The day I brought down a Prime Minister

It was 1979 and the end of another busy day in Fleet Street. I was on the Daily Star, housed in what Private Eye always called the Black Lubyanka.

The stunning glass fronted building, designed by Sir Owen Williams, boasted a spectacular front hall with an ornate floor and curving marble staircase and featured in the 1961 film The Day The Earth caught Fire. It had an identical twin in Ancoats, Manchester, where I normally worked, which was briefly glimpsed in the 1951 movie The Man In The White Suit.

In the London office I remember a sign which read "Starway to the Stairs", which I thought was very clever. In Manchester, we had a writer called Pat Codd and there was a sign on the wall there with extracts from his work below the headline "Codds-wallop".

That evening the requisite number of celebrity reputations had been puffed or poisoned, the weather story had been done (was it “hailstones as big as golfballs” or “paving-stone cracking sunshine”? I can’t recall) and a few jars in The Old Bell beckoned. However, tonight was different.

My accomplice reporter Pam Francis and I had taken ownership of two invitations to a swanky PR event in The Savoy. We strolled in, mingled and sank as many glasses of champagne as decorum allowed. Now to find the exit before the tedious speeches began. Unfortunately, the Press officers had done their logistics and in a pincer movement of which von Clausewitz would have been proud, Pam and I were ushered into a large auditorium where someone began droning about something like fluoridation or animal rights in Kazakhstan.

We had to find a way out before deep vein thrombosis took hold. I spied a door so we wriggled along a side wall as inconspicuously as two Turkish greasy wrestlers in a nunnery and dashed for freedom. We found ourselves in the hotel’s kitchens, where the sharpening of knives did wonders for our slight inebriation. Having negotiated the stainless steel maze for less than a minute I spotted another door and urged Pam to follow me through it as quickly as possible.

I was still checking that Pam was right behind me as I burst through the door and collided shoulder to shoulder with Harold Wilson, who ended up on his back. Amid profuse apologies we both hauled the statesman to his feet, brushed him down and as befits our calling made our excuses and left. Luckily, he wasn’t smoking his pipe at the time.