The PM must improve her communication skills while the going is good
As Theresa May flew over the Atlantic this week to meet…
By Robert Taylor on the January 27th, 2017
Watching another of the many anniversary documentaries about 9/11 last night, I started a mental list of the biggest news stories I can remember (and my memory for such stories starts in about 1975, horrifyingly enough).
To qualify for a place on my list, it has to be an event that I remember where I was when I heard it.
So here goes, in descending order of hugeness:
- 9/11
- Death of Princess Diana (1997)
- 7/7
- Resignation of Margaret Thatcher (1990)
- Space shuttle disaster (1986)
- The Brighton Bomb (1984)
- Argentina invades the Falklands (1982)
- The Heysel Stadium tragedy (1985)
- The Hillsborough disaster (1989)
- Obama’s inauguration address (2009)
- Black Wednesday (1992)
- Labour election victory (1997)
- Dunblane massacre (1996)
Five from the ‘80s, five from the ‘90s and three from the last decade. Of course this is an intensely personal list, and has a strong British bias.
Also, it misses out major news stories such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, which was part of a bigger, slower-moving news story over a number of months (and therefore I can’t pinpoint where I was when it happened).
It might seem churlish to put the death of Princess Diana ahead of the 50 people who lost their lives on 7/7.
But my list doesn’t rate the awfulness of the event, merely the enormity of the news story.
