I ESCAPED THE BROOM CUPBOARD TO INTERVIEW MARGARET THATCHER

Photo by Bogomil Mihaylov on Unsplash

As a young radio news editor, it was quite a big deal for me at the time.

An offer of an exclusive broadcast interview with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

But I never envisaged the rather comical logistics that would precede it.

Or that more than forty years later, there’s an (almost) full transcript of it still on the internet. More of that later….

I was reminded of all this today when I read an article by my friend and former Sky News colleague Jon Craig about this week’s 50th anniversary of Thatcher becoming leader of the Conservative Party.

My interview with her was nine years later in her second term as Prime Minister and took place in February, 1984. I was in my twenties and the News Editor of a very successful commercial radio station for Coventry and Warwickshire called Mercia Sound.

Like VHS tapes, waterbeds and Kajagoogoo, the station was one of many things from the 1980s that have since disappeared.

Margaret Thatcher, then 58, had eight months earlier won her second landslide election for the Conservatives, defeating a Labour Party led by Michael Foot, whose socialist manifesto for that election was described by one Labour figure as “the longest suicide note in history.”

The Falklands War had already been fought and won in the South Atlantic, and the Miner’s Strike was about to happen. These were two of the key events that defined her premiership, while my interview on local radio was not…

Getting this “exclusive” didn’t involve any journalistic enterprise on my part. It was a common practice when the PM was doing what was essentially a local event, rather than a national one, that the local radio station would be offered an interview to talk to her about local concerns.

She was due in Coventry to open a new science park at Warwick University on the edge of the city, and I was told I needed to be already in the building by the time she arrived. Perhaps they didn’t want me interviewing the angry students who were due to turn up for a demonstration.

Anyway, I did as I was told and was ushered through a side entrance and eventually taken down a long corridor and left outside the room where the interview would take place.

Then somebody who was either from the Downing Street team or from the Orwellian-sounding Central Office of Information ran up to me looking flustered and asking me what did I think I was doing.

“I’m here to interview the Prime Minister,” I said.

“But you can’t stand here. You can’t actually BE in the corridor when Mrs.Thatcher arrives!”

Having firmly told me I wasn’t yet allowed in the room either, he then opened a different door and shoved me inside what was literally a broom cupboard. “You’ll have to wait there, and I’ll come and get you.”

Somewhat stunned at my sudden incarceration, I blinked into the darkness to discover I was taking up the only bit of space left in a cupboard full of mops, brooms, and gallon cans of pink disinfectant. It was definitely pink, and not true blue.

Trying not to lean against anything in case my suit got dirty, I was perfectly happy to wait for a few minutes in these slightly bizarre circumstances.

But inevitably, Prime Ministerial visits run behind time. So I stood in that cupboard for what seemed like an hour – but was probably twenty minutes – constantly wondering if they’d forgotten me. Occasionally I would open the door slightly to peer through the gap to see if anything was happening.

Eventually I heard a commotion in the corridor and uselessly stood to attention as straight as the brooms and mops, even though nobody could see me.

A couple of minutes later, and I was in the room sat at a desk alongside the Prime Minister, while her acolytes and organisers sat in a row of seats in front of us, as if we were the teachers and they were the students.

I wondered whether I smelled of disinfectant. But she never mentioned anything….

Today I found it remarkable to read a transcript of the whole interview which exists in the Margaret Thatcher Foundation archives.

As you’ll see below, the record states that the interview’s importance rating was deemed to be “low”, which is as crushing as it is also obviously true!

The transcript shows we discussed the new science park she opened, the advance of technology, retraining people who had become unemployed, and the plight of manufacturing industry which was in steep decline in Coventry. The city had hit 20% unemployment a couple of years before, and job prospects were still very grim.

“No, well, if you think back to the beginning of the century when most people were working in agriculture and there was no such thing as cars, they would have said, well, my goodness me, you’re going to put all the blacksmiths out of work,” the Prime Minister said.

She also pointed out to me that my own grandparents wouldn’t have been able to do the job that I was now doing, working in radio.

To my own recollection, there is something missing from the transcript.

As I fumbled with my reel-to-reel tape recorder before the interview started, I said I wanted to ask a question at the start about the demonstration outside. She said one question on that was fine.

So I asked for her reaction to the “noisy demonstration” outside. She replied: “Well the noise doesn’t matter. They were all very well behaved.”

That was all she said.

Actually, they weren’t that well behaved because they threw eggs at her car. But the point was that this wasn’t really a usable answer, which was my fault for asking a question that was too general.

So I started to follow up and she said: “Young man, I said one question…” but I ploughed on with a “yes, but…” and asked whether the students didn’t have a reasonable case about education cuts and grant increases that were below the inflation rate.

Then I did get an answer, all about the amazing opportunities that young people had in higher education and that the university was a “magnet of opportunity” provided by the taxpayer.

But my minor impertinence and her minor admonishment seems to have been erased from the record of a very minor interview.

Minor, but memorable.