Baldwin had been listening, and asked if he could get me a drink. I gave him the thumbs up and he raced off. I now had to tell Arabella what we were about to run. In my own mind I suppose I assumed that Major may have by now guessed what was coming. I did not know if he had picked up from somewhere that the Currie diaries were imminent. In any case I supposed this was something he had known might be revealed at any stage in the last thirteen years.
I told Arabella the essentials of the Times splash – that we were serializing Currie’s diaries and that she had disclosed that she and John Major had had a four-year affair. Arabella was clearly shocked but she was utterly professional. Her calm in the face of what I told her made me feel that there was unlikely to be a denial or any attempt to stop the story. The reaction was more one of sad resignation. I told her that if it was possible to have some response from her boss – and quick – I would be massively grateful. By now my anxiety had given way to huge relief. I had fulfilled Robert’s command.
And I now told him that the contact had been made, and that I was hopeful of getting some kind of comment from Major. It was by then close to 8.40 p.m. Arabella asked if I could give her twenty minutes and I said of course, but please come back to me even if there is nothing other than a ‘no comment’.
Tom Baldwin returned with beers and pizza. The Press Gallery bar was closed, it being a Friday. He had been up to Victoria Street. I was starving and thirsty. Again I told Robert that we were nearly there. Maybe twenty-five minutes later my phone rang again and I knew it would be Arabella. As I said hello, I quietly dialled Robert’s direct line in the office and heard him pick it up. She did indeed have a statement. And as she read it I repeated it out loud so that Robert could hear. It was 9.12 p.m. The statement read: ‘Norma has known of this matter for many years and has long forgiven me. It is the one event in my life of which I am most ashamed and I have long feared it would be made public. Neither Norma nor I has any further comment.’
Major has stayed true to that statement ever since. His first thought when he learnt of what we were running was for his family, and he obviously wanted to tell them what was appearing. But he has never since that day said another word on the subject.
I thanked Arabella. She in turn thanked me for giving Major advance knowledge and a chance to respond. It was a stunning result for the paper. Not only was the story confirmed by the main subject, he had also given a very good quote talking about his shame at what had happened. Even at that stage Tom and I surmised that Currie – hidden away in France – would not take too kindly to Major’s response. It gave us a follow-up for Monday morning.
My office sources tell me that it was at this stage that the editor of The Times gave out a whoop of delight and did his jig. I swiftly e-mailed Major’s words to the night editor, Liz Gerard.
The main paper of the night was then prepared at lightning speed.
As Brian MacArthur wrote later: ‘We had our scoop. Our rivals had the spoof. The new front page and pages four and five – carrying the Dougary interview – were ready to go immediately and were being printed by 9.36 p.m. Out of 655,000 copies printed from London, only 18,000 were the spoof edition. Luck plays as big a part in newspapers as in other areas of life and none of the nightmare scenarios we had considered occurred on the night.’
I didn’t tell them even then that for ninety minutes or so I had gone through a real nightmare. But I’ve mentioned since to George Brock, among others, that it nearly didn’t go all right on the night. George replied: ‘OK, there was the odd ripple of alarm. We knew you’d manage and you did.’
When the edition was done, a glass or two of champagne was drunk at the office – well deserved given the brilliance of the operation marshalled by Thomson, his deputy, Ben Preston, and the rest of the team. Tom and I had our beer.
I went home shattered but the tension of the night made sleep impossible. I was up early and in my car driving north to the Labour conference in Blackpool (via a Norwich match against Preston at Deepdale) when Robert Thomson was introduced on the Today programme by John Humphrys and interviewed about one of the great scoops of recent years. Piers Morgan, then editor of the Daily Mirror, who was woken after 2 a.m. when our Currie edition landed in his office, wrote that it rated as a story alongside ‘Elvis Dead’ and ‘Man on the Moon’.
A Day in the Desert as John Major Sues
My job was full of coincidences. Nine years earlier, I had been with John Major when he announced he was suing two magazines for libel for alleging – falsely – that he had an affair with Clare Latimer, a Downing Street caterer.
Stopping off in Oman – where he went off to the desert to see the sultan, on his way between Mumbai, India, and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia – Downing Street officials announced that he was taking legal action against the New Statesman & Society and Scallywag over the allegations about his private life. Clare Latimer also took action.
News that the New Statesman had repeated rumours that had appeared in the satirical magazine the previous month reached Major and his team very late the previous night in Bombay. It meant little sleep for him or the travelling press, who raced around for most of the early hours looking for comments, and in the paper of 29 January, I chronicled the events in Major’s extraordinary thirty-hour day.
All of us were up at around 5 a.m. on the Thursday, after at the most three hours of sleep. The decision to sue was taken on the plane to Muscat and announced by Gus O’Donnell, the PM’s press secretary, on arrival. Returning from the overpowering heat of the desert, Major staged a press conference and took the inevitable questions from UK reporters who were not too interested in the news of orders received from the Omani Government.
At 6 p.m. that night we put down in Riyadh, where Major had six hours of talks with King Fahd and other ministers. At midnight we were told that British Aerospace was to supply forty-eight Tornado aircraft to Saudi Arabia in what was Britain’s second-biggest defence contract. Both the libel and Tornado stories were spread across the front page of The Times. In the early hours of Friday we then got on the plane for Heathrow. A long day in our lives.
Fast-forward nine years and an angry and relieved Clare Latimer voiced her satisfaction that the ‘shabby truth’ had come out at last. She spoke of her pleasure that the real ‘other woman’ in Major’s life had identified herself, sparing herself the fate, as The Times reported, of becoming a footnote in the history of Conservative sleaze in the 1990s. ‘The world will now hopefully believe I did not hop into bed with John Major,’ she said.
There were other spin-offs from our sensational revelation that Saturday. As Tom Baldwin and I had predicted, Currie was not best pleased. From her hideaway she spoke of the hurt she felt at his describing his shame over the affair. ‘He was not very ashamed of it at the time I can tell you. I think I’m slightly indignant about that remark.’
And for the Kremlinologists of Westminster – those of us who enjoyed analysing every word and gesture from politicians to divine their motives and feelings – it threw some light on Major’s decisions not to bring back Currie to the Government from which she had resigned as health minister in 1988 over remarks about salmonella in eggs.
In her diaries she claimed Major had told her shortly before he became prime minister in 1990 that she might become housing minister in the reshuffle that followed his win. But no offer came.
Then, after Major’s victory in 1992, we watched on reshuffle day as Currie marched happily up Downing Street. We expected her to get a Cabinet job but Major offered her the post of prisons
