A day in the life of a political editor often amounts to seventeen or eighteen hours. I did the job for The Times from 1993 to early 2010, and it was not unusual for the day to be that long and not impossible, as I relate in other chapters, for it to be even longer, if you include the time spent trying to sleep on an aircraft while travelling with the prime minister of the day.
But let me try and take the reader through one of those long days to give those from outside the world of political journalism an idea of what it involved.
7 a.m. Wake up, usually without an alarm, but one has been set for 7.15 just in case. Turn on the Today programme. The radio is within reach. Listen for a few minutes and then turn the radio up loud while showering and dressing. By now, all the day’s papers have tumbled loudly through the door.
7.30 a.m. Go to the kitchen and turn another radio on. Still Humphrys, Naughtie and the rest. The Today programme is utterly irreplaceable. Prepare and eat breakfast while standing in the kitchen, reading the papers, praying that the others have not scooped you in the later editions. I would know by now if they had exclusives in their early editions. Start thinking about the likely best stories of the day, which ones I would do, and which I would farm out to the team.
8.30 a.m. First call of the day would come in, probably from John Wellman, if he was news editing, swiftly followed by Roland Watson, Mike Smith, Dave Taylor or Jeremy Griffin, if they were head of news for the day. Even at that stage, politics would be the obvious first choice for the main stories of the day. Only when another major non-political story was brewing would those calls not happen.
8.45 a.m. Leave home and drive from West London to Westminster, making hands-free calls to Downing Street, the Opposition party, and any other obvious sources I would need before briefing the news desk properly on what we would be doing during the day. If I was sending someone out of town, call them early and stop them coming into Westminster. I was fortunate enough to have a Commons car park pass so the drive was a good time to prepare.
9.30–9.45 a.m. Arrive at Westminster and, having collected thoughts on the way, tell the news editor all obvious lines for the day at that stage. I would not mention in this call my thoughts or hopes for any off-diary story that might give us a potential splash – the lead story – later in the day, but they would know I was thinking about it. Discuss with the team what we would be doing. For most of my time we were a team of five or six reporters, with a sketch-writer.
10.30 a.m. Take a quick look around the Members’ Lobby. At this time, not too many back-bench MPs are around but the whips, whose offices are alongside the Lobby, were always busy then. Most of them liked to chat.
10.45 a.m. Head to the Treasury – it used to be Number 10 – for the first briefing of the day from the Prime Minister’s spokesman. Usually a run-through of the PM’s day and questions on whatever were the stories of the moment. The spokesman would have come armed with lines on everything that mattered. It lasts thirty minutes or so.
11.45 a.m. Another chat with the news desk to update them on anything I’d heard at the briefing or from anywhere else, and any stories my colleagues had told me about. They would tell me how the paper’s morning conference felt about the early list, the stories the editor was keen on, any extra requests that had arisen during the meeting. The morning and afternoon conferences are the key moments in any day at The Times. Heads of all the paper’s different departments present their list of wares for the day and take the meeting through the best of them. Home news is followed by foreign, business, sport, comment pages, features, obits, the lot. Questions follow. The various department editors have a big responsibility. Good stories can die here if they are not sold properly or they don’t know the answers to searching queries.
I would then pass all of that on to the team and the day proper would be under way.
12 p.m. Return to the Lobby, and in later years Portcullis House (opened in 2001 to provide office space for over 200 MPs), to talk to ministers, MPs and other sources about the running stories, all the time trying to work up something else to surprise the office with later on. As political editor, I knew that I would have to write or pull together the main running story, but the search is always on for an exclusive line that people will not have seen on the 10 p.m. news bulletin – something that you hope will excite and interest them when they are having their breakfast. There are the open sources, such as the Number 10 briefings, speeches from ministers, committee meetings in the House, and the proceedings on the floor of the chamber, starting in the mornings on Wednesdays and Thursdays and at 2.30 p.m. on a Monday and Tuesday. And then there are the closed sources, the contacts and deep throats in all parties that you’ve built up over the years and call on the private Commons line in the office.
12.45 p.m. Rush to lunch at one of many favoured restaurants within walking distance or a quick taxi ride from Westminster. I was usually with a lunch partner, Elinor Goodman, and later Gary Gibbon of Channel 4, or Charles Reiss of the Standard. Choice of lunch partners was one of the great rituals of Westminster reporting and the tie-ups obviously changed the more senior you became. Today our guest at the Cinnamon Club is one of our favourites, and a glass or two of wine is guaranteed. Politicians and journalists have drunk less and less at these encounters over the years but the tone is usually set by the guest. If he or she fancies a drink, the journalists will eagerly go along with it. The lunch is on non-attributable Lobby terms, and that’s fine because more will emerge than if it was a public encounter like a press conference.
2.30 p.m. Race back to the office, usually by going through the St Stephen’s Entrance of the Commons into the Central Lobby and turning left into the Members’ Lobby, which is typically beginning to bustle at this time. Phone calls or texts along the way have told me any further developments during the morning, and of any good interviews on BBC Radio 4’s World at One or anywhere else. This is the time to grab a valuable few minutes with any politician who might be figuring in your stories later on.
3 p.m. Call the news desk which is by now frantically preparing the afternoon schedule and is still desperate for a splash. Tell them your best shots at this stage to give them their lines to go at the top. Reassure them that the top story will make a splash by the time you’ve made a few more calls. Don’t mention anything you might have up your sleeve.
