MICHAEL COCKERELL's memoir is brimming with priceless indiscretions 

MICHAEL COCKERELL's memoir is brimming with priceless indiscretions 
MICHAEL COCKERELL's memoir is brimming with priceless indiscretions 

On a cold, bright morning in the spring of 2013, I filmed Boris Johnson playing tennis doubles, partnering his sister Rachel against his brothers Leo and Jo.

He was wearing red shoes, black socks, below-the-knee cargo shorts and a beanie hat bearing a Union Jack. He is a take-no-prisoners player who leaps in the air to smite the ball, grunting like a gorilla.

He was pretty good – especially as he was playing with a warped wooden racquet that must have been old when Fred Perry was young. It had the advantage, though, that it despatched the ball at wildly unpredictable angles – rather like Johnson himself.

I remember talking to Brown and seeing that his fingernails had been gnawed down to the quick. I felt that he was being eaten up from the inside by his years of bileful resentment against Tony Blair, and he was eating himself up from the outside

I remember talking to Brown and seeing that his fingernails had been gnawed down to the quick. I felt that he was being eaten up from the inside by his years of bileful resentment against Tony Blair, and he was eating himself up from the outside

When Jo Johnson, then a Tory MP, had to leave early, I took his place.

Boris said to me later that he was very worried about the film I was making about him.

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I kept trying to hit the ball very hard straight at you to knock your head off when you were at the net – and you were somehow getting it back. You might cut the film to make it look as if you were better than me.’

‘Perish the thought, Boris,’ I said.

His premiership so far has been like no other I’ve filmed over the years. It has been like a Netflix series penned by a scriptwriter on speed, blending Shakespeare, Monty Python and The Sopranos.

As a TV interviewee, Johnson differs from all the other politicians I have encountered on camera.

While they are endlessly concerned to ensure they do not have a hair out of place, Johnson starts an interview by ruffling his blond mop and goes on doing so.

He is also never afraid of seemingly playing the fool, most notably during his celebrated zipwire trip to promote the London Olympics.

When we replayed the video to him, he became almost hysterical with laughter as he viewed himself dangling in mid-air.

‘That was far more painful and frightening than you might think,’ Johnson said with tears of laughter in his eyes. ‘It was jolly high up, and after you were stuck up there for a while, things started to chafe.’

‘Where was it chafing?’

Working in television for over half a century, I have been lucky enough to make films about all the past 12 Prime Ministers. Pictured, Michael Cockerell

Working in television for over half a century, I have been lucky enough to make films about all the past 12 Prime Ministers. Pictured, Michael Cockerell

‘I don’t want to go into details,’ he said.

‘But,’ I countered, ‘in your book about the London Olympics, you said: “There was chafing in the groin area.”’

‘Did I? Oh, right.’

‘That’s what’s so difficult about interviewing you, Boris,’ I said. ‘You can’t even recognise your own words.’

‘I can never remember what I’ve written – but if it’s in my book, it must be true.’

I always thought that Chafing In The Groin Area might be a good title for a Boris biography.

Johnson’s own last book was about his hero, Winston Churchill, whose contempt for what he described as ‘this thing they call Tee Vee’ was immense. Making it sound like a communicable sexual disease, Churchill once said: ‘Television is a tuppenny ha’penny Punch and Judy show.’

His Labour rival, Clement Attlee, agreed, believing that it would have been better if TV had never been invented. It was, he said, nothing more than an idiot’s lantern that would turn politicians into entertainers.

Surprisingly, such views were shared at the time by the BBC.

How things have changed.

Working in television for over half a century, I have been lucky enough to make films about all the past 12 Prime Ministers. I have also specialised in making candid profiles of many other politicians who never quite made it to the top of the greasy pole – including Barbara Castle, Enoch Powell, and Denis Healey, as well as the libidinous Alan Clark.

I have three criteria in choosing what some people call my ‘victims’, and I call my ‘subjects’.

They need to be or have been at the top of politics; they have to know where the bodies are buried and be prepared to talk candidly; and they have to have what Healey famously called ‘a hinterland’ – an existence beyond politics.

