The History of the Times: The Murdoch Years
Graham Stewart
The seventh in a series chronicling the remarkable history of The Times newspaper and the media mogul who bought and reshaped it in the early 1980s.This volume looks at the history of one of Britain’s most venerable newspapers since its takeover by Rupert Murdoch in 1981, and the many changes that took place in the turbulent years that followed.The account will encompass the media mogul’s infamous clashes with the British printers’ unions, culminating in 1986 with the Wapping dispute in which the power of the unions was decisively broken, with far-reaching implications for British trade unions and the media at large.Taking over from the late John Grigg, who wrote the most recent two volumes in this series, Graham Stewart is a highly rated historian with a gift for depicting the complex characters who inhabit the upper echelons of power. With this book, he will provide valuable insight into the workings of one of the most controversial business leaders in the world today and the newspaper that helped shape his media empire.
Graham Stewart
THE HISTORY OF THE TIMES
Volume VII 1981–2002
The Murdoch Years
PREFACE
This is an official history. It has access to private correspondence and business documents that have not been made generally available to other writers or historians. Some may consider this a mixed blessing and assume that the consequence must necessarily – in the words of the accusation that used to be labelled at The Times’s obituaries – ‘sniff of an inside job’. It should therefore be stated from the first that at no stage has anyone altered anything I have written or pressured me into adopting a position or opinion that was not my own. It is an official history but not a formally approved or authorized version of events.
Indeed, Rupert Murdoch’s relaxed attitude while I probed around in an important part of his business empire contrasted favourably with past precedent in this series. Those commissioned to write the six previous volumes of the official history of The Times were closely involved in the paper’s life, a conflict of interest that certainly hindered the appearance of objectivity. The first four volumes, covering the period between its foundation in 1785 and the Second World War, were compiled between 1935 and 1952 by a team under the command of Stanley Morison. Morison was the inventor of the world’s most popular typeface, Times New Roman. He was also a close friend of the paper’s then owner, John Astor, and its editor, Robin Barrington-Ward, who went so far as to describe Morison as ‘the Conscience of The Times’. Iverach McDonald, who was an assistant editor and managing editor of the paper during the period he described, wrote volume five in 1984. Volume six, covering the years 1966 to 1981, was written in 1993 by John Grigg. He had been the paper’s obituaries editor between 1986 and 1987 and was a regular columnist. Grigg, at least, was not directly involved in the events about which he wrote. Instead, he brought the insight and flair of the independent historian of note, attributes for which he will be fondly remembered. For my own part, I cannot claim much personal involvement with the paper during the years covered in this volume. My only first hand experience was garnered during the year 2000, when I was a leader writer. As a historian, my specialist area is British politics in the 1930s.
The Times is not, first and foremost, a national institution. It is a business. Yet I have avoided the temptation to treat it purely as a corporate entity, as if its journalistic and literary output had no more cultural significance than the manufacturing of the paper on which it was printed. Consequently, I have described its journalism within the context of the world events that were its stimulation. The book, therefore, is part business history, part work of reference, part anthology. It is intended to appeal both to those interested in the paper in particular or journalism in general who want to know how The Times conducted itself during the period 1981 to 2002.
The book would not have been possible without the knowledge and assistance of The Times’s archivist, Eamon Dyas, and his assistant, Nick Mays, at News International’s impressively organized Archive Centre and Record Office. Elaine Grant and Karen Colognese were unceasingly helpful in providing assistance from the chairman’s office. Journalists too numerous to mention here have accepted my invitations to share what they know over some light refreshment. Their recollections and observations have made this book a pleasure to write. It has also been a relief to discover that the traditions of the Fleet Street lunch are not entirely a thing of the past. It is not the place of an official history to indulge the sort of convoluted tales of uncertain provenance that enliven many a hack’s memoir of the Street of Shame’s alleged glory days. Nonetheless, despite my preference for primary evidence, I have not omitted gossip where I have been able to cross reference the story and establish its basis in fact. Any errors or misrepresentations remain, of course, entirely my own.
Among the many individuals that have helped me, I should like in particular to thank Richard Spink and Tasha Browning for their indefatigable generosity of spirit. At HarperCollins, Annabel Wright has been a stalwart aid. I have profited enormously from the valuable suggestions made by Andrew Knight and Brian MacArthur whose experience of the newspaper world is exceptional. Rupert Murdoch gave me a considerable amount of his time and I appreciate the unconditional assistance he has given me. I should especially like to thank Les Hinton, executive chairman of News International, who has been a great friend of the project and unfailing in his support and enthusiasm. It is my regret that Sir Edward Pickering, grand old man of Fleet Street and executive vice-chairman of Times Newspapers, did not live to see the completion of the book he commissioned and for which he provided such sagacious advice. I dedicate it to his memory.
Graham Stewart, February 2005
CHAPTER ONE
A LICENCE TO LOSE MONEY
The Problems of Owning The Times; the Thomson Sale and the Murdoch Purchase
I
On 22 October 1980, in its one hundred and ninety-sixth year, The Times was put up for sale. It would be closed down if no suitable buyer secured a deal before 15 March – the Ides of March. Staff received notice that their contracts were being terminated.
Superficially The Times was a prize, but few who had studied the accounts would have thought so. It resembled the sort of Palladian mansion still occasionally offered for sale through the pages of Country Life. Despite the odd seedling protruding from the cornicing, the exterior still looked magnificent and the asking price seemed preposterously low. But those enquiring beyond the inventory of rare and exotic contents (to be auctioned separately) soon discovered why the previous owners no longer felt able to comply with the conditions of this national treasure’s preservation order. The lead had come away from the roof, the attic floorboards had collapsed and damp enveloped what had once been a ballroom. The costs of upkeep would be punishing and, with little prospect of a change of usage permit, the likely revenue insufficient. On hearing the news that The Times was for sale, the reaction of Rupert Murdoch, the owner of the Sun and the News of the World, was reported in the press: ‘I doubt whether there will be any buyers.’[1 - Financial Times, 23 October 1980; UK Press Gazette, 27 October 1980.]
It was certainly a bad sign that the share price of the Thomson Organisation, The Times’s owner, soared by £40 million on the announcement that it was offloading its flagship paper. This was particularly alarming since for sale was not only The Times and its three smaller circulation supplements but also the Sunday Times, a paper that had been profitable for seventeen out of the past twenty years. But the Sunday market leader had lost 300,000 copies through industrial action the weekend before Thomson’s announcement that it was for sale. It had lost 800,000 the weekend before that. No newspaper that lost five million copies in a year as a result of the action of those employed to print it could realize its potential.[2 - Listener, 30 October 1980.] Together, the papers – The Times, the Times Literary Supplement, the Times Educational Supplement, the Times Higher Education Supplement and the Sunday Times – that comprised Times Newspapers Limited (TNL) had made after-tax losses of £18.8 million in 1979 and £14.5 million in 1980.[3 - Price Waterhouse’s audit for the TNL Directors’ Report (Hamilton 9762/6).] In the same interview in which he declared little interest in picking up the bill, Rupert Murdoch was quoted as describing TNL as a ‘snake-pit’.
It was hard to see what hard-headed businessman would leap at the opportunity to enter this environment. Certainly, there would be bidders with an interest in either asset stripping or wanting to turn The Times into a private toy. Middle Eastern backers expressed interest but, as Sir Richard Marsh, chairman of the Newspaper Publishers’ Association (NPA), indelicately put it: ‘I think [the idea of] The Times being owned by somebody in the Lebanon would be a joke.’[4 - UK Press Gazette, 27 October 1980.] Nearer home, there were some circling sharks, among them Robert Maxwell, James Goldsmith and Tiny Rowland, to whom the Thomson board were simply not prepared to sell the paper at any price.[5 - Sir Gordon Brunton to the author, interview, 8 April 2003.]
In Westminster there was cross-party alarm. Michael Foot, the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, who had once been one of Beaverbrook’s sharpest pens, declared ‘every journalist in the country, I would think, would be deeply shocked at hearing the news’ that The Times was for sale or closure, adding: ‘undoubtedly this has created a crisis of major proportions for the free press in Britain’.[6 - The Times, 23 October 1980.]
The mood in the non-parliamentary wing of the Labour Movement was also glum. Meeting the members of the Thomson board two days after the announcement of the sale, Joe Wade, general secretary of the National Graphical Association (NGA) print union, whose members made up much of the skilled print labour force at TNL, said that the news ‘had wonderfully concentrated people’s minds’ and that in the last forty-eight hours he had been able to obtain a number of guarantees of continuous production. This was surprising. During 1978–9, his union had preferred to witness TNL’s papers being taken off the streets for eleven months rather than make concessions to its management. The shutdown of the papers had cost Thomson £40 million and ended only when management crumbled at the first sight of union guarantees that subsequently proved worthless. But now that his supposed antagonists appeared to be quitting the field, Wade changed his tune: ‘the Unions would prefer the Times titles to remain with The Thomson Organisation – better the devil you know’. The thirteenth-hour loyal protestation, if that is what it was, had come too late. The decision to sell was irrevocable. Wade unhelpfully commented to the press: ‘the unions frankly had grave doubts whether a realistic proposition would emerge for the transfer of the titles to a new owner’.[7 - Times Archive, Box 9383.1.]
In a rare moment of unity, the editor of The Times agreed. William Rees-Mogg had been in the chair since 1967, having been appointed shortly after Roy Thomson’s purchase of the paper from the Astor family. His father was a Somerset squire, but he was brought up in the Roman Catholic faith of his American mother, a former actress who in her day had performed alongside Sarah Bernhardt. Sent to school at Charterhouse, his precocious abilities won him a Brackenbury scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, where he was at ease with the college’s temporal traditions; he was elected president of the Oxford Union. On going down, he worked first for the Financial Times and then at the Sunday Times as its deputy editor. He was still only thirty-eight when he became editor of The Times. Under his editorship the paper had continued to play to its strengths – in particular the authority of its comment and reflection on world events – while continuing to lag behind the Daily Telegraph in the breadth and immediacy of its home news coverage. In particular, Rees-Mogg had maintained the high standard of Times leader articles, the most memorable of which were his own work. As a seasoned commentator of the period put it with regard to Rees-Mogg’s paper: ‘One found oneself every morning in the company of a civilized, slightly barmy, humorous, usually gentle, intelligence, whose most stimulating characteristic was its unpredictability.’[8 - Patrick Marnham in Spectator, 20 February 1982.] This last facet was now to make itself evident as Rees-Mogg decided that it had fallen to him – with the journalists around him – to save The Times.
No sooner had the news of the sale broken than Rees-Mogg summoned his editorial staff. As many of the 330 full complement as could crowded around. His deputy, Louis Heren, described the occasion as ‘almost like a revolutionary commune’.[9 - Louis Heren on Panorama, BBC TV, 17 November 1980.] If a ‘person of good character and quality’ wanted to buy the papers then that would be acceptable, Rees-Mogg declared. But merely switching ownership from one press baron to another should not be the ‘plan to save our future’. Thomson was offering The Times and Sunday Times for sale together as a package. This, Rees-Mogg argued, was a mistake. If anything was now clear it was that the two papers were ‘by their natures so different that neither paper is good for the other’. Not only did they have incompatible audiences, ‘the industrial logic which put the Sunday Times and The Times together was mistaken industrial logic’. In any case, ‘if the Thomson family were not able to master this business why should any other individual be any more successful?’. With the example of Le Monde, which was run by a journalists’ cooperative, the editor proposed bringing the already-formed staff group known as Journalists of The Times (JOTT), together with managers, as minority shareholders in a consortium supported by a variety of financial backers. Together they would buy the paper.[10 - William Rees-Mogg, undated memo [22 October 1980], Box. 9335.]
It was a bold idea. Some found the editor’s newfound conversion to worker participation perplexing, but others were enthusiastic. The paper’s Whitehall correspondent, Peter Hennessy, stood up to say, ‘I am very pleased about the powerful lead you intend to give us in our struggle and unwillingness to accept any Northcliffe-type buyer.’ Northcliffe had bought The Times from its original Walter family owners in 1908, popularizing it but interfering in its cherished editorial independence. He had also saved the paper from certain death. Within six years of Northcliffe’s acquisition of the paper, its circulation had risen from a mere 40,000 to 314,000 copies a day. It was a sign of what had happened under the two subsequent owners that, despite the massively expanding market during the twentieth century, this 1914 figure was higher than the 298,000 The Times was averaging between July and December 1980.
The Times of 23 October 1980 carried as its front-page lead story its own perilous position. Rees-Mogg wrote a signed article on the Op-Ed page (the page for columnists opposite the leaders and letters page) elaborating on his ideas in his speech to the staff. ‘Now The Times is going to fight for herself,’ proclaimed a new agenda: ‘the lesson of the Thomson years is that subsidy destroys the commercial operation of newspapers’ and that ‘I no longer believe in the virtue of a newspaper proprietorship which does not include the people who make the paper as shareholders in the ownership.’ ‘From now on,’ he announced, ‘the main thrust of my work will be to try with like-minded colleagues to develop a partnership – commercial not charitable – which can keep The Times in being.’[11 - William Rees-Mogg, ‘Now The Times is going to fight for herself’, The Times, 23 October 1980.]
The paper’s letter page soon filled with exhortations from readers, often pledging the length of their active service to the paper’s circulation by way of qualification, in support of Rees-Mogg’s idea of a journalist-capitalist syndicate.[12 - In particular, see The Times, letters page, 28 October 1980.] Barings became the project’s merchant bankers and Sir Michael Swann, Provost of Oriel College, Oxford, and a former chairman of the BBC, chaired the consortium. Lord Weinstock, managing director of GEC and a personal friend of Rees-Mogg, sat on its steering committee. If £10 million of working capital could be raised, fortified by £30 million a year revenue, it was certainly feasible that The Times could balance its books if it could cut its expenses by printing outside London’s notorious high labour costs. Lord Barnetson, the chairman of the Observer, had suggested to Rees-Mogg that printing The Times at a provincial ‘greenfield’ site could be done for £7 million a year. This was a third of the cost of doing it with the current TNL print workers at the paper’s London headquarters in Gray’s Inn Road.[13 - Harold Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, pp. 97, 108.]
Of course, it was not that simple. Even if an existing provincial print works, for example the United Newspapers’ plant in Northampton, could be engaged, there would be a period of disruption – conservatively estimated at six weeks – before The Times could roll out from its new site. Readers’ loyalty had already been seriously tested by the eleven-month shutdown the previous year and another lengthy period in which the paper was off the streets was clearly something to be avoided. More importantly, the strategy assumed that the London print unions would sit back while their jobs were transferred to ‘brothers’ in the provinces. This was not in the spirit of union solidarity. Even if their fellow members in the provinces did decide to handle The Times, the print unions could then hold hostage the Sunday Times by going on strike at Gray’s Inn Road. With this, the whole Thomson strategy of selling the papers together would unwind. Even without these problems, the Rees-Mogg consortium had to convince long-term investors that it could gain access to sufficient and sustainable capital and that a syndicate in which journalists played a part would have the necessary unity of purpose to take hard decisions.[14 - John Grigg, The History of The Times, vol. VI: The Thomson Years, p. 554; Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 108; Listener, 30 October 1980.]
The consortium’s best hope was to step in following the Thomson board’s failure to attract a serious bid from one of the major media magnates. This Rees-Mogg came to accept, ultimately viewing his plan as a fall-back position,[15 - William Rees-Mogg to the author, interview, 3 December 2001.] but at the time the Thomson board watched with mounting alarm as the extent of his desire to promote his rescue plan manifested itself. The Times’s editor had a journalist’s eye for finding ways to maximize publicity (some supposed that this must have had something to do with the early influence of a theatrical mother). Gathering a television crew about him, Rees-Mogg now set off across the Atlantic. There, he hoped, he might find white knights, ready to take a share in his mission to save ‘this strange English institution’.
Having arrived in the United States, Rees-Mogg had lunch with Katharine Graham, the proprietor of the Washington Post. Despite her liberal politics, she had shown the determination to break a debilitating print workers’ strike that threatened to strangle the Post in 1975, defeating those besieging her printing plant by flying newsprint into it over their heads. Unlike Times Newspapers’ management, she had taken on her industrial tormentors and won. But, joined for lunch by her senior management, even she could not see how The Times could get out of its dire situation. Having listened to Rees-Mogg’s presentation, the verdict was to the point: ‘The Washington Post saw The Times as a potential disaster area which they didn’t want anything to do with,’ Rees-Mogg recalled, ‘although they were very polite and friendly.’[16 - William Rees-Mogg to the author, interview, 3 December 2001.]
Rees-Mogg had considered Kay Graham the sort of acceptably independent-minded proprietor The Times should be trying to attract. He had not yet spoken of Rupert Murdoch in that light. Indeed, in 1977 he had told the Royal Commission on the Press: ‘Mr Murdoch’s writ does run in his own building and, much as I respect his energy and vigour, because of his views on the proprietorial function, I would never myself be willing to work for him.’[17 - Quoted in Piers Brendon, The Life and Death of the Press Barons, p. 247.] Less than a month before it was announced The Times was being put up for sale, Rees-Mogg had encouraged his New York correspondent, Michael Leapman, to write an attack on Murdoch’s methods at his New York Post. The article, illustrated with a Post front-page headline ‘PREGNANT MOM IN 911 TERROR’ was equally punchy:
It is nearly four years since Mr Murdoch gave the United States its first true sampling of the journalism of the lowest common denominator. That was when he bought the struggling New York Post and filled its senior editorial positions with British and Australian newspapermen, expert in plumbing the depths of bad taste which Americans had scarcely guessed at.[18 - Michael Leapman in The Times, 27 September 1980; Michael Leapman, Barefaced Cheek, p. 190.]
