THE ART OF THE DOORSTEP
John Simpson on the
revolution that has overtaken the televising of politicians
MICHAEL Heseltine's head jerked, and something came to his eyes. He had been planting acorns, surrounded by cameras, when the news of Margaret Thatcher's resignation reached him. It meant that he was no longer the certain victor, that he now had a fight on his hands. He found the right words, but not the right manner. He sounded as though he was grieving for his own chances. Michael Heseltine's un- doubted abilities do not include a mastery of the art of the television doorstep inter- view. He shakes his leonine head at the first hint of a question, or retreats into some carefully rehearsed formula which may look good on the printed page but sounds wrong to the ear. This is the first time any campaign for the leadership of a British political party has been fought out primarily on televi- sion; one forgets the speed of the changes which have come to British political life since the 1970s. The three candidates for the Conservative leadership wandered embarrassed and aimless through the En- glish countryside, feeding the wildlife or even feeding themselves in full view of the Watching millions. And yet of those mil- lions only 372 were eligible to vote — the electors of a strange form of rotten borough, attempting to second-guess the views of the nation as a whole. It was for them that the candidates were play-acting in front of the cameras: a difficult art to master.
Last week, clumping across an Oxford- shire field alongside Douglas Hurd and asking him those brief, waspish questions which produce the best results, I reflected that he was the only one of the three candidates who understood that the art is to conceal the art. Michael Heseltine was too controlled, John Major too tense. You must possess the appearance of frankness. You must seem to take this irritating questioner, this kind of burr, into your confidence — and through him or her, the unseen watching millions. Formerly, a British prime minister would give public answers to journalists' questions only in a television studio. Throw an impromptu question outside and you were in trouble. One day in the early summer of 1970 I stood, young and gawky, halfway down platform 7 at Euston station on my first reporting assignment. Harold Wilson swept down the platform towards me, a portly god in a cloud of aides and civil servants. I gripped my radio micro- phone tighter. The lobby correspondents had been authoritatively predicting an election soon, but there had been no announcement.
Harold Wilson approached the coach labelled 'Huyton'. I looked round: clearly, none of the reporters and cameramen beside me was going to tackle him about this. Instead, they wore the vacuous smiles which journalists put on in the presence of the powerful. I stepped forward, micro- phone out, tape turning. `Excuse me, Prime Minister: when will the elec- tion . . .?' The transcript from the tape then reads, 'Simpson: Urgghh.' Harold Wilson had sunk his fist into my stomach. `You know I never do these things,' he snarled, close enough for me to smell his breath; 'I shall ring the Director-General and complain personally.' You'll hear more of this,' hissed Gerald Kaufman, at that time a Labour Party press officer. Then they all swept on, leaving me. I had been mugged by the Prime Minister on my very first story. The journalists and cam- eramen were still laughing. `You don't doorstep the Prime Minister, sonny,' said one of them. No one reported what had taken place. There was no complaint to the Director-General.
You didn't doorstep the Leader of the Opposition either. In Strasbourg in 1975 Margaret Thatcher, on her first visit abroad after deposing Edward Heath, stared haughtily at the journalists who presumed to throw questions at her as she arrived at the European Parliament. Even at her press conference she replied in hostile monosyllables. 'You can see she'll never make Prime Minister,' someone said. Maybe it was me. And yet over the next four years she learned to stop resent- ing the cameras and the questions; they were, she realised, as potentially useful to her in this strange symbiosis as she was to them.
And so she began saying more than just, `Good morning, good morning,' and answering the dreary, 'Are you optimis- tic?' with an equally dreary, `I'm always optimistic.' Head forward like an athlete swooping to the tape, weighed down by that heavy handbag, she would make for the television lights while giving the im- pression she was heading in that direction anyway. She revelled in the awkward, barbed question. Did you enjoy pressing the button?' I asked her once, on the cold North-German plain, after she had climbed out of a Challenger tank whose gun she had been firing. Her political enemies were calling her a warmonger at the time. A chilly flash of the blue eyes, then a seraphic smile: 'British tanks are marvellous.'
She learned that there was more to television than the meretricious message that appearance counts; that politicians are at their strongest when appearance and intention fully coincide. Her doorstep in terview with John Cole in the immediate aftermath of the Brighton bomb was a powerful statement in itself of the fact that her determination was undiminished. Catch her before or after some big occa- sion and you would get the full mood of the moment: triumph, carefully controlled scorn, all of Elizabeth Tudor in a sound bite.
It was in Downing Street, to my one- time colleague Michael Cole, that Mrs Thatcher first properly exercised the art of the doorstep interview; his shouted ques- tion the morning after the election was answered with the famous, heavily pre- pared quotation from St Francis about bringing healing and harmony. It was in Downing Street that she instructed the nation, through television, to rejoice at the success of British arms in the Falklands war. And it was in Downing Street that she called out her last, defiant words before the decision to resign: 'I fight on; I fight to win.' She used the cameras like someone in a Shakespearian history play. There could he high comedy too — perhaps intentional, perhaps not. After some malcontent threw a hand-grenade at the building in Luxem- bourg where an EEC summit was droning on, she emerged clutching Sir Geoffrey Howe's sleeve like a mother with an unwilling teenager. 'Geoffrey was speaking when it went off, weren't you, Geoffrey?' He nodded miserably; she beamed. 'It was quite a good speech, too.'
Her press secretary, Bernard Ingham, seemed to detest these moments. Obliged to stay out of shot, uncertain what was being said, unable to step in and shape or control the message, he lurked in the background, ear cocked, red face glower- ing. His view of television seemed fixed in the Wilson era: he gave the impression he couldn't quite see what it was for. Mrs Thatcher could: it was for talking to ordinary people, as directly as a British politician can. In this, as in more important ways, she has changed the job of being prime minister. Her successors will have to learn to master the doorstep.
John Simpson is foreign affairs editor of the BBC.
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