Tom
I’ve been arguing with my father over dinner tables
ever since I can remember. I always enjoyed trying to
take him on — often failing — though the older I got
the more points I managed to score. I think it helped
me develop an aptitude for throwing tomatoes rather
than catching them — a politician like my father
catches tomatoes, a political journalist throws them.
You’re good at one or the other but rarely both.
I can’t recall a time when my father wasn’t involved in
politics. I think he’s the longest-serving MEP of all time:
he was there in 1979 when the European parliament was
first directly elected and at the very end when Britain’s
MEPs were forcibly ejected by the British electorate.
My parents lived in south London when I was born.
Dad ran the Stockwell Conservatives and, next door,
the Brixton Conservatives were run by one John Major.
Those Conservative associations were so small that
for safety my father and Major used to go around the
estates knocking on doors together.
He really believed — I think he still does — in the
United States of Europe. He’d have regular ding-dongs
with Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. There were times
when he made Ken Clarke look Brexity. But at some
stage he fell out of sync with his voters — ironically he
represented Lincolnshire, probably the most Brexity
county in the country — and he lost the argument
with his own party and the nation. He’s too modest
to admit to any real sadness over this. If I ask him he’ll
never answer directly because he comes from an era
when you weren’t encouraged to talk about how you
felt about anything.
He has never been strong on expressing how he feels
about his children and grandchildren in words. He
shows us he loves us through his gestures. He bought
and read The Sun every day I worked for it [as defence
and then political editor]. It must have been very hard
for him during Brexit, but he did it out of a deep sense
of loyalty. He’s at his most emotional watching Arsenal.
Every time Arsenal score the rest of the crowd jumps
up and cheers; my father jumps up and weeps.
I was extremely precocious politically as a child.
I remember aged eight or nine feeling vigorously
opposed to CND and I’d campaign around our posh
Highgate suburb. I then went through an avowed
Marxist stage — aged about 14 — when I bought my
communist star and wore it proudly on my lapel. But
as I got older I found it harder to align to any particular
viewpoint or political philosophy. As a political
journalist it’s not helpful to have very strong views —
if you want to get stories you have to see things in the
round and you have to be friends with everyone.
RELATIVE VALUES
Tom and Bill Newton Dunn
The broadcaster and his politician father on laissez-faire parenting and tears at football
My father is the most unconventional person I’ve
ever met and he instilled in me a life philosophy of
independent thought. He never dictated anything
about what to believe, say or do. He was incredibly
laissez-faire and tolerant of everything I ever did when
I was young — sometimes to my Hungarian mother’s
fury because she was the disciplinarian. I think I’ve
inherited more of her hot-bloodedness, but I strive to
be like him in both my own parenting and life generally.
Very often, I fall short.Bill
I stood as a Conservative candidate in the first 1974
general election when Thomas was seven weeks old.
His mother, Anna, and I stayed in a little hotel and
tramped the streets canvassing. It was like your first
love affair — you never forget it. But God it was
gruelling. I had no chance at all of being picked, so we
dressed Thomas up in an enormous rosette that said
“Vote for Daddy”, and it got on the front page of The
Western Mail. Poor lad, it was politics from day one.
I was the Conservative Party MEP for Lincolnshire
when Tom was growing up. It was a tough patch.
I remember him standing beside me in Boston Market
Place handing out leaflets. A man screwed one up andMain: Tom, 48,
and Bill, 80, on
Richmond Green,
near Bill’s home in
southwest London.
Right: together in
summer 1974“He’d have regular ding-dongs with
Thatcher. There were times when
he made Ken Clarke look Brexity”
6 • The Sunday Times Magazine