When I prepared a TV portrait of David Cameron, I was struck by the fact that every previous leader I had made a film about had become leader and then got themselves a spin doctor. Cameron was the ultimate identity bender: the spin doctor who became leader.

When he was still Leader of the Opposition, I asked him my favourite question that I put to seekers of the top job: do you have any doubts about your ability to fulfil the role of Prime Minister?

‘Look,’ he replied, ‘if I had major doubts, I wouldn’t have put myself forward to lead my party in the first place. You have to be absolutely ready to take the difficult and big decisions you would have to take as Prime Minister, including sending troops to war. And I decided I was ready for that.’

Of all the future Prime Ministers who answered that question, Cameron was the least self-doubting.

BY COMPARISON, when Gordon Brown finally got the job he had always craved, he was temperamentally completely unsuited for it. For much of the time he seemed swamped by the range of demands on a modern Prime Minister – there being one notable exception: the great banking crash of 2008.

About a year before Brown moved into No. 10, a very senior mandarin who had worked closely with him said to me: ‘Gordon will hate being Prime Minister, it’s everything he loathes: making quick decisions, going on daytime TV, sucking up to foreigners.’

Brown became increasingly indecisive. According to one of his top officials, he virtually never completed his red box papers and big issues would pile up.

Brown’s Chief Whip, Geoff Hoon, said: ‘Gordon wants to interfere in everything.

‘He’s temperamentally incapable of delegating responsibility. So he drives himself demented.’

About a year before Brown moved into No. 10, a very senior mandarin who had worked closely with him said to me: ¿Gordon will hate being Prime Minister, it¿s everything he loathes: making quick decisions, going on daytime TV, sucking up to foreigners¿

About a year before Brown moved into No. 10, a very senior mandarin who had worked closely with him said to me: ‘Gordon will hate being Prime Minister, it’s everything he loathes: making quick decisions, going on daytime TV, sucking up to foreigners’

I had been seeking to make a genuine access film about Blair from almost the moment he was elected Labour leader. It took six years for him and his chief spin doctor Alastair Campbell to agree

I had been seeking to make a genuine access film about Blair from almost the moment he was elected Labour leader. It took six years for him and his chief spin doctor Alastair Campbell to agree

I remember talking to Brown and seeing that his fingernails had been gnawed down to the quick.

I felt that he was being eaten up from the inside by his years of bileful resentment against Tony Blair, and he was eating himself up from the outside.

It was painful to watch.

I had been seeking to make a genuine access film about Blair from almost the moment he was elected Labour leader. It took six years for him and his chief spin doctor Alastair Campbell to agree.

We were given unprecedented access to both men and the No 10 media operation for three months. They made no prior conditions and had no editorial rights over the finished film.

As filming went on, Campbell became increasingly concerned about the decision to give us access.

‘I had the nagging feeling that letting Cockerell in was a mistake,’ wrote Campbell one week in his diary. He followed it up by saying: ‘TB [Tony Blair] is very sensitive to the possible thesis that he could not do anything without being directed – that he couldn’t cope without me.’

Probably the best spontaneous moment came when we filmed the shirt-sleeved Prime Minister coming into the smartly suited Campbell’s office in No 10, looking rather like a nervous schoolboy entering the headmaster’s study.

As Campbell put it in his diary: ‘I was behind my desk with TB looking on a bit anxiously. It looked like I was the boss and he was explaining himself, which got me worried.’

The image of Campbell as the dominant partner in the relationship with Blair was one that the impressionist Rory Bremner had already seized on. By chance, I was playing in a charity cricket match with Bremner on the day after the documentary was broadcast and he told me: ‘I’ve been studying your programme frame by frame.’

His TV sketches impersonating Blair and Campbell became deadly accurate in terms of the way they spoke and their body language.

But having filmed over three months in No 10, I got the sense that the two men each increasingly felt about the other: ‘I can’t live without him, but I can’t live with him.’

According to The Times, when Margaret Thatcher fought the 1979 General Election campaign, she had in her earlier days come across on TV ‘with all the charisma of a privet hedge’.

At first as the new Tory leader, she reacted to the sight of a TV crew almost in the manner of a superstitious tribesman

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