It was the day of the funeral of Tony Bevins – 30 March 2001. I know Tony would have forgiven me but I spent most of that day trying to get a story, and then wondering whether the one I did write up as the Times splash was right or not.
Tony was a brilliant political journalist. He joined The Times from the Daily Mail as number two to political editor Julian Haviland, around the same time that Harold Evans promoted me from the gallery reporting team to the Lobby. The son of Reginald Bevins, who served in Harold Macmillan’s cabinet as postmaster general, he understood the inner working of politics from an early age. He was a great story-getter, who would spend hours reading obscure reports looking for a scoop, rather than taking the easy option of doing the story of the day.
He had many friends in politics but there was no favour. No matter who you were, you had reason to fear Bevins if you had something to hide. I learnt a lot from him, particularly the lesson that you never give up on a story if you think it’s there. We would often leave him in the office late at night burrowing away, and then I would find him back there, having driven in from Berkshire, when we went in the next morning. A true one-off.
Tony, who went from The Times to be political editor of The Independent and later The Observer, died suddenly from pneumonia at the age of only fifty-eight. The turnout at the funeral in Slough was testament to his popularity and the respect in which he was held by politicians of all parties.
I drove to Slough with my colleague Roland Watson. As I walked round the crematorium talking to friends and politicians afterwards, the gathering that most interested me was a group including Alastair Campbell, Philip Gould (Tony Blair’s polling guru) and Sally Morgan (another senior aide). They spent a lot of time in earnest discussion and I sensed something was afoot.
The issue at the time was the general election. It had been expected to be on the same day as the local elections on 3 May. But the country was in the grip of a foot-and-mouth outbreak, and two weeks earlier an alliance of countryside council leaders had urged Blair to postpone voting until the epidemic was eradicated. The disease was spreading quickly and although Labour MPs and ministers wanted to go to the country in May, Blair was beginning to have doubts.
Campbell says in his diaries that he spoke to me, Don Macintyre of The Independent and Trevor Kavanagh of The Sun that day. But I don’t recall speaking to him early on or at the funeral, and believe it was a later conversation that he was referring to. Campbell tells how, on the train down, John Prescott, Blair’s deputy, had still been in favour of May while another MP, Rosie Winterton – who became Labour chief whip in 2015 – thought it would be ‘madness’.
After the funeral I drove back into London to the House of Commons, passing my home in Osterley, West London, on the way in. I was uneasy. I felt I was missing something and needed to make some calls. I called a couple of contacts in the whips’ office and other special advisers but they could not help me further. The line was that 3 May remained the likeliest date, and there was no reason to expect otherwise at the moment.
I put in calls to Alastair which were not responded to, something that always alerted me. No good press man would ever lie, or even completely steer you away from a story if it was right, but the way to avoid an awkward conversation was not to have it. By now I was getting paranoid. The Sun had earlier gone hard on the line that the election would be on 3 May, and I wondered if it would be the first to say that the election was off.
I left the office – dissatisfied – at 7.45 p.m. and drove my car out of the Commons car park. Halfway up Victoria Street, I pulled into a lay-by and thought I would give Campbell one more call. He answered. I asked him whether I would look silly if I wrote that the election was about to be called off and, clearly discomfited, he said that he could not speak and had to rush. That was it.
I decided I had to write the story. I called the office and told them to hold me a slot on the front if possible and I would file within twenty minutes – very late for a Friday. I then went on to the copy-taking department and dictated off the top of my head a story beginning:
Tony Blair is ready to call off his long-standing plans to hold a general election on May 3. The Prime Minister is close to a decision to delay the election until June so that he can devote all his time to the effort to contain the foot-and-mouth outbreak.
There was an element of wriggle room in the words, but none in the headline, which declared: ‘Blair to postpone election until June.’ I felt that Alastair’s refusal to speak – i.e. he had not told me I would look silly – was enough to go on. But I knew I was flying by the seat of my trousers.
By the time I reached home, I was feeling worried. I wondered whether I had pushed myself into writing a story without properly standing it up. I rang Trevor, a great friend, and told him what I had written. He was at first annoyed because I think he wondered if there had been a breach of security at the office. The Sun and The Times were in the same building and I think he wondered if someone had somehow seen what The Sun had done, given my late call. But I assured him that this was not the case, that my story was already written and in the paper, and that I had based it on instinct as much as anything. I just wanted him to put me out of my misery. At least I learnt we had done the same story, but Trevor’s was better than mine and he had not held back.
In his diary note for Saturday (the next day), Campbell wrote:
My chat with Kavanagh had been written up hard as a June election … I had been hoping to steer Trevor off May and sixty-five per cent towards a delay but he had gone with it one hundred per cent. Also Webster having chased it harder around 8 p.m. last night, it looked like a News International favouritism job and we would pay for it elsewhere.
The Sun and other papers in the News International stable had backed Labour in 1997, and rivals made accusations through the first Blair parliament that Campbell and his colleagues were unduly generous towards them when it came to placing stories.
Campbell also revealed that he had a call from Gordon Brown that day saying: ‘As you know I’ve always been in favour of May 3.’ ‘Unbelievable,’ Campbell noted in the diary entry. That was not too surprising. The chancellor had tailored his March Budget to a 3 May election, as The Times recorded with a splash entitled ‘Brown woos families for May election’. The ‘election postponed’ story was swiftly confirmed over the weekend, and by early the next week Blair was saying that it would be on 7 June regardless of the progress made in containing foot-and-mouth.
I’ve told this story to show again that political reporting can be a hazardous business and that nothing is ever quite as simple as it appears. Sometimes, when it is impossible to gain confirmation of something that has not yet quite happened, you have to go with a hunch. On that occasion I did, and I hope Mr Bevins would have been pleased with me.