Saturday 24 September 2016
501 Newsnight
First viewed : 16 July 1981
I first caught BBC2's long running current affairs show on the date above when it was a special edition , extended to cover the result of the Warrington by-election.
For those who weren't around at the time the by-election was one of the most extensively covered of my lifetime and was in the papers every day for a month before the poll. The reason for this extraordinary interest was the candidature of former Labour Chancellor and Home Secretary Roy Jenkins in the first electoral contest for the new Social Democratic Party.
Jenkins had been absent from Parliament for five years having taken the job of President of the European Economic Commission ( as it was then ) when Jim Callaghan easily saw him off for the leadership of the Labour Party in 1976. The leftward drift of the party since defeat in 1979 led to three prominent Labour moderates deciding to quit and set up a new party. Having already let his membership lapse Jenkins was quick to jump on board and make it the "Gang of Four" ( ironically an expression recycled from communist China ). He already had a good relationship with the Liberal leader David Steel who was able to persuade most of his party to co-operate with the new players in the centre ground.
The first electoral test was the unpromising seat of Warrington, vacated by the previous MP becoming a judge and solidly Labour since 1945. One of the Gang, David Owen ,no great admirer of Jenkins, later wrote that the most popular of the quartet, Shirley Williams, who had lost her seat in 1979, ducked the contest on the advice of psephologist Tony King. Jenkins decided to pick up the baton with the local Liberals ( a distant third in 1979 ) accepting him. As the Alliance between the two parties hadn't yet been cemented, he was described on the ballot paper as "Social Democratic Party with Liberal support". The coverage made much of Jenkins' patrician air , wondering how his reputation as a bon viveur would play in a northern working class constituency. Moreover, Jenkins's previous constituency , Birmingham Stechford, had been a safe Labour seat giving him little experience of hard campaigning. His Labour opponent Douglas Hoyle was a rather charmless left winger who'd been turfed out of his previous constituency in 1979.
I was interested because, with the Tories under fire for the huge unemployment figures , the SDP seemed the best hope of blocking the rise to power of Anthony Wedgewood Benn. Benn's utopian socialist vision was utterly anathema to me because it threatened my most fervent hope for the future, namely earning more money than the people who bullied me at school . I wasn't intending to hire people to take them out but I certainly would have enjoyed driving past while they queued up at the Post Office. So anything that pushed Benn out to the margins was worth supporting. As time went on my support for the SDP took on a slightly more positive aspect. As my personal life nosedived , the prospect of these key figures from the Callaghan era returning to power seemed increasingly appealing. If the clock could be turned back politically, to the time in which the Littleborough Travelling Society flourished, perhaps it too could be resurrected ? The early SDP's policy prospectus was later criticised by key figures in the party as unimaginative and timid. I think it was David Marquand who said they were promising "a better yesterday" but that was exactly what I wanted. Unfortunately, a military dictator thousands of miles away put paid to that.
In the event Hoyle squeaked home by a whisker with Jenkins collecting 42% of the vote. His speech at the count commented that it was his first defeat in 30 years in politics but "by far the gweatest victowy" in which he'd ever been involved. Expectations for the new party's prospects ballooned and Jenkins's political courage now made him the frontrunner for leadership of the SDP. Even his political foes were privately impressed; Jim Callaghan later said his opinion of Jenkins had shot up during the campaign. In a personal sense Jenkins' words were truer than he realised; if he'd actually won at Warrington rather than Glasgow Hillhead six months later, the membership would have had rather more time to ruminate on his poor performances in the Commons and might have plumped for David Owen instead.
After that I began watching Newsnight semi-regularly . It was to have started broadcasting at the tail end of 1979 but a strike at the BBC delayed its launch until January 1980. I enjoyed the political analysis and Peter Snow became a great favourite. I'm a bit surprised to read that its most famous presenter / interrogator Jeremy Paxman didn't join the programme until 1989. The programme has made mistakes as any institution that's lasted for over 35 years is going to and has thankfully survived its greatest crisis over the Savile affair. I don't watch it religiously but will often check what it's covering if I have the remote around 10.30pm.
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