My Greatest Mistake: Robin Oakley, European Political Correspondent, CNN
'If you pressed the wrong button with Thatcher, she could go off on an unstoppable diatribe'
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Your support makes all the difference.The first big mistake I made was at the Kuala Lumpur Commonwealth conference. Everybody else in the Commonwealth wanted sanctions applied against South Africa, and Thatcher was holding out. The mistake I made was to stand up at a press conference and say, "Well, Prime Minister, here we have a situation with everybody else wanting to do this, and you are the one person standing out against it. Don't you ever wake up in the middle of the night, thinking, 'I could just conceivably be wrong'?" And she fixed me with one of those glares that could kill at 30 paces and said, "If it's 48 against one, then I'm just sorry for the 48." And I melted back into my seat.
Another occasion that might have become a disaster was at the time of the 1987 election, again involving Thatcher. I was political editor of The Times, and we were looking for an interview with each party leader. I rang up Conservative Central Office, as it was into the last week of the campaign. They were terribly sorry, but she had a toothache and would not be able to fit me into her schedule any more. I cashed every cheque I'd got with every senior figure in the Tory party. Eventually, Lord Young persuaded her to do it.
Unfortunately, when she got back to Downing Street that night, they passed her the front page of The Times, which had a marvellous picture of the Kinnocks looking happy as hell, and a story saying that things were going wrong with the Conservatives. She hit the roof and told us that there was no way she was going to do the interview. So I had to go through the whole process again until she relented and agreed to do an interview two days before the election.
The problem with interviewing Thatcher was that if you pressed the wrong button, she could go off on an unstoppable diatribe. Sure enough, that's what she did with the first question I asked. I said, "Look, Prime Minister, you've given me 20 minutes. From now on I need 40-second soundbites, covering a whole range of issues; otherwise this is going to be a complete nonsense." She glared at me and put her hands on the side of her chair and started getting up. She rose right to her feet and then suddenly she grinned, sat down and said, "All right, fire away." Her replies came out just like revolver shots, and I got my half-page.
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