Sometimes something unexpected comes along to turn an average news story into a very good one. Trailing around the Middle East with Neil Kinnock in February 1988 at the time of a Palestinian uprising on the West Bank and in Gaza, one such event happened.
The story up to then during the trip had been the claims made to Kinnock that the Israeli Government had used undue force in its moves to contain the protests. After talks with Palestinian leaders in Nablus on the West Bank, Kinnock and his wife, Glenys, were taken to visit protesters who had been injured in the demonstrations. I was one of the ‘pool’ who was allowed in with them as they went to the hundred-bed al-Ittihad Hospital, run by the Arab Women’s Union. Shown around by Yousef al-Masry, the hospital director, they saw men who had recently been seriously injured in the disturbances.
The first patient, Kinnock was told, had been shot with an explosive bullet, and doctors showed the Labour leader the X-rays. He saw another who had had a leg amputated. The Kinnocks were then shown a young man whom al-Masry said had been shot in the back. Kinnock pointed to a small wound on the man’s chest and asked if it was an exit wound, and was told that it was.
It was when he moved on to the next man, who was seriously ill and who was having cold compresses applied to his forehead, that Kinnock’s shock turned to anger. When the doctor explained how the injuries had occurred, he asked: ‘Are you telling me that this boy was shot in the back as well?’ The doctor replied: ‘Yes, in the kidneys and pancreas.’ Kinnock was then told that the man could not move his legs.
He emerged from the hospital pale-faced and muttering to his colleagues: ‘They were shot in the back.’ It was when he stood on the hospital steps that something happened that turned a foreign-page lead story into a front-page contender. With Glenys standing beside him, Kinnock attacked the behaviour of the Israeli troops and said nothing could justify shooting people in the back. He was most obviously outraged and did not mind showing it. But members of the travelling press had spotted something else – Mrs Kinnock appeared to be in tears.
The first to mention it was the eagle-eyed David Kemp of The Sun. As we went into a huddle afterwards – and yes, the Lobby does its huddles like any other branch of journalism, as well as football teams – David suggested that Glenys might have been crying. Others, like me, had noticed her wiping her eyes. So was she in tears? Yes, she was. The Lobby was in agreement.
In the pool of reporters inside the hospital, John Williams of the Evening Standard had also noticed the impact on Mrs Kinnock. Looking at the injured boy, she said to her husband: ‘This boy is the same age as our Stephen.’ Then she started to cry. Williams wrote a ‘Glenys cries’ splash for his paper. Stephen Kinnock is now a Labour MP.
Five of us – including my friend and lunch partner Jim Naughtie, then of The Guardian but for decades afterwards of Radio 4’s Today programme – had a taxi waiting to take us back to Jerusalem and the American Colony Hotel. I had taken down every word in shorthand and as we travelled through the Holy Land, I dictated from the front of the car to my colleagues. Without going into too much detail, this exercise made Mr Kemp from The Sun feel decidedly unwell, but he was not going to miss any word as I went through my notes.
The truth was – and this in some eyes will confirm the cynicism of which some accuse us journalists – the tears had made the story. This was something happening in Israel but the British Opposition leader’s wife was moved to cry. That was a story for The Sun and everyone else. All of us got a great show the next day. The story was on the front of The Times with a picture.
We went to the foreign ministry the next morning where Kinnock was holding talks. A broadcast journalist who, for all we knew, had received a kicking from his news desk for not running the ‘Glenys cries’ line, seemed to be less than happy with the travelling Lobby and asked Mrs Kinnock directly whether she had cried the day before. Glenys, bless her, replied: ‘Yes, I did, actually.’
He should not have asked, as he could no longer claim to his bosses that the Lobby had made it up. There was always a tension between the visiting pack and journalists on the ground who thought, quite rightly, that they knew the domestic story better. But we were often working for a different market – known as the front page.
Kinnock’s visit had an impact. The next day, Yitzhak Shamir, the Israeli prime minister, responded to accusations of army brutality and hellish conditions in the occupied territories by insisting that Israel was doing everything it could to avoid casualties and suffering. But he did not deny Kinnock’s controversial statements, repeated personally to him during the talks, that he had seen injured Palestinians on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip who had been shot in the back.
Kinnock raised the use of so-called ‘dum dum’ ammunition with Yitzhak Rabin, then defence minister but later a prime minister who made several historic agreements with the Palestinians through the Oslo Accords. Rabin was assassinated in 1995 by an opponent of the peace process. Back then it was an awkward encounter for Kinnock as Rabin was a Labour minister.
For John Williams of the Standard, the timing meant it was a splash for his paper again. But John knew that if he stayed and filed, he would miss Kinnock’s trip to Gaza that morning. I told him to stay in Jerusalem and I would fill him in. We returned from Gaza in time for me to dictate notes of our trip to Gaza, and for him – helped by the time advantage – to catch his paper with yet another splash. Which all proves that in the competitive world of political journalism, there is still time for cooperation.
Kinnock had timed his trip well. Other Western leaders visiting during this period also put pressure on Israel to soften its security policy in the so-called occupied territories. And unusually for an overseas trip, whether by an Opposition leader or a prime minister, there was no big gaffe, no downside.