Peerless inquisitor Brian Walden dies, 86
Former MP and presenter of Weekend World who was the sharpest inquisitor in the business
Brian Walden, the former Labour MP who left the Commons to become the presenter of the London Weekend Television current affairs flagship, Weekend World, has died, aged 86. As an interviewer, his personal style divided opinion, but there was no one better at winkling out of politicians the unguarded admission, and his stewardship of Weekend World from 1977 to 1986 was thought to have made a vital contribution to LWT’S retention of the franchise.
BRIAN WALDEN, who has died aged 86, was a Labour MP for Birmingham Ladywood (as it became) from 1964 to 1977, before leaving the Commons to become the presenter of the London Weekend Television current affairs flagship, Weekend World.
In a survey conducted in the mid-1980s to find out which leading interviewer the public preferred, Walden scored 87 per cent for trustworthiness but only 7 per cent for likeability. His long-winded, somewhat hectoring manner, nasal voice and slight speech impediment could certainly irritate, and his mannerisms sometimes verged on self-parody.
Yet no one was better at winkling out of politicians the unguarded admission, and his stewardship of Weekend World from 1977 to 1986 was thought to have made a vital contribution to LWT’S retention of the franchise.
Walden deployed an arsenal of weapons – flattery, assumed intimacy, feigned astonishment and ruthless paraphrase – to get politicians to admit what they really thought. Though always polite and outwardly genial, he was regarded as the deadliest inquisitor in the business.
When in 1995 psychologists analysed interviewers’ techniques by the number of “no-win” questions asked, Walden topped the bill. He had the eye for inconsistencies of a forensic scientist and the ability to remember every answer, so that he was capable of quoting it back verbatim an hour later.
He was relentless, even reducing Margaret Thatcher to stammering “I don’t know, I don’t know” after he had asked her over and over again why she had allowed Nigel Lawson to resign as Chancellor. “Brian,” she said during the grilling, “if anyone’s coming over as domineering, it’s you.” In an election interview with Neil Kinnock in 1992, Walden asked about his plans to tax the middle classes, not once or twice, but again and again over nearly an hour. The effect was devastating.
One of his most effective strategies was to build up an extreme hypothesis, a worst-case scenario of where a minister’s policies might lead – a ruse which trapped several unwary politicians into damaging disclosures. Another strategy was to disconcert the interviewee by implying that they had just revealed some closely guarded secret (“Now let me get this straight, Sir Geoffrey, because it really is most astonishing and you have never said this before …”)
“He uses the skewer,” AN Wilson observed. “He kebabs his victims on the end of a spike and then turns it round and round over the flames.”
Although Walden was sometimes accused of being overbearing and opinionated (in one encounter with John Major, his rambling questions took up a good third of the time available), he remained something of a mystery even to those who worked closely with him.
As a Labour MP, he had been one of the best speakers in the house and was certainly shrewd enough to have made it to the top. Instead, he made himself unpopular with the party hierarchy by habitually tearing up notes from the whips’ office, and with the grass roots by revelling in the large fees he earned from outside consultancies, notably with the National Bookmakers’ Association, a connection that earned him the nickname “the bookie’s runner” from his fellow Labour MP Dennis Skinner.
Disillusioned with the Labour Party, he became a devotee of Mrs Thatcher. He was one of the first to use the term
“Thatcherism” and recognise that she was no ordinary prime minister. He was even said to have helped her with an election speech in 1983. While she remained in power, he did not deny the charge. Besides, it served his purposes, as she certainly trusted him, even though he sometimes tempted her on to dangerous ground.
It was Walden who suggested the phrase “Victorian values”, which she endorsed with enthusiasm, to the delight of her enemies. In 1987, in a newspaper interview, he got her to admit that “none of my present colleagues are up to it so I dare not lay down the powers of government” (though she later confided to him that she thought John Major was the man).
After her political demise, however, Walden claimed that his admiration was not that of an ideological soulmate, but more akin to that of a spectator watching an accomplished vaudeville act: “The act amused me. It so much reminded me of my mother, this dogmatic certainty about everything, even when you knew and she knew you knew that she couldn’t possibly know.”
An only child, Alastair Brian Walden was born at West Bromwich on July 8 1932. His father, a glazier, was often unemployed and his mother struggled to feed the family. Though she was, by her son’s account, an overbearing woman, he adored her, and remained devoted to her after she died when he was 12.
