ from the editor the next day. The colleague who drove me home, a lovely man called Bernard Withers, was convinced that we – or at least he – would be sacked the next day for missing out some words. I’m sure we did miss some but no one complained.

      Young reporters today would probably find that story bewildering. If it happened now, there would be a way of taping the words and transmitting them automatically. But the one piece of advice I have always given to young people starting in the business is to learn shorthand, because there is no substitute for it. Throughout my career I have used shorthand when interviewing leading figures – it takes much less time to write up an interview if you don’t have to spend your time replaying tapes – and to take down words from politicians on television and radio.

      The reporting of Parliament has changed so much since I started. When I joined The Times in February 1973, I was one of a team of twelve whose role was to report the proceedings in both Houses of Parliament. That was three times the size of the Lobby team. Now papers have sketch-writers to chronicle parliamentary events, but no reporters dedicated solely to covering the debates of MPs and peers.

      There were eight or nine reporters, a couple of editors and an office chief on the team. Two were allocated to the Lords for a week in every month. Two stayed on late each night until the House rose; they were called ‘the victims’. For a few years we covered the European Parliament, one of us going each month for a week in Strasbourg or Luxembourg. I had decent French, so was fortunate to be a regular.

      One of the Nixon team was Gordon Wellman, a great man whose son John also worked for The Times. From my first day in the Commons, Gordon was my so-called ‘victim partner’, which meant that we worked together on the late shift and did the monthly Lords stint together. He was a hilarious colleague who delighted in regaling us with some of the greatest intros of all time. His favourite was one by the Guardian writer Norman Shrapnel, who once began a sketch with the words: ‘In scenes reminiscent of Colonel Nasser’s funeral …’

      He had been reporting in the gallery since the Second World War. His shorthand did not match mine, but he never missed a thing. If he knew he had failed to get correctly the words of an important intervention he would slip next door to Hansard and check them out when he left the gallery. Most of us were scared to do that.

      Gordon had an instinct that told him precisely when something significant was about to be said. He taught me the importance of listening and understanding remarks as they were being said. The best shorthand note in the world would not help if you had not really listened to what was being uttered. I learnt much from him.

      The task of the team was to fill at least a full page every day, eight columns of pretty small print, with coverage of Question Time and the main debates. It was essential reading for MPs, who would let you know if they felt they had deserved to be covered and somehow were not. Tapes were not allowed in the Press Gallery until much later on, so you really had to be able to cover speeches verbatim to avoid questions being asked about your abilities. My own first front-page story in The Times was a report of the maiden speech in the Lords of the Prince of Wales – another frightening experience because he spoke at length, head down looking at his notes, and very fast.

      It was a tough school in The Times Room, as it was known throughout the Palace of Westminster. Reporters whose shorthand notes sometimes failed under the pressure were told in no uncertain terms that they needed to up their game. I got in because the reporter I replaced was not fast enough with his notes; he went on to a highly successful career elsewhere.

      Accuracy and clean copy were absolute musts. Grammarians today are divided on the split infinitive. There was no such doubt in the mind of our beloved leader, Alan Wood. If we committed the crime of writing, for example, ‘The minister promised to quickly follow up the MP’s complaint’, or failed to correct the MP who had committed this abuse of the language, the cry of ‘Split infinitive!’ would disturb the comparative silence in which we worked.

      These were pre-computer days and we used typewriters for writing our stories. For a handful of us the job also involved travelling down to the office each night and overseeing our page or pages as they were prepared by the compositors, and then taking a page proof back to the office for later-edition changes. In another room upstairs in the Commons, we had an operator who would type our copy into a tickertape transmitting machine. It would come out as code in an inch-wide paper tape with holes punched in it. This would then be fed back into the machine and transmitted to head office in ‘takes’, where it would be set in type.

      In those days The Times was regarded as providing a sort of mini-Hansard. When Hansard was overstretched with its coverage of every word that was spoken in Parliament – СКАЧАТЬ