The Top 10: Politicians Getting Off Planes
After Priti Patel’s closely monitored return to the UK from Nairobi, here are some other disembarkations by the great and good
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Your support makes all the difference.Special tribute to the day the Westminster press pack and 22,000 other people spent a whole day on flightradar24.com tracking Priti Patel’s return to the UK from Nairobi so that she could be told what a fine minister she had been and how right she had been to decide to resign. Thanks to David Mills for the suggestion.
1. Teddy Roosevelt, 1910. Having stood down as President the previous year, Roosevelt was campaigning for the Republican Party in the 1910 elections when he was persuaded to take a flight at a meet in St Louis arranged by the Wright Brothers. The newsreel footage is remarkable. Nominated by Chris Jones.
2. Ramsay MacDonald was the first British prime minister to fly, in an RAF biplane, 1929. The Pathé newsreel is here. Thanks to Matthew Bailey.
3. Neville Chamberlain’s speech in front of the Lockheed 14 in which he had returned to the UK from Munich, Heston Aerodrome, 1938 (he used the phrase “peace for our time” in another address outside 10 Downing Street later that day). Nominated by Robert Wright, Robert Hutton and Robin Kellett.
4. Franklin Roosevelt, the first serving US president to fly, crossed the Atlantic to see Winston Churchill in 1943. Thanks to Mr Memory.
5. Richard Nixon to China, 1972. Shook hands with Chinese premier Zhou Enlai when he got off the plane. From Sean O’Grady, Spinning Hugo and Rhodri Jones. The photo of Nixon turning to wave as he boarded the helicopter on the lawn to leave the White House in 1974 ought to be in a Top 10 embarkation pictures.
6. Gerald Ford falling down the steps of Air Force One in Austria, 1975. Nominated by Lawrence Freedman and David Mills.
7. Ayatollah Khomeini getting off the plane from Paris in 1979 after 14 years in exile, heralding the Iranian revolution. Welcomed at the airport by millions. Thanks to Rohullah Yakobi, David Mills and Arieh Kovler.
8. George W Bush was the first serving president to arrive in an arrested landing in a fixed-wing aircraft on an aircraft carrier, the USS Abraham Lincoln, off the coast of California, to announce the end of major combat operations in Iraq in front of a banner saying Mission Accomplished, May 2003. Nominated by Geoffrey Mamdani.
9. Gordon Brown got off the plane at Tel Aviv in 2005 and straight back on to return to London to vote for 90 days detention (which the Government lost). Damian McBride, his spin doctor, admitted in his memoir he had been told about the vote before Brown set off, but didn’t want to disappoint the travelling pack of journalists. So Brown spoke to reporters on the plane and then pretended he had just received the instruction to return when he arrived. Thanks to Nick Robinson.
10. King Salman and the Malfunctioning Golden Escalator, 2017. The Saudi king, 81, had to be helped down most of the steps after it stopped when he visited Moscow last month. Nominated by Charlie Cooper.
Honourable mentions must include John McCain, who ejected from his Skyhawk, “landing in a lake with both arms broken, then choosing to remain in captivity and face torture rather than leave his comrades behind in Vietnam”, 1967 (nominated by John O’Shea); James Callaghan’s news conference at Heathrow airport, although we never saw the plane, when he told reporters not to take the view there is “mounting chaos” (reported as “Crisis, what crisis?”), 1979; Boris Yeltsin, Russian President, who refused to get off a plane in Dublin in 1994 (Rob Ford, Allan Holloway); Hillary Clinton, US Secretary of State, who claimed to have arrived in Bosnia “under sniper fire” in 1996 (Charlie Whelton); Nigel Farage’s plane crash in 2010 (Binyizdabbalah); Keith Vaz with a Costa coffee greeting Victor Spirescu, a single Romanian new arrival when restrictions were lifted, at Luton airport on 1 January 2014 (Agnes Frimston).
There were so many good entries for this one – more here.
As one correspondent wrote: “Wasn’t it a drive to an airport that eventually brought Chris Huhne down? One lesson is coming through strongly here – for politicians, airports mean trouble, they should steer well clear of them.”
Next week: People Whose Names Could Be Journeys, such as Lewis Hamilton
Coming soon: Unexpected Words in Pop Songs, starting with “encumber” (“He would not encumber me”) in “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother”
Your suggestions please, and ideas for future Top 10s, to me on Twitter, or by email to top10@independent.co.uk
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