Please email your nominations for both categories – the same writer can be put forward for both, of course – to bwdesign@basswalker.co.uk, or, if you must, write the names on the back of an envelope and send it to: Great Political Corrs, Bass Walker Associates, 133 Bradbourne Vale Road, Sevenoaks, Kent TN13 3DJ. Only one vote in each category per person, please. Closing date: 31 August 2005.

The uniform of black coat and waistcoat and striped trousers is now worn chiefly by hotel managers, male dental receptionists, maitres d’hotel in restaurants and barristers when they are on duty. For more than a decade after the 1939-45 war, I would estimate, it persisted as the approved outfit of the official and professional classes in this country. The late Osbert Lancaster’s pocket cartoons in the post-war Daily Express (always an acute guide to contemporary fashions in dress) would show senior civil servants and eminent physicians attired in this manner.

In 1959, when I first entered the Palace of Westminster as assistant to Wilfred Sendall, the political correspondent and “Crossbencher” columnist of the Sunday Express, the fashion was dying out among politicians, though S O Davies, the Labour member for Merthyr, was invariably dressed in this way, and another Welsh MP and former minister, Jim Griffiths, also adopted the old style. So did William Deedes when he was minister for press relations in Harold Macmillan’s last Cabinet and Alec Douglas-Home’s first one. Lord Deedes, as he later became, told me that when he first entered the parliamentary lobby on behalf of the old Morning Post before the war, he too had been required to wear a black coat and striped trousers. The only lobby correspondent to maintain this old custom was the representative of the paper which had absorbed the Morning Post. That was The Daily Telegraph, whose correspondent was H B Boyne: this was his byline, though he was universally known as Harry Boyne. He did not wear his formal outfit every day. Quite what his rules were for putting it on – or, indeed, whether he had any rules – was something I never discovered. My recollection is that he invariably wore it for Budget Day: then, as my capitalisation suggests, a more auspicious and ceremonious event than it has since become.

The uniform suited the silver-haired, trim Boyne as it would have done a butler, but a most scrupulous and honourable butler, who would have no hesitation in telling his master where he thought he had gone wrong. He was so honest that when he put in his always modest claim for expenses from the Telegraph, he would deduct 7s 6d (37.5p in today’s money), or several such sums, for what he would have spent on lunch anyway had he been on his own. And, later, when he was semi-retired, he was spotted on a Telegraph picket line during one of those industrial disputes which engulfed not only industry but even newspapers in the 1970s.

Boyne was not a graduate. But then, 45 years ago, not many lobby correspondents were. There were, of course, exceptions: Arthur Butler of the News Chronicle, Douglas Clark of the Daily Express, Edward Greenfield of The Guardian (later to become more famous as a music critic), my mentor Sendall and one or two others, including Anthony Howard of Reynolds News, who was then in his mid-20s. Boyne did not mind in the least about having graduated at the University of Life; indeed, he was rather proud of it. His equivalent on The Guardian, Francis Boyd (Greenfield occupied a subordinate position) minded a great deal, and made no secret of his feelings of injustice and deprivation. He used to say that the saddest moment of his life had been when, as a sixth-former, he had rushed to the notice board on which the list of scholarship winners had been pinned, only to find his name not on it. Anthony Howard and I decided that something should be done about – or, rather, for – Francis. To this end we resolved to approach Sir Edward (later Lord) Boyle, a political acquaintance of ours who had left active Conservatism, with which he had never been specially happy in any case, to become vice-chancellor of Leeds University. We both mentioned separately to Boyle that Boyd would be a suitable recipient of an honorary degree. After a few months, or it may have been longer, he duly received a doctorate.

This did nothing to mitigate the asperities of his discourse. He was a tall, bony, strong-featured, rangy man, like a certain type of second-row forward in rugby. He was obsessed by two aspects of life: that other journalists were getting away with paying less tax than they should, and that he was surrounded by younger men who had enjoyed an education more privileged than his own. “Of course,” he once said to me, “it’s all very well for expresidents of the Oxford Union such as yourself.” I explained that I had been at Cambridge, not Oxford, and that I had not been president of the union, though I had spoken there. It made not the slightest difference.