Yet now Rees-Mogg made the trip to the top of the New York Post building overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge to discover whether Rupert Murdoch, owner of eighty-four newspapers including the Sun and the News of the World, was interested in helping to save The Times.
The meeting, Rees-Mogg reflected, went well. Murdoch was friendly, courteous and drank not from a mug but from an elegant china tea service. He did not let himself be drawn on exactly what his intentions were but by the time Rees-Mogg returned to Manhattan street level he had gained the impression that Murdoch was sizing up the possibility of a bid for the Sunday Times. This was good, for the whole point of Rees-Mogg’s consortium plan was that there should be a divorce in the Times family. Furthermore, Murdoch appeared to be keen to help the consortium in any practical way, perhaps even printing it at his plant in Worcester. Indeed, ‘he was sympathetic to anything that would keep The Times alive’.[19 - William Rees-Mogg to the author, interview, 3 December 2001; Leapman, Barefaced Cheek, pp. 184–6; Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, pp. 96–7.]
It was only the third time Murdoch and Rees-Mogg had properly met one another. Previously they had found themselves seated together at a table with the Queen at a celebratory gathering of the Press Club during which Rees-Mogg had noticed the Australian’s ability to make the Queen laugh. But their first meeting, in the summer of 1951, had been more prescient. The young Rees-Mogg, already at the age of twenty-three bearing the assumed gravitas of an elder statesman, had been walking up The Turl in Oxford when he was stopped by a ‘brash young member of the Labour Club’ who wanted to cut him in on a business venture. The Antipodean undergraduate said he was thinking of buying the ailing student newspaper Cherwell, and wondered whether Rees-Mogg wanted to invest in his scheme. Venerable title or not, Rees-Mogg replied that Cherwell was staid and boring and would never attract sufficient advertising to be an attractive business proposition. The young Murdoch countered that with drive and initiative it could be made attractive by changing the editorial content, bringing it up to date and transforming the finances. ‘You’ll never make any money out of Cherwell’ was the young Rees-Mogg’s cheerful reply. And with that mistaken prophecy, the two undergraduates went their separate ways.[20 - William Rees-Mogg to the author, interview, 3 December 2001; William Rees-Mogg in Independent, 29 October 1990.]
Twenty-nine years later, two men were determined to put Murdoch’s profit-making expertise back in touch with a venerable, occasionally staid, loss maker. The first was one of Fleet Street’s most respected figures – Sir Denis Hamilton, editor-in-chief of Times Newspapers Limited. The other was Sir Gordon Brunton, managing director of TNL’s parent company, Thomson British Holdings Limited. Both men thought Rees-Mogg’s consortium idea was suicidal, but when they had discussed the disposal of Times Newspapers in a secretly convened meeting with Thomson’s chairman, Lord Thomson of Fleet, on 18 September 1980, Hamilton had reported the opinion that ‘Rupert Murdoch is probably not interested’.[21 - Minutes of ad hoc committee on TNL, Thomson British Holdings Ltd, 18 September 1980. Hamilton Papers 9758/4.] One look at the other likely bidders was enough to convince those seated around the table that it was a matter of urgency to get him interested.
Sir Gordon Brunton had got to know Murdoch through the Newspaper Publishers’ Association. The two men shared a similar attitude towards dealing with the print unions and, unlike so many of the other Fleet Street proprietors who attended NPA meetings, Brunton believed that if Murdoch gave his word on a particular action he would keep it.[22 - Sir Gordon Brunton to the author, interview, 8 April 2003.] Murdoch considered Brunton ‘clear-headed and strong-willed’.[23 - Rupert Murdoch to the author, interview, 4 August 2003.] Besides his godfather role at Times Newspapers, Sir Denis Hamilton was also chairman of Reuters, the board meetings of which Murdoch regularly attended. It was on a flight to Bahrain for one of these meetings that the two found themselves sitting together in the aeroplane. This was a seating coincidence that Hamilton – assuming Murdoch would be taking the same flight – had carefully engineered. The long flight was an unrivalled opportunity to get Murdoch alone and Hamilton did his best to, as he later put it, ‘plant as much of a seed as possible – for my fellow directors felt that only a really strong owner who would be prepared to take savage measures, and of whose determination the unions could have no doubt, had any hope’.[24 - Denis Hamilton, Editor-in-Chief.]
In fact, Murdoch had already scented blood. Back in September, he had bumped into Lord Thomson in the Concorde departure lounge at JFK and gained from him, however obliquely, the impression that TNL would not remain within the Thomson empire for much longer. Murdoch, indeed, had greater forewarning that The Times would be up for sale than had its editor. But whether the owner of predominately tabloid titles, a man who gave little impression of wanting to join the British Establishment, could be persuaded to take the bait and rescue The Times still remained far from clear.
Whichever projection was favoured, The Times was not on any rapid course to profitability. Although it had edged into the black during the early 1950s and for one tantalizing moment in 1977, it had been losing money for the vast majority of the twentieth century. A paper with such a track record would have been shut down long ago had it not been for its reputation and the manner in which being the proprietor of The Times conveyed a position in public life that had a value of its own. Gavin Astor, who became (alongside his father) proprietor in 1964, described the newspaper as ‘a peculiar property in that service to what it believes are the best interests of the nation is placed before the personal and financial gains of its Proprietors’.[25 - Quoted in Simon Jenkins, The Market for Glory, p. 53.] But a proprietor’s belief in his role as a national custodian was not necessarily appreciated by less sentimentally minded shareholders. When Roy Thomson bought The Times in 1966 he recognized that it would not be a cash cow and, in order not to trouble shareholders’ consciences with it, opted to fund it out of his own exceptionally deep pocket. In 1974 this decision was reversed when the Thomson Organisation’s portfolio diversified further into other interests, including North Sea oil, whose profitability dwarfed TNL’s losses. The only commercial argument for retaining The Times was that as a globally recognized quality brand, it (at least psychologically) added value as the glittering flagship of the Thomson Line. Unfortunately, in becoming a byword for unseaworthiness, it risked very publicly bringing down Thomson’s reputation for business savvy and managerial skill. From that moment on, it became a matter of floating it out into the ocean and abandoning ship.
When it came to the announcement of sale, the Thomson board maintained that although they had failed, a new management team might be able to turn the paper around. This was a predictable statement – The Times could not easily be sold by asserting it had no viable future whoever owned it. But no serious forecaster believed it could be turned around quickly. Could supposedly ‘short-termist’ shareholders be expected to understand a new owner’s perseverance? In this respect Murdoch offered more hope than some potential bidders because he and his family owned a controlling share of his company, News International Limited. Thus, so long as Murdoch saw a future for the paper, News International could carry The Times through a long period of disappointing revenue without its survival in the company being frequently challenged by angry shareholders. And given the profitability of the other stallions in the stable, the Sun and the News of the World, there was every reason to expect that the banks would continue to regard News International as creditworthy.
On the other hand, appearing to have an excess of available money also threatened The Times. Journalists and print workers who regarded their paper as a rich man’s toy could be expected to want to joy ride with it. This had been part of the problem with the Thomson ownership of TNL. Roy Thomson was the son of a Toronto barber who described purchasing The Times when he was aged seventy-two as ‘the summit of a lifetime’s work’. An Anglophile, he renounced his Canadian citizenship in order to accept a British peerage (as the future Canadian proprietor of the Daily Telegraph, Conrad Black, would later do). He took as his title Lord Thomson of Fleet – the closest a peerage could decorously go towards being named after a busy street. Not only did he describe owning The Times as ‘the greatest privilege of my life’ he announced that in acquiring it, the paper’s ‘special position in the world will now be safeguarded for all time’.[26 - Newsweek, 3 November 1980.] This was a hostage to fortune. Owning STV (Scottish Television) had provided much of the financial base for his British acquisitions and he had once famously described owning a British commercial television station as ‘like having your own licence to print money’. He appeared to accept that owning The Times was a licence to lose it.
II
Fleet Street, whose pundits were paid daily to indict others for failing to put the world to rights, was noticeably incompetent in managing its own backyard. For those proprietors already ensconced, there was at least the compensation that this created a cartel-like environment. The huge costs of producing national newspapers caused by print unions’ ability to retain superfluous jobs and resist cost-saving innovation acted to ward off all but the most determined and rich competitors from cracking into the market. Competition from foreign newspapers was, for obvious reasons, all but nonexistent. The attempts through the Newspaper Publishers’ Association to act collectively against union demands were frequently half-hearted. No sooner had the respective managements returned to their papers’ headquarters than new and deadline-threatening disputes would lead them to cobble together individual peace deals that cut across the whole strategy of collective resistance. During the 1970s, it was widely understood that one of the major newspaper groups had resorted to paying sweeteners to specific union officials who might otherwise disrupt the evening print run.
By 1980, Fleet Street’s newspapers were the only manufacturing industry left in the heart of London. The print workers came predominantly from the East End, passing on their jobs from father to son (never to daughter) with a degree of reverence for the hereditary principle rarely seen outside Burke’s Peerage or a Newmarket stud farm. They were members of one of two types of union. The craft unions, of which the National Graphical Association (NGA) was to the fore, operated the museum-worthy Linotype machines that produced the type in hot metal and set the paper. The non-craft unions, in particular NATSOPA (later amalgamated into SOGAT), did what were considered the less skilful parts of the operation and included clerical workers, cleaners and other ancillary staff. Almost any suggested change to the working practice or the evening shift would result in a complicated negotiation procedure in which management was not only at loggerheads with union officials but the officials were equally anxious to maintain or enhance whatever differential existed with their rival union prior to any change. The balance of power was summed up in a revealing and justly famous exchange. Once Roy Thomson, visiting the Sunday Times, got into a lift at Gray’s Inn Road and introduced himself to a sun-tanned employee standing next to him. ‘Hello, I’m Roy Thomson, I own this paper,’ the proprietor good-naturedly announced. The Sunday Times NATSOPA machine room official replied, ‘I’m Reg Brady and I run this paper.’[27 - Sir Gordon Brunton to the author, interview, 8 April 2003.] In 1978, the company’s management discovered that this was true.
The print unions operating at Times Newspapers, as at other Fleet Street titles, were subdivided into chapels, individual bargaining units intent on maintaining their restrictive advantage. The union shop steward at the head of each chapel was known as the father. He, rather than anyone in middle management, had far more direct involvement in print workers’ daily routines. The father was effectively their commanding officer in the field. The military metaphor was a pertinent one for, although the position of father was an ancient one, the Second World War had certainly helped to adapt a new generation to its requirements. Non-commissioned officers who, on returning to civvy street, were not taken into management positions often found the parallel chain of command in the chapel system to their liking.
At Times Newspapers there were fifty-four chapels in existence, almost any one of which was capable of calling a halt to the evening’s print run. TNL management’s attempt to enforce a system in which a disruption by one chapel would cause the loss of pay to all others consequently left idle had been quashed. And chapels often had equally scant regard for the diktats of their national union officials. When in 1976 the unions’ national executives got together with Fleet Street’s senior management to thrash out a ‘Programme for Action’ in which a change in work practices would be accepted so long as there were no compulsory redundancies, the chapels – accepting the latter but not the former – scuppered the deal.[28 - Linda Melvern, The End of the Street, p. 175.]
It was not only those paying the bills who despaired of this state of affairs. Many journalists, by no means right wing by political inclination, became resentful. Skilled Linotype operators earned salaries far in excess of some of the most seasoned and respected journalists upstairs. As Tim Austin, who worked at The Times continuously between 1968 and 2003 put it, ‘We couldn’t stand the print unions. They’d been screwing the paper for years. You didn’t know if the paper was going to come out at night. You would work on it for ten hours and then they would pull the plug and you had wasted ten hours of your life.’ The composing room was certainly not a forum of enlightened values. When Cathy James once popped her head round to check that a detail had been rendered correctly she was flatly told where a woman could go.[29 - Tim Austin to the author, interview, 4 March 2003.]
Relations had not always been this bad. The Times had been printed for 170 years before it was silenced by industrial action, the month-long dispute of March to April 1955 ensuring a break in the paper’s production (and thereby missing Churchill’s resignation as Prime Minister) that even a direct hit on its offices from the Luftwaffe during the Blitz had failed to achieve. But the 1965 strike had affected all Fleet Street’s national titles. Times print workers had not enjoyed a reputation for militancy until the summer of 1975 when the paper’s historic Blackfriars site in Printing House Square was put up for sale and the paper, printers and journalists alike transferred to Gray’s Inn Road as the next-door neighbours of Thomson’s other major title, the Sunday Times. The decision to move had been taken as a cost-cutting measure – although the savings proved to be largely illusory. The consequence of bringing Times print workers into the orbit of those producing the Sunday Times was far more easily discernable. Even in the context of Fleet Street, Sunday Times printers had a reputation for truculence. Partly this was attributed to the fact that they were largely casuals who worked for other newspapers (or had different jobs like taxi driving) during the week and were not burdened by any sense of loyalty to the Sunday Times. Industrial muscle was flexed not merely through strike action but by a myriad minor acts designed to demonstrate whose hand was on the stop button. Paper jams occurred with a regularity that management found suspicious. Such jams could take forty minutes to sort out and result in the newspaper missing the trains upon which its provincial circulation depended. But from the print workers point of view, paper jams meant extra overtime pay. Newsagents began referring to the newspaper as the Sunday Some Times.[30 - Marmaduke Hussey, Chance Governs All, pp. 129, 132.]
More important than industrial action or sabotage was the effect the print union chapels had on blocking innovation. Muirhead Data Communications had developed a system of transmitting pages by facsimile for the Guardian back in 1953 but, because of union hostility, no national newspaper had dared use the technique until the Financial Times gritted its teeth and pressed ahead in 1979.[31 - Financial Times, 18 February 1986.] By then, The Times – in common with all other national newspapers – was still being set on Linotype machines (a technology that dated from 1889). Molten metal was dripped into the Linotype machine, a hefty piece of equipment that resembled a Heath Robinson contraption. As it passed through, the operator seated by it typed the text on an attached keyboard. Out the other end appeared a ‘slug’ of metal text which, once it had cooled, was fitted into a grid. It would then be copy checked for mistakes. If errors were spotted, a new ‘slug’ would be typed. Once the copy was finally approved, it would proceed to ‘the stone’. There, it would be encased in a metal frame. This was the page layout stage, from which it was ready to be taken to the printing machines. It was an antiquated and occasionally dangerous (the hot metal could spatter the operator) method of producing a newspaper, not least because most of the rest of the world – including the Third World – had long since abandoned Linotype machines for computers. Thomson had purchased the computer equipment but had to store it unused in Gray’s Inn Road pending union agreement to operate it. Using computer word processors to create the newspaper text for setting out was a far less skilled task than operating the old linotype machines. In 1980, journalists were still using typewriters. Their typed pages were then taken to the Linotype operator who would retype in hot metal. But with computerized input, journalists could type their own stories directly into the system, negating the need for NGA members to retype anything. This was part of the problem – it would make redundant most of the Linotype operators and, if followed up by other Fleet Street newspapers, would soon threaten the very existence of a skilled craft union like the NGA. Thus the union officials at TNL refused to allow the journalists to type into a computerized system unless their own union members typed the final version of it. In other words, if journalists and advertising staff typed up their text on their own computer screens, NGA members would have to type it up all over again on computer screens for their exclusive use. This was known as ‘double-key stroking’ and negated any real saving in introducing computer technology.
Management’s attempt to break the NGA’s monopoly on keying in text in favour of journalists having the powers of direct input was one of the causes of the shutdown of The Times for just short of a year between November 1978 and November 1979. Led into battle by TNL’s chief executive, Marmaduke Hussey, management attempted to force the print unions to conclude new deals that would pave the way for the computer technology’s introduction. When no comprehensive deal emerged, management shut down the papers in the hope of bringing the unions back to the negotiating table. As a strategy it proved a miserable failure. It cost Thomson £1 million a week to keep its printing machines idle and to have a nonexistent revenue from sales or advertising. The fear that The Times’s best journalists would be poached by rival newspapers ensured that all the journalists were kept on on full pay to do nothing. This was a clear signal to the print unions that there was no intention to shut down The Times permanently. Furthermore, they could also see that, buckling under the costs, the management were increasingly desperate to resume publication. By sitting it out, the printers could drive a harder bargain.
Management did attempt one daring breakout. It was often alleged that it would be cheaper to print the newspaper abroad and airfreight it into Britain than print it under the restrictive practices of Fleet Street. What was certainly the case was that 36 per cent of advertising revenue in The Times came from overseas. So it was decided to print a Europe-only edition that would at least show that the paper was alive and could feasibly be produced elsewhere. A newspaper plant in Frankfurt agreed to undertake the task. This proved most illuminating. In Fleet Street, NGA compositors doing ‘piece work’ managed to type around 3500 characters an hour. They defended their high salaries by pointing to this level of expertise. But the German compositors in Frankfurt – women (all but barred by the Fleet Street compositors) working in a language that was not their own – managed 12,500 characters an hour (in their own language they could set 18,500).[32 - Bill O’Neill, Copy Out manuscript.] Such statistics told their own story.
