Michael Cockerell – Favourite Things

Each week Reaction Weekend brings you Favourite Things – interviews with interesting people about the skills, hobbies, pleasures and past times that make them who they are.

Michael Cockerell is a journalist, broadcaster and the BBC’s most established political documentary maker. His political programmes, across television and radio, have won several awards including an Emmy. Cockerell specialises in witty and eye-opening profiles of PMs and other colourful top politicos from Margaret Thatcher, Enoch Powell, Alan Clark and Barbara Castle to Tony Blair, David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson. “You are no-one in British politics until  you’ve been Cockerelled”, The Sunday Telegraph once said. He is currently working on a memoir, due out this autumn.

These are a few of his favourite things…

Parties

“I have measured out my life in coffee spoons,” TS Eliot wrote. My version would be: I have measured out my life in cocktail sticks. Pre-pandemic, parties gave shape to my year. At The Spectator summer party some time ago, I remember talking to the then Liberal leader David Steel  as we were all literally squashed together, cheek by (Tessa) Jowell. Steel said to me, “If they’re going to invite so many people, why don’t they hire Hyde f***ing Park?” Rachel Johnson was mortified by having to cancel her book launch party last April because of the first lockdown. “I love my book launches,” she said. “It’s the only time I get to make a speech.” Her gregarious dad Stanley outdid her when he launched one of his many memoirs at Waterstones in Kensington. He made three speeches, one on each floor – in response, he told me, to popular demand.

Elgydium

This is a pleasure at least twice a day, every day. Elgydium. It’s not a district in Rome. It’s a French toothpaste to which I am addicted. It has recently become near impossible to source in England. I have taken to buying it in cardboard boxes of thirty, direct from France. Elgydium tastes much nicer than any other toothpaste I have ever used. It is pure white, slightly sweet and has the best peppermint taste ever – unlike the metallic or sometimes slightly granular and antiseptic other brands. It comes in various types – gel, whitening, and lemon fresh. I like the standard issue anti-plaque best, though I also like the one with the caption “Pour dents sensibles” – meaning for sensitive teeth. But I think Elgydium is really for sensible teeth – because I have never found a paste that’s more refreshing for my gnashers.

Shirts

I love shirts. Every kind. There are few things more enjoyable than putting on a freshly laundered favourite shirt. The best casual shirts I get come from Uniqlo: dark blue linen best buy. Many of my other shirts come from the Turnbull and Asser Edwardian style emporium in Jermyn Street. They made Winston Churchill’s wartime boiler suits as well as shirts for James Bond, from Sean Connery to Daniel Craig. When I bought my first shirt there half a century ago, it cost five guineas. I remember around that time reading an article by the actress Jill Bennett, who was the fourth wife of the volcanic playwright, John Osborne, until he walked out on her. She was heartbroken and said she went to Turnbull and Asser and bought a shirt that would fit him in what she called “a very fetching colour of blue”. She sent it to Osborne with a note – “I’d like the contents of this shirt back sometime”. She obviously thought that the way to a man’s heart is through his shirt; but sadly, she never got either of them back. It would have worked on me.

Political cartoons

I’ve been collecting originals of political cartoons all my life. Though they are essentially ephemeral, they often capture a truth which is timeless. I have a cartoon of Mrs Thatcher after one of my TV documentaries caused a bit of a bust up with her government. It shows her as an onscreen TV newsreader saying: “There has been a shake-up at the BBC”.  Modern cartoonists follow in the scabrous tradition of the eighteenth-century Hogarth and Gillray, who delighted in presenting our leaders as money-grabbing charlatans in various states of undress. These days The Guardian’s Steve Bell enjoyed depicting David Cameron wearing a huge pink condom pulled over his face. Bell told me Cameron once came up to him and asked: “Hi, what’s this condom thing about?”. “I answered as truthfully as I could,” said Bell. “It’s to do with your extreme youth and the smoothness of your complexion”. I didn’t actually say: “It’s because you’re a dick.””

My favourite recent Peter Brookes cartoon shows Boris Johnson with eight buggies each containing a baby Boris all with the same mop of blond hair over their eyes. Above them is a newspaper Covid headline saying, “PM tackles the R problem”. And the bubble from Johnson’s mouth reads, “Honest. You can trust me to keep the reproduction rate down.”

Cricket

I have loved cricket – playing it and watching it – since I first discovered the game at the age of six. George Bernard Shaw once said: “The English, not being a spiritual race, invented cricket to give them some idea of eternity.” It can of course look boring as if nothing is happening, but it is a game of subtlety and nuance – a mixture of athleticism, skill and guile. It is one of the few games where the question who is winning can lead to a thirty-minute debate. The endgame of a very close match can be as exciting as the climax in any other sporting event too. Witness the white-knuckle finish of the World Cup final a couple of years ago, which England controversially won off the last ball – after extra time. It was heart-stopping. As was the famous England-Australia game at the Oval that created the Ashes in 1882 – and was so tense that one spectator reportedly chewed through the handle of his umbrella. In games like that the umpire becomes a key figure. At a far less elevated level, when I played in Corfu and appealed for LBW – the exquisitely polite umpire responded: “Not out, but thanks for asking.” When I played in a game at the Oval for The Spectator against Private Eye, the umpire was the fabulously bibulous journalist Jeffrey Bernard (as in “Jeffrey Bernard is unwell”). Again, I appealed for LBW and Bernard answered: “I don’t know. I can’t see that far.”