My incredible life at The Sun from escaping death to meeting US presidents, dodging KGB & being branded a ‘fascist’
I’VE had a fabulous ride – and the privilege of working for the world’s greatest newspaper and the joy of all those letters from our warm-hearted family of readers.
A House of Commons Lobby pass is a great prize, a front row seat in the parliamentary cockpit where Prime Ministers fight for survival against savage Opposition leaders and ruthless Cabinet assassins.
But to hold the title as political editor of The Sun, as I did for almost a quarter of a century, is to win the jackpot.
It gives access on equal terms to holders of the great offices of state, opening a rich seam of raw politics, often more than we can cope with.
At lunch, dinner or over a drink, ministers quiz us for gossip about who’s for the chop, rather than the other way round.
Beyond Downing Street itself, the Lobby is the first to learn of momentous events involving war and peace, economic crises, sackings, promotions and plots — the first draft of history.
Sometimes even we don’t realise how much we know.
At a meeting with a bank whose clients handled portfolios worth billions, I casually said Tony Blair would never join the euro as long as Gordon Brown was Chancellor.
It was blindingly obvious, but it caused an instant spike in the currency markets.
I was constantly asked to address the Oxford or Cambridge Union or lunch with EU ambassadors.
They were desperate to know what The Sun knew.
My Lobby pass carried me first class on the PM’s VIP jet to almost every country in the world, including Russia when it was still the Soviet Union.
Missile’s unwitting target
In Siberia I rubbed shoulders with KGB men in black leather jackets, ate Chicken Kiev in Kiev and travelled by train on a luggage rack from Moscow to Leningrad in winter snow.
There were trips to Mao Zedong’s Forbidden City, Vladimir Putin’s sinister Kremlin and the White House Oval Office of every American President from Jimmy Carter to George Bush Jr.
I have seen Gaza by helicopter, ridden a camel in the Saudi desert and flown along the Andes where rivers plunge as waterfalls over mile-high cliffs.
There have been brushes with danger.
I came close to being “necklaced” — roasted by a burning rubber tyre — in Soweto, missed death by inches when Margaret Thatcher’s jet clipped trees on a foggy approach to Washington and was the unwitting target of a surface-to-air missile over Africa.
In 1984 I was next door to Brighton’s Grand Hotel when an IRA bomb came close to assassinating the entire Cabinet.
A year earlier, when I joined the Lobby, Maggie Thatcher was in her Falklands pomp.
She had put paid to the infamous Winter of Discontent and miners’ leader Arthur Scargill’s shameful attempt to bring down her elected government.
To the Labour left she was the devil made mortal.
To the Russians, The Iron Lady.
To lothario French President Francois Mitterrand she had “the eyes of Monroe and the lips of Caligula”.
And to her Tory critics, led by screamingly ambitious Michael Heseltine, she was TBW, “That Bloody Woman”.
It was Margaret Thatcher who dragged Britain from intensive care as the Sick Man of Europe to one of the world’s strongest economies.
Rich nations scrambled to invest in UK assets.
In ever-turbulent France, where a Parisian woman once spat in the street on hearing my English accent, I was asked: “Can we ’ave Mrs Thatcher when you have finished with ’er?”
In 1990 I watched from the press gallery as Maggie denounced European Commission boss Jacques Delors’ plan to suck Britain into a European superstate.
“No! No! No!” she stormed.
The Sun backed her with the headline: Up Yours Delors.
Months later she was gone, knifed by her own Cabinet.
All political careers end in tears, they say.
Her departure marked the high watermark of sound government — strong defence, robust economy, low taxes — and the beginning of a long slide into EU-style bureaucracy which now threatens to engulf us again.
I was driving into Westminster when John Major called on my new-fangled carphone to thank The Sun for supporting him as Mrs T’s successor.
Preaching from his soapbox, Major crushed Welsh boyo Neil Kinnock, who believed Labour had won the 1992 election before a vote had been cast.
“Who’d have thought it?” Major told his stunned Cabinet.
Not many, was the answer.
I followed the new PM that year to the Dutch border city of Maastricht where he signed up to the grandiose EU plan for a single currency, the euro.
Boris Johnson, then a newspaper reporter, stood guffawing as Major claimed he had won Britain a special deal, “game, set and match”.
In fact he had sown the seeds for the Black Wednesday currency crisis which saw the Pound crash out of the crazy system to peg its exchange rate.
Interest rates hit 15 per cent, wrecking the Tories’ hard-won reputation for economic management and triggering the long march towards Brexit.
Major was massacred by Tony Blair’s New Labour in 1997.
It was Blair, aided and abetted by Chancellor Gordon Brown, who opened the floodgates of uncontrolled mass immigration — cheap labour.
‘Fascist’ slam
The aim, as his former adviser Andrew Neather blurted out, was to “rub the Right’s nose in diversity”.
I was branded a “fascist” by a Blairite minister after asking about the “changing face of Britain”.
Today, both Labour and the Tories are feeling the multicultural backlash.
My criticism of New Labour for parading as pale blue Tories while pushing a vast socialist agenda was unwelcome.
Peter Mandelson, a powerful Cabinet consigliere, tried to have me sacked for “playing too much golf”.
My boss, I’m pleased to say, laughed in his face.
Mandelson may have been seeking revenge after I got HIM sacked over the Hinduja passport scandal by asking too many questions in Downing Street.
As for golf, it was a useful political tool.
I organised an annual match between the Lobby and Whitehall mandarins.
I was playing with a Cabinet secretary when he was summoned to deal with the strange death of Dr David Kelly, the scientist who leaked information about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
There were none.
Yet Downing Street’s infamous “Dodgy Dossier”, edited by spin doctor Alastair Campbell, claimed dictator Saddam Hussein could deploy WMD “within 45 minutes”.
Strangely, there was no inquest into Kelly’s death.
Instead, Downing Street ordered the Hutton Inquiry into the alleged suicide.
I broke its verdict — a whitewash — exclusively before the report was published.
Perhaps as a result, Tory leader David Cameron offered me the Campbell role as his communications chief.
I might now be Sir Trev, but I turned it down.
I’m not a gambler by nature, except on Page One of The Sun in the face of furious but spurious denials.
But I am proud to say I took a crisp £50 note off snarling Alastair after Brexit.
String of Tory chaos
I won another £50 off SNP loudmouth Alex Salmond over the collapsing price of oil, the black gold which might have made Scottish independence possible.
He never paid up.
The past 14 years have been a blur of Tory chaos.
Theresa May almost lost to Jezza Corbyn.
Liz Truss was a disaster.
Boris Johnson deserves his fare share of blame for the Conservative collapse.
I liked Rishi Sunak but he was the wrong man for the job.
It’s been a glorious innings for which I have many people to thank, not least my co-star, Brighty, the brilliant cartoonist who lightens up every page.
But there is only one person who made this dream come true.
Rupert Murdoch is the greatest newspaper man of the age.
Like me, tens of thousands of news men and women owe him their well-paid jobs and fascinating careers.
“At any tick of the clock,” he once said, “someone somewhere is eating lunch at my expense.”
I am proud to say that someone was usually me.