But if a point was proved by the exercise, it was the value of brute force. The British print unions persuaded their German brothers to picket the plant. With ugly scenes outside, the German police discussed tactics with Rees-Mogg who was at the Frankfurt site for the launch. They offered to use water cannon on the crowd in order to clear a path for the lorries to transport the first edition out of the plant but they could not guarantee subsequent nights if the situation deteriorated further. Meanwhile, inside the plant, various sabotage attempts were being detected, including petrol-soaked blankets that had been placed near the compressor – potentially capable of causing a massive explosion, which, as Hussey put it ‘might have blown the whole plant and everyone in it sky high’.[33 - William Rees-Mogg to the author, interview, 3 December 2001; Hussey, Chance Governs All, p. 164.] Reluctantly, Rees-Mogg gave the order to abandon production. Once again, management’s attempts to circumvent their unions had been humiliatingly defeated.
In November 1979, the TNL management formally climbed down and called off the shutdown. They had failed to secure direct input for journalists or to get the print workers to agree legally binding guarantees of continuous production. The only upside to this humiliation was that management was prevented from installing what would actually have been the wrong typesetting system (a disastrous discovery Hussey made late in the dispute when he visited the offices of The Economist and realized his mistake).[34 - Andrew Knight to the author, 2 December 2004.] The shutdown meant that The Times, which had long claimed to be Britain’s journal of record, had reported nothing for almost a year. Among the events it was unable to comment upon was Margaret Thatcher’s coming to power. The total cost to Thomson exceeded £40 million. The unions’ concession was that – already obsolete – computer typesetting would be introduced in stages but that NGA operatives would ‘double-key stroke’ all text.
That The Times returned at all after a stoppage of such duration was impressive. That it returned with circulation figures similar to those it had enjoyed before the shutdown was an extraordinary testament to the quality of the product and the extent to which its readers had mourned its absence. Indeed, such was the economics to which Fleet Street was reduced that the eleven-month shutdown left little enduring advantage to The Times’s competitors. The Times’s absence had increased their market opportunity. The Daily Telegraph, in particular, made gains. But gains involved pushing up production levels and this was only achieved at a cost that met the increase in sales revenue. When The Times returned, its rivals had to scale production down again but, thanks to union muscle, they were unable to cut back the escalating cost that had been forced upon them in the meantime.[35 - Simon Jenkins, The Market for Glory, p. 149.]
It might have been imagined that the journalists’ frustration at the print workers would have bonded them more closely with management in ensuring that The Times saw off its tormentors, but the failed shutdown strategy made many of them equally critical of TNL executives.[36 - And the feeling appeared equally hostile among staff at the Sunday Times: Harold Evans to Sir Gordon Brunton, memo, 9 February 1980.] Indeed, the success of the print workers in defending their corner emboldened some of the more militant Times journalists to see what would happen if they too pushed at a door that was not only ajar but loudly banging back and forth in the wind.
During the 1970s, salaries for Times journalists had lagged behind the spiralling inflationary settlements of the period. But during the shutdown, Thomson had kept faith with its Gray’s Inn Road journalists by continuing to pay their full salaries during the eleven months they were not actually doing anything. Furthermore, they were given a 45 per cent pay increase in 1979 to make up for previous shortfalls.[37 - The Times, 30 August 1980.] Despite this, in August 1980 the journalists went on strike when TNL offered a further 18 per cent pay increase instead of the expected 21 per cent.
Of the 329 members of the paper’s editorial staff, about 280 were members of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ). The union meeting at which the decision to strike was made took place when many were away and – although it represented a majority of those who turned up to the meeting – only eighty-three actually voted for industrial action. They were responding to the call of The Times NUJ’s father of the chapel, Jake Ecclestone, who argued that it was a matter of principle: an independent arbitrator had suggested 21 per cent and in offering only 18 per cent TNL had refused to be bound by independent arbitration. That the NUJ chapel had also refused to be bound by it was glossed over.[38 - Ibid.]
While the independent arbitrator had concentrated upon what he thought was the rate for the job, TNL had to deal with a law of the market: what they could reasonably afford. The difference between the two pay offers amounted to £350 a journalist but, if the knock-on effect of subsequent negotiations with the print workers was factored in, then TNL maintained the difference was £1.2 million. There was certainly collusion between print and journalist union officials in calling the strike. Although many journalists crossed the picket line, the NUJ had taken the precaution of getting the NGA to agree to go on strike too if management attempted to get the paper out.
Management had long come to accept that dealing with those who printed the paper was a war of attrition against a tenacious and well-organized opponent. But the attitude now displayed by some who actually wrote the paper was too much to endure in silence. The strike ended after a week but it destroyed the will of the existing management to persevere. When The Times returned on 30 August, its famous letters page was dominated by readers of long standing who had loyally waited for their paper’s return during the eleven-month shutdown but who now felt utterly betrayed. ‘It is impossible to believe in the sense, judgment or integrity of your journalists any longer’ was one typically bitter accusation. Subscriptions were cancelled, sometimes in sadness but frequently in anger at the fact that ‘you and your staff can have no feeling for your advertisers and readers. Other newspapers do not get into these situations. Your ineptitude beggars belief.’[39 - Letters from Alan Reid and T. C. M. Powell, The Times, 30 August 1980.] But the most important lecture came not from disgusted of Tunbridge Wells but in the day’s leader column, written by Rees-Mogg himself. ‘How to Kill a Newspaper’ ran the length of the page. It washed the paper’s dirty linen in public and some staff disliked the idea that their editor was writing a leader chastising the actions of many of his own colleagues. Jake Ecclestone, ‘gifted but difficult’, was even named in the sermon that laid out before readers exactly the scale of journalists’ pay increases over the previous two years and contrasted it with the extent of the newspaper’s losses. Rees-Mogg pulled no punches, claiming that there could be no such thing as dual loyalty, for a journalist ‘is either a Times man first or an NUJ man first … if the strikers do not give their priority in loyalty to The Times … why should they expect that the readers, or indeed the proprietor, of The Times should continue to be loyal to the paper?’[40 - William Rees-Mogg, unsigned leader, ‘How to Kill a Newspaper’, The Times, 30 August 1980.]
This was very much to the point, for the Thomson board had been meeting to debate that very question. Although it was denied at the time, it was the NUJ strike that tipped the balance in convincing Thomson executives to dispose of The Times and, with it, the other TNL titles.[41 - Sir Gordon Brunton to the author, interview, 8 April 2003.] Sir Gordon Brunton had called senior colleagues to his beautiful country house near Godalming, Surrey, and it was there that the decision was taken. This was then ratified by the Thomson British Holdings board and, over the telephone, confirmed with Lord Thomson of Fleet. Preferring to live most of his time in Canada, Ken Thomson had taken over the family empire on the death of Roy, his father, in 1976. He felt little of his Anglophile father’s obvious pride in owning The Times. In the end, the ultimate proprietor did not take much persuading although, naturally, in the press release he stated, ‘it grieves me greatly’.[42 - Lord Thomson of Fleet, press release, 22 October 1980. File 9335.] It was Harold Evans, editor of the Sunday Times, who put it succinctly: ‘One can’t blame Lord Thomson … the poor sucker has been pouring millions into the company and has been signing agreements which have been torn up in his face.’[43 - Harold Evans at a luncheon talk to Morgan Grampian journalists, quoted in UK Press Gazette, 27 October 1980.] Roy Thomson’s dream of securing The Times’s future forever had ended after only fourteen years and at a cost of £70 million. The Spectator’s media pundit, the historian Paul Johnson, summed up the situation:
The Times … is a femme fatale: it sent Northcliffe off his rocker, proved too expensive even for the Astors and wrecked Thomson’s reputation for business acumen. It could well drag down Murdoch and his entire empire, financially much less solid than Thomson’s, if he is fool enough to saddle himself with it.[44 - Paul Johnson, Spectator, 31 January 1981.]
And yet, on New Year’s Eve, the last day in which bids for the paper would be accepted, Times Newspapers received an offer from Rupert Murdoch. It was for a mere £1 million, but it was a declaration of intent.
III
In all, there were around fifty bids, although given the criteria Sir Gordon Brunton and Sir Denis Hamilton had drawn up, less than a handful were seriously considered. The Aga Khan and a plethora of Middle Eastern bidders were ruled out by the decision to ensure that a potential owner had to be either British or from the Commonwealth. At a stretch this would be widened to include suitable (North) Americans. Rejected on personal grounds were Robert Maxwell, Sir James Goldsmith and Tiny Rowland.[45 - Grigg, The Thomson Years, pp. 554, 556; Sir Gordon Brunton to the author, interview, 8 April 2003; Denis Hamilton, Editor-in-Chief, p. 179; Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 125.]
In so far as any one man could determine who would buy The Times, that man was Sir Gordon Brunton. Lord Thomson fully trusted his chief executive with the task of disposing of his most famous possession. Born in the East End and influenced as a student by Harold Laski, his tutor at the LSE, as well as by his experiences of wartime command in the Royal Artillery and Indian Army in Assam and Burma, Brunton combined formidable business acumen, left-leaning political inclinations and a committed interest in the Turf. He had joined the Thomson Organisation in 1961 and within seven years had risen to become its managing director and chief executive. Given that TNL had ultimately proved to be the one major failing company in Thomson’s British operations, it would have been understandable if Brunton had regarded its disposal as a matter of getting the best price in the fastest time with the minimum of fuss. But this was not at all how he saw his task. Rather, he threw his full weight behind finding a buyer who would ensure the survival of the famous newspaper, even if this meant declining a higher but separate bid for the Sunday Times on its own. By the 31 December deadline, Rees-Mogg’s consortium had proffered a token £1 for The Times. Believing that the paper’s viability was tied to staying within the TNL family, Brunton was fundamentally at odds with the Times consortium’s assumption that the daily could have an independent future. Consequently, he was equally dismissive of the attempts of Harold Evans to form a separate consortium to buy the Sunday Times. Like Rees-Mogg with The Times, Evans had been trying to encourage a range of investors to take a share in the future ownership of the paper he edited. At one stage he had been hopeful that the Guardian would be the paper’s saviour, although the Guardian’s board soon balked at the cost. But even if Evans had succeeded in attracting sufficient support, Brunton was having none of it, making his position clear in a telephone conversation in which Evans recalled the chief executive saying, ‘Consortia cannot deal with unions. And I am not selling single titles. I will not see The Times shut down.’[46 - Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, pp. 89–91, 111, 125.]
In the 1960s, The Times’s then owners, the Astor family, concerned by the paper’s inability to make a profit, had also concluded that it could not stand on its own. They sought out the possibility of it merging with the Guardian. The Guardian enjoyed a higher circulation, but there were serious questions over whether the differences in political outlook (and the readership thereby attracted) could be harmonized successfully into one merged paper. When in 1966 the scheme fell through, The Times considered merging with the Financial Times. This would have created a newspaper of perhaps unsurpassable international authority with a readership profile tailored to suit a quality – and thus very lucrative – advertising market. The Times would have formed the main paper with the distinctive pink-papered FT inserted inside as its business section. Owned by Pearson, the FT was profitable and had established itself as the principal daily record of business and finance. But despite his protestations that owning The Times was about preserving the national interest rather than making a profit, Gavin Astor had considered Pearson’s price for buying The Times inadequate to the point of insulting. Meanwhile, Roy Thomson, owner of the Sunday Times, offered over £3 million for The Times. Considering the Astor family had bought it for £1.5 million in 1922, this gave some indication of how poor an investment it had proved. But the Thomson bid was far better than that from the Financial Times.[47 - Iverach McDonald, The History of The Times, vol. V: Struggles in War and Peace 1939–1966, pp. 409–28; Jenkins, Market for Glory, p. 53.] Thus was given up one of the great opportunities to ensure The Times’s market sector pre-eminence so that it could successfully fund its own expansion. Instead, its future would depend upon subsidy from the wealth of its group owner.
In becoming the one hundred and eighty-third newspaper in the Thomson Organisation, The Times found itself in the same group as the Sunday Times. Despite the coincidence of the same word in the title, there was no shared ancestry between the two papers – both had always had different owners. Roy Thomson had bought the Sunday Times from its then owner, Lord Kemsley, in 1959. Only when Thomson purchased The Times in 1966 did the two papers find themselves, while still editorially independent from one another, sharing a common proprietor. Although his own experience was in guiding the Sunday Times to its extraordinary commercial success, Sir Denis Hamilton prided himself on his role in supporting Brunton’s fusion of these two very different newspapers into one company, Times Newspapers Limited. In fact, it was always cohabitation rather than a marriage and the decision to live together at Gray’s Inn Road, while not obviously affecting The Times’s editorial morality, was widely viewed as corrupting it in other respects. Courteous and highminded, this was not how Sir Denis saw it and he desperately wanted to avoid seeing what he regarded as one of his life’s achievements end in an acrimonious break-up. Thus he shared Sir Gordon Brunton’s view that whoever bought the potentially profitable Sunday Times would have to be equally committed to shoring up the losses of The Times. On no account should their creation, TNL, be broken up. This dovetailed perfectly with Murdoch’s plans since he did not think he could buy either paper separately. In the case of the Sunday Times, he thought the Monopolies Commission would block his purchase. In view of the daunting scale of its losses, he recalled, ‘I would not have had the guts to buy The Times on its own.’[48 - Rupert Murdoch to the author, interview, 4 August 2003.] But if both were sold to him as a joint package, so these barriers were removed: the daily paper’s losses could be cancelled out by the Sunday’s revenue potential while the Government might permit him to own the Sunday paper if it meant that in doing so he could save the existence of the daily.
Having skimmed down the list, Brunton and Hamilton were left with what they considered were just two serious offers. One was from Rupert Murdoch, the other from Vere Harmsworth, third Viscount Rothermere. Besides its regional papers, Lord Rothermere’s Associated Newspapers owned the Daily Mail and part-owned the London Evening Standard. His great-uncle, Lord Northcliffe, as well as founding the Daily Mail, had owned The Times between 1908 and 1922, saving it from bankruptcy. But future profit rather than family pietàs appeared to be Rothermere’s motivation now. He offered Thomson £25 million for the Sunday Times but would knock £5 million off if the price of closing the deal meant that he had to buy The Times as well.[49 - Sir Gordon Brunton to the author, interview, 8 April 2003.] This was ominous. Rothermere later stated:
I didn’t want The Times. I wanted the Sunday Times. What we wanted to do was somehow shunt off The Times where it would survive as a parish newspaper of the elite. So it would remain that way at a minimum loss situation because none of us could see how it could ever be made commercially viable.[50 - Quoted in S. J. Taylor, An Unlikely Hero, p. 180.]
That he should want the Sunday Times was hardly surprising. If its troubled industrial relations could be sorted out it would quickly return to great profitability. And buying it certainly seemed less risky than Associated’s other plan – launching the Mail on Sunday. But the notion that The Times could survive as some sort of specialist interest publication with a tiny readership and minimal investment was, from a business perspective, without logic. Ultimately it would not even satisfy its core market: if it was starved of the money necessary to retain experts reporting from home and abroad, why would even an elite turn to it as a reliable source of information? When Brunton asked Rothermere if he could guarantee that he would not close down The Times if he bought it, Rothermere admitted he could make no such undertaking.[51 - Sir Gordon Brunton to the author, interview, 8 April 2003.]
Rothermere was a victim of his own honesty since, once the deal had gone through, he would have got his hands on the prize of the Sunday Times and could have shut The Times down almost immediately, pausing only to transfer its better features and journalists to the Sunday title along the way. That he told the truth may well have been what saved The Times from the scrap heap. Brunton’s insistence that he would not sell TNL to anyone who did not intend to invest in The Times’s future meant that there remained only one other press magnate on the Thomson chief executive’s list. But could Rupert Murdoch’s motives be trusted?
Murdoch had delayed asking for a prospectus until early December. But once he had decided to move he did so with speed. Two key players were brought in. One was his banker friend Lord Catto, chairman of Morgan Grenfell, who organized a meeting at his flat with Brunton to discuss the deal. Educated at Eton and Cambridge, Catto was the son of the Governor of the Bank of England during its ‘nationalization’ by the Attlee Government. He had been on the board of Murdoch’s News International Ltd since 1969, having played a decisive part in securing Murdoch’s first foothold in Fleet Street: ownership of the News of the World (by convincing its owners, the Carr family, that their paper would remain safe in their hands if the young Australian became a major shareholder). Catto now had to convince Brunton that The Times would be safe in the Murdoch grip. Murdoch’s other lieutenant in the operation was his old boarding-school friend, Richard Searby. As boys they had been roommates together at Geelong Grammar School before following one another up to Oxford. A politically well-connected QC in Australia, Searby was sufficiently impressed by Murdoch’s seriousness about purchasing The Times that, over the course of a telephone call, he offered his services and flew in to London in order to be in the closest position to offer legal advice on the deal.[52 - Richard Searby to the author, interview, 11 June 2002.]
