On the morning of 28 January 1975, Margaret Thatcher gave her first broadcast interview after announcing that she would be challenging the former Prime Minister, Edward Heath, for the leadership of the Conservative Party. Waiting for her outside the House of Commons was ITN's political editor who began by asking the 'confident, but not overconfident' challenger, 'what is it you are offering the party which Mr Heath doesn't offer?'
Having stressed that 'I don't count my chickens before they're hatched', the standard-bearer of what Chris Patten later called the 'peasants' uprising' told Haviland that her campaign had 'great hopes' for the first ballot and invited comparison with the 'delightful' Indira Gandhi who, she believed, had proved that 'women have done very well in leadership'.
Urbane, supremely well-connected, and an incisive reporter, Mrs Thatcher's interlocutor, Julian Haviland, who died last Friday at the age of 93, was a fixture of British political life for over half-a-century. The bulk of Haviland's career as a broadcast journalist coincided with the golden age of ITN which had, as the Annan Committee observed in its report on the 'Future of Broadcasting' in February 1977, finally got 'the edge over BBC news'.
Before being employed by the network in 1961, Haviland joined the
Surrey Advertiser after graduating from Magdalene College, Cambridge (having studied English and classics) where he had first demonstrated the 'extraordinary recall' that would stand him in such good stead throughout his career. After a stint in South Africa, reporting for the
Johannesburg Star, Haviland worked for
The Daily Telegraph and the
Evening Standard.
After two years on Fleet Street, Haviland joined ITN in 1961, working as a reporter for four years, before joining its growing team of political correspondents. Born half-a-decade too late to serve in World War Two, Haviland was as unflappable as those who had been under shot and shell, possessing 'an Etonian confidence, but never a swagger'. He emanated, as one of his ITV colleagues, put it, a 'relaxed gravitas'. Possessing a clipped, 'cut-glass' accent – asking concise questions, slowly and precisely – Haviland was, as his obituary in
The Times notes, a 'persistent interrogator... trusted by politicians of all parties because of his transparent impartiality'.
In both high-profile, set-piece interviews – such as his frequent encounters with the beleaguered Prime Minister, Edward Heath, in the winter of 1973 through 1974 – as well as field reports from the civil war in Nigeria in 1969, Haviland was consummate in the art of using courtesy as a weapon. As one ITN reporter who was shown the ropes by Haviland told
The Times, the high regard that Haviland was held in at Westminster was demonstrated by the fact that Cabinet ministers often approached him, 'rather than the other way round, to discuss the issues of the day'.
After moving to
The Times in June 1981 after the paper's new proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, persuaded
The Sunday Times' crusading editor, Harold Evans, to move to its sister paper, Haviland exploited his considerable address book to report the 'inside story' of Margaret Thatcher's turbulent premiership. In a remarkable first year in his new job, Haviland reported on the tumult within the Conservative Party – with his former sparring partner, Edward Heath, threatening to join the Social Democratic and Liberal Alliance after Shirley Williams's victory in the Crosby by-election – the government's response to the Toxteth and Brixton riots, as well as a Prime Minister 'full of ringing conviction and empty of new ideas'.
Throughout 1981, Haviland also reported on the fall-out from the Gang of Four's 'Limehouse Declaration' including what the Social Democrats described as the Labour Party's 'slide to the left' after representatives of the Soviet Communist Party were invited to its annual conference, as well as Michael Foot's efforts to appease Tony (then-still Wedgwood) Benn. In one of his most elegant pieces, published just a fortnight after he started at
The Times, Haviland came to Foot's defence, arguing that 'only a heartless observer or political foe would be without a twinge of sympathy' for Foot whose 'dismal inheritance… has been crumbling even as he tries to gather it'.
Forty years later, 'Jules' made his final contribution to
The Times last March when he lamented the 'possible imminent death' of the Conservative Party and castigated Boris Johnson for his 'swift and determined assault on the Constitution and on one-nation Toryism'. Having witnessed its fair share of internecine warfare, Haviland's pen had one final flourish, urging Conservative MPs to 'return from the recess with pruning knives or scalpels ready for resolute use' as soon as the Metropolitan Police ruled on Johnson's behaviour during the Covid pandemic.
After three wretched Prime Ministers in quick succession, let's hope that, as Haviland did, that the 'organism in their care will respond to severe pruning' and re-establish itself as a party of the centre-right.
Tom Chidwick is a contemporary historian, who splits his time between London and Edinburgh