Walden was educated at West Bromwich Grammar School, where he developed an interest in politics and chess and won a scholarship to read History at Queen’s College, Oxford. He went up after his National Service, which was spent for the most part as a clerk at various RAF bases.
It was at Oxford that he met his political mentor, Hugh Gaitskell. He became active in the campaign to turn Labour back from unilateralism, and claimed to have written the great man’s “Fight, and fight, and fight again” speech.
By the time Walden became president of the Oxford Union in 1957, people were talking of him as a future prime minister. The same year, he married Sybil Blackstone, secretary to the Oxfordshire Chief Constable. By this time he was at Nuffield College working on a doctorate about Lord Randolph Churchill, which he never finished.
It was at Oxford too that he gained a reputation for embellishing his accomplishments. He would claim to have flown aeroplanes in the Korean War, or to have been an MI6 officer in Pakistan (“so you’d better not say anything more about Bhutto or I’ll tell my superiors”).
At a New Statesman editorial conference, he is said to have claimed that his father had died of cancer contracted in the pits. “But I met your father two weeks ago,” said a colleague. “Yes, I know,” replied Walden. “But I thought this would add greater weight to my argument.”
In 1959 he left Oxford to become an adult education lecturer at Keele. By this time he was deeply involved in Labour politics. Quite how close he really was to Gaitskell is not entirely clear, though it was apparently Gaitskell who prompted him to stand, in 1961, for the safe Tory seat of Oswestry – which he duly lost to John Biffen.
By 1964, when Walden entered Parliament as Labour MP for Birmingham All Saints (which became Birmingham Ladywood after boundary changes in 1974), Gaitskell had died. It may have been his mentor’s death that left Walden feeling semi-detached about the Labour Party, and it was never entirely clear why he had gone into politics.
In Parliament, he spoke rarely but always superbly – a speech he gave against the death penalty after a terrorist bombing in his own constituency was thought by many of those present to have been the finest they ever heard. But he was the despair of the Labour whips.
In 1976 he lost the Labour government a vital vote when he refused to support the Dock Work Regulation Bill, designed to strengthen the unions’ grip on the docks, which Walden saw as a cynical quid pro quo for the support of the Transport and General Workers’ Union leader Jack Jones for the government’s incomes policy. It was an act for which he was never forgiven.
At the same time, he alienated his constituency party and back-bench colleagues by taking on a number of lucrative consultancies, which earned him some £25,000 a year, a large sum in the mid-1970s. “Money is the most important thing in my life,” he said, somewhat tactlessly. “I have no particular love for money as such, but I love the freedom and time it can buy.”
His motivations remained a mystery to many of his colleagues, partly because he himself did not always seem sure. When, in 1974, he turned down Harold Wilson’s offer to make him Tony Benn’s number two at the Department of Industry, he gave various reasons at different times: that his wife was ill and he could not afford the drop in income; that his dislike for the policies of Wilson was only matched by his contempt for Benn; and that he did not want to take responsibility for something he could not control.
He remained an MP for 13 years but was increasingly restive. When, in 1977, John Birt asked him whether he would like to take over from Peter Jay at Weekend World on the grand salary of £40,000, Walden jumped at the chance. Margaret Thatcher, then leader of the opposition, was his first interviewee, in September.
Walden left Weekend World in 1986 and became a political columnist for The Sunday Times and the Evening Standard. But, in 1988, he returned to LWT with The Walden Interview and later Walden. He was a member of the Board of Central Television from 1981 to 1984, and after 1994 his broadcasting was only intermittent, including series for the BBC such as Walden on Villains. He later became chairman of an asset management company.
Walden’s contract with LWT made him a wealthy man and in 1986 he settled in Guernsey with his third wife and their son. He once described himself as an “anarchist individualist” and was a reserved, unclubbable figure, who preferred staying at home writing or reading or memorising sporting facts (he was a keen racegoer) to socialising. In one Who’s Who entry, he listed his hobbies as chess and gardening, but admitted he had lied about the gardening.
Walden’s first two marriages ended in divorce. His second wife, the journalist Jane Mckerron, marked the end of their stormy relationship by writing an article in a pornographic magazine entitled “Is Your MP Good in Bed?”
Walden is survived by his wife, Hazel, whom he married in 1975, by their son, and by a son of his first marriage and two sons of his second marriage.
Brian Walden, born July 8 1932, died May 9 2019