Here’s a thought: why not suggest Lawrence? I think he’s still got his wits about him (just about), and he could certainly be relied upon to come to the right conclusions. Worth a try, anyway.

I see her now, and talk to her, more than ever before. Such happy days.

June 23rd 1982

Very agreeable lunch with Thomas in the private dining room at Stewards.1 Extremely fine port – must encourage the Club to buy some, to replace the raspberry syrup they serve at the moment. Pheasant a little overcooked. Nearly lost a tooth on the gunshot.

Thomas has agreed to help us out with the flogging-off of Telecom.2 Took a little persuading at first, but I convinced him that if he and the bank were going to prosper under Margaret’s government then they were going to have to be a little more robust in their business practices. It helped, of course, when I told him the kind of fees he could expect to collect. Also predicted that there was going to be any number of these sell-offs over the next few years, and if Stewards wanted a good slice of the action they should get in early. He asked me what else was going to come up in the near future and I told him that it was basically the lot: steel, gas, BP, BR, electricity, water, you name it. Not sure that he believed me about the last two. Just wait and see, I said.

This was the longest chat we’ve had, I think, for about thirty years. Stayed till about 5, talking about this and that. He showed off his new toy, a machine that plays back films on what looks like a silver gramophone record, with which he seemed inordinately pleased. I couldn’t really see it catching on, but didn’t say so. He’d seen my latest appearance on the box, and told me that I’d done very well. Asked him if he’d noticed I hadn’t answered any of the questions, and he said no, not really. Must tell this to the PR people: they’ll be very pleased. They’ve been training us all quite intensively over the last few weeks and I must say it seems to be paying off. I timed the interview on playback last night and was impressed to find that only 23 seconds after being asked about theBelgrano, I was already talking about Militant infiltration of the Labour Party. Sometimes I surprise even myself.

June 18th 1984

Reforms progressing, although not as speedily as I’d hoped. Everybody on the committee seems to have a full calendar, and today was only the second time we’d managed to get together since the review was announced. Still, the Griffiths1 report gives us plenty to go on, and is a firm nudge in the right direction, since it deals something of a death blow to the whole idea of ‘consensus’ management. One lady committee member (of pinkish hue, I suspect) queried this but I shut her up by quoting Margaret’s definition of consensus as ‘the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies’ and ‘something in which no one believes and to which no one objects’. Point made, I think.

What we’ll now end up recommending – if I have anything to do with it – is the introduction of general managers at every level onperformance-related pay. That’s the crucial thing. We’ve got to squash this dewy-eyed belief that people can be motivated by anything other than money. If I’m going to end up running this show, after all, I need people underneath me who I can be sure are going to give of their best.

Went upstairs to the TV room at the Club for the Nine O’Clock News this evening and saw extraordinary scenes at some pit or other.1 A whole gang of thuggish-looking miners were mounting a murderous, unprovoked assault – throwing stones, some of them – on policemen who were armed only with truncheons and riot gear. When the police tried to ride through, some of these hooligans blatantly obstructed them, actually trying to trip up the horses by getting in the way. What will Kinnock2 have to say about that, I wonder?

October 29th 1985

Over to Shepherd’s Bush this evening to appear on Newsnight, where it turned out that the guest presenter was none other than my old enemy Beamish. Contemplated walking off at that point, since it’s well known that the man is practically a Communist and has no business chairing a supposedly impartial discussion programme. Anyway, I managed to come off very well from the whole thing. To present the ‘other point of view’ they wheeled out some pig-ugly female doctor with NHS specs and a bleeding heart, who whined and moaned a lot about ‘goodwill’ and ‘chronic underfunding’ before I put her in her place by quoting a few simple facts. Thought I’d heard the last of her, after that, but she came up to me afterwards in hospitality and claimed that her father had known me at Oxford. Gillam was the name, apparently. Meant nothing to me, I must say – in fact this sounded suspiciously like a chat-up line, and since she didn’t look quite such a Gorgon away from the studio lights, I asked if she fancied a quick one to show there were no hard feelings. Nothing doing, needless to say. She took the hump and stormed off. (Did look a bit dyke-ish, now I come to think of it. Just my luck.)1

∗

From A Pox on the Box: Memoirs of a Disillusioned Broadcaster,by Alan Beamish (Cape, 1993)

… I can even pinpoint the incident which first convinced me that the quality of public debate in this country had entered into precipitous decline. It was in October 1985, during one of my occasional stints as presenter of Newsnight: the guest was Henry Winshaw (or Lord Winshaw, as we all had to get used to calling him for a year or two prior to his death) and the subject was the NHS.

This, you will recall, was at the high tide of Thatcherism, and the last few months had seen a series of aggressive measures which had left the more liberal wing of the electorate feeling punch-drunk and disoriented: a radical cutting-back of the Welfare State announced in June, the GLC abolished in July, the BBC forced to abandon a documentary featuring interviews with Sinn Fein leaders, and, most recently, Mrs Thatcher’s implacable opposition to sanctions against South Africa, which left her isolated at the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ conference. At the same time, the question of the Health Service continued to bubble away in the background. A fundamental policy review had been set in motion, and there was mounting unrest within the medical profession about dwindling resources and ‘privatization by the back door’. We decided it would be instructive to invite one of the architects of the NHS reforms on to the programme and confront him with someone working at the front line of medical practice in a London hospital.

For this purpose we brought in a junior doctor called Jane Gillam, who had recently taken part in a Radio 4 phone-in and impressed everyone with her commitment and grasp of detail. I remember her as a tall woman, whose jet-black hair was cut in a bob and whose small, gold-rimmed glasses framed a pair of striking and combative brown eyes: and yet it was obvious from the beginning that she was going to be no match for Winshaw. Long gone were the days when I had interviewed him for the old ‘Backbencher’ slot and inadvertently exposed his hazy grasp of foreign policy. It was impossible, now, to connect that nervous, fresh-faced MP with the puffy, glowering old firebrand who stared at me across the table, thumping it with his fist and barking like a rabid dog as he answered Dr Gillam’s questions. Or rather, failed to answer them: for Winshaw’s mode of political debate, by this stage in his career, had long since parted company with rational discourse and tended to consist entirely of statistics diluted with the occasional gobbet of scattergun abuse. And so, consulting a transcript of that discussion, I find that when Dr Gillam first raised the subject of deliberate underfunding as a prelude to privatization, his answer was: