An Unexpected MP (19 page)

‘Bloody subs.’

‘Welcome to journalism, son.’

Anyhow, Rebekah and Les Hinton, News International’s chief executive, were very pleased with the columns. They led me into the main conference hotel bar, which was awash with journalists. ‘Have you guys been reading Jerry’s column?’ boomed Les. ‘It’s brilliant.’ That was the kiss of death. I never wrote for News International again.

All sorts of other offers came in. I was a regular contributor on Sky and the BBC, mostly reviewing the papers. And then all sorts of weird stuff. I used to appear on some Granada TV teen show with Sacha Baron Cohen and eventually did a pilot with him which included his Ali G character. Except he was called Wanker Boy instead and was white. He did a delightful
send-up interview with Dr Madsen Pirie, who should be very thankful that it was never aired. I appeared in a game where I had to test my wits against a hamster in a wheel. It goes without saying that I lost. The only surviving part of the programme was Sacha’s new creation. The rest is history.

But if you think that politics is a swamp of backstabbing chancers, it is infinitely worse in the media. You are always the last to know if you are about to be sacked, and if you are in the running for a presenter job, it will be months before anyone bothers to tell you that you haven’t got it.

One day I was wandering back to the
Punch
office when my mate Simon Bates screeched his Beemer to a halt and wound down his window. ‘Luv, we must meet, may be a programme in it for you. Terrible station, the manager’s a complete tosser, but you’d be great presenting the breakfast show. I’ll arrange a meeting with the tosser.’ And, true to his word, he did.

The radio station was Liberty Radio, owned by Mo and two floors above the
Punch
office. To be fair, although hardly anyone listened to it, the product was rather good. Richard Arnold, now of
Daybreak
television stardom, and former
children’s
TV presenter Toby Anstis presented excellent shows, while Bates, that great old pro, did drive time. His idea was to crowbar me into presenting the breakfast show. But Bates was right about the manager, a grade-A tosser who wore
polyester
suits and was a complete caricature of the Smashie and Nicey Harry Enfield creations, a combined confection of Fluff Freeman and Tony Blackburn. He tried me out presenting a night-time show consisting of off-the-wall interviews and music of the 1980s and ’90s. He would let me know if I got the breakfast gig.

An old friend from the
Whale Show
, Victoria, was my
brilliant
producer. Once, with about thirty seconds’ notice, her voice in my ear told me that there was a guy live from Miami whom I was to interview about tantric sex. To be honest, I wasn’t quite sure what it was … only that I wasn’t getting any. So off we went.

‘So tell me, Chip, how do you achieve this great sexual marathon?’

‘Well, Jerry, first you have a well-greased hand and carefully thrust it into a well-greased…’

Well, that’s as far as I let it go as I turned up the fader for Sister Sledge’s ‘We Are Family’ to drown out what I knew Mo would regard as a rant from a ‘filthy pervert’.

I did quite a few of these programmes and Victoria was very pleased. She would recommend me for the breakfast job. But did I hear a word from Smashie and Nicey? Not a word, and not for the want of me trying. The ghastly little man gave me the runaround. Eventually, one afternoon I bumped into him on the stairs.

‘Well, you know how to treat the boys in the big school, don’t you?’

‘What on earth are you talking about? We haven’t spoken in weeks.’

‘Don’t you remember lurching into me yesterday, calling me a tosser and saying that you were going to rip out my eyeballs and piss in the sockets?’

‘Actually, no. But I am happy to repeat it.’

In fact, I had no recollection of speaking to him at all. Then I had a vague flicker of memory. I had been lunching with Steen the day before and we had been rather thirsty. I must
have been forcibly expressing my views about Mr Polyester and Steen must have gurgled, ‘Well, go and tell him then.’

I never got the job. A few weeks later Mo sold Liberty to an evangelical Christian broadcaster. I don’t think I would have fitted in very well. Bates went off to Classic FM.

But it stood me in good stead a few years later when I did a month’s stint on a mid-morning programme at BBC Essex, playing music and doing phone-ins. I loved it. And my great producer Stuart schooled me in the art of driving a desk, which means twiddling all the knobs and faders. I can only recall one little mishap. To set the scene, let me explain how a desk operates. In the middle is a red fader for your voice. On the left are faders for news, weather and callers, with a screen saying who they are and what they are going to bang on about. In the middle is a screen setting out beds (background music to talk over), jingles and tracks to be played. To activate these you move a fader on the right, click the screen and press ‘GO’ on a machine called ‘Radioman’.

One day we had a caller getting very uptight about
paedophiles
. The time came to wrap him up and play a track. Sadly, I was on autopilot.

‘Well, thanks for your views, John,’ I said as I cut him off. ‘And enough of paedophiles. Let’s play some Michael Jackson.’

Sadly, listeners just heard the beginnings of my hoots of laughter before ‘Thriller’ burst onto the Essex airwaves.

I learned to my advantage that it is not just MPs who go on fact-finding missions; journalists do too. So I was delighted to be invited on a trip to northern Cyprus to get the lay of the land and interview the President, Rauf Denktaş. It was
all arranged by my mate Ian Hernon, who, apart from being a cracking journalist, is a very fine historical author. So, him, me, Eben Black, political editor of the
News of the World
, and Peter Willoughby, doyen of the Press Association, were feted by the Turkish Republic of Cyprus.

It really was an eye-opener. Of course, we were shown the usual sites of atrocities committed by the Greeks. Beautifully preserved spattered brains lovingly presented behind Perspex was a highlight. But I suspect that if we had been entertained by the Greeks we would have been shown exactly the same sort of thing.

I have always been a Turkophile and found Denktaş a personable and attractive fellow. Although it was a little disconcerting to see so many bits of blue circled pottery, to ward off the evil eye, in one room.

We only had one little mishap. While waiting in the VIP lounge in the early hours of the morning we thought that it would be a good idea to have a few swifties to ease the pain of the flight back home. This didn’t agree with Willoughby, who made a mad dash to the bathroom. Ten minutes passed. Twenty and then thirty, without any sign of the old boy. Somehow he had locked himself in a cubicle and had been wailing for help. Our flight was being called by now and there was a very real
possibility
that we would miss it. So drastic measures had to be taken. We broke down the door and scuttled guiltily off to the plane.

However, I did learn a serious lesson on that trip. Although most journos and editors (the ones who haven’t been dried out) drink like fishes, it cannot be admitted publicly, for reasons well beyond the comprehension of my little brain. So in all innocence I wrote a light-hearted piece mentioning
that ‘Eben Black was permanently plugged into a life-support machine known as Stella Artois’. He went ballistic, fearing that his editor would give him his marching orders. In
retaliation
he printed a less-than-flattering photo of me astride a very phallic cannon. I learned my lesson.

Then I organised a trip to Gibraltar. The then First Minister, Peter Caruana, was a friend, as was the Governor, Sir Richard Luce, a former Minister for the Arts. Ian Hernon, the splendid Jon Craig, then of the
Sunday Express
and now chief political correspondent for Sky News, and I set off for a great jolly on the rock.

Craig is the master of teasing out a story where there is none. He casually mentioned to a senior official that Prince Andrew would make rather a fine Governor when Richard’s tour of duty was over. This translated into the headline ‘Andrew tipped to be next Governor of Gibraltar shock’.

Then he learned that the fierce little Barbary apes which were a menace to tourists were breeding too fast. He managed to get a two-page spread plus pictures out of that one on the lines that they were going to be issued with contraceptives. The man is a genius.

‘
I
f we catch you at it you're in it' was the slogan we adopted at
Punch
. And one of the first was none other than Cabinet minister Peter Mandelson, when we uncovered his controversial mortgage ‘loan'. He resigned. Through the sheer creative ingenuity of James Steen, Richard Brass and Dominic Midgley,
Punch
had become enormously popular with opinion-formers, though sales were not as good as any of us really wanted. The trouble is that under previous and short-lived editors like Peter McKay (now a columnist at the
Daily Mail
), the legendary Stewart Steven (former editor of the
Mail on Sunday
and the
Standard
) and Paul Spike (God knows where he is now, probably the seventh circle of hell) a gradual mountain of debt had built up. One reason: millions of pounds had been spent on a TV advertising campaign for the relaunch.

Under Steen's editorship, the advertising was restricted to billboard posters in Underground stations. These would never be seen by Steen because his view was that travel on the Tube was some sort of perverted torture. Our advertisers gave a very excitable pitch once they'd created the posters.

‘James, let me take you round the Underground one morning
next week. We'll look at the new posters in the stations, and then we can do a lovely lunch.'

Steen drew on a fag while he considered the idea for about two seconds. ‘Let's just do the lovely lunch,' he said.

But the people who mattered, editors, political editors and senior politicians, loved the magazine, even if the public were lukewarm. They just didn't get the fact that
Punch
had become fun, innovative, original and totally outrageous. We were stuffed by our old brand image, mild middle-class humour which would make the vicar and his wife contentedly smile over pre-bedtime cocoa, with a few safe cartoons thrown in. Worse, it was perceived as dentist waiting room fodder. This wasn't helped by the launch editors, who thought they were carrying on some quaint British tradition like incest or Morris dancing.

Spike was certainly anti-Establishment and brought in exciting new columnists, but the new
Punch
under Steen was cutting edge and sometimes downright dangerous. Even better, we were totally unpredictable. This seriously angered old-school humorists like former
Punch
editor Alan Coren, to whom humour post-1965 was no laughing matter. In truth, the circulation of
Punch
had been on a gradual slide decades before the title was acquired by Al Fayed.

Within about an hour of becoming editor, Steen tracked down the very first issue of
Punch
magazine. He wanted a proper look at the roots of this grand old-timer of the
magazine
world. Sitting quietly in his office, he chained his way through a pack of Benson & Hedges while reading the issue that was published on 17 July 1841. On page three there was a leader item entitled ‘The Moral of
Punch
', which included the
founders' objective: ‘
Punch
hangs the devil.' Steen was
captivated
by this mission. And so we set a course, ‘
Punch
hangs the devil…' Or, as a young trainee in the advertising department put it, ‘
Punch
gets the baddies.'

Steen instilled in us a totally different mindset. I mentioned a few chapters back the time when John Prescott thumped me, a story that I had dined out on for years, thinking that it was rather funny. I did a few hundred words on it in the magazine. Prezza, now Deputy Prime Minister, went ballistic and instructed solicitors on an action for defamation.

This was, incidentally, a couple of years before Prescott delivered a left jab to a man who'd thrown an egg at him.

As always in these matters, David Price, by far the best in the business, was instructed as our solicitor advocate. He arrived to discuss the matter, accompanied by his colleagues Paul Fox and Rose Alexander. This formidable legal team was in conference with Steen and, after an agonising wait outside the editor's door, I was called in. They were ashen-faced. James said, ‘Jerry, can you take David and the team through it, please? Tell them what happened on that day in the House of Commons.'

It was as if I had been waiting stage left, and now I was ready to deliver my lines. I went into full theatrical mode, rolling on the floor, giving agonising groans and not a bad Prescott impersonation of ‘Ya little Tory cunt!' David's eyes sparkled. Steen told me many years later that while I was waiting outside, Price had given him a stern warning: ‘Do you realise,' Price had said, ‘we're up against the Deputy Prime Minister? This is serious.' Price, like me, had the capacity for drama. However, when Price saw what I was saying was true,
his little eyes sparkled. Perhaps he could also see how it would look before a larger audience upon the right platform; namely in the Royal Courts of Justice, in front of a jury. This could be an enormous, glittery, high-profile case for him.

Prezza's grand solicitors assumed that we ghastly little Al Fayed oiks, spots on the bottom of Fleet Street, would be quivering in our shoes and would roll over. They did not bet on the total unpredictability of Steen. In the next issue, on the front page was a photo of Prezza in a judge's wig. A few pages in, readers were treated to a photocopy-style image of the pompous letter before action from his solicitors (‘not for publication', it screamed). Turn the page and there, a
Sunday Times
-style graphic of what actually happened: the two protagonists illustrated before, during and after the punch. Fleet Street loved it. Prezza sensibly caved in. And the Thumper had been thumped. But it was all good clean fun. Well, ish.

I am often asked what Al Fayed was really like. The answer is simple: fun. There are so many myths surrounding him that it is difficult to know where to start. Myth One was that he bought
Punch
to counter
Private Eye'
s attacks on him. Myth Two was that as proprietor he exercised editorial control. Myth Three was that it was just a vehicle to trash his enemies and laud his friends. Myth Four was that it was all part of a clever campaign to improve his image so that he could be given the coveted British passport.

All of these are hopelessly wrong. He never once told James, or any of us, what to write. Or rather, if he did then James
ignored
him. He didn't interfere, other than to make suggestions and take an interest in the magazine as a business entity. Yes,
he was keen for the magazine to succeed, of course. But he had a mile-wide mischievous streak, as did each member of the staff at
Punch
, and there was a mutual desire – almost a compelling need – to ridicule the Establishment. In other words, it was not that Steen needed to approve of Al Fayed's instincts; more that Al Fayed did approve of Steen's instincts.

The first he saw of what was going in the magazine was when he was handed the ‘mocked-up pages' or the ‘book' (printed-out pages of what had been despatched to the
printers
), and by that time the pages were rolling off the press. Al Fayed's problem was that, from time to time, he had to placate his friends who had been parodied or ridiculed. It was usually with a shrug and a roll of his eyes and an apologetic sigh of ‘It is James. What can I do?' And as for getting his passport, we probably made the situation even worse.
Punch
was his toy, but the toymaker, unpredictable and sometimes totally
off-the
-wall, was James Steen whom he forgave everything, just revelling in the fun of it all.

You may recall the great cash-for-questions scandal, when MPs were said to be given brown envelopes by Fayed. These envelopes were stuffed with £50 notes in return for putting down parliamentary questions. It dominated the news for months and resonated throughout the country for years. One day, Steen thought of a wheeze. He rang up a friend in the travel business (a specialist in dives in the Red Sea) and memorised one sentence phonetically. He then rushed from our offices, crossed to the other side of Brompton Road, into Harrods, and up the escalators to Al Fayed's office. As usual, sitting in the chairman's chair was not Mo but the enormous white polar bear that always occupied his place. But he was
there, as always. So Steen rattled out his words of Arabic, which stunned Mo, who was sitting at a meeting with the good and the great. They were rather perplexed. Who is this man and what has he just said to Al Fayed in his native tongue to make him roar with laughter? For their benefit he
translated
. ‘Where is my brown paper envelope?' Nobody but Steen could get away with that.

One great scoop was ‘Life with Rupert Murdoch', by Philip Townsend, who had been Murdoch's butler at his apartment overlooking St James's Park in London. It was a
hilarious
three-parter (run over three issues) and was so comical in content – heaps of behind-the-front-door stories about the ‘media mogul' – that some readers even mistook it for a spoof. When the first instalment was heading to the printers, Steen took a copy of the butler's story to Al Fayed. He was giving the proprietor a sneak preview of what would be on the newsagents' shelves a day or two later. Al Fayed was a little anxious. He knew Murdoch and wondered how he would take it. ‘Oh, it'll be fine,' said Steen. ‘Rupert has a great sense of humour.'

On the evening of publication, at the local pub, Steen phoned the Harrods switchboard and, adopting a ridiculously strong Australian accent, he said, ‘Can you put me through to Mohamed Al Fayed, please?'

‘Who's calling?'

‘Rupert Murdoch.'

Eventually, the call was transferred through the ranks of Al Fayed's regiment before reaching his personal assistant. The conversation went like this:

‘Hello, Mr Murdoch?' she said.

‘Can I speak to Mohamed?' said Steen-Murdoch, sounding a bit grumpy.

‘Can you hang on a moment, please?'

Steen was put on hold. Followed by:

‘I'm terribly sorry, Mr Murdoch, but Mr Al Fayed has gone travelling.'

It was a wheeze, but when Mohamed found out that he had been the victim of a practical joke he phoned Steen the following day and tried to play the same trick. Alas, it wasn't as successful because Mo used his personal assistant to make the call. She said, ‘Hi James, I'm putting you through to the boss but you're not supposed to know it's him.'

Then Mo came on the line, with an Australian
impersonation
that was even worse than Steen's. He said, ‘Hello, James Steen. This is Rupert Murdoch…' Then he burst into laughter.

This story illustrates the workings of
Punch
– a lot of
miscreants
causing a lot of mischief, and all at one man's expense.

There was an interesting spat with Ian Hislop, the editor of
Private Eye.
One day he rang up James about some story we had written. They had rather a serious conversation in which Hislop let slip that he didn't like animals and couldn't bear dogs. In the next issue there was a calendar involving mocked-up photos of Hislop posing with a different dog for every month of the year. It goes without saying that the taped conversation was available for all to hear on an 0800 number, these being the days before Twitter and YouTube. I don't think Ian found it very funny.

The atmosphere in the office was always quirky, creative and fun. We were like a bunch of kids thinking up new wheezes. It must have been what
Private Eye
was like when it started.

The first thing that anyone who came in noticed was an amazing work of modern art by Richard Brass's desk (Brasso was later to become a superb editor). Everyone admired the vivid colouring and avant-garde style. Nobody had the heart to tell them that this was the office betting plan. In those days there was a lot of betting in the office on gee-gees, football, investments and just about anything else, and this was his totally incomprehensible grid. It was there to say how much was being won and lost, though it was mostly a mass of red lines. He should have put it in for the Turner Prize.

The office was also a hub for some fascinating people.
Bank-robber
-turned-journalist John McVicar was a columnist, and always up for a laugh and a good lunch. Philip Townsend, aforementioned former butler to Rupert Murdoch and on the road as a photographer with the Rolling Stones, would also appear from time to time with a story. And don't let's forget George Best, who wrote for us on football. Cartoons still featured within the magazine, and Steve Way was the cartoons editor.

There was also Debbie Barham, the highly gifted gag-writer who died a few years later, her life cut short by anorexia. You couldn't call her a gag-writer to her face for fear of her
delivering
, at rapid speed, a dozen obscene gags about gagging. For her column, Debbie was asked to file 800 words. Instead, she filed five times the amount. One of Steen's delights was subbing the copy, laughing uncontrollably as he read while he trimmed.

There was George the genial security man, who was always on the look-out for solicitors posing as couriers – they'd be delivering writs. He'd phone up to Steen, ‘I've got a courier
down here. Says he must deliver something to you personally. Not so sure about this one…' Steen would traipse down to reception and return with another writ. Eventually, so many piled up that the magazine's front cover had a banner that read ‘Putting on the Writs!' The legal battles were frequent but someone once calculated that we won 90 per cent of cases. Most people who sued did so because they wanted to prevent Fleet Street following up the stories, sharing them with a wider audience. We're talking bruised egos.

Then there was Benji the bin man (Benjamin Pell). Benji was delightfully eccentric and his passion was hunting through other people's dustbins to see what delights he could find. One day he stumbled upon an amazing story which we ran with for weeks. Outside a well-known NatWest bank in one of the poshest parts of London, bin bag after bin bag was filled with un-shredded bank statements and personal details. The headline was ‘How Your Secrets are Left on the Streets'. It took months before they appreciated that this was not just plain wrong but was a serious breach of their duty of care to their customers, who were now open to identity fraud. We even published a helpline so that customers could come and collect their discarded details.