My ringside seat at the Nixon resignation melodrama

American politics seem particularly febrile in 2024. The sitting President has withdrawn from the election, days after his predecessor was shot campaigning at a rally in Pennsylvania.

But American democracy is by nature restless and tumultuous. It’s worth remembering that 50 years ago this week, Washington was in turmoil over the question of whether Richard Nixon was going to resign.

Those early days of August 1974 seem like yesterday to those of us who became swept up in them. At the time I was a 31-year-old MP, five months into my first parliamentary term as an opposition backbencher. My summer recess took me to the home of a hospitable Anglophile hostess in Georgetown. In her basement lived two presidential aides who helped to give me a ringside seat to the resignation melodrama. At its peak I was invited by them to lunch in the White House Mess, where the press secretary, Ron Ziegler, persuaded me to write a letter to the soon-to-depart president.