With Catto and Searby at his side, Murdoch’s clear display of interest contrasted favourably with the more languid approach to negotiation displayed by Rothermere who, cocooned in his Parisian tax haven, left most of the negotiating to Associated Newspapers’ managing director, Mick Shields. But the crucial difference was that Murdoch stated categorically that he was bidding for all of TNL and fully intended to keep The Times as a going concern. He told Harold Evans that Rees-Mogg was mistaken if he had come away from his meeting at the New York Post with the impression that Murdoch’s interest was in the Sunday Times alone.[53 - Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 122.] Importantly, Murdoch had Sir Denis Hamilton’s support. On 9 January 1981 Hamilton wrote a memo to Brunton giving his views, and those of the national directors of Times Newspapers, that Murdoch was their preferred choice. It was true he had had a ‘deteriorating effect’ on tabloid standards but this had to be balanced by the fact that he had created a quality broadsheet in The Australian. If binding guarantees could be secured regarding editorial independence and quality, then there were no objections to his purchasing Times Newspapers. Hamilton and the directors were much less enthusiastic about Rothermere’s bid, suspecting that ‘property potential is greater motivation than the development of these papers’. Furthermore, the ‘strong and consistent bias towards the Conservative Party’ displayed in Rothermere’s newspapers was ‘incompatible with the independent role of The Times’.[54 - Sir Denis Hamilton to Sir Gordon Brunton, 9 January 1980, Brunton Papers.] This contrasted with Murdoch who was ‘neither greatly to the left or greatly to the right’.[55 - Sir Denis Hamilton to the Directors of TNHL, 16 January 1981. Hamilton Papers.] In this last respect, opponents of the political orientation of Murdoch’s newspapers in the 1980s might be forgiven for delivering a mirthless laugh.
Initially Harold Evans at the Sunday Times had been taken aback by the speed with which Hamilton had come round to seeing Murdoch as a saviour.[56 - Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, pp. 106–7.] Yet, while continuing to press the claims of his own Sunday Times consortium, Evans wrote to Brunton on 20 January passing on the views of Sunday Times staff: ‘between Murdoch and Rothermere, it is Murdoch who is preferred by a wide margin’. Subject to the appropriate safeguards, Evans also conceded, ‘I myself would choose Murdoch’.[57 - Harold Evans to Sir Gordon Brunton, 20 January 1981, (underlining as in original), Brunton Papers.]
Brunton’s task was to keep Murdoch interested without giving him the impression he was the only horse in the race. This was not just because the hint of competition would encourage Murdoch to raise his offer price. Closing down The Times would cost its owner £35 million in redundancy payouts. Thomson would have to foot this bill if the paper’s ownership was not transferred before the 15 March deadline. If Murdoch believed none of his rivals could secure a deal before that date, he could sit it out and wait for The Times to fold, allowing Thomson to pay the costs. After a seemly pause, there was nothing to stop Murdoch then starting a new paper called The Times (after all, in Fleet Street’s history there had been a number of newspapers of varying longevity called the Sun). For this ‘new’ Times he could hire whoever he liked on whatever terms (subject to employment law) fitted in with his own business strategy, including possible adoption of the Rees-Mogg plan of freeing himself from Fleet Street’s costs and militancy by printing from a provincial location.
In fact, there was nothing in Murdoch’s negotiating stance that suggested this ethically doubtful option formed any part of his strategy. Indeed, the more Hamilton and the Times Newspapers directors contemplated the ‘ruthless operator’ the more they believed he had ‘a personality which probably could relate to The Times’.[58 - Denis Hamilton to Directors of TNHL, 16 January 1981. Hamilton Papers.] Rees-Mogg was now firmly of the view that Murdoch, rather than his own consortium, was the newspaper’s saviour-in-waiting. All that remained was for an appropriate price to be agreed together with his assent to a number of safeguards that would stop him interfering in the paper’s editorial content in the way in which he was known to do with the Sun.
The negotiations came to a head on 21 January at the elegant Thomson headquarters in Stratford Place, off Oxford Street. The Thomson team refused Murdoch’s demand that they should give a written guarantee that the company’s assets were worth £17.9 million and that the current losses would be no greater than £14.5 million. There was, Brunton later admitted, ‘some blood on the walls’. Murdoch then went downstairs to face the vetting committee that had been drawn up to assess his personal suitability. ‘These dignified gentlemen probably thought I was quaking with fear,’ he recalled; ‘actually I was shaking with anger’.[59 - Quoted in the Sunday Times, 15 February 1981.] Despite this, he made a favourable impression. The vetting committee consisted of Sir Denis Hamilton together with the two editors, Rees-Mogg and Harold Evans, and the national directors, Lords Roll, Dacre, Greene and Astor (Lord Robens, who was in America, kept in touch by telephone). Murdoch made several assurances: that he would abide by the editorial safeguards drawn up and would not seek to direct editors, even when they pursued views contrary to those expressed in his other titles; that he hoped Harold Evans would continue to edit the Sunday Times; that he did not have the resources of Lord Thomson at his disposal. He said that he saw the role of the independent national directors as that of a court of appeal for an editor who felt himself in conflict with his proprietor. Murdoch guaranteed to increase the number of independent directors sitting on the board of Times Newspapers Holdings Ltd. This board alone would have the power to appoint or remove an editor, voting by majority decision. It would also take a majority vote of the directors to approve any subsequent sale of The Times or Sunday Times.[60 - Minutes of the TNL Editorial Vetting Committee, 21 January 1981, file A759–9335.]
Harold Evans took great care to ensure the wording of the guarantees. Rees-Mogg took a less legalistic view, believing that, once ensconced, the power of a proprietor was such that little could realistically be done to bind him to guarantees he had chosen, for whatever reason, to disobey. Rees-Mogg maintained, ‘I thought therefore a judgment of character had to be made’, and in his opinion Murdoch ‘would in fact honour the agreements’. Thus the precise wording was not really crucial.[61 - William Rees-Mogg to the author, interview, 3 December 2001.] The Spectator’s press columnist later took a yet more robust view, maintaining that The Times would never have seen the light of day if John Walter, the ex-bankrupt who founded it in 1785 with the intention of making money for himself, had been subjected to the proprietorial guarantees forced upon Murdoch.[62 - Paul Johnson, Spectator, 20 April 1985.] In fact, the Australian was in some respects treated with less condescension than had been Roy Thomson. When he had bought The Times in 1966 he had to agree not only to abstain from editorial interference (which was, in any case, never his style) but also that he would not even sit on the newspaper’s board (from where, with de haut en bas condescension and despite having sold the business, Gavin Astor managed to ensure his appointments continued to exercise a guardian role). Murdoch fully intended to sit on the board of his own company into which he would be pouring money.
The vetting committee voted unanimously in favour of Murdoch. The deal was eventually done after the midnight hour had struck. Subject to securing agreement for job cuts with the unions and that the Government would not refer the purchase to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission, The Times and the other TNL titles would become the property of News International. The press releases went out on 22 January. Brunton expressed the hope that the unions would agree with him that Murdoch represented the best hope of keeping TNL together. Murdoch sought to concentrate on the guarantees he had given with regard to independent national directors, to his faith in Harold Evans as ‘one of the world’s great editors’ and to his own intentions:
I am not seeking to acquire these papers in order to change them into something entirely different. I have operated and launched newspapers all over the world. This new undertaking I regard as the most exciting challenge of my life.[63 - Statements by Sir Gordon Brunton and Rupert Murdoch, press releases, 22 January 1981, Hamilton Papers A759–9335.]
The first major newspaper to carry the news was Rothermere’s London Evening Standard. The banner headline roared out ‘MURDOCH BUYS THE THUNDERER’.[64 - Evening Standard, 22 January 1981.]
Thomson’s asking price for Times Newspapers was £55 million. Murdoch’s final offer of £12 million was £8 million less than the bid Rothermere had made and £13 million less than Rothermere had proffered for the Sunday Times alone. That Brunton nonetheless favoured Murdoch’s bid was proof that Thomson was philanthropically more interested in the long-term future of The Times than in making money from its sale.
What remained to be seen was whether Murdoch was equally highminded. True, TNL was making a loss, but such losses could be set against the tax payable on the profits of News International’s other press division, News Group Newspapers (the Sun and the News of the World). NGN had recorded a £20.3 million pre-tax profit in the second half of 1980. In return for the £12 million Murdoch had paid for TNL, he had gained the freehold of the Sunday Times building on Gray’s Inn Road (said to be worth at least £8 million) together with other assets such as vehicles and machinery that were roughly computed to be worth nearly £18 million. Of the £12 million paid to Thomson, £8 million was for the Gray’s Inn Road property and only £4 million for the shares in Times Newspapers. By keeping the property assets of TNL separate from the publishing subsidiary, News International could shut down the papers with minimal redundancy payouts to the employees and yet liquidate the property assets separately.[65 - Sunday Times, 15 February 1981; Daily Telegraph, 29 September 1981.] Brunton believed Murdoch was a man of his word. If he was not, Thomson had sold out to someone who could make a quick profit as an asset stripper.
IV
Murdoch’s purchase of Times Newspapers was conditional. If he could not negotiate sufficient job cuts with the unions before 15 March the deal would be off. In this eventuality, the Thomson board would find themselves scrapping around at the last minute for an alternative purchaser in whatever days remained before the official shut-down of the company. In that eventuality it would be a buyer’s market and the papers might have to be sold to a proprietor who fell short of Brunton’s ideals (although he remained adamant that he would rather see The Times put to sleep than handed into the bear hug of Robert Maxwell).[66 - Sir Gordon Brunton to the author, interview, 8 April 2003.] There was also a second hurdle. Newspaper takeovers were subject to referral to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission. Purchasing TNL gave News International more than a quarter of the market share in dailies. The Government might block the purchase on these grounds alone. At any rate, there was no prospect of the Monopolies Commission issuing its report before the 15 March deadline for transferral of ownership.
On 19 January, the Times’s NUJ chapel had carried overwhelmingly (there was only one vote in opposition and four abstentions) a motion stating that ‘any further concentration of ownership of national newspapers in Britain would be against the public interest’ and that a potential purchaser should be referred to the Monopolies Commission.[67 - The Times, 20 January 1981.] Since the newspaper’s purchase by either of the major bidders could not do other than concentrated ownership, the union activists appeared to be endangering any future for their paper unless it was from a consortium like that proposed by Rees-Mogg (who was, in any case, now in the pro-Murdoch camp). This stance fortified efforts to block Murdoch’s purchase in the House of Commons. The Labour MP Phillip Whitehead was attracting names for an Early Day Motion as opposition, particularly although not exclusively on the left, mounted to the deal.
On the first Saturday after he had made his provisional agreement with Thomson and the TNL directors, Murdoch was shown around the Sunday Times’s composing room. Stopping to look at the proof of the paper’s leader article on the sale, he spotted a factual omission (the Daily Star had not been added to the list of titles owned by Express Newspapers). Instinctively, Murdoch reached for his pen and marked on the proof where the words ‘Daily Star’ should be inserted. This was his first error. Word soon got around that the proprietor designate had already broken his guarantees and was interfering in the editorial policy of the Sunday Times. Had he not had the gall to change a leader article in the full view of the composing room? Evans sent him a note of rebuke. Murdoch quickly apologized, but the incident was a gift to his detractors.
Given the attitude expressed by the NUJ chapel, reassuring the journalists was an immediate priority. With Rees-Mogg standing supportively at his side, Murdoch addressed the editorial staff of The Times on 26 January. He had ‘great respect’ for the paper and reaffirmed his intention not to alter its essential character. There would be more of interest for women with extra sections to make it ‘of greater value and appeal at home rather than being taken off to work by commuters’ but there would be no sudden attempt to become a mass-market paper. Murdoch repeated that he would stand by his editorial guarantees and that while he would ‘complain if the facts are wrong’ he had ‘no intention of interfering with any opinions in the paper’. He believed that any attempt by him to tear up the guarantees would create ‘a terrible public stink’ that ‘would destroy the paper’. On the paper’s financial future he was resolute. It was ‘unhealthy’ for it to be dependent on a proprietor. Profitability was the best guarantor of independence. But it was the ‘biggest challenge in the world’ to make The Times viable and it would take at least three to four years for it to make a profit. It would not move to his currently idle print works at Wapping. He thought the Guardian and Daily Telegraph were equal rivals. He apologized for previously calling The Times a ‘dead duck’. He had meant to say ‘sick duck’.[68 - Record of Murdoch’s remarks to staff, 26 January 1981, Hamilton Papers A759–9335; The Times, 27 January 1981.]
Although the union activists in the paper’s NUJ chapel remained sceptical or hostile, opinion was sharply divided and immediately after Murdoch had made his address to them, one hundred journalists on the paper quickly signed a statement supporting his purchase. On the same day, Jake Ecclestone passed on the view of the NUJ meeting to John Biffen, the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, demanding a referral to the Monopolies Commission.[69 - The Times, 27 January 1981.]
Looked at at face value, the case for referring the Murdoch bid to the Monopolies Commission was overwhelming. In 1966 Harold Wilson’s Government had referred Roy Thomson’s purchase of The Times even although it would give him control of a mere 6.5 per cent of the national and provincial dailies’ circulation. In 1981, The Times had only 1.9 per cent of the market share in national daily newspapers but the Sun enjoyed a 25.3 per cent share. Together this meant that News International’s papers would account for 27.2 per cent. Concentration was yet higher in the Sundays market where the 7.7 per cent share of the Sunday Times, when added to that of the News of the World, gave News International a 31 per cent share.[70 - Market share breakdown in memo of 26 January 1981 in Hamilton Papers.]
On the other hand, such was the relative smallness of their sale, the addition of the Times titles made only marginal difference to News International’s total market share, especially in the dailies market. In any case, adding the Sun’s circulation to The Times produced a figure of limited practical meaning since the proportion of readers who regularly bought both a daily tabloid and a broadsheet was tiny. But even if the sales were all added together and treated as one, the company would still not be the market leader. Adding the sales of The Times gave News International 4,120,493 daily sales. The Mirror Group had 4,380,000 sales a day. London would still have less of a monopoly newspaper structure than existed in New York, Paris, Bonn or Frankfurt.[71 - Paul Johnson, Spectator, 31 January 1981.]
Whatever the spin put on the statistics, the 1973 Fair Trade Act stipulated that all major newspaper takeovers should be referred to the Monopolies Commission. But the Secretary of State could overrule this stipulation if the paper concerned was unprofitable and in danger of closing down without a quick transferral of ownership. This section, 58(3) of the Act, was the Thomson-Murdoch ‘get out of jail’ card and one they were determined to play.
Thomson’s submission to the Secretary of State, John Biffen, left little room for ambiguity. On no account would the seller extend the deadline in order to facilitate the Monopolies Commission to undertake its report (which was expected to take a minimum of eight weeks to compile). The proposed agreement with Murdoch rested on consent from the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) being granted by 12 February otherwise the deal was off. A new potential proprietor would then have to be approached in the time remaining. This would not be easy since ‘there is little likelihood that a suitable alternative buyer for TNL as a whole will be identified. There are no signs that any other potential buyer for TNL as a whole has as strong a commitment as NIL [News International Limited] to preserving The Times on a long-term basis.’ Indeed, if a new serious bidder came forward he would probably be another owner of a media empire, necessitating a fresh Monopolies Commission report to be put in motion and causing yet further delay. The process could last for months with each serious bidder eventually being ruled out in turn until someone sufficiently minor could be found to take on the paper’s elephantine problems. Rather than continue losing money while this merry-go-round proceeded at its own leisurely pace, Thomson were not prepared to relent on their decision to close down The Times and its sisters, with or without a sale, by 15 March.[72 - James Evans (Director, The Thomson Organisation) to John Biffen, 26 January 1981; Thomson submission to the Department of Trade and Industry.] In other words, the Government could agree to the sale and secure the papers future, or it could demand a referral and risk their destruction.
On 26 January, John Biffen was deluged with visitors. Having only just returned from a trip to India, he was heavily dependent upon the briefing provided by his departmental officials who had spent the last few days working on the legal technicalities of whether the TNL sale necessitated a referral. Sally Oppenheim, his junior minister at the DTI, came over to discuss the matter. Their first visitor was Sir Gordon Brunton. Biffen and Oppenheim insisted that he postpone the sale deadline so that the Monopolies Commission could intervene. Brunton refused point-blank.[73 - Sir Gordon Brunton to the author, interview, 8 April 2003.] The next visitor was Rupert Murdoch. He made clear that he would pull out of the deal if it was referred to the Commission. If some thought this a bluff, they were wrong. Murdoch would have pulled out if the deal had been referred.[74 - Rupert Murdoch to the author, interview, 5 August 2003.] Then came Jake Eccelestone (with Eric Jacobs, his Sunday Times counterpart) to put the NUJ case for referral. Finally, Sir Denis Hamilton called, assuring Biffen that Murdoch was the papers’ only hope and that he had made guarantees on editorial freedom that no other Fleet Street proprietor had been prepared to make.
This was not the only influence brought to bear. In 1981, Margaret Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch scarcely knew one another and had no communication whatsoever during the period in which The Times bid and referral was up for discussion.[75 - Ibid.] But, in Woodrow Wyatt, Murdoch and the Prime Minister had a mutual friend. This clearly being the moment to make the most of such a contact, Murdoch got Wyatt to plead his case directly with her.[76 - Woodrow Wyatt, Journals of Woodrow Wyatt, Vol. I, p. 372, diary entry, 14 June 1987.] Subsequently, Murdoch assumed that Biffen was ‘probably told what to do by Margaret.’[77 - Rupert Murdoch to John Grigg, Grigg, The Thomson Years, p. 573.] In fact the part played by Margaret Thatcher in the decision not to refer the bid was at best a subtle one. Critics of Thatcher and Murdoch have long maintained that there must have been some – even if tacit – understanding in which she used her weight to ensure that he could bypass the Monopolies Commission and buy The Times and in return he ensured his newspapers henceforth banged the Thatcherite drum. There is a problem with this theory. Although John Biffen assumed the Prime Minister wanted the bid to go through, he could recall no occasion when she pressed him on the matter. What was more, when ‘E’ Committee – the Cabinet committee delegated with the task of determining whether to make the referral – convened on 26 January the most outspoken voice in favour of permitting Murdoch’s purchase was the decidedly un-Thatcherite Jim Prior. Prior, who was Employment Secretary, wanted the deal to go ahead not least because the unions wanted Murdoch.[78 - Lord Biffen to the author, interview, 1 August 2003.]