On another occasion I was going to a Labour Party conference at Scarborough, travelling on a Sunday. This made connections difficult, so I asked my secretary on the Sunday Express to book a chauffeured car from York to Scarborough. (This was achieved without the slightest question or fuss. I was only 30. I doubt whether such extravagance would be allowed on many papers today, but times were different then.) On the train from Kings Cross I came upon Boyd, bound for the same destination. I told him of my arrangements and offered him a lift, which he accepted with every appearance of gratitude. Ever afterwards, however, he would remark, at roughly monthly intervals: “Of course, it’s all very well for people like you, who work for papers that can afford to drive you around in hired cars…”

Victim of class system

“If a minister sends for you,” Wood once advised me, “you go at once.” “Oh yes,” I said, refraining from adding that this was far from being my own practice. If a minister sent for me – a fairly rare occurrence in any event – I would suggest a meeting on neutral ground: in a restaurant or at a club or, if the matter was urgent, at one of the numerous watering holes in the House of Commons. I was even prepared to go to the minister’s room at the House. What I was not willing to do was attend the ministry, where the minister would be on home territory, probably surrounded by sympathetic and obedient civil servants (ministerial press officers were less common in those days).

Admittedly I was involved in Sunday, then in weekly and then later again in Sunday journalism, while Wood was engaged in the daily grind of securing news stories. So his perspective was inevitably rather different from my own. Even so, I think he overdid the deference. He also wrote a column which, to be fair, was a proper column rather than a cat-sat-on-the-mat recital of the week’s events of the kind that political editors of today tend to offer when they are invited to fill space. Shortly after Wood’s column had been inaugurated, The Times began to put news on the front page. One day the news editor was hard up for suitable stories. In his weekly column, which was meant to appear on the next day, Wood had written that it would not be surprising if Harold Macmillan (the Prime Minister) had taken Selwyn Lloyd (the Foreign Secretary) by the arm and told him that, in these troubled times – it was at the peak of the Cold War – enough was enough. The higher command at the paper decided to put Wood’s column on the front page. Sensation! The Prime Minister intended to dismiss his Foreign Secretary! It must be true, because The Times said it was. Oddly enough, a similar story would probably be accorded the same awed treatment today, not so much because The Times possessed the all-round authority it did in Wood’s time, as because it was thought to enjoy close relations with No.10.

Hugh Massingham of The Observer also wrote a column, strap-lined: “A London Diary” by “Our Political Correspondent”. With Henry Fairlie, who was never, I think, a member of the parliamentary lobby, Massingham was the founder of the modern political column. Like Fairlie, he did not show up very often at Westminster. In fact he did not bother much with news at all, confining his activities to the topping and tailing of agency reports, again as “Our Political Correspondent”.

The Sunday Times, by contrast, took political news quite seriously. Its correspondent was James Margach, a neat, spry Scotsman whose shorthand was impeccable and whose memory went back to Ramsay MacDonald. He lived at Purley in Surrey and would from time to time take a day off at the beginning of the week to attend to his garden. His paper, then as now, was assiduous in badgering its specialist correspondents: the consequence of having too many minor “executives” at the office with nothing else to do with their time. The result was often a telephone conversation of this nature:

Sunday Times executive: Could I speak to Mr Margach, please?
Mrs Margach: I’m afraid he’s out.
Executive: Would you mind telling me where he is?
Mrs M: He’s in town.
Executive: What’s he doing in town?
Mrs M: He’s having lunch.
Executive: Would it be too much trouble to tell me whom he is lunching with?
Mrs M: With the minister, of course.
Executive: And where would that be?
Mrs M: At the club.

Margach also wrote a column which specialised in stating the obvious while being at the same time very well informed. He wrote it as “A Student of Politics”, which prompted Bernard Levin to remark: “About time that lad took his finals.” However, I was fond of Jimmy, not least because he was always very kind to me, as established journalists often are not where younger persons who may become rivals are concerned.

Someone else who exhibited the same helpful characteristics was George Hutchinson, then of the Evening Standard. When the third London evening paper, The Star, ceased publication (the other such paper was the Evening News, which survived much longer), the Standard decided to acquire the Star’s better-known political correspondent, Robert Carvel. He, like Hutchinson, was a Scot, as many leading journalists were in those days, but he was one of a more obvious kind. Indeed, the word “pawky” might have been coined specifically with Carvel in mind. Hutchinson responded to the change – for it was not exactly a dismissal – in a manner which, as I was later to learn, in Hutchinson’s days at the Conservative press office and as manager of The Spectator, was typical of his entire approach to life. He did absolutely nothing: or, rather, he continued to attend the Commons in his usual fashion and to send stories to his paper. Eventually the embarrassment became too great to bear and Hutchinson was appointed diplomatic correspondent, a title that had lost its pre-war allure, a process that has continued to this day, with acceleration.

You may have noticed that I have referred to all these Westminster journalists as “political correspondents”, for that was what they were called. Each would have at least one assistant, sometimes more than one, who would go by the title of “political reporter”. Often the political reporter would be of the same age as or even older than his ostensible superior (it was always a “his” in those days), the relationship resembling that of an officer and a senior NCO. Thus H B Boyne had Rowland Summerscales, an expert on the Labour Party, as his subordinate, while David Wood had the highly regarded George Clark.

