Farewell, Bernard Ingham and Betty Boothroyd

When you start work the figures of authority you encounter are from your parents’ generation. They are significant to you and when they die it brings you up short.

In the past few days we’ve lost Bernard Ingham, at the age of 90, and Betty Boothroyd, who was 93. Both were big players in Westminster when I began as a TV reporter there in the early 1980s. If they had never existed out political culture would be even worse than it is today.

They had many shared values although in their prime one was Labour and the other Tory. He was Press Secretary and loyal aide to the Conservate Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher throughout her eleven years as power. She was firmly on the right wing of Old Labour, the first female Speaker of the House of Commons from 1992 to 2000, the John Major into Blair years.

Both were Yorkshire born and bred in mill towns, Bernard in Halifax then Hebden Bridge, Betty in Dewsbury.  They were raised in modest circumstances through the thrifty, hard scrabble years, of 1920s, 1930s, and “the war”, as they all called it.

Bernard was happily married to Nancy, a former policewoman, for sixty years. Betty had many gentlemen admirers but remained single. But the two Yorkshire white roses enjoyed a platonic public flirtation, complete with barbs.

Bidding for a part in the famous sketch in which Four Yorkshiremen compete with the depths of the hard times they were raised in, Bernard chose Dock Leaf Pudding, a war time staple, as his favourite dish in a Yorkshire celebrity cookbook. Betty went for the classier Lemon Chicken. At seventeen she’d been a shopgirl at Bixters, a posh store she couldn’t afford to patronise. This left her with a lifelong appreciation of the finer things of life.

Bernard and Betty first came across each other as teenage unknowns. Similar backgrounds led them both to join the West Riding chapter of the Labour League of Youth. Betty already stood out. “I knew of her”, Bernard reminisced in The Yorkshire Post years later, adding hopefully “we may even have met”.

He got his chance at last when she was invited to the launch of his book The Wages of Spin in 2003. Only for her to boom out to the assembled company “He’s never asked me out for lunch but I’ve got a free glass of champagne now”.

Bernard and Betty were united against the New Labour government for disrespecting parliament by announcing policy elsewhere, in newspaper columns and leaks to the media. As Speaker, Boothroyd protested in the chamber, Ingham urged her on in their local patois: “Better get tough, Betty, or parliament will soon count for nowt”.

Betty was an outspoken Remainer, Bernard voted leave. But they were united in their condemnation of the way Cameron handled the referendum. “No time for madcap adventures!” Betty opined, “I cannot envisage how Margaret Thatcher would have got into such a mess” , Bernard muttered.

Schooled by comedy in the heyday of “the wireless”, Betty and Bernard both had a liking for catch phrases. More theatrical than the hackneyed “Order, Order” she favoured “Call me Madam!”, “The honourable gentleman will resume his seat immediately” and “Time’s up!”. Glowering from his heavy eyebrows he favoured “bunkum and balderdash” to squash stories of which he disapproved. Betty’s working life began with a false start in show business as a dancer in the chorus line. She retained a poise and unspoken sauciness, as a kind of upmarket version of Mrs Slocum on ‘Are you Being Served?”. 

“Formidable”, “incomparable”, “worth her weight in gold”. Bernard continued to shower praise on Betty. She was one of only five women in his list of “50 Yorkshire Greats”. Judi Dench didn’t make the cut. He noted that, apart from a happy stint working for Tony Benn, his civil service career had been spent serving strong women, first the “Red Queen” Barbara Castle and then Mrs Thatcher. Boothroyd was next when she co-opted him to her, ultimately successful, campaign for a memorial commemorating the Women of the Second World War. “I think I can safely say that serving on her committee eradicated from me any vestige of male chauvinist piggery that somehow Margaret Thatcher had failed to scold or handbag out of me”, he wrote ruefully.

Boothroyd was undaunted. Only a year ago she took umbrage when Ingham suggested John Major should “shut up” criticising Boris Johnson’s behaviour. “The more said the better, especially by people of Sir John’s integrity”, she thundered in the letters column of Sir Bernard’s favourite newspaper, “Free speech and respect for the law are the core of British values. Parliament embodies them in its statutes, however hard parliament tries to ignore them. We don’t shut up in this country because we are told to do so, least of all when are destiny is threatened by a shallow interpretation of the obligations of government to foster national unity and respect its institutions. We shun extremism, listen to the other side, but believe in Patriotism. Long may it be so.”

In spite of this verbal spanking, I doubt Bernard disagreed with a word of it. The key to both of them was their belief in institutions. This served me in good stead with Bernard, who I knew much better than Betty, seeing him twice daily at Lobby briefings in parliamentary term time. I was a young man representing two much-mocked start-ups. I do not believe that either TV-am or Sky News would have become trusted news providers without the institutional support of Mrs Thatcher’s press secretary. “Your organisation has been admitted by the Lobby,” he told me, “and I will treat you exactly as I treat the other broadcasters”. Unlike his successor Alastair Campbell, Bernard respected that political journalists were ultimately accountable to parliament as an institution, rather than to the government of the day.

Ingham was as good as his word. I joined TV luminaries such as John Cole of the BBC and ITN’s Michael Brunson regularly to interview the Prime Minister and we crammed into the back seat of Mrs Thatcher’s beloved, if ageing, Queen’s flight VC 10 on foreign trips.

Bernard was a reporter before he joined the civil service. He actually liked reporters and paid attention to their craft. In those days we used to crowd into his Downing Street office for the morning briefing. I shouted a question from the back of the pack. Bernard was discombobulated because he couldn’t see me. “I thought your voice was coming from the television”, he explained.

Bernard did his best to look after Mrs Thatcher, who plunged into unplanned walkabouts wherever she was. Even in Kano Northern Nigeria, where the Emir had invited the Prime Minister to attend a horse Durbar. The local armed security detail only recognised Thatcher. A melee ensued when they blocked the passage of her accompanying entourage. Chris Moncrief, the indefatigable correspondent from the Press Association wire service spotted a story, so did Bernard. Obligingly he provided colour. “He stuck his gun in me guts”, he said of one guard. There were links trucks lined up at Heathrow for broadcasters to go live on the Battle of Kano, when the plane touched down at the VIP suite a few hours later.

Betty saw her job as defending the Commons and keeping the government up to the mark. She didn’t have much truck with reporters. Most of our exchanges were of the “That’s enough from you, young man” variety. I last saw her in a swanky West End restaurant, resplendent in a Commons green silk blouse. A galleon in full sail, she effortlessly commanded the attention of the whole room and was as gracious as ever, even to me.

Honesty, straight-forwardness, toughness, the value of institutions. I learnt a lot from these two Yorkshire tykes of my parents’ generation and I won’t forget them.   

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