Whether adding 1.9 per cent to News International’s market share of daily sales constituted a threat to the free working of a competitive market was no longer the issue bothering ‘E’ Committee. But there certainly remained a presentational problem if the bid was not referred. Lawyers spent the evening working out how the safeguards Murdoch had made to the TNL vetting committee could be legally incorporated into the conditions giving consent for the transfer of ownership to go ahead. The somewhat arbitrary commitment to editorial quality could not be phrased into a legal obligation, but in other respects the guarantees would be made legally binding. Although a fine was more likely, Murdoch would risk a spell in jail if he flouted them.[79 - Hamilton Papers 9758/4; The Times, 28 January 1981; Sunday Times, 15 February 1981.]
Biffen was due to give his statement to the Commons on 27 January. By then ninety-two MPs had signed the Early Day Motion demanding a referral to the Monopolies Commission and the Speaker of the House of Commons permitted the Opposition a three-hour emergency debate on the matter.
As Shadow Secretary of State, Labour’s John Smith opened the case for referring the sale of what he called ‘The Times, perhaps our most prestigious newspaper’. It was, he believed, ‘one of the largest and perhaps the most significant mergers in the history of journalism in the United Kingdom’. He questioned the Sunday Times’s supposed unprofitability and cast doubts on the ability of national directors – of whom ‘there was a faint air of the Athenaeum’ – to keep Murdoch true to his promises. Biffen then made his statement. He conceded the law stipulated that any transferral of a national newspaper must be subject to the scrutiny of the Monopolies Commission but mentioned the let-out clause if, because of the paper’s unprofitability, doing so would endanger the paper’s life. This was such a case. He had asked Thomson to extend their deadline so that the Monopolies Commission could look into the sale. They had refused. He was not prepared to risk the closure of The Times and over four thousand redundancies at TNL by demanding a referral.
Cries of ‘disgraceful’ resounded around the Commons chamber. Jo Grimond, the former leader of the Liberal Party (and a trustee of the Guardian), was outraged: ‘Parliament could not have legislation made a nonsense of because people laid down a timetable.’ Not content with describing it as ‘blackmail’ and ‘an insult to the nation’ the Labour MP (and sometime business associate of Robert Maxwell) Geoffrey Robinson described it as ‘a pay-off’ for the Sun supporting the Conservatives in the general election.[80 - Hansard, 27 January 1981; The Times, 28 January 1981.] But the most penetrating speech in opposition came from the Conservative benches. Jonathan Aitken was Beaverbrook’s greatnephew. He was concerned about the method with which the Government had approved the bid but, privately, he also feared that Murdoch was looking for fresh springboards to promote his anti-Establishment and republican views.[81 - Jonathan Aitken to the author, interview, 27 May 2003.] It was clear Aitken had done his homework when he quoted from an interview Murdoch had given to an American magazine, More, in 1977. Murdoch had been quoted as saying it was ‘quite correct and proper’ that the Monopolies Commission would prevent him from acquiring another ‘successful’ British daily. ‘Successful’ was, of course, the key clause, but Aitken had more to add. The guarantees were worthless. Murdoch had ‘strewn assurances and safeguards on newspaper and television ownership like confetti’ both to the Carr family and in Australia. There were plenty of credible owners for The Times – the Rees-Mogg consortium, Lonhro, Associated Newspapers, Atlantic Richfield – which the Thomson board had chosen to ignore because their deal with Murdoch was ‘pre-arranged’. Aitken even cast vague doubts upon one of the TNL directors on the vetting committee, who was also chairman of Warburgs (Thomson’s merchant bankers), asking ‘What is the role of Lord Roll? [laughter on both sides of the House] Is he banker of fees or the bulwark of liberty?’ His conclusions were sweeping:
This is a sad day for Fleet Street, which is to see the greatest concentration of newspaper monopoly in its history. It is a sad day for the Conservative Party, which appeared this afternoon to have abandoned its traditional role of the opponent of large monopolies whenever possible.[82 - Hansard, 27 January 1981.]
Aitken was one of five Conservative MPs (the others were Peter Bottomley, Hugh Fraser, Barry Porter and Delwyn Williams) who defied a three-line whip and voted with the Opposition. It was in vain, and the Commons divided 281 to 239 against referring the sale. Murdoch had won a major battle. Securing the job cuts with the unions remained the only hurdle before Times Newspapers would be in his hands.
But while he had won the vote, not everyone was convinced his case had won the argument. Although he would soon accept Murdoch’s shilling, Harold Evans wrote Aitken a letter congratulating him on his speech.[83 - Jonathan Aitken to the author, interview, 27 May 2003.] There was a widespread belief that it had all been a stitch-up. Aitken had alleged that Thomson had suspiciously ignored several serious bids because it had already decided upon Murdoch. But were the names Aitken reeled off superior bidders? Rees-Mogg himself thought Murdoch a better option than his own consortium. Atlantic Richfield was about to move out of British newspaper ownership. Associated Newspapers could not guarantee The Times’s future. The idea that the editorial independence of the paper would be in safer hands with Lonhro’s Tiny Rowland was, as the Observer would later discover, highly contestable. If Brunton had pre-judged Murdoch’s suitability over these alternatives, might it not have been on the basis of an honest assessment of who offered the best future – perhaps the only future – for The Times? And if Lord Roll was a ‘banker of fees’ would he not have urged acceptance of the far higher bid from Rothermere’s Associated Newspapers?
The controversy was kept alive when, only a month after Biffen had made his statement in the Commons, the American oil company Atlantic Richfield sold the troubled Observer to Outrams, a subsidiary of Tiny Rowland’s Lonhro Group. Given that the Glasgow Herald was the closest Outrams/Lonhro could claim to owning a national newspaper, Biffen’s decision to refer the bid to the Monopolies Commission appeared perverse. Memorably dubbed by Edward Heath the ‘unacceptable face of capitalism’, Rowland had made himself objectionable to conservatives, socialists and liberals in equal measure and could find fewer defenders than Murdoch. The manner in which the Observer had been sold to him created unease, for the first that any of the editor-in-chief, the editor or the board of directors knew of it was after the deal had been done. There was also a more clearly defined question of public interest, in particular whether there was a conflict between the Observer’s extensive coverage of African affairs and Rowland’s business interests there. The Monopolies Commission could find no evidence to assume that it would and permitted the deal to go ahead subject to the installation of independent directors on a model similar to that adopted at Times Newspapers.[84 - The Times, 26 February 1981; Alan Watkins, A Short Walk Down Fleet Street, pp. 178–9; Jenkins, Market for Glory, pp. 169–70.] The experience was not to prove a happy one. But in February 1981 there remained many who could not see the consistency in the Government’s handling of newspaper takeovers.
Whatever the political symmetry between the Thatcher Government and Rupert Murdoch, the decision not to refer the TNL purchase was only legally possible on the grounds of the papers’ unprofitability. The Thomson submission to Biffen had claimed, ‘neither The Times nor the Sunday Times are economical as going concerns and as separate newspapers under current circumstances’.[85 - Thomson submission to the Department of Trade and Industry.] That The Times was in dire straits was not in doubt. But could that really be said of the Sunday Times, whose problems were hoped to be but temporary?
The TNL statistics sent out by Warburgs to prospective buyers had shown that the Sunday Times had actually scraped into the black in 1980 and by 1983 would be making projected profits of £13 million. John Smith immediately challenged Biffen on these figures since they appeared at odds with the statement he had given to the Commons. Biffen had to concede that he had based the paper’s loss on an estimate of the first nine months of 1980 and not, as MPs had been led to assume, the first eleven.[86 - John Biffen to John Smith, 3 February 1981, letter reprinted in The Times, 4 February 1981.] Harold Evans was not alone in resenting the way in which those seeking to avoid a referral had treated his paper. He found that many of his journalists ‘objected to being swept into what they saw as a large, alien publishing group on the sole grounds that it was necessary to save The Times’.[87 - Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 143.] This now became a problem. The NUJ chapel of the Sunday Times decided to challenge Biffen’s non-referral in court. The action could cost £60,000 – a sum that was far beyond the chapel’s reach. Negotiations were opened with Rothermere’s Associated Newspapers to see if they would underwrite the expense. The intermediary was Jonathan Aitken. But Associated were hesitant and, with only thirty-six hours to go before the court hearing, the chapel called off the action following Murdoch’s promise that two working journalists would be appointed to the TNL Holdings board.[88 - Ibid., pp. 151–3; Sunday Times, 18 February 1981.]
Murdoch could now turn his attention to jumping the final hurdle: agreement with the unions. Historically, he had not been one of the unions’ principal bogeymen. In 1969, they had emphatically preferred his bid for the Sun to that of Robert Maxwell who promised under his ownership a paper that ‘shall give clear and loyal support at all times to the Labour movement’ but who wanted to cut the number employed printing the paper.[89 - Jenkins, Market for Glory, p. 58.] Compared to Rothermere who might close The Times, or the Rees-Mogg consortium that wanted to move printing to the provinces, Murdoch seemed the best bet for keeping jobs at Gray’s Inn Road. Because of this, Bill Keys (SOGAT), Joe Wade (NGA) and Owen O’Brien (NATSOPA) had written on the day after Thomson had accepted Murdoch’s provisional bid to Michael Foot, Labour’s Deputy Leader, urging him not to press for a referral to the Monopolies Commission.[90 - The Times, 13 February 1981.] The appeal fell upon deaf ears, but it was a positive sign of how they regarded Murdoch.
News International and the unions had until 12 February to agree a deal. A 30 per cent cut in the four thousand jobs at TNL was demanded. If enough voluntary redundancies could not be agreed, compulsory ones would make up the shortfall. There would also have to be a wage freeze until October 1982. Murdoch put two of his most doughty negotiators in charge of the talks. One was John Collier. Collier had been a NATSOPA official, working for the Guardian back in the days when it still retained Manchester in its title. He had joined Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers following its purchase of the Sun, becoming general manager in 1974. He knew how Fleet Street negotiations worked. In contrast, his accomplice had not even set foot in Britain before. But Murdoch had every confidence in the ex-secretary of the Sydney Ten-pin Bowling Association, Bill O’Neill. He had started as a fifteen-year-old apprentice in the composing room of the Sydney Daily Mirror. Like Collier, he had been active in the print union although disgust at the outlook of its pro-Communist officials led him to seek out union responsibilities that were less overtly political. He was still at the Sydney Mirror when its owners, Fairfax, sold it to Murdoch. The new proprietor promptly set about reinvigorating the run-down title in a manner similar to his later strategy at the Sun. By the mid-seventies, O’Neill had switched to the management side. When, in early 1981, Murdoch asked him what he thought of the intention to buy The Times, O’Neill mumbled something about barge poles. Murdoch shot back, ‘it’s obvious you’ve been talking to the wrong people’, and told him that he should expect to be in London for only as long as it took to finalize the deal with the unions there – which he estimated at two weeks. This was one of Murdoch’s less accurate predictions.[91 - O’Neill, Copy Out.]
In truth, the scope for trimming departments stretched far beyond what was discussed. When a thirty-year old Iowan named Bill Bryson arrived as a subeditor on The Times’s company news desk in the dying days of the Thomson ownership he was astonished by the work culture he encountered. His colleagues wandered in to the office at about 2.30 in the afternoon, proceeded to take a tea break until 5.30 p.m. after which they would ‘engage in a little light subbing for an hour or so’ before calling it a day. On top of this, they got six weeks’ holiday, three weeks’ paternity leave and a month’s sabbatical every four years. Bryson was equally taken aback by the inventive approach to filing expense claims and the casual attitude of the reporters in his section, many of whom stumbled back to the office after a lengthy liquid lunch to make ‘whispered phone calls to their brokers’. ‘What a wonderful world Fleet Street then was,’ Bryson concluded twelve years later when he wrote the episode up with only mild exaggerations for comic effect in his best-selling book on his adopted Britain, Notes from a Small Island, adding wistfully, ‘nothing that good can ever last’. Suddenly, Murdoch’s men – ‘mysterious tanned Australians in white short-sleeved shirts’ – began roaming around the building armed with clipboards and looking as if ‘they were measuring people for coffins’. Soon company news got subsumed into the business news department and Bryson found himself working nights and ‘something more closely approximating eight-hour days’.[92 - Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island, pp 46–7.]
Despite the extent of the options for where cuts could be made, Collier and O’Neill were faced with a massive task to reach agreement with all fifty-four separate chapels in the twenty-one days between Murdoch’s deal being agreed in principle with Thomson and the 12 February deadline. Invariably brinkmanship played its part but on the final day a compromise was reached. The TNL payroll was cut by 563 job losses, a reduction of around 20 per cent. This was achieved by voluntary redundancy at a cost of around £6 million to News International. It was telling that removing a fifth of the workforce did not appreciably lower the quality of the product. Importantly, agreement was reached to print the supplements (the Times Literary, Times Educational and Times Higher Education) outside London. This probably saved the life of the loss-making TLS. But the proposed wage freeze would only last for three months, there were no compulsory redundancies and no movement from the unions towards allowing journalists direct input. ‘Double-key stroking’ would remain. Harold Evans later concluded that the negotiations were ‘an opportunity forgone’: of the 130 jobs cut from the 800-strong NATSOPA clerical chapel, 110 were actually unfilled vacancies (in itself an extraordinary statistic at a time of soaring unemployment) and the most militant union fathers kept their jobs. But the truth of the matter was that there was little prospect of the newspapers being printed had News International tried to sack the unions’ spokesmen. At about this time, Len Murray, the general secretary of the TUC, confided to Murdoch his long-held belief that the Fleet Street proprietors had got the trade unions they deserved. With just a hint of menace, Murdoch replied, ‘well, now perhaps the unions have got the proprietor they deserve’. He appeared to mean it. Asked how he would respond to any new bout of industrial action at Gray’s Inn Road, Murdoch told the press, ‘I will close the place down’.[93 - O’Neill, Copy Out, p. 15; Sunday Times, 15 February 1981; Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 182; Grigg, The Thomson Years, p. 576; The Times, 13 February 1981.] It was an unequivocal response from the man who was being interviewed because he had just officially become The Times’s owner.
V
Richard Searby believed Rupert Murdoch’s desire to own The Times was deep-seated and stretched back to the splendid engraved inkwell that the paper’s owner, Lord Northcliffe, had presented to his father.[94 - Richard Searby to the author, interview, 11 June 2002.] At Geelong Grammar, a boarding school labouring under the tag ‘the Eton of Australia’, the boys mocked the young Rupert with his father’s nickname, ‘Lord Southcliffe’. In fact it was his first name, Keith, that Rupert shared with his father.
The friendship between Northcliffe and Keith Murdoch had been forged during the First World War. In 1915 while employed by one of the news agencies, Keith Murdoch had been sent out to cover the Dardanelles campaign where Australian and New Zealand (Anzac) soldiers were suffering heavy casualties. He quickly surmised that the senior command was incompetent and that heroic Anzac troops were being let down by their British counterparts. In fact, he was not on the front line and much of his information came from a dissatisfied reporter from the London Daily Telegraph. But if his sources were weak his readership was focused. His report landed on the desk of the Australian Prime Minister and, on reaching London, Keith Murdoch went to The Times with his account. Northcliffe, the paper’s editorially interfering proprietor, read it and told the driven Australian journalist to pass it to the Prime Minister. Asquith promptly circulated it to his Cabinet.
The commanding officer, General Sir Ian Hamilton, blamed his subsequent removal on Murdoch’s coloured account. The Anzacs’ withdrawal from the campaign also came to be seen as stemming from what had been written. Keith Murdoch’s version would eventually be summarized by his admiring son: ‘it may not have been fair, but it changed history’.[95 - Quoted in William Shawcross, Murdoch, p. 38.] In the year the son bought The Times, he co-financed a film, Gallipoli, starring Mel Gibson, in which effete British commanders casually sacrificed the lives of courageous anti-Establishment Australians. Given a choice between truth and legend, the son continued to promote the legend.
From the moment of Keith Murdoch’s Dardanelles scoop, he had the attention and support of Lord Northcliffe. The owner of The Times became a mentor for the motivated Australian, inspiring him and including him in his influential social circle. And Murdoch learned a good deal from the man who had done so much to create the mass-appeal ‘new journalism’, launching new titles and rejuvenating old ones like The Times. When Murdoch struck out on his own, taking up the editorship of Australia’s Melbourne Herald, Northcliffe even went over there to sing his praises. The Herald’s directors soon had cause to join in: circulation rose dramatically and its editor joined its management board, buying other papers and a new medium of enormous potential – a radio station. Growth would be fuelled by acquisition, creating a business empire in a country in which the print media was entirely localized. It was also a route to making enemies who believed Keith (from 1933, Sir Keith) Murdoch’s expansionist strategy not only gave the Herald and Weekly Times Group too much financial clout but also made its managing director a kingmaker in Australian politics as well. The Herald Group’s competitors were especially dismayed when with the outbreak of the Second World War he was appointed Australia’s director-general of information. The role of state censor was certainly not in keeping with the role he had played in the previous conflict. But when, in 1941, ten-year-old Keith Rupert Murdoch arrived at boarding school, it was to discover to his surprise that it was his father’s crusade to bolster the power of the press that was often looked at with mistrust and apprehension.
