Man with a mission

I used to write a few political profiles in my time, and the one thing I always hoped was that the subject would refuse to co-operate. You had to offer to interview them, naturally, otherwise there might be legal difficulties. But you prayed they would say no. That rarely happened. When I did see them, I would try to concentrate on the sort of detail that can be hard to come by — where they spent their honeymoon, why they had that row with X, favourite television programme and so forth. What I usually got was the elder statesman in relaxed and contemplative mode, casting his wise, benign eye over the political scene at great and tedious length.

The good stuff invariably came from friends, colleagues and enemies. Take Denis Healey’s splendid riposte to the Prince of Wales during a lunch at Chequers. The prince had been chuntering on about his life, how dreary and demanding it was, you really wouldn’t want to be me, and so forth, when Healey interrupted him: ‘It’s yer own fault. You didn’t need to take the job,’ which was, as my informant said, a perfect Denis remark, being very rude, quite funny and totally untrue.

He’d never have told me that himself (in fact, he denied it later, but my source was both present and impeccable). In the same way, Tony Blair would not in a million years have told a television crew that when going on holiday he asked the No. 10 library for a 12th-century book on Christianity, for beach reading. That one line tells you more than any number of hour-long on-the-record interviews.

So Michael Cockerell was fortunate not to have his own subject’s co-operation when making his three-part series Blair: The Inside Story (BBC2, Tuesdays).