By Sam Macrory - 26th April 2011
As he prepares to celebrate 50 years on the Westminster beat, reporter Chris Moncrieff reflects on a lifetime spent wheedling stories out of politicians – and in many cases earning scoops for his discretion and fair-mindedness.
Fifty years ago this October, a young reporter with “no interest at all in politics” arrived for his first day’s work at the Houses of Parliament. Chris Moncrieff is still here and still writing for the Press Association, the only news outlet he has worked for since he decamped to SW1. And as he approaches his half century at Westminster, he has no plans to retire either. “They’d have to drop me, or I’d have to drop myself,” he declares, and though accuracy – Moncrieff would approve – obliges me to report that he looks every one of his 81 years, Moncrieff, who continues to write prodigiously, remains as sharp as ever.
“Reporters are a maligned lot,” he suggests, as he reflects on his trade. “But generally speaking they do a straight story. Tony Blair’s favourite phrase was to say that reporters just created ‘media froth’. Well, if any of my stories were called froth, then I’d think I’d done something right.”
And after 50 years of loitering for stories in the Members’ Lobby – “It’s just like being a prostitute” – Moncrieff’s output of successful ‘froth’ is hard to match. He broke the resignations of Margaret Thatcher, Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson, has reported on politics since the days of Harold Macmillan, written for this publication since just after its launch in the autumn of 1976, and was described by Blair as “one of the most remarkable people I have met in any walk of life”.
It’s a lifelong passion, with Moncrieff first deciding to be a reporter when he was four years old. “My parents went along with it, but when I was 15 and 16 they got very uptight,” Moncrieff recalls. “They thought it was a disreputable career, probably rightly, and they forced me into the law.” He lasted only six months at a solicitors’ firm in Holborn, spending most of his time firing off tentative application letters to prospective newspapers. In 1949, he was taken on by the Harrogate Herald: “My parents just gave up – and I haven’t regretted one minute since.”
Jobs at the Nottingham Evening Post and the Coventry Telegraph followed, before he applied for a general reporting role with the Press Association in 1961. Instead, Moncrieff was offered the parliamentary beat. “It was about the one area I didn’t want to go to, but you don’t turn down the chance to join Fleet Street,” he recalls. On his first visit to the Commons he saw “Harold Macmillan and Hugh Gaitskell going hammer and tongs: I thought I wouldn’t be able to cope with this, but then it grows on you, and you just love it.”
Macmillan was the first major figure to give the young reporter an interview. Having initially decided to carry on after the debilitating Profumo scandal, and fight the election due by 1964, Macmillan was struck by a sudden bout of illness. He changed his mind and decided to quit. “Just after his resignation in 1963, I was asked by the PA to ring the hospital to check on his condition,” Moncrieff remembers. “I was put through directly to him. ‘I was alright until you bloody well woke me up,’ Macmillan said, as he answered.”
Moncrieff would see prime ministers Alec Douglas-Home, Harold Wilson, Edward Heath and James Callaghan at close quarters, but it was Margaret Thatcher – “no doubt at all” – with whom he struck up the best relationship. “She liked the PA and we seemed to get on okay, and I was, and am, a very great friend of her press secretary Bernard Ingham.” Indeed, the pair had lunch the day before our interview, discussing parliamentary expenses and spin over their meal. Moncrieff had been given exclusives on both Thatcher’s and Geoffrey Howe’s resignations, though he wasn’t averse to scooping the Iron Lady either.
One evening he received a call from the Treasury, informing him that Nigel Lawson, the chancellor, had resigned. After confirming the story, Moncrieff put it out on the wires. “Lawson was very clever,” Moncrieff recalls admiringly. “He had given me all this stuff, via whoever it was, to put on the wires at 6pm. The Press Gallery sounded like a herd of stampeding elephants when that one broke. There was going to be a special Downing Street briefing at 7.30pm, but newspapers always use what comes first, so Downing Street’s version was tagged on the end – and that’s still the version today. Lawson scooped Thatcher – not the easiest thing in the world.” When Michael Heseltine resigned over the Westland affair three years previously, Moncrieff also enjoyed a direct line. “Heseltine rang me up on Boxing Day and asked if I knew about his holiday in Nepal. I told him I did. “Well, I’m not going on it,” he replied.
“Is it because you need to be around for this row?” I asked. “Yes,” he said. “But you can’t do the story – it needs to come from the press officer.” An absurd chase followed, as Moncrieff rang the press officer in question, who declared that he didn’t know about Heseltine’s holiday plans, wouldn’t tell him if he did, and ordered him not to phone Heseltine – which, of course, Moncrieff duly did. An irate Heseltine then called the press officer himself, and told Moncrieff to ring him in ten minutes. Moncrieff followed the ministerial instruction, only for the press officer to give him a “huge dressing down”.