Though he showed little interest in Geelong’s emphasis on team sports, Rupert Murdoch’s childhood had been predominately spent outdoors with his three sisters riding and snaring (Rupert persuaded his sisters to skin the unfortunate rodents for a modest fee while he sold on the pelts at a larger mark-up). Home was his parents’ ninety-acre estate, Cruden Farm, thirty miles south of Melbourne. The house itself was extended over the years and by the time Rupert was growing up there it resembled the sort of colonnaded colonial residence more generally associated with Virginian old money. But rather than be overexposed to its creature comforts, Rupert spent his evenings between the ages of eight and sixteen in a hut in the grounds. His mother thought it would be good for him.[96 - Shawcross, Murdoch, pp. 47–9; Rupert Murdoch to the author, interview, 4 August 2003.]
Cruden was named after the small Aberdeenshire fishing village from which Rupert Murdoch’s grandfather, the Revd Patrick Murdoch, had lived and preached. A Minister in the principled and unyielding Calvinism of the Free Church of Scotland, the Revd Murdoch had in 1884 transferred his mission to the fast-expanding metropolis of Melbourne. Widely admired, by 1905 he had risen to the church’s highest position in the country – moderator of the General Assembly of Australia. The grandfather on his mother’s side provided young Rupert with a contrasting influence: Rupert Greene was an affable half-Irish, free-spirited gambling man. Not surprisingly, commentators came to see Rupert Murdoch as, in some ways, a composite of the two.
In 1950 Murdoch went up to Oxford University. For the most part he enjoyed student life there and later became a generous benefactor of his college, Worcester. But at the time, and despite the efforts of such eminent tutors as Asa Briggs, it was not his Philosophy, Politics and Economics degree course that held his attention. At the Geelong school debating society, he had espoused radical and frequently socialist views. He maintained this stance at Oxford, often attending Union debates where bestrode confidently the young Tory matador, Rees-Mogg of Balliol. Murdoch, however, chose to stand for office in the university Labour Club. The club’s president, the young Gerald Kaufman, had other ideas, and had him disqualified for illegally soliciting votes (canvassing being – technically – forbidden). Some thought it was Murdoch who was indulging in gesture politics. He kept a bust of Lenin in his rooms, but they were among the finest in college. He was also one of the few students committed to the triumph of the proletariat to own, in his final year, a car in early 1950s Oxford. He had an eclectic circle of friends in a whimsical philosophical society he joined named after Voltaire. Cherwell described him as ‘turbulent, travelled and twenty-one, he is known … as a brilliant betting man with that individual Billingsgate touch. He manages Cherwell publicity in his spare time.’[97 - Quoted in Shawcross, Murdoch, p. 61.] Relegated to even sparer time were his studies and in 1953 he went down with a third-class degree.
On coming down, he got his first taste of Fleet Street as a junior sub at the Daily Express. The pride of Beaverbrook’s titles, the Express was at that time close to the summit of its prestige and popularity. Edward Pickering found time to keep a paternal eye on Sir Keith’s son as he toiled away on the subs desk. Indeed, Pickering assumed the mentor’s role for Rupert Murdoch that Northcliffe had played for his father. And the young journalist appreciated the training, retaining throughout his career the highest regard for the man he would ultimately make executive vice-chairman of Times Newspapers.
In September 1953, Murdoch returned to Australia. But it was not the homecoming of which he had once dreamed. Sir Keith had died the previous year while his son was still up at Oxford. It was a terrible blow. ‘My father was always a model for me,’ Murdoch later said. ‘He died when I was twenty-one, but I had idolized him.’[98 - Murdoch quoted in Chief Executive magazine; quoted in TNL News, November 1982.] And the son had learned something else from his father’s experience: Sir Keith had built up a newspaper empire, but as a manager, not an owner. After death duties had taken a sizeable claim, the money left for his widow Lady (later Dame) Elisabeth, son and three daughters was held in the family holding company, Cruden Investments. The Herald Group persuaded Lady Elisabeth to sell them the Murdoch half-share in the Brisbane Courier-Mail on terms that proved highly favourable to the Herald Group. Thus the only proprietorship left for Rupert Murdoch to inherit was a controlling interest in News Limited, owner of a single by no means secure daily, the Adelaide News – which was not even the biggest paper in Adelaide – and its sister title, the Sunday Mail. The immediate response of the Herald Group was to try and strip him of it. On failing to persuade Lady Elisabeth to sell them the Murdoch stake in News Limited, they announced their intention to drive the Adelaide News out of business. Sir Keith had helped make the Herald Group the most important media company in Australia. Its treatment of his family on the morrow of his death caused tremendous acrimony. And it instilled in the son an important lesson about where power lay. He would follow in his father’s footsteps, but with one crucial difference – he was determined to own the papers he built up.
The first objective was to see off the Herald Group’s assault on the Adelaide News and Sunday Mail. The attack was repulsed and News Limited became the basis of Rupert Murdoch’s acquisitions fund. Within two years of taking the helm he saw its net assets double. After purchasing a Melbourne women’s magazine, the loss-making Perth Sunday Times became his first newspaper acquisition in 1956, when he was still only twenty-four. He transformed its sales but kept its sensationalist reporting. The purchase of other small local papers followed. Then he bid successfully for one of the two licences for Adelaide’s first television channels. His Channel 9 beat the rival Channel 7 to be first on the air and started generating enough revenue to finance far grander dreams of expansion. Sydney’s newspaper market was a virtual duopoly of the Fairfax and Packer families but in 1960 Murdoch got a foot in the door when Fairfax sold him the Mirror, a downmarket paper which had become something of an embarrassment to the company and which when sold, it was imagined, would be less of a threat if owned by an outsider like Murdoch than by a more direct rival. Instead, the result was a no-holes-barred circulation war in which Sydney’s tradition of sensationalist reporting was surpassed.
In 1964 Murdoch launched his first new title. Based in the capital, Canberra, The Australian became the country’s only truly national newspaper. It was also a serious-minded broadsheet, committed to political analysis and in-depth reporting. In other words, it was a departure from its owner’s previous projects. Maxwell Newton, The Australian’s editor, recalled that on its first night Murdoch told him, ‘“Well, I’ve got where I am by some pretty tough and pretty larrikin methods … but I’ve got there. And now,” he said, “what I want to do – I want to be able to produce a newspaper that my father would have been proud of.”’[99 - Maxwell Newton in ‘Six Australians: Profiles of Power’, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 1 January 1966, quoted in Neil Chenoweth, Virtual Murdoch, p. 32.] He stuck with the paper ever after, despite its inability to return a profit.
In 1969, Murdoch made the great leap, breaking into the British market with a newspaper far removed from his product in Canberra. He had originally wanted to take control of the Daily Mirror, but purchasing sufficient shares proved impossible. The News of the World was a popular Sunday institution, long known as the ‘News of the Screws’ because of its stories about defrocked vicars and low goings-on in high places (or just low places if it was a slow news day). With six million copies sold each Sunday (down from a peak of over eight million in 1950), the raucous and right-wing publication had the largest circulation of any newspaper in Britain. But by 1968 its Carr family proprietors, giving the outward impression of ennui, found themselves fragmented and receiving the unwelcome attention of Robert Maxwell. In order to prevent Maxwell buying a third of their company’s shares, the Carrs opted to sell a 40 per cent stake to Murdoch. This seemed the best policy since, although the thirty-eight-year-old Australian would become managing director, he had promised that he would not seek to increase further his share and that Sir William Carr – or, in time, another member of his family – would continue to be chairman of the company. Within six months of the deal going through, Murdoch duly increased his share, entrenched his control of the paper and forced Sir William, incapacitated by illness, to resign. Murdoch then put himself forward as chairman. He regarded this as a matter of business sense. Others called it sharp practice.
It was the trade unions that provided Murdoch with his greatest coup. Maxwell, having been thwarted in his attempt to acquire the News of the World, hoped to buy the ailing Sun from the Daily Mirror’s owners, IPC. He would maintain the Sun’s left-leaning politics and would not let it challenge the Mirror directly for dominance. Delighted, IPC agreed generous terms of sale. But Maxwell also made it clear that in taking on a loss-making paper he would have to cut jobs and costs. The unions objected to this, and Hugh Cudlipp, IPC’s chairman, feared it might trigger a wave of union militancy that would disrupt production of the company’s highly profitable Mirror. Cudlipp had fathered the Sun in 1964 as a middle-market broadsheet (it replaced the defunct trade union-backed Daily Herald bought by IPC three years earlier) and did not want to contemplate infanticide. So he sold it for the trivial sum of £500,000 (of which only £50,000 was a down payment) to Murdoch, a man who – compared to Maxwell or the alternative of certain death – had the unions’ blessing. Over the next three years, the circulation of Murdoch’s Sun rose from under one million to over three million. The paper’s mix of sauce and sensationalism earned its new owner the sobriquet ‘Dirty Digger’. But more to the point, he now had his cash cow and could plan for expansion accordingly.
Yet Murdoch’s next forays into Fleet Street were unsuccessful. It seemed The Times would never come up for sale – Roy Thomson had pledged as much and was not in apparent need of ready cash. But the future of another illustrious title, the Observer, edited by Gavin Astor’s cousin David, appeared far less certain. In 1976, however, it preferred to sell itself for a mere £1 million to Atlantic Richfield rather than to the downmarket tabloid owner of the Sun and the News of the World. Like Thomson with Times Newspapers, Atlantic Richfield was a company making large profits from oil exploration that talked the language of moral obligation rather than business opportunity (at least until 1981 when it sold the loss-making paper to Tiny Rowland). In 1977, Murdoch’s was one of the raised hands in the crowded bidding for the fallen Beaverbrook empire. The prospect of breathing new life into the once mighty Daily Express, where nearly a quarter of a century earlier he had learned the subeditors’ craft from Edward Pickering, was naturally appealing. But he lost to a higher bid from Trafalgar House who placed a building contractor, Victor Matthews, behind the chairman’s desk of the newly named Express Newspapers.
But by this stage, Murdoch’s News Limited had spread to three continents. His first American acquisitions came in Texas when in 1973 he bought the San Antonio Express and its News sister paper. After a slow start the titles became increasingly profitable. An attempt to launch a rival to the National Enquirer proved unsuccessful but he was not to be put off by temporary reverses (he merely transformed his product into Star, a women’s magazine that by the early eighties returned a $12 million annual profit). The great test of his mettle came in 1976 when Dorothy Schiff sold him the liberal leaning New York Post. He paid $10 million for a paper that was haemorrhaging money, but rather than taking time to regroup he immediately pressed ahead, spending a further $10 million to buy New York magazine and Village Voice.
In the twenty-eight years between his father’s death and his acquisition of The Times, Murdoch had progressed from owning one newspaper in Adelaide to becoming a major presence across the English-speaking world with annual sales of over A$ 1 billion (£485 million). His News Corporation was valued on the Sydney stock exchange at £100 million. It owned half the shares in its British subsidiary, News International (owner of Times Newspapers and the tabloids of News Group Newspapers). The other half of News International’s shares was quoted on the London stock exchange with a value of £35 million. Yet the perceived imperative of keeping personal control had not been squandered in the midst of this expansion. The Murdoch family’s holding company, Cruden Investments, still owned 43 per cent of the parent company.[100 - Sunday Times, 15 February 1981; Daily Telegraph, 30 September 1981.]
Murdoch was able to pursue a policy of aggressive expansion because of the profitability of his London tabloids and by pointing to a proven track record in turning around under-performing titles. It was enough to secure credit from the banks. But his growing band of critics had come to credit him only with debasing the profession of journalism. Aside from his patronage of The Australian (and even here there had been evidence of his interference in editorial policy), he was now held in contempt by those who believed he had built success upon a heap of trash. His titles sensationalized events, trivialized serious issues (when indeed they bothered to report serious issues at all) and frequently allowed their zeal in getting a scoop to overcome questions of taste, fairness and honesty. More than any other, it was Murdoch’s name that had become associated with ‘tabloid journalism’ as a pejorative term.
From November 1970, the Sun sported topless women on its page three. Feminists and arbiters of decency loudly condemned this popular move. In fact, it was not exactly a Fleet Street first: as long ago as 1937 the high-minded Hugh Cudlipp, then editor of the Mirror’s Sunday sister paper, had reproduced a topless damsel chaperoned by the obtuse picture caption ‘a charming springtime study of an apple-tree in full blossom’. Even newspapers owned by such respectable figures as Lord Thomson and edited by William Rees-Mogg were not immune. Five months after the Sun launched its topless page three girls, The Times pictured one of them nude in a full-page advertisement for Fisons’ slimming biscuits (one reader asked whether the paper’s self-regarding 1950s advertising slogan ‘Top People Take The Times’ should be replaced with ‘Topless People Take The Times’; another wrote, ‘I hope this delightful picture has the same effect on The Times’s circulation as it does on mine.’). Although it proved a sell-out issue, it did not, however, start a broadsheet trend. In contrast, page three nudity became synonymous with the Sun. Those who did not believe masscirculation newspapers were the place for entertainment or triviality hated Murdoch’s winning formula every bit as much as a previous generation had chastised Northcliffe for giving the people what they wanted in place of what was thought good for them. In the case of the Sun and the New York Post, Murdoch had indeed taken serious-minded newspapers downmarket. But many of his offending newspapers (in particular the News of the World, the Perth Sunday Times and the Sydney Daily Mirror) had been peddling titillation, half-truth and questionable journalistic standards long before his arrival on the scene. But the increasing size not only of headlines – now often involving a comic pun – but also graphic photographs certainly made their wares more pervasive and intrusive.
Murdoch was not interested in the critics of his tabloids. In his eyes they were cultural snobs, seeking to enforce their own tastes on millions of people whose lives were lived in conditions about which the arbiters of taste demonstrated scant concern or understanding. Papers like the Sun and the New York Post were responding to a need, reflecting what their readers wanted to unwind with in the course of what was otherwise a day of toil. But Murdoch went further in the defence of his titles. They were not just a form of cheap entertainment; they were genuine upholders of a fearless fourth estate. What the cultural establishment branded scandal-mongering was, more often, an attempt to hold to account those in public life for their actions – public and private. While the self-righteous broadsheets lazily reported ‘official’ news after it had happened, the popular press regularly created the news in the first place, by uncovering what was actually going on behind the veneer of authorized pronouncement. It was, Murdoch asserted:
not the serious press in America but the muck-rakers, led by Lincoln Steffens and his New York World, who became the permanent opposition and challenged the American trinity of power: big business, big labour and big government. It was not the serious press which first campaigned for the Negro in America. It was the small, obscure newspapers of the Deep South.[101 - Rupert Murdoch, speech at Melbourne University, 15 November 1972.]
Nor was this a phenomenon of the New World. Having sympathized with the Confederates in the Civil War, zealously advocated the appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s and adopted an understanding attitude towards Stalin in the 1940s, The Times had, in its high-minded way, not always walked with angels.
Yet, it was the social and political comment in Murdoch’s tabloids that many of his critics found the most pernicious aspect of his influence. The proprietor had long since mislaid his bust of Lenin, but not his dislike of the class system, and in the first three general elections of his ownership, the Sun endorsed the Labour Party. But when it came out in support of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives for the 1979 election, left and liberal commentators perceived they were now up against a formidable foe that was hooking millions of innocent readers to right-wing policies by pandering to their fears and sugaring the poison with smut and light entertainment. It was as if the Sun had become the opiate of the people. Two headlines in the paper in the months leading up to the 1979 election became legendary: ‘Crisis? What crisis?’ misquoted what the Labour Prime Minister, James Callaghan, had said on returning from a summit in Guadeloupe (although it caught accurately the mood he conveyed) while ‘Winter of Discontent’ soon became the recognized description of the period of industrial strife.[102 - Sun, headlines, 11 January and 30 April 1979.] In fact the Richard III reference had actually been made by Callaghan in a television interview two months earlier, but it was the Sun’s usage that gave it wider currency. Despite the evidence – as Callaghan acknowledged – that there was a cultural sea change underway among the electorate in favour of Mrs Thatcher, discontented figures on the left began to believe that their arguments had been defeated not in a reasoned debate but by the cheap headlines of Murdoch’s newspapers and their equivalents on the advertising hoardings hired by Saatchi & Saatchi. Given that Murdoch was known to interfere in the line his newspapers took, it was reasonable to assume the right-wing slant was all his doing. In fact, the extent of the Sun’s partisan support for Mrs Thatcher was far more a case of its editor, Larry Lamb, dictating the paper’s politics to the proprietor. Murdoch’s instincts had been far more cautious. But editors were easily dispensable and it was Murdoch who gained the opprobrium, one that got worse the more he came to believe Lamb had made the correct call.
This was the background to Harold Evans’s determination to have legally watertight safeguards against Murdoch’s exercising any editorial interference in The Times and Sunday Times. And there were plenty of journalists on the payroll determined to assert their independent judgment from the first. The profile of Rupert Murdoch that appeared in The Times upon his gaining control of the paper was certainly not effusive. Dan van der Vat described a ‘ruthless entrepreneur … and pioneer of female nudity’ pursuing a strategy of taking his papers ‘down-market to raise circulation’. Murdoch was the owner in the United States of ‘the downmarket Star’ who ‘transformed in the familiar down-market manner’ the New York Post. Scraping the barrel to try and find something positive to say, van der Vat’s profile concluded that The Times and Sunday Times ‘each have the most demanding readership in Britain, and it is a well-known tenet of Mr Murdoch’s philosophy to give the readers what they want’. The leader article, written by Rees-Mogg and entitled ‘The Fifth Proprietorship’, was less keen to find fault. Sketching the previous four owners of the paper, it noted, ‘neither Northcliffe nor Roy Thomson … managed to solve its commercial problems. If Mr Murdoch does resolve those problems he will have achieved something which has defied the masters of his craft.’ In Rees-Mogg’s opinion, the new owner stood ‘somewhere between’ Northcliffe’s ‘editorial genius’ and Thomson’s outlook as ‘a business man’. Murdoch was ‘a newspaper romantic’.[103 - Leading article, ‘The Fifth Proprietorship’, The Times, 13 February 1981.]
