Raising An Echo

by Glyn Mathias 

(Y Lolfa, £9.95)

FOR over two decades Glyn Mathias was an ITN reporter, lobby correspondent and authoritative political editor at a time when News At Ten was Britain’s most popular news programme, with viewing figures in excess of 10 million. 

A sharp-elbowed operator who could hack it with the best, on the eve of the Malvinas war he was the one who got to interview Margaret Thatcher. 

As the grandson of an army chaplain and son of a conscientious objector — the distinguished poet Roland Mathias — his objectivity was beyond question. He got Rajiv Gandhi to attack Margaret Thatcher’s opposition to sanctions against South Africa in 1986, another exclusive interview which went global, while the BBC’s celebrated India correspondent Mark Tully fumed outside the door.

He covered Harold Wilson’s resignation, Jim Callaghan’s government of permanent crises and had a leading role in setting up the televising of Parliament.

In the 1990s he gambled that Wales, where he had grown up, would vote yes in the Welsh Assembly referendum in 1997. He joined BBC Wales and returned to Cardiff where he began his career as a reporter on the South Wales Echo. It proved a close call.

His insight on the setting up of the Assembly is valuable, as is his interview with Ron Davies after his moment of madness on Clapham Common. Likewise the attempts to stop Rhodri Morgan from becoming Wales’s first minister makes for interesting reading.

Mathias’s return to Wales did not go as well as expected and in 2000 he returned from holiday to find he was no longer presenter of BBC Wales’s weekly political programme. Dai Smith, Head of English Programmes, wanted a “prettier” face it seems.

He touches too on Peter Hain’s resignation from the Cabinet for failing to report substantial donations he had received towards his campaign to be deputy leader of the Labour Party.

The writing is breezy and often funny. The monarchy is described as a stage army of curious characters irrelevant to the body politic who live in a different time zone from the rest of us. And apparently there are three types of Tory candidates — men, women and those prepared to stand in Wales.

An enjoyable insight into the lives of those in power and even more so those who try to hold them to account.

Gwyn Griffiths