A few years later, in a speech to government press officers, Moncrieff was retelling this saga when he recognised the same press officer sitting in the front row. “His face was turning puce – it was the first time that he became aware that his own minister had tried to stitch him up.”
Moncrieff happily admits that he has “probably” been spun himself, but says he is “never embarrassed about writing these things”. “If they try and give you a different steer, then that is part of the story.” More often than not, however, the quality of spin leaves him unimpressed. “Generally speaking, you do notice it – and I don’t regard Peter Mandelson as a skilled spinner,” he declares.
As for the current government’s communications team, Moncrieff is even more scathing. “I’ve not had much to do with the press officers, but they aren’t looking after David Cameron. He keeps coming out as the chap that changes his mind all the time. His staff should think these things through before they embark on them – they’re to blame. I would get rid of a lot of these special advisers – they’re a waste of public money.” When I ask if he ever considered entering politics himself, the suggestion shocks him. “No, that’s the last thing I’d do. I’m not a political animal. I am very impatient with people who go from journalism to PR or politics.”
But is he, especially given the obvious fondness for Thatcher, a Conservative? No, he insists, though (as one of his constituents) he always voted for Norman Tebbit, “because he was so good for the Press Gallery”, while Tebbit’s constituency successor Iain Duncan Smith – who “is good value from our point of view” – gets the Moncrieff vote too. And while there isn’t a politician to whom he would send a Christmas card, Tebbit “would come round sometimes and we’d have a drink in the pub”.
A trust developed. Five days after the IRA bomb at the Conservative Party conference in 1984, when Tebbit and his wife – whose injuries would confine her to a wheelchair – were hospital-ised by the blast, Moncrieff received a message from the injured Tebbit, asking to be interviewed from his hospital bed. “He didn’t know, nor we, how bad his wife was, he just knew she was alive. He wouldn’t allow anyone else to speak to him, and there were scores of journalists waiting downstairs in the lobby. I had to hold my own press conference after the interview – but I filed my story first.” For Moncrieff, of course, the story always comes first. He was once invited to discuss the role of political editor for the Sun – the post went to Trevor Kavanagh – but turned it down. “I just liked the Press Association,” Moncrieff explains. “We have no campaigns or views, and everything has to be done straight away. I don’t like hanging around with a story.”
He remains optimistic that print reporting will survive the rise of online journalism, recalling a 1949 debate in Harrogate on whether print could survive “the onslaught of TV”. And the rise of citizen journalism, he says, is a good thing. “If I knew how to work the camera on my phone then I’d do it. They’re just making a bit of money, aren’t they? Good luck to them.” However, he laments the increasingly rare sight of the reporter with notebook and pen in hand, seeking out their stories.
“We spend too much time – it’s a drug – in front of a screen, and there’s far less personal contact,” he argues, suggesting that changes in Parliament are to blame.
“After Labour won in 1997, no ministers went to the Members’ Lobby any more. So we would stand at the bottom of the Ways and Means corridors to ambush them, and then we noticed they weren’t coming down that way to vote either. It struck me as being deliberate – and it’s my hunch that it was Alastair Campbell’s doing.” Another change, of course, is the notable reduction in the scale of Westminster’s “ferocious” drinking culture, in which Moncrieff – teetotal now for over 25 years – joined in enthusiastically.
“I was never seen without a pint of draught Guinness in my hand,” he admits. “I’d go to the Strangers’ Bar in the evening and it was like a beer garden. We would drink far into the night. You would get a lot of stories on the Terrace Bar too, but now you virtually can’t use it.” But despite all the changes – some healthy, some not – to the way Parliament operates and the methods by which journalists find their stories, Moncrieff remains the last of his generation still patrolling the corridors of Westminster. What keeps him going, 50 years after he arrived?
“I’m still as excited being a reporter now as I was when I started, and I can’t walk past a story and not do it – it must be in my blood,” he replies without hesitation. “They say that some people would shop their grandmother. Well, I’d even shop my wife for a story.”
And he has. Poor Mrs Moncrieff once made the mistake of entering a cake in a local competition, only to accidently submit her effort in the under-eights category. “She still didn’t win!” Moncrieff explains with delight. “So I did a story about it.”
His wife is clearly indulgent of her husband’s calling: on the weekend after our interview, the couple held a party to mark their golden wedding anniversary, the first celebration in this landmark year for Chris Moncrieff. Before then, however, he is heading to Westminster to attend a leaving reception for an old colleague. As he shuffles across Parliament Square I notice a pen in his pocket: he may just be thinking that there’s a story or two to be found while he’s there.
Have your say...
Please enter your comments below.