Less happy with this affair of the heart was the new owner’s wife, Anna. Looking forward to bringing up a young family in New York, she did not want to be uprooted and moved to London, a city in which she had previously had bad experiences (in particular the murder of a friend by kidnappers who mistook the woman for their actual ransom target – Anna herself). The Times, she conceded, was ‘not something that I really want, but if Rupert wants it and it makes him happy I’m sure we’ll sort it out’.[104 - Quoted in Leapman, Barefaced Cheek, p. 174.] Nonetheless, for her husband’s fiftieth birthday on 11 March 1981, she presented him with a cake iced with a mock front page of The Times – into which he excitedly plunged the knife.
CHAPTER TWO
‘THE GREATEST EDITOR IN THE WORLD’
The Rise and Fall of Harold Evans
I
After fourteen years in the chair, William Rees-Mogg had made it clear he would relinquish the editorship once the transferral of The Times’s ownership was complete. Thus, the first question facing Rupert Murdoch was whether the new editor should be appointed from inside or outside the paper. It was recognized that existing staff would be happier with ‘one of their own’ taking the helm rather than an outsider who might sport alienating ideas about improving the product. But it was not the journalists who were footing the losses for a paper that, on current performance, was failing commercially. In making his recommendation to The Times’s board of independent national directors, the proprietor had to consider the signal he would be sending out both to the journalists and to the market outside about what sort of paper he wanted by how far he looked beyond the environs of Gray’s Inn Road.
There were three credible internal candidates. As early as 12 February, Hugh Stephenson, the long-serving editor of The Times business news section, had written to Murdoch asking to be considered for the top job.[105 - Hugh Stephenson to Denis Hamilton, 13 February 1981, Hamilton Papers 9383/12.] A left-leaning Wykehamist who had been president of the Oxford Union prior to six years in the Foreign Office, Stephenson had been with The Times since 1968. This was an impressive résumé, but not one especially appealing to the new proprietor who was, in any case, not an admirer of the paper’s business content. Even quicker off the blocks was Louis Heren, who had made his intentions known to Sir Denis Hamilton the previous day. He was probably the candidate who wanted the editorship most and his success would certainly have been something of a Fleet Street fairy tale. The son of a Times print worker who had died when his boy was only four, Louis Heren had been born in 1919 and grown up in the poverty of the East End before getting a job as a Times messenger boy. His lucky break had come when an assistant editor noticed him in a corner, quietly reading Conrad’s Nostromo. Subsequently, he was taken on as a reporter and, after war service, he developed into one of the paper’s leading foreign correspondents, sending back dispatches from Middle Eastern battlefronts where the new state of Israel was struggling for its survival, and from the Korean War and later becoming chief Washington correspondent. If not a tale of rags to riches, it was certainly rags to respectability and, as Rees-Mogg’s deputy, he was entitled to expect to be considered seriously. But the fact that he had been, to all intents and purposes, educated by The Times posed questions as to whether he was best able to see the paper’s problems from an outside perspective. He was also sixty-two years old. When he sent the new owner a list of suggested improvements to the paper, Murdoch replied, without much sensitivity, that he wanted an editor ‘who will last at least ten years’ and that another rival for the post, Charles Douglas-Home, ‘is more popular than you’.[106 - Quoted in Michael Leapman, Barefaced Cheek, p. 203.]
On this last point, Murdoch was well informed. Charles Cospatrick Douglas-Home (‘Charlie’ to his friends) was the popular choice, certainly among the senior staff. He was the man Rees-Mogg wanted as his successor and when the outgoing editor asked six of the assistant editors whom they wanted, five of them had opted for Douglas-Home. The chief leader writer, Owen Hickey, had even taken it upon himself to write to Denis Hamilton assuring him that Douglas-Home was the man to pick.[107 - Owen Hickey to Denis Hamilton, 11 February 1981, Hamilton Papers 9383/12.] At forty-four, he was the right age and since joining The Times from the Daily Express in 1965 he had held many of the important positions within the paper: defence correspondent, features editor, home editor and foreign editor. He had been educated at Eton and served in the Royal Scots Greys. He was the nephew of the former Conservative Prime Minister, Alec Douglas-Home, and his cousin, a childminder at the All England Kindergarten, had recently become engaged to the heir to the throne. So he certainly had highly placed ‘connections’ (a disadvantage in the eyes of those who believed having friends in high places compromised fearless journalism). But ‘Charlie’ was no society cyphen. He took his profession seriously and had well-formed ‘hawkish’ views, especially on defence and foreign policy – all likely to endear him to the new, increasingly right-wing proprietor. He was also something of a contradictory figure: a former army officer who no longer drank, a fearless foxhunter who did not eat meat and a gentleman who, like an ambitious new boy in the Whips’ Office, had once been caught keeping a secret dossier on the private foibles of his colleagues.[108 - John Grigg, The History of The Times, vol. VI: The Thomson Years, p. 376; Leapman, Barefaced Cheek, p. 201.]
Murdoch interviewed the three ‘internal’ candidates on 16 February although, since he already had a preferred candidate in mind, he was essentially going through the motions. The man he wanted was not an old hand of The Times. Having made such a success steering the Sun, Larry Lamb anticipated the call up and was deeply hurt when it did not come. ‘I would never have dreamt of it,’ Murdoch later made clear, ‘he would have been a disaster.’[109 - Rupert Murdoch to the author, interview, 4 August 2003.] Yet Murdoch’s critics, incredulous that he meant what he said about guaranteeing editorial independence, were still waiting to see which other stooge he would appoint. In an article entitled ‘Into the arms of Count Dracula’, the editor of the New Statesman, Bruce Page, informed his readers, ‘it is believed in the highest reaches of Times Newspapers that the candidate which [sic] he has in mind is Mr Bruce Rothwell. Rothwell can reasonably be described as a trusted Murdoch aide …’[110 - Bruce Page, ‘Into the arms of Count Dracula’, New Statesman, 30 January 1981.] But, whatever was now the practice at the New Statesman, The Times was not ready to be run by a man named Bruce. Murdoch had fixed upon someone very different – a hero in liberal media circles.
Even before the deal to buy Times Newspapers was done, Murdoch had invited Harold Evans round to his flat in Eaton Place and asked him whether he would like to edit The Times. It was a probing, perhaps mischievous, question since Evans was at the time still trying to prevent the Murdoch bid for TNL so that his own Sunday Times consortium could succeed. But Murdoch could have been forgiven for regarding the avoidance of saying ‘no’ as a conditional ‘yes’.
Harold Evans was the most celebrated editor in Fleet Street. At a time when standards were said to be falling all over the ‘Street of Shame’, Evans appeared to exemplify all that was best about the public utility of journalism. By 1981, he had been editor of the Sunday Times for fourteen years – thereby shadowing exactly the service record of his opposite number, Rees-Mogg, in the adjoining building at Gray’s Inn Road. The two editors were the same age but their backgrounds could not have been more different. Two years older than Murdoch, Harold Evans was born in 1928, the son of an engine driver. His grandfather was illiterate. Leaving the local school in Manchester at the age of sixteen, he had got his first job towards the end of the Second World War as a £1-a-week reporter on a newspaper in Ashton-under-Lyme. The interruption of national service with the RAF in 1946 led to opportunity: the chance to study at Durham University (where he met his Liverpudlian first wife, Enid) and later Commonwealth Fund Journalism fellowships at the universities of Chicago and Stanford. By 1961 he had become editor of the Northern Echo. Driven by its new editor, the Echo started to take its investigative journalism beyond its Darlington readership. Its campaign to prove the innocence of a Londoner wrongly convicted of murder gained it national prominence. One of those who took notice was the editor of the Sunday Times, Sir Denis Hamilton, who brought Evans down to London to work alongside him. The following year, 1967, he succeeded Hamilton as editor of the paper. It was a meteoric rise from provincial semi-obscurity. Evans immediately proved himself at Gray’s Inn Road. In his new role as editor-in-chief, Sir Denis’s patronage and guidance were useful and some of the paper’s success was the consequence of his own formula: the paper’s colour magazine (a honey pot for advertising) and major book serializations. But Evans built on these strong foundations and, assisted by Bruce Page, Don Berry and others, he entrenched the position of the Sunday Times as Britain’s principal campaigning and investigative newspaper.
In 1972, Evans drove the campaign with which his name, and that of the Sunday Times, will always be associated: the battle to force Distillers Ltd to compensate adequately the victims of its drug, Thalidomide. The immediate reaction – as he well anticipated – was Distillers’ withdrawal of £600,000 worth of advertising in the paper. The other equally swift response was an injunction silencing the Sunday Times’s attempts to reveal the history of the drug’s development and marketing. With great tenacity (and an understanding proprietor in Roy Thomson), Evans continued the fight through the courts and to Strasbourg. Distillers was eventually forced into a £27 million payout to its product’s victims. And at last, in 1977, the Sunday Times got to print the details of its story (although the print unions decided to call a stoppage that day, ensuring few got to read about it).
Under Evans, the Sunday Times was a paper with a liberal conscience. The paper appeared at ease with the more permissive and meritocratic legacy of the 1960s. The cynic within Murdoch may well have thought that he could silence the howls of protest about his being allowed to buy The Times by putting such a respected, independent and liberal-minded editor in charge of it. Indeed, to appoint the man who had spent the previous months trying to wreck the News International bid with his own consortium (and who had privately applauded Aitken’s attack on it in the Commons) appeared to show a spirit of open-minded forgiveness that few had previously associated with Murdoch’s public conduct. Surely the new owner could not be all that right wing or controlling if he put in charge a man who had wanted the Sunday Times to be part owned by that tribune of democratic socialism, the Guardian? This would certainly be a calming message to convey.
But there was genuine admiration as well. Back in 1972, Murdoch had played his part in the Thalidomide controversy. He had been behind the anonymous posters that suddenly appeared across the country ridiculing Distillers, hoping (unsuccessfuly) that by this means his papers could discuss the company’s role at a time when its legal proceedings made doing so contempt of court. Unusually for Fleet Street proprietors, Murdoch understood every aspect of the newspaper business – not just the accounts. Thanks to the efforts of his father and Edward Pickering at the Express, Murdoch could sub articles with effortless aplomb. In this respect, he had something in common with Evans – comprehensive mastery of the journalistic craft. For Evans was the author of such tomes as The Active Newsroom and Editing and Design (in five volumes) which covered almost every aspect of putting together the written (and pictorial) page. The two men also appeared to have a common outlook. They admired American spirit and drive (both later became American citizens) and neither wished to be considered for membership of the traditional British Establishment. Despite his migration to London, Evans still wanted to be considered something of an outsider and this attracted Murdoch. The American academic Martin Wiener had just written his influential book, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850–1980. Its message appealed to Murdoch who told a luncheon at the Savoy: ‘It is the very simple fact that politicians, bureaucrats, the gentlemanly professionals at the top of the civil service, churchmen, professional men, publicists, Oxbridge and the whole establishment just don’t like commerce.’ Apart from the reference to ‘publicists’, he had basically reeled off a list of the core Times readership. But he was not finished with his castigation: ‘They have produced a defensive and conservative outlook in business which has coalesced with a defensive and conservative trades union structure imposing on Britain a check in industrial growth, a pattern of industrial behaviour suspicious of change – energetic only in keeping things as they are.’[111 - Rupert Murdoch to the annual lunch of the Advertising Association, quoted in TNL News, April 1981.]
With this attitude, it is easy to see why Murdoch hoped for great things from a restless and meritocratic figure like Harold Evans. That he could be given a pulpit in the housemagazine of the Establishment while being sufficiently intelligent to prevent accusations of being a downmarket influence made him, in Murdoch’s view, the ideal candidate.
It was up to the independent national directors, sitting on the holdings board of Times Newspapers, to make the final decision. The board consisted of four peers of the realm, Lords Roll, Dacre, Greene and Robens who, before ennoblement, had been Eric Roll, civil servant and banker; Hugh Trevor-Roper, historian; Sid Greene of the National Union of Railwaymen; and Alf Robens of the National Coal Board. Two new directors nominated by Murdoch now joined them: Sir Denis Hamilton and Sir Edward Pickering. Hamilton’s appointment was uncontroversial but Dacre objected to Murdoch assuming Pickering would be acceptable without the directors first voting on it. There was an embarrassing delay at the start of the meeting while this was done although it was not entirely to the directors’ credit that they appeared to know little about one of Fleet Street’s most successful editors and longest serving figures.[112 - Richard Searby to the author, interview, 11 June 2002; Leapman, Barefaced Cheek, pp. 204–5.] It had been under Pickering’s editorship that the Daily Express had achieved its highest ever circulation. Suitably acquainted with his qualifications, the directors hastily assented to Pickering joining them and proceeded on to the main business – the appointment of the new editor. Under the articles of association, the proprietor had the power of putting forward his preference for editor. The directors had the right of veto but not necessarily the option of discussing who they actually wanted. Had they the right of proposition, the editorship would most likely have gone to Charles Douglas-Home. But it was Harold Evans’s name that Murdoch put before them.
Not everyone shared his enthusiasm. Marmaduke Hussey, the executive vice-chairman of TNL who had overseen the failed shutdown strategy with the unions in 1979–80, had already assured Murdoch that the intention to make Evans editor of The Times and to move his old deputy, Frank Giles, into his vacated chair at the Sunday Times was ‘the quickest way to wreck two marvellous newspapers I can think of!’. To no avail, Hussey pleaded with him to make Douglas-Home the new editor.[113 - Marmaduke Hussey, Chance Governs All, p. 179.] Having brought Evans to the Sunday Times in the first place and watched over him as group editor-in-chief and TNL chairman, Denis Hamilton was, in principle, well placed to offer his assessment. And it was not entirely favourable. Certainly, Evans had his flashes of inspiration, even genius, but he was temperamental and liable to change his mind. In the course of producing a once weekly product this could be managed, but in editing a daily it could be disastrous. Yet, at the meeting of national directors, Hamilton chose to pull his punches and the opposition to Evans’s appointment was instead led by the forthright historian Lord Dacre, who articulated his objections with a pointed vehemence that bordered upon the abusive. But Dacre’s blackball was not enough and following his departure to deliver a lecture at Oxford, Murdoch’s insistence that The Times needed the best and Evans was the best convinced the rest of the board.[114 - Sir Edward Pickering to the author and Richard Searby to the author, 11 June 2002; Rupert Murdoch to the author, 4 August 2003; Denis Hamilton, Editor-in-Chief, p. 181; Leapman, Barefaced Cheek, p. 205.] So it was that Harold Evans became only the eleventh man to edit The Times since Thomas Barnes established the modern concept of the office in 1816, the year after Waterloo.
Evans’s appointment caused a buzz throughout Fleet Street. Those with a liking for archaic usage may still have referred to the paper as ‘The Thunderer’ but as a noun, not a verb. If anything, critics, particularly those who did not read it, thought of it as The (behind the) Times. Murdoch hoped that the new editor would instil some of the Sunday paper’s drive and contemporary feel into the all too respectable daily.
Those happy with the paper as it was greeted this prospect with disquiet. Louis Heren was of the view that ‘we were not a daily version of the Sunday Times’. But he conceded that the niche was a small one, being ‘boxed in by the Guardian on our left and the Daily Telegraph on our right’ while ‘the FT stood between us and all that lovely advertising in the City of London’.[115 - Louis Heren, February 1981, Quarterly of the Commonwealth Press Union.] The fact that the paper’s readers were sufficiently loyal to return to it after it had been off the streets for almost a year was not, in itself, proof that all was well. In retrospect, Hugh Stephenson took the view that the 1979–80 shutdown ‘served to make people realize that the things they really missed about The Times were its quirky features – letters, law reports, obits, crossword. They didn’t miss its news, which wasn’t particularly good. In most respects the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian and the Financial Times were better newspapers.’[116 - Hugh Stephenson, ‘Not the age of The Times’, New Statesman, 11 January 1985.] This was an assessment broadly shared by the new editor.[117 - Harold Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, pp. 188–9.] In 1981, The Times was normally four pages longer than the Guardian and four pages shorter than the Telegraph. But the gap was wider in the statistics that mattered. In daily sales, the Guardian had overtaken The Times in 1974. Almost since the day of its launch in 1855, the Telegraph had given The Times a pasting. When Evans took over, The Times averaged 282,000 daily sales to the Telegraph’s 1.4 million.
Now the drive was on at least to catch up with the Guardian again. There would be no repeat of the famous 1957 advertising campaign – ‘Top People Take The Times’ a preposterously exclusive slogan for a campaign supposedly intended to widen circulation. Murdoch believed The Times could aim for a half-million readership. Under Hamilton and Evans the Sunday Times, with its book serializations and glossy colour magazine, had promoted the new elite of the photogenic. It was as glamorous and of the moment as The Times was monochrome and old-fashioned. Evans’s Sunday Times promoted celebrities and ‘big names’ while the Times old guard were still lamenting the loss of the anonymous non-de-plume ‘By Our Special Correspondent’. Sunday Times reporters having occasion to cross the Gray’s Inn Road connecting bridge that took them into The Times claimed to feel they were crossing into East Berlin.
