Inside Story: Politics, Intrigue and Treachery from Thatcher to Brexit. Philip Webster

in everything written about the episode that it would be a waste of time. I would not reveal my sources. He would never be named. We used ‘The Times Diary’ to tell our readers that their political reporter was safe. Under the heading ‘Uncommon luck’, PHS (as ‘The Times Diary’ was known from its headquarters in Printing House Square) said:

      The coming of the general election denies my colleague Philip Webster the privilege of being hauled before the House of Commons privileges committee. The motion to refer Webster’s full and accurate account of a select committee report on future policy over the Falklands to the privileges committee dies with the Parliament. If the matter were to be revived in the new Parliament the whole issue of whether to refer or not (carried last time by 159 votes to 48) would have to be debated again. It is highly unlikely that the new House will have the stomach for it, and even some MPs who voted for the reference on April 21 admit now that they are glad to see the matter drop.

      And so it proved. But senior MPs still did not learn that our job is to disclose what we find. Three years later, my friend Richard Evans revealed in The Times the findings of an environment committee report that highlighted the dangers of waste from nuclear power stations. Despite the revelation clearly being in the public interest, the privileges committee recommended he be barred from the House for six months. The Commons, thankfully, and sensibly, rejected the idea when it was put to the full House.

       The Foreign Secretary Who Never Was

      In May 1983, two weeks before the general election, I wrote a Times splash suggesting that Margaret Thatcher would dismiss Francis Pym, her foreign secretary, after the election and replace him with her party chairman and close friend Cecil Parkinson, who was about to oversee an election landslide.

      The story came as a result of a lunch with a senior Cabinet minister who knew Thatcher’s thinking. Jim Naughtie (then of The Guardian and later of the Today programme), Margaret van Hattem (of the Financial Times) and I had taken the minister to the sumptuous Ma Cuisine in Walton Street, Chelsea.

      Margaret, who was to die tragically young in 1989 from a brain haemorrhage, was a highly intelligent, attractive woman, with a mischievous, occasionally flirtatious, air.

      The minister – tall, debonair and unbelievably smooth – who joined us that day was completely taken with Margaret, whom he had not met before. Before long, as almost always on these occasions, we got on to the subject of the post-election Cabinet reshuffle, making sure that our guest’s glass of white wine was nicely topped up.

      The minister was putty in Margaret’s hands. Jim and I were virtual bystanders – although we were listening carefully and taking mental notes – as our friend took our guest through all the likely changes and he answered them all directly, almost as if he were privy to the Prime Minister’s thoughts. He was playing to the gallery – showing off – and the gallery was Margaret. Jim and I, meanwhile, were playing gooseberry.

      He was clear that Pym, by whom ‘Margaret’ – he was talking about Thatcher – was increasingly frustrated, was on his way out. And when our Margaret asked who would replace him, our man blushed and told her and us that he would have to leave that to our imagination. We knew what he meant and he appeared almost beside himself with excitement at the prospect of going to the Foreign Office. Thatcher, we were told, had in a way groomed him for the role by appointing him – at the time a relatively junior figure in the Cabinet hierarchy – to the War Cabinet set up for the Falklands conflict. By the time our guest had finished, we felt we had a pretty good idea of what the Cabinet would look like after the Conservatives’ certain victory.

      When he had left us, Jim and I congratulated Margaret on her charming interrogation techniques and talked about how we would write up the story. Ministers were never averse to such speculation, and the job of the reporter was to decide whether they were guessing or knew what they were talking about. This minister left us in little doubt that he knew what he was about. Our guest was, of course, Cecil Parkinson.

      When Thatcher won her landslide and carried out her reshuffle, Pym – probably the most infuriating of the ‘wets’ in the eyes of his boss – was indeed sacked and refused to take any other job, retiring in dignified fashion to the back-benches. But rather than going to the Foreign Office, Parkinson became secretary of state for trade and industry. Jim, Margaret and I decided philosophically that ‘you win some, you lose some’ and that we had at least got the story fifty per cent right. But it was not long before we were to learn why the second half of our story had not happened.

      As Margaret Thatcher was to confirm in her autobiography, she had indeed intended to appoint Parkinson as foreign secretary.

      He and I agreed on economic and domestic policy. Neither of us had the slightest doubt that Britain’s interests must come first in foreign policy. He had served in the Falklands war Cabinet. He had just masterminded the most technically proficient election campaign I have known. He seemed to me right for this most senior job.

      She did not say this, but Parkinson was also her kind of man – handsome and smooth, even if some found him oleaginous. She was the daughter of a grocer, he the son of a railway man. He was the grammar-school boy who went to Cambridge and was everything the more privileged members of her Cabinet were not, the charmer whom the Tory members loved.

      But on election day Parkinson had visited her and told her that he had been having an affair with Sara Keays, his personal secretary. The following day Thatcher received a personal letter from Sara Keays’s father revealing she was pregnant with Cecil’s child. She showed Parkinson the letter when he arrived for lunch. She kept him in the Cabinet and reluctantly sent Sir Geoffrey Howe to the Foreign Office, a decision she was sorely to regret. The scene then shifted to the Blackpool conference. Parkinson had publicly admitted the affair but said he was staying with his wife. During the week I contributed to a front-page story revealing that Parkinson would have been foreign secretary but for the affair. Vindication!

      On the Thursday of conference, the political editor Julian Haviland, his number two Tony Bevins and I were told by the news desk that Sara Keays had given The Times an interview that day and that we should stand by to react when the paper hit the streets.

      Speaking to Richard Dowden, Keays said Parkinson had first proposed to her four years ago and again on election day. But seven weeks later he had told her he no longer intended to marry her. Speaking at her father’s home near Bath, she said she had ‘implored’ him to tell the Prime Minister but he had refused. She had decided to speak only ‘because of my duty to do so’. ‘My baby was conceived in a longstanding, loving relationship which I allowed to continue because I believed in our eventual marriage,’ she said. It was a sensational story and we enjoyed the rumpus as our colleagues from other papers exited the bar at the Imperial Hotel and ran around doing follow-ups.

      It was a stormy night and I remember struggling to stay upright in the wind as I wandered from the Imperial back to my hotel at around 3 a.m., only to return four hours later in the hope of catching Parkinson and other ministers early in the day. Parkinson’s position was untenable and he resigned quickly.

      Such was the lottery of politics. But for Parkinson’s affair, Thatcher would have had a foreign secretary with whom she felt happy, the tie-up between Chancellor Nigel Lawson and Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe that opposed her – fatally – over Europe would not have happened, and, who knows, she might have gone on and won a fourth election.

      Parkinson died in January 2016 at the age of 84 after a battle with cancer. The obituaries all told of a career that had effectively been ruined by the Keays affair, and suggested that Parkinson could well have become prime minister but for it.

      It is beyond doubt that back in 1983 Thatcher was already thinking of Parkinson as an heir apparent. And looking back on that lunch in Ma Cuisine, it is quite clear that even then she trusted him enough to talk about the make-up of her Government.

      What