The title “political editor” came in during the 1970s, though the Daily Express had used it before then. It was invented not as a substitute for giving political correspondents more money – the usual reason for the bestowal of fancy titles of one sort or another – but, on the contrary, as a legal justification for awarding increases in salary all round. The Labour Government-imposed pay policy which was then in operation made it unlawful to pay employees more unless they were doing different jobs. Renaming all specialist correspondents – not just political correspondents – as “editors” resolved the problem. In fact they did not edit anything at all, a position which persists to this day. Sometimes it produced difficulties. David Watt was the leading political figure on the Financial Times and was already called “political editor”. The trouble was that he hardly ever set foot in Westminster and confined himself largely to writing an excellent column. The political correspondent was John Bourne, whose career was to be cut sadly short by illness. The FT could hardly have two political editors. So Bourne was made “lobby editor” instead.

Obvious explanation

Just as the numbers of political staff have increased, so have the stories which each is required to cover every day – or, with Sunday correspondents, every week. This has been true throughout what used to be called broadsheet journalism (with The Times and The Independent having gone tabloid, and The Guardian about to adopt an intermediate size, we may have to coin a different name – though, as a combative Hugh Cudlipp once told one of our numerous Royal Commissions on the Press, there was nothing wrong with being a tabloid, which was, after all, what the Church Times was). At all events, I recently came across an old colleague, now working as health editor of one of our expensive papers. How many stories, I asked him, was he himself expected to cover in a day? One? Two? He laughed. It would be six at least, he said, and possibly seven or eight. In that case, I said – for he was an old, old colleague – he could not, in the nature of things, be covering them very well; to which he assented with a good humour that I should not have displayed in the circumstances.

I sometimes tell Michael White of The Guardian that he writes too much. He tells me it has to be done and that he is perfectly happy to do it. But his immediate predecessor, Ian Aitken, rationed his contributions. He would confine himself to what he considered to be the most important story or stories of the day. After a convivial lunch at the Garrick Club, almost always in the company of his friend, the late Geoffrey Parkhouse of the The Herald, Glasgow, he would arrive at the House shortly after three: Prime Minister’s Questions then took place twice a week, on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, from 3.15 to 3.30. Afterwards Aitken would not spend too much time hanging about the Members’ Lobby, to which political editors and a few other categories enjoyed privileged access, but would trawl the corridors and the numerous bars. Of these the greatest, at any rate in the 1970s and 1980s, was Annie’s Bar. This was called after the presiding barmaid of the pre-1939 period, and had been re-established by Robert Maxwell when he was Labour MP for Buckingham and chairman of the Kitchen Committee. It was one of the few beneficent actions the old monster had ever undertaken.

The bar was particularly important as a stock exchange of information when the life of James Callaghan’s government was imperilled virtually nightly, as it was from 1976 to 1979. But it was important at the high tide of Thatcherism as well. At some time between seven and eight, Aitken would move to the telephone on the wall, assemble his notes, some of which had been made on torn-up cigarette packets – he was a smoker in those days – and dictate a story which was a model of its kind. He might, of course, work till later, and often did. But a previous generation – the Boyds, the Boynes, the Woods – could usually all be found pacing the corridors late in the evening. Indeed, Derek Marks of the Daily Express, perhaps the greatest scoop-merchant of the post-war era (the others were probably Walter Terry of the Daily Mail and Trevor Kavanagh of today’s Sun), wrote a sort of semi-column appearing on the news pages entitled: “Derek Marks Writes at Midnight”.

Despite everything we read about 24-hour news, seven days a week, the political day starts earlier and finishes earlier. This development was apparent well before Robin Cook, as Leader of the House, introduced a timetable that was supposed to be more convenient for the Labour women members who had recently arrived. Parliamentary sketch writers (who are outside the scope of this article) have to begin their sketching in the late afternoon. That most dramatic of parliamentary occasions, the 10 o’clock vote, has long disappeared into the mists over the Thames. It seems bizarre that the television cameras are allowed into the Central Lobby at seven in the evening: not so much that they are let in, though that is certainly surprising, as that there are so few people about the place, apart from the television interviewer and his or her subject.

I have never subscribed to the theory of the growing unimportance of the House of Commons. In the past 15 years it, or one side of it, has removed a Prime Minister; abolished foxhunting, contrary to the wishes of another Prime Minister; and substantially modified the Terrorism Act. But the changes of the last few years certainly mean that it is more difficult for political editors to question the Government as effectively as they once did.