Discuss with colleagues their stories and how they are going. Has anyone got an obvious splash with which we can placate a hungry office? No, but someone has got an obvious page two lead and someone else is working on something that – if true – would be a contender for the splash.
3.40 p.m. Final pre-conference call to the news desk. Give them any new stories that have emerged and confirm best hopes for a splash. Wish them luck.
3.45 p.m. Climb the stairs to the Lobby room for the afternoon PM’s spokesman briefing. Get it over with quickly. There’s nothing new from there. Get down to the Lobby fast, calling a special adviser to the Cabinet minister with whom we had lunch on the way.
4.30 p.m. Call the news desk from the Lobby to see if the afternoon conference, especially the editor, is happy with what they’ve got so far. They are! They reckon the story at the top of the list will give them the splash. Pressure off for now, but having spoken to the ‘spad’, I’m thinking that the lunch story might be better because it is exclusive. By sheer chance, here’s the minister we’ve had lunch with. Run a couple more questions by him and give him at least a hint that this might be playing big in the morning. He knows what he is doing and gives the impression that this was what he expected all along.
5.30 p.m. Now I’ve got two big stories to write. I tell the news desk about the new one. They are very excited because it has not been sitting on the list all day but, of course, I had not been sure about it until my call with the ‘spad’. That’s my story anyway, if they think I’ve been deliberately holding it back to achieve maximum impact later. Which is, of course, what I have been doing.
After discussions in the office, I get a call to say my new story is the splash and the other one is page-two lead. My colleague then tells me that their story had stood up well, and it, too, is a candidate for the splash. I inform a by-now-overexcited office and tell everyone else to get writing fast. Let’s give ’em the stories and they can decide what they want to splash on.
6.30 p.m. Original story done and sent. Colleague asks me to look over their big one. Great stuff. Make a suggestion about tightening the intro a bit. That’s sent and everyone else has filed.
I write up potential splash having told lunch partner that we are going to run it big. A flavour of it appears in said partner’s two-way at the end of report on Channel 4 News.
7.15 p.m. File. Five minutes later, head of news calls and says it’s the splash and makes a couple of suggestions about taking in lines from another story elsewhere in the office. I do that and resend.
7.30 p.m. Quick half in the Press Gallery bar. Colleagues ask if we’ve got anything special. We admit to having two quite good stories which will be worth them having a look at later. One or two of them reciprocate by saying they have something good as well.
8 p.m. Quick scoot down to the Lobby to catch MPs before they head to dinner.
10 p.m. Division in the Commons on fairly boring bill but should hang about just in case. Run into my minister yet again and tell him that he’s responsible for the morning’s splash in The Times. He runs off rather quickly, hoping no one has seen us talking.
10.30 p.m. Leave for home.
11.15 p.m. Call from James Burleigh, night news editor. Guardian have got a good Labour splash. What did I think of it? Not bad. Would he mind calling the night duty person and say I think it’s worth a few paragraphs?
11.45 p.m. James calls again with a line in Telegraph story that could nicely be incorporated in my splash. I check it out with my ‘spad’ friend and it’s fine. I e-mail James with three insert paragraphs, and say goodnight.
Midnight. Go to bed but listen to the late news on Radio 4. Ah, they’ve just read out the top of the Times lead story. Sleep.
Postscript: Fridays tended to be casual days at the Commons. I once went into the office in my jeans knowing that, because the House was not sitting, I would not be breaking any rules. The House demanded reasonably smart gear, and certainly a tie for men.
During the morning I got an urgent call from the office of the editor, Peter Stothard. I was told: ‘Please get down here quickly. Peter’s got lunch with Rupert Murdoch and wants you to be there.’ ‘Of course,’ I said, wondering how I could possibly appear before the ultimate boss dressed as I was. At that moment, one of my great team, Arthur Leathley, entered the room. I looked him over and told him I needed his suit. We were of similar size, although I judged his waist measurement was a bit wider. We then took adjoining cubicles in the Press Gallery Gents and passed each other’s clothes over the top. During the afternoon, after I had returned, we did the exercise in reverse. Such was the cooperation in the Times office.
PPS: Television and radio broadcasting was a regular part of life as a political correspondent. But for me, one of the happiest memories was of a live appearance on Richard & Judy, the daily chat show hosted by Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan. I was no more than a supporting act. I appeared in June 2007 alongside Lee McConville, an ‘at risk’ youngster from a tough part of Birmingham whom I was trying to turn into a journalist. Lee had been picked to benefit from a mentoring scheme financed by the culture department and run by the Media Trust to help youngsters escape from difficult circumstances in their home areas. I agreed to be his mentor and it became one of the most fulfilling experiences of my career. I showed him how to interview Cabinet ministers and then took him to the G8 summit in Heiligendamm, Germany, when I sent him along to an early morning summit between George Bush and Tony Blair, their last official meeting.
I wrote about the whole experience in The Times, and so did Lee under the headline ‘I thought Phil would be a boring old fart, but he wasn’t like that at all’. Richard and Judy noticed and we went on together to talk all about it, Lee more than holding his own under difficult questioning. He later went on to do a full-year journalism course at Harlow in Essex, the one I had been on forty years before him, and we helped him into a new life.