Someone asked me the other day to name the proudest achievements of my 50-year career in journalism.
I found it a hard one to answer, since I have never covered a war, exposed a great scandal or had an important scoop. Indeed, I’ve spent most of my working life writing about the humdrum trials and tribulations of ordinary family life and the comedy of the human condition.
But two minor triumphs did come to my mind, and since this is to be my final weekly offering before I retire on my 72nd birthday tomorrow, I hope that readers will try to forgive me for boasting if I recount them here.
One was a glorious moment in 2002, when I worked for the Daily Telegraph. I had written a rude piece about curling, which struck me as a ridiculous sport (although now that I’m older and wiser, I see that it’s not much sillier than most others).
To the fury of many Scottish readers, I described it as a national humiliation that Great Britain had nothing more to celebrate at the Winter Olympics that year than a single gold, awarded to what looked to me like a team of demented housewives, frantically sweeping a sheet of ice in front of a sliding lump of stone.
Elation
I wrote that if curling qualified as an Olympic sport, then why not scrunching up pieces of paper and throwing them into the bin – a skill at which I myself happened to excel?
Rashly, I went on to say that I prided myself on being able to hurl a ball of paper into a wastepaper basket, with unerring accuracy, from a distance of 30 feet. I pressed the ‘send’ button on my computer to dispatch the column to the sub-editors, whose job was to prepare it for printing.
A few minutes later, the sub who was handling my copy came over to my desk. A terrific stickler for the truth, he told me: ‘I’m sorry, Tom, but we can’t put this column in the paper until you prove you really can land a screwed-up piece of paper in the bin from 30 feet.’
‘This is my final weekly offering before I retire on my 72nd birthday tomorrow,’ writes Tom Utley
He then picked up a bin, paced out ten yards and plonked it down on the other side of the huge open-plan office in Canary Wharf tower. I gulped. Suddenly, 30 feet seemed a considerably longer distance than I had imagined.
But I saw no way of ducking the challenge. So, as a crowd of about 20 colleagues gathered to witness my seemingly inevitable humiliation, I scrunched up a piece of paper, launched it towards the bin and awaited the jeers.
A quarter of a century on, I can still see the flight of that ball of paper as if I’m watching a slow-motion replay. When it left my hand, it flew in a beautiful arc across the room … before landing, plop, in the very centre of the bin! It didn’t even touch the sides.
The mouths of my spectators fell open – though none wider than my own – as scepticism turned to astonished applause. I hadn’t experienced quite such a moment of elation since I won the under-10 high jump at my school sports day in 1963!
As for the other triumph, I can date it precisely to December 9, 1980, because that was the day we, in the UK, learned John Lennon had been shot dead in New York.
At the time, I was a rookie lobby correspondent, working at the House of Commons for the Liverpool Echo.
Of course, Lennon’s death was a huge story all over the world, but nowhere was it more so than in his native city.
Clearly, my bosses at the Echo wouldn’t be much interested in politics that day. So having rung round the local Merseyside MPs to get their reaction (Labour’s Harold Wilson, the former Prime Minister, gave me the best interview), I felt that I’d done all I could.
Rookie
But on the off-chance that something interesting might turn up, I went along to that morning’s lobby briefing at 10 Downing Street – a daily event, at which Margaret Thatcher’s Press Secretary, the crotchety, no-nonsense Yorkshireman Bernard Ingham (later Sir Bernard), answered questions about the great political issues of the day.
One by one, my eminent colleagues from other papers asked about such matters as proposed changes in trade union law, the ongoing infighting between Wets and Dries in the Cabinet and the PM’s reaction to the latest, catastrophic opinion polls.
(A Mori poll later that month was to put Michael Foot’s Labour on 56 per cent, a commanding 24 points ahead of Mrs T. Yet her Tories were to sweep to a second resounding victory three years later – a lesson to all who attach much weight to polls in the early years of an administration).
But where was I? Ah, yes. When my turn for a question came round, I asked the only one I could think of that day: ‘Will Mrs Thatcher be sending condolences to Yoko Ono?’
At this, a burst of mocking laughter went round the room. This just wasn’t the sort of question you asked at a lobby briefing, in those days before Prime Ministers habitually issued emotional statements about every celebrity’s death, in the hope that a little of the departed’s stardust would rub off on them.
But Bernard, an old newsman himself, silenced the hilarity with a glower from beneath his phenomenally bushy eyebrows.
Grateful
He then came out with a remark that chuffed me more than I can say. It has stuck in my mind ever since.
Margaret Thatcher with her former Press Secretary, ‘the crotchety, no-nonsense Yorkshireman Bernard Ingham’, pictured in 2003
‘I don’t know what you lot are laughing at,’ he said. ‘Lennon’s death will be the only story in tomorrow’s papers. Tom is the only proper journalist in the room!’
Nobody had ever called me that before – and nobody has since.
All right, a lucky shot with a ball of paper and the rarest of compliments from a crusty Yorkshireman are not much to show for 50 years’ privileged access to a public pulpit.
But of course I have much more to be grateful for than that. For one thing, my ancestral trade of journalism (I’m a fourth-generation hack) has been kind to me. The 19 editors I’ve served over the years, on ten newspapers, local and national, have paid me enough to keep Mrs U and our four boys housed, clothed and fed – although often in the early days, it was touch and go whether there would still be food on the table between one payday and the next.
If my financial advisers are to be believed, I’ve even managed to save enough to retire in modest comfort (though on Wednesday’s evidence, the Chancellor seems determined to prove them wrong).
But best of all has been the outpouring of goodwill from readers since I announced my intention to retire.
My wife and I have been taken aback by all the cards, letters and emails I’ve received, expressing best wishes to us both in my retirement, and telling me that my weekly ramblings have cheered up their Fridays and made them smile. I can’t thank them enough.
It’s the highest praise I’ve ever wished for and all I’ve ever wanted to achieve.
But that’s quite enough boasting from me. As I bid you a fond farewell, Mrs U joins me in wishing you a very merry Christmas – and all the peace and happiness we hope for ourselves in the time left to us.
