freelanceintellectual.com

Give Me Ten Seconds, by John Sergeant

photograph courtesy of Simon Gosney

I found this book a bit disappointing actually. Anyone who's obsessed with British politics will know John Sergeant, the long-serving BBC political correspondent who finally went over to become political editor at ITN. He's most famous for his microphone moment with Mrs. Thatcher outside the British Embassy in Paris - you know, when she emerged having failed to win outright and Bernard Ingham fumbled around looking for a microphone, and I thought this book would be full of brilliant insights and stories from a Westminster insider.

Well, yes, and well, no. It's entertaining enough, as you'd expect from a man who starred in Oxford reviews and with Alan Bennett before going into journalism. Sergeant comes across as a warm, witty, engaging character with a disguised underlying bitchiness which must make him great fun to have a drink with. After he'd been passed over for the BBC political editor's job in favour of the dour Robin Oakley,

there was general delight when the story went round of how I responded to Robin's first major broadcasting disaster. He dried up on air. 'We've all nearly done that,' I was widely reported to have told him.

Which is not a denial.

There are some real insights here into the mad world of war reporting, in which desperate men call each other cowards and get each other killed through a drive to be at the most dangerous scene. Sergeant rather attractively admits he wanted as much safety as possible. There are also some surprising vignettes of individuals, such as Ted Heath, who, Sergeant says, would stop in a pub for a whisky at the end of a long day during a general election campaign and talk politics with journalists like him. I especially enjoyed his story about the crazily paranoid Tony Benn trying to demagnetise Sergeant's tape recorder so as to destroy an interview they'd been doing, and this story from a summit in Okinawa:

I was staying in the same hotel as Mr. Blair, and as he passed with his party I could not resist making a formal bow in the Japanese fashion. The Prime Minister smiled and from the back of the group an unmistakable voice shouted "Lower, Sergeant, lower.'

Alastair Campbell, of course. What's a bit strange about the whole thing, though, is the lack of political obsession. It doesn't feel as though the man writing these stories was as immersed in the politics as I think I'd have been if I'd been in his place.

He seems to me to read things wrong, for instance, especially on the Labour side of politics. He seems to think, for example, that Michael Foot might have liked to oppose the Falklands war and felt constrained to take a more supportive stance, but if you read or listen to the debate (it was broadcast not long ago by the BBC for the 25th anniversary) it's clear he was fired by loathing of the Argentine junta and passionately supported military action, even if some of his front bench did not. Again, he seems to think Neil Kinnock might have wanted to come out strongly in support of the miners' strike, but dared not. Doesn't he realise Kinnock's real frustration was that he felt unable to denounce Scargill, as he did Militant not long afterwards? Nor does he seem to me to understand that David Owen's opposition to the SDP-Liberal merger might have been political, at least as much as personal.

A slightly strange book, then, about politics but not wrapped up in it. If you're wrapped up yourself, that's a bit of a let down.