Canada’s Prime Minister, Brian Mulroney, had back-channel advice for Britain’s leader, Margaret Thatcher on this date in 1988. In a call to the UK’s High Commissioner, Sir Alan Eurwick, in Ottawa, Mulroney strong advised his friend across the Atlantic against allowing sessions at Westminster to be televised. In turn, the High Commissioner sent a memo about the conversation to 10 Downing Street.
“Mr. Mulroney said that the Canadian experience had been an unmitigated disaster,” Eurwick wrote. “As a consequence of allowing television into the House of Commons, media and public attention was now devoted almost exclusively to the daily 45-minute Question Period when the Prime Minister and other government leaders were exposed to a barrage of impromptu questions: There was often no way of preparing for them and they distorted the whole political process.”
You can read the entire memo from Eurwick at this link:
https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/208520
Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist. He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy. A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.