In common with all Telegraph journalists, I received a letter at home yesterday from the editor urging me not to strike. It was a sombre letter, but it reminded me of a funny story by Ian Jack about the Wapping dispute, an episode of newspaper history that I would rather not have had to live through.
It was February 1986. Rupert Murdoch had sacked 5,500 striking print workers, replaced them with members of the electricians’ union and moved production of his four principal titles from Fleet Street to a new plant surrounded by razor wire in Wapping, east London.
Jack was among Sunday Times journalists who had agreed, many of us far from wholeheartedly, to work at Wapping. He was at his new computer terminal on the foreign desk, listening to the pickets’ shouts of “Scab” and “Judas” from outside, when Nigella Lawson, who was then working on the books desk and best known as the daughter of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, came up to show him a tin of walnut oil.

“There’s a marvellous wine warehouse that stocks it just around the corner,” she said. It was a large tin, big enough for several months of salad dressing. “They’re very helpful. You just ring them up and they’ll deliver your order right through the picket line.”

Jack concludes:

It is, of course, unfair to pick out Nigella. There were hundreds of us. But I can’t forget the walnut oil. For me it was the first clue in a trail of evidence that sealed the case against many writers of English fiction who try, in their novels, plays and films, to describe the condition of England by heightening its reality. They are wasting valuable imaginations. The reality of England is already high enough; just getting it right in simple documentary terms should earn any writer the Prix Goncourt.”

In Before The Oil Ran Out, Jack himself does a good job of documenting the reality of Thatcher’s Britain. If you haven’t already read it, I recommend it.