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Total Politics - because knowledge is power

In the sixties, parliamentary journalists were ordered not merely to hear, speak and see no evil, but were also banned from taking notes and running after members. Julia Langdon reflects on life then, and how things have changed 

 

 

Shortly after I joined the parliamentary lobby someone pressed into my trembling young hand a small booklet, the size of an old driving licence, covered in maroon leatherette and discreetly entitled in small gold letters Lobby Practice.

 

Inside it is entitled Notes on the Practice of Lobby Journalism and it carries the warning, underlined in bold print, Private and Confidential. It is dated July 1969, five years before I was admitted to what was then, in effect, a secret society. I have never seen another copy of this booklet and I doubt very much whether any other member of the lobby today can claim even to know of its existence, let alone to have laid eyes on it. I was probably meant to have eaten it when I'd read it.

 

But here it is, still in the middle drawer of my desk, a curiosity from another age. And very strange reading it makes today, too. There are 22 "Notes", some more bizarre than others. Number 13: "Do not run after a Minister or Member. It is nearly always possible to place oneself in a position to avoid this." Number 15: "Never use a notebook in the Lobby. Should it be necessary to make a note of anything, care should be taken to do so discreetly and unobtrusively, eg on the back of an Order Paper."

 

Number 16 (their capitals):"NEVER IN ANY CIRCUMSTANCES MAKE USE of anything accidentally overheard in any part of the Palace of Westminster." Number eight (their capitals again): "DON'T TALK ABOUT LOBBY MEETINGS BEFORE OR AFTER THEY ARE HELD, especially in the presence of those not entitled to attend them."

 

Under "General Hints" it suggests, Number 12: "Do not 'see' anything in the Members' Lobby or any of the private rooms or corridors of the Palace of Westminster. It is the rule that incidents, pleasant or otherwise, should be treated as private if they happen in those parts of the building to which Lobby correspondents have access solely because their names are on the Lobby list."

 

So there you have it: what sounds like the antithesis of journalism. The three wise monkeys have been expanded into five: don't see, don't hear, don't talk, don't run and don't even think about taking notes. It might otherwise be described as how to make a monkey out of a journalist. And perhaps it is no coincidence that the Latin motto of the United Grand Lodge of Freemasons is Audi, Vide, Tace which means hear, see, keep silent. There was (is?) a parliamentary lodge and there were (are?) certainly journalists among the members.

 

I was already familiar, in 1974, with the fact that there were things going on among my journalistic colleagues at Westminster to which I had no access, trouser-leg rolling aside, because I had joined the press gallery three years earlier as a foot soldier. In those days, mysterious notices would appear on the notice board in the corridor outside the Daily Mirror room referring lobby members exclusively to the Lobby Cupboard.

 

This was a place of utmost secrecy, where ordinary press gallery mortals not only feared to tread, but wouldn't dare to do so. I did, of course, when the coast was clear; the sacrosanct walk-in cupboard, adjacent to the line of telephone booths from which we filed our copy, was more than a little disappointing.

 

It carried piles of advance notices about such things as the forthcoming appointments of bishops and boasted a notice board with messages even more obscure and arcane, and certainly more boring, than those for general consumption. "Blue Mantle 5pm Lobby Room" "Red Mantle as NORMAL". The meetings that dared not speak their name were colour-coded for the political parties; it wasn't exactly training for the secret service, however many members of the then lobby were discreetly so employed, as it was widely rumoured many were. It was never quite clear whether being a spy was co-terminus with being a Freemason, but in my day one thing was sure: none of them were women.

 

It seems extraordinary now that those same telephone booths, lined up beside the Lobby Cupboard, in which an ordinarily diligent lobby correspondent might spend - what? three hours a night, four days a week - not counting Fridays when you could file from the phone on your desk and Sundays when you were in the office - are listed today as historic, outdated by the computer which has changed journalism so utterly, and changed the lifestyles of journalists besides.

 

Some journalists have had professional lives shorter than the lifetimes that others spent penned up in the phone booths in the press gallery. The role of some junior political reporters, after their own more straightforward copy had been filed, was to keep the whisky supply flowing to their seniors in the phone booths in order to ensure the smoother flow of dictation.

 

And that was what we did; we dictated everything, usually off the tops of our heads, having made a list of important points, to office copytakers of varying sympathies. Sometimes they were political and would challenge assertions in one's copy from a contrary standpoint.

 

"I don't have time to discuss this with you - and now I've lost the thread!" I would wail. Sometimes they were enormously helpful and, when one paused for an adjective, would make an appropriate suggestion. Often they were not.

 

Yet, by the time I arrived, the lobby correspondent in the 1970s was not the craven creature described in Lobby Practice. The old guard, the gentlemen whose by-lines were initials, were almost all gone. There were still some we referred to as Mr - just as on my local paper in the 1960s, the editor, the news editor and the chief reporter had all been known as Mr - but their age was over. We were obliged to observe the politesse of the two Houses, and rightly so, but my generation of journalists at Westminster watched and heard and went out to lunch and then went and put it in our newspapers.

 

Lunch was a hugely important aspect of the journalistic political day - and for both sides of the news imperative. The political day started in the chamber in the afternoon and not much happened elsewhere. If you didn't have an exclusive story, it was the floor of the House that mattered and select committees were not invented until the 1979 Thatcher government.

 

Deadlines were looser and later. A selfrespecting lobby correspondent could thus go out to lunch with a Cabinet minister - or whoever - eat, drink and then merrily observe events in the chamber at 3.30pm, attend the lobby meeting (about which nobody was meant to know ) at 4pm, have a few sherbets in Annie's or on the Terrace from 5pm in order to sweep up what had occurred at other locations, and still be on the phone dictating an extemporary front page splash at 8pm.

 

It was an exacting schedule and the pace did not let up. We allowed ourselves dinner at the lobby table in the press gallery dining room, as it was then known, at 9pm - several people scooting in from the phones in order to meet the deadline for last orders fiercely enforced (until they learned to love you) by Dolly and Mary - before the wind-up speeches and the 10pm vote, dealing with the first editions and drinks in the Strangers' until the business of the House was concluded, often well into the early hours.

 

In the course of the evening the junior correspondents were, of course, attending upon the minor speeches, watching the votes and minding the shop for the political editors to mop up in their late stories. It was no way to run a private life. For anybody: man or woman, politician or journalist, Dolly or Mary.

 

There had already been several women lobby correspondents before my day - although I was the first woman political editor of a national daily newspaper (the Daily Mirror) and the first woman to chair the lobby (in 1987). Lobby Practice asserts (Number one) that "The Lobby journalist's authority to work in Parliament is the inclusion of his name... He has complete freedom to get his own stories in his own way....but he also owes a duty to the Lobby as a whole..." (my italics, of course). Well, we've changed all that. And much more besides. We did it easily and speedily.

 

I knew it was done and dusted when my friend Alan Watkins bumped into me one day and exclaimed heartily: Julia! Dear boy! How are you?"

 

 


Julia Langdon is a political journalist, author and broadcaster