Michael Crick is not what I expected. As a journalist who moves through Parliament Street like a shikari through the Kashmiri cloud-forest, and as the only man ever to have been both President of the Oxford Union and Editor of Cherwell, I had imagined Michael Crick to be the hackiest hack in Britain. Avuncular. Utterly at ease. Perhaps ever so slightly condescending.
The man in front of me is none of these things. He orders himself a slim-line tonic, citing two large glasses of wine at lunch earlier. It’s November 10, but he’s not wearing a poppy. Instead, an enormous and immaculate Ralph Lauren scarf – more of a stole, really – splashes scarlet over his chest. Little things matter in Crick’s world.
We make small talk about the student protests a mile away in Westminster. Crick mentions he went down to London for just this kind of demonstration in 1976; I ask if he would be out there now if he were 21 again. He dodges the question, a little awkwardly.
Well then, I continue, are the late 70s coming back? Rising unemployment, crashing cuts, simmering race issues, polarised politics – is Britain about to become an interesting country again? “I doubt it,” says Crick confidently. “Maybe a bit. But I don’t think you will see the level of unrest on anything like the scale that you saw in the 60s, 70s and early 80s.
“Although certain uninformed journalists” – I blush – “might say ‘aw, we’re back to the 70s’, these rallies are just token gestures. I don’t think we will return to the unrest that we saw in the 70s. I know you’ve just come from one of these demonstrations, and I’m sorry to disappoint you, but it ain’t gonna be like it was then.”
At this precise point in time just as Crick is speaking – I checked when I saw the news – 200 protesters burst through the police cordon into Millbank Street, heading for the Conservative Party HQ with grim determination. Just saying.
So. I have one of the most influential journalists in the country sitting opposite me, a man with more contacts in his little black book than Arnold Goodman, and more leads in Westminster than the National Grid. What shall we talk about? Journalism, of course.
And, surprisingly, Crick is both deprecating and proud about his profession. Its biggest failing, he begins, is its shallowness. “It’s a very imperfect profession,” he says. “The number of journalists who can read a balance sheet or understand company accounts is few.” Finance, science, Islam: all burning questions of the day that require a specialist knowledge beyond the average journalist’s expertise. So they are not held to account.
Crick is sceptical of the media’s power and reach: “We are one of the checks and balances in a free society. Parliament…the legal profession…the lobby groups – there are various forces at work holding people in power to account. I had an editor on Newsnight years ago who used to come in every morning and say, ‘right, how can we fuck the government today?’ He didn’t mean the then Labour government, he meant the government in the sense of ‘small G’, the people running, er, the world.”
So just how much has Crick buggered up the system? “I don’t know how successful I have been in fucking the government. I mean, I think I’ve probably irritated them, I know I’ve irritated them. There are times when they wish I wasn’t there.” Just in time, he comes over a little bashful. “I’m pretty sure I haven’t, you know, brought about any huge changes in government policy.”
This is partly modesty. Wikipedia tells me that during the elections earlier in 2005 somebody said the five most terrifying words in English were “Michael Crick is in reception.”
One of the most charming things about Michael Crick is his frankness about where he has been right and where he has been wrong. A life-long and ardent Manchester United fan, Crick is more forthcoming about The Betrayal of a Legend, his attack on the club’s spendthrift new management under an arrogant rookie called Alex Ferguson, than he is about his more political works on Jeffrey Archer and militancy in Britain.
“The ultimate judgement that my co-author and I reached was utterly wrong,” he says, “which was that so long as you are obsessed with money then you won’t be successful on the pitch. United then went on to prove me totally wrong. But it was revolutionary in that nobody up until that point had ever applied the normal kind of journalistic scrutiny you would apply to all sorts of other organisations to a sporting institution like that.Lots of modern politics really is sport. And we do cover it increasingly like sport. You know the Match of the Day highlights followed by the panel discussion? Well that’s how we cover politics these days. Since politics became, y’know, non-ideological in the last 20 years, it has really been a contest between the Blues and the Reds.
“The policies pursued by the Blues and the Reds are almost interchangeable- y’know, the Blues pursue one policy on, say, tuition fees” – his eyes sparkle – “and the Yellows decry it. Then they swap jobs and the Blues and the Yellows come into power and adopt that very policy, and then the Reds decry it.
“It is increasingly a sporting contest between two tribes who, like United and City fans, just hate each other. But the significant division between them is nothing like as great as it used to be.” You get the impression Crick would have loved the chariot-racing politics of Imperial Rome. His version of politics is about people, not policies, and, listening to him, you get the feeling that the back-stabbing rabble-rousing puppet-mastering machinations of the Senate never went out of style in the western world.
Meanwhile, the far left has had its teeth pulled out. “Polls suggest that most of the public do feel the time has come to cut public expenditure,” says Crick, “and I don’t think we’re going to see this government’s activities halted by industrial unrest. As for poor students and demonstrators, why should anybody take any notice of them?”
He giggles. 30 Millbank St burns. But in the long run, it looks like Crick will be right. Politics ultimately comes down to a group of men and women sitting around a table and compromising furiously. The hoodie-wearing placard-wielding student in me hates him for it, but Crick understands the nature of power better than any other man I have ever met.