The Times old guard – those horrified by the connotations of the word ‘promotion’ and ill at ease with the world of the colour supplement – hated the prospect of their paper being turned into a daily Sunday Times or a mark two Telegraph. They and their spiritual forebears had blocked a 1958 report by the accountants Coopers with its outlandish idea about putting news on the front page (as the Guardian had done since 1952), their objections only finally overcome in 1966. Nor did they see what was wrong with a relatively low circulation so long as it was sufficiently upmarket to cover its costs through advertising (as the FT did). There was certainly no obvious link between a broadsheet’s influence and its sales figures: by the late 1930s, the Telegraph had opened up a half-million lead on The Times, but it was Geoffrey Dawson who was the politically influential editor, not the Telegraph’s Arthur Watson.
Those apprehensive about the forthcoming Evans – Murdoch strategy of going for growth could also point to precedent. Fortified by Thomson’s cash injection, Rees-Mogg’s editorship had started with radical attempts to modernize the paper by introducing a separate business news section, a roving ‘News Team’ acting like a rapid reaction force under Michael Cudlipp’s direction, bigger headlines and shorter sentences. Circulation had improved dramatically from 280,000 in 1966 to 430,000 in 1969. Meeting in the White Swan pub, twenty-nine members of staff, including the young Charles Douglas-Home and Brian MacArthur, had signed a declaration condemning what they believed was the accompanying cheapening of the paper’s authority. But the most telling argument was that the paper was still not making a profit – the boosted revenue from sales being outstripped by the cost of the expansion programme necessary to sustain it. So the expansion policy was abandoned; circulation slipped back towards 300,000 and, by the mid-seventies the paper even – fleetingly – returned a profit.
Now the introduction of a Sunday Times man at the helm suggested The Times would retrace its steps and repeat the failed 1967–9 growth strategy, but Harold Evans saw his task as editor in less primarily commercial terms. ‘At the Sunday Times before Hamilton and Thomson,’ he later recalled, ‘it was a sackable offence to provoke a solicitor’s letter,’ but after he became editor ‘we were in the Law Courts so many times I felt they owed me an honorary wig.’ Evans maintained that this became necessary ‘because real reporting ran into extensions of corporate and executive power that had gone undetected, hence unchallenged, and the courts, uninhibited by a Bill of Rights, had given property rights priority over personal rights.’[118 - Evans in British Journalism Review, vol. 13, no. 4, 2002.] This had not been how The Times had generally seen its role during the same period. Indeed, when in 1969 the paper caught out Metropolitan policemen in a bribery sting some old Times hands were deeply uneasy about their paper going in for the sort of exposé that subverted the good name of the forces of law and order. Others agreed. Three days after the story broke, the paper reported on its front page a meeting of Edward Heath’s Shadow Cabinet in which ‘it was considered deeply disturbing that to trial by television … there might now be added trial by newspaper, with The Times leading the way … It was agreed that The Times appeared to have put the printing of allegations against the police above the national interest.’[119 - Michael Leapman, Treacherous Estate, 1992, p. 51.]
With Evans’s arrival, it seemed The Times would become a disruptive influence again. The new editor proposed what he called ‘vertical journalism’ as opposed to the ‘horizontal school of journalism’ with which the paper had become too comfy, whereby ‘speeches, reports and ceremonials occur and they are rendered into words in print along a straight assemblyline. Scandal and injustice go unremarked unless someone else discovers them.’ Evans believed he was the true inheritor of an older Times tradition, ‘The Thunderer’ of Thomas Barnes, in which ‘the effort to get to the bottom of things, which is the aspiration of the vertical school of journalism, cannot be indiscriminate. Judgments have to be made about what is important; they are moral judgments. The vertical school is active. It sets its own agenda; it is not afraid of the word “campaign”.’[120 - Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 340.]
Evans’s style of leadership was markedly different from that of Rees-Mogg. The outgoing editor had always given the impression that it was the paper’s commentary on events that was his prime interest. The leader articles written, he was quite content to leave the office shortly after 7 p.m. in order to spend the evening with his family or at official functions and dinners, confident that the team on the ‘backbench’ could be entrusted with presenting the breaking news stories. Evans could not have been more different. On his first day as editor, he told his staff that he would be on the backbench every night. ‘It is called,’ he said proudly, ‘the editing theory of maximum irritation.’[121 - TNL News, April 1981.] And he was not wrong. As if to make his point, he took off his jacket – a sight unseen during Rees-Mogg’s fourteen years in the chair (unfortunately Evans’s unattended jacket was promptly stolen).[122 - Spectator, 20 June 1981.]
One who lamented the passing of the baton from Rees-Mogg to Evans was Auberon Waugh. He foresaw what might be in store:
If, in the months that follow, footling diagrams or ‘graphics’ begin to appear illustrating how the hostages walked off their aeroplane into a reception centre; profiles of leading hairdressers suddenly break on page 12; inquiries into the safety of some patent medicine replace Philip Howard’s ruminations on the English language; if a cheap, flip radicalism replaces Mr Rees-Mogg’s carefully argued honourable conservatism and nasty, gritty English creeps into the leader columns where once his sonorous phrases basked and played in the sun; if it begins to seem that one more beleaguered outpost has fallen to the barbarians, we should reflect that there never really was an England which spoke in this language of good nature, of friendliness, of fair dealing, of balance. It was all a product of Mr Rees-Mogg’s beautiful mind.[123 - Ibid., 28 February 1981.]
II
In 1967, William Rees-Mogg had left the Sunday Times to edit The Times and brought only three journalists with him from his old paper. But Harold Evans intended a far more dramatic exodus. His first thought was to bring Hugo Young across the bridge to replace the disappointed Louis Heren as deputy editor of The Times. Young, a serious-minded Balliol liberal, was the political editor of the Sunday Times and Evans thought him a suitable successor when, in seven years or so, he would want to stand down from editing The Times. But Frank Giles, the very embodiment of a Foreign Office mandarin whom Murdoch had – to much surprise – appointed as Evans’s successor, did not want to lose so capable a lieutenant and dug in his heels, appealing to Murdoch for protection. To Evans’s annoyance Murdoch backed his new Sunday Times editor. That Evans did not initially want a Times man as his deputy was resented and only after Murdoch, Hamilton and Rees-Mogg all advised him strongly did he agree to elevating Charles Douglas-Home into the position. It was a decision Evans would have cause to regret, but having someone the paper’s staff respected as deputy editor did much – at first – to calm the feeling that the new editor intended to surround himself with his own clique of non-Times men.
The turf war between Evans and Frank Giles continued for several days, the latter resenting what he regarded as his predecessor’s aggressive attempt to poach so many of his old paper’s best staff. Giles tried to hold on to Peter Stothard but Evans was adamant that his young protégé should join him. Despite another appeal from Giles to Murdoch, Evans got his way and Stothard became deputy features editor.[124 - Harold Evans to Frank Giles, 27 and 29 April 1981, Evans files.] Features was one of the areas Evans wanted to see given more emphasis and it promised to be a key role in the new paper. Assisted by Nicholas Wapshott, Stothard would work with the new features editor, the thirty-two-year-old Washington correspondent of the Observer, Anthony Holden. After persuading Holden – a renaissance man whose interests ranged from poker to writing libretti for opera – to join The Times, Evans held out to him the prospect that he would succeed him as editor … in good time.
Other senior changes were also made. Fred Emery, who had been reporting from the world’s various trouble spots for The Times since 1958, became home news editor. In Douglas-Home’s place as foreign editor, Evans put the former editor-in-chief of Reuters, Brian Horton. Sir Denis Hamilton’s son, Adrian (who had been at the Observer), was brought in to run business news in succession to Hugh Stephenson who decided it was time to cut his losses and leave. The following year he became editor of the New Statesman. The other disappointed candidate for the editorship, Louis Heren, was given a ‘roving brief’ as an associate editor. This soon proved – to Heren’s distress – to be something of a non-job.
In the event of both Evans and Douglas-Home being out of the office, the acting editor was to be Brian MacArthur. Responsible for news content and its subediting, he was to be the bridge between the day planning and the night editing. MacArthur was already an immensely experienced journalist. Before Evans brought him over from the Sunday Times, he had worked at the Yorkshire Post, The Times (as news editor) and the Evening Standard. He had also been the founding editor of the Times Higher Education Supplement. These were precocious achievements that Evans admired in a man he thought vaguely resembled ‘one of those eighteenth century portraits of a well-fed Cardinal’.[125 - Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 253.]
Another key addition to Evans’s kitchen cabinet was Bernard Donoughue. The son of a metal polisher in a car factory, Donoughue had gone on to be a policy adviser to Harold Wilson and James Callaghan and was part of the new meritocracy with which Evans felt most at home. Evans wanted Peter Riddell to join the political team under Donoughue’s direction. This would have been a powerful infusion of talent, but not even a generous salary could at that stage tempt Riddell away from the Financial Times.[126 - Evans Day File, 29 April 1981.] However, ballast was added when David Watt, director of the Royal Institute of International Affairs and a former political editor and Washington correspondent of the FT, was hired to write a weekly column on political and foreign affairs.
It was also necessary to tickle the public. Evans brought in Miles Kington to write what he suggested should be a ‘Beachcomber-Way of the World’ column.[127 - Evans Day File, 6 April 1981.] Located on the Court & Social page, the column, entitled ‘Moreover …’, began its Monday to Saturday run in June. Although only 450 words long, it was a tall order for Kington to maintain a daily output of whimsy and a tribute to his skills that he so frequently carried it off week in, week out, for the next five and a half years. It immediately attracted a devoted following, except among its targets. The Welsh trade unionist Clive Jenkins was not amused about a Kington joke that appeared to encourage Welsh Nationalists to burn his house down. Jenkins was furious, demanded an apology on the Court page and assured Evans, ‘My lawyers and the police do not think it is “a joke” and as a result we now have surveillance of my home and office.’ Evans advised him to stop drawing so much attention to the supposed incitement. But to Anthony Holden Jenkins fumed, ‘Who edits Miles Kington?… There are some jokes which are so off that they should never be published.’[128 - Clive Jenkins to Harold Evans, 3 July 1981 and Evans to Jenkins 12 July 1981; Jenkins to Anthony Holden, 3 July 1981, Evans Day File, 3 July 1981.] Meanwhile, Mel Calman continued to raise a smile with his distinctive front-page pocket cartoons, as he had four days a week since 1979. But the editor was deluged with complaints when he put caricatures drawn by Charles Griffin at the head of the day’s prominent person’s birthday column. For some, a cartoon on the Court & Social page was further proof of The Times’s apostasy although many of those featured were delighted and asked if they could purchase the original.
The introduction of a resident political cartoonist caused more prolonged debate. Ranan Lurie was an Israeli born US citizen who had trained with the French Foreign Legion and been dropped behind enemy lines in the Six Day War. Having worked for Life, Newsweek, Die Welt and Bild, he was the world’s most widely syndicated political cartoonist. Like Vicky in Beaverbrook’s Express newspapers, Lurie’s cartoons often created a dynamic tension by taking a different angle on politics from that being proposed elsewhere in the paper. His draughtsmanship was excellent, his small, rotund figures especially suited to depicting ‘hard hats’ enjoying a bit of military brinkmanship. But inevitably he was not to everyone’s taste, particularly those who believed his art trivialized the news pages on which they were carried. Evans had far more consistent success with the appointment that also gave him the greatest satisfaction. This was the arrival of the relentlessly droll Frank Johnson as parliamentary sketch writer. When it came to material, the House of Commons of the early eighties was to provide Johnson with an embarrassment of riches.
Amid these arrivals came a major departure. Bernard Levin was the most famous columnist on the paper. One of the enfant terribles of the sixties satire boom (he was the subject of a famous attempted physical assault while presenting That Was The Week That Was, his assailant seeking revenge for a supposedly cruel review of his wife’s acting talents), Levin combined a sharp intellect, high-culture sensibilities and a talent for upsetting the full range of vested interests, be they union barons or barristers. Scarcely a week went by without Levin ‘going too far this time’. But he had the support of the one person who mattered – the editor. Rees-Mogg had persuaded him to become a Times columnist in 1971, ultimately taking the view that ‘he alone has the ability to resist the gentle English equity which sometimes drifts like desert sand from one column to the next’.[129 - The Times, 23 October 1980.] He was not really, therefore, a Times man in the established sense of the term and various of the offended vested interests got their revenge by blackballing him from the Garrick Club, where Rees-Mogg was a member.
Evans admired Levin’s vituperative prose, if not his ability to punctuate it. Comparing the length of his sentences to ‘the corridors of a Venetian palace’ Evans failed to persuade him to make more concessions to readers’ mental stamina.[130 - Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 263.] But the greatest exertion fell upon Levin himself whose column appeared on Tuesdays, Wednesday and Thursdays (he also wrote for the Sunday Times). He needed a rest, or at least a lightening of the load. His decision to take a break suited Evans’s new features editor, Anthony Holden, who was keen to introduce new blood.[131 - Anthony Holden to the author, interview, 9 April 2003.] Nonetheless, in his final column, Levin helpfully reassured his readers:
My decision is in no way based on any disquiet on my part at the change of editor or proprietor, nor on any lack of confidence in the paper’s future, and anyone saying or writing anything to the contrary is, and for all material purposes should be treated as, a liar.
It would not be long before Evans would be pleading with Levin to return. But by then the trickle of famous names from the Rees-Mogg era departing the paper had turned into a flood.
III
On his twenty-first day in the chair, Evans got his first major test on how to handle a major breaking story for The Times. During the evening of 30 March 1981 news came through that the American President, Ronald Reagan, had been shot. Evans raced back to Gray’s Inn Road and immediately assumed control. His direction proved masterful.
The front page was given over to the story in its entirety (previously even the most momentous news was mixed with other front-page lead stories and continued elsewhere inside the paper). Three sequential picture strips caught like a cine-freeze frame effect, Reagan turning to face his assailant and then going down as he was hit. The headline was itself a cliffhanger: ‘President Reagan shot: bullet still in lung’. The subheading quoted Reagan’s plucky comment to his wife; ‘Honey, I forgot to duck … don’t worry about me I’ll make it.’
Evans’s dramatic cover was certainly different from the front page of The Times on 23 November 1963 which – with classified adverts still on the front page – merely carried a small three-word ‘President Kennedy Assassinated’ note at the top right of the paper’s masthead. Predictably, some traditionalist readers wrote to complain at what they regarded as Evans’s sensationalist, almost tabloid, front page. But had they to hand a Times copy of the death of Kennedy they might have been surprised. Although the news of the Kennedy assassination had appeared on page eight (because that was where foreign news was then to be found, regardless of its importance) the actual page layout was surprisingly similar, complete with an action photograph of a security guard leaping on the back of the dying President’s car with Mrs Kennedy tending to the slumped figure of her husband. Another photograph showed, closeup, the look of shock on New Yorkers’ faces as they learned the news from a tele-type machine in a news agency office window.[132 - The Times, 23 November 1963.] It was true that Evans ran the headline across the width of the page, whereas in 1963 it had followed the separate column spaces, but this was the only major cosmetic difference. The story’s treatment – narrative of the shooting, history of past presidential assassinations, the reaction of world leaders, the next in line – was remarkably similar between 1963 and 1981. Evans merely had the advantage – denied his predecessor – of being able to splash it across a front page.
Unlike Kennedy, Reagan did not die and, by the night’s last edition, the headline had been amended to the more hopeful if less dramatic ‘Bullet removed from lung’. Nor would the story spawn an industry of conspiracy theories. By 2 April, the paper was in a position to report that the would-be assassin, John Hinckley, was a troubled obsessive, intent on killing the President as a means of proving his (unsolicited) love for the eighteen-year-old-actress Jodie Foster.[133 - Ibid., 2 April 1981.] But if the shooting proved, by a matter of centimetres, not to be a turning point in world politics, it provided the first example of Evans’s ability to capture the drama of breaking news and present it in an effective manner. It was commonly agreed across Fleet Street that The Times had excelled.
For an editor with an eye for presentation on the page, improving the paper’s layout was an immediate priority. Frequently, readers had turned the front page to find a full-page advertisement greeting them on page three. Although this was a prime commercial site, it did not convey the impression that the paper was serious about conveying hard news. When, in 1966, classified ads had finally been taken off the front page, they were moved to the back page. They had remained there ever since. Evans questioned whether such a prominent part of the paper should be given over to small ads for budget travel brochures, secretarial courses and personal announcements. With Murdoch’s support, page three was henceforth given over to news while Evans proposed something new for the back page. It was important that the crossword stayed in the bottom left-hand corner where, with paper folded, it could be easily attempted by those lunching on park benches or being jiggled about in congested train compartments. But besides retaining this, the back page was now to be divided in two. The top half would continue main stories carried over from the front page (again, this was easier for tightly packed commuters) alongside the column designed most to sparkle and entertain – Frank Johnson’s parliamentary sketch. In the bottom half, Evans introduced what was christened ‘The Times Information Service’. This was a daily almanac of eclectic information: weather forecasts, a brief digest of what other newspapers were saying, opening hours for historic houses, even, for some reason, London restaurants offering al fresco dining facilities (there appeared not to be very many of these). ‘There is nothing like it in the British press,’ Evans boasted, ‘it is, indeed, another example of The Times, as so often in its history, being the first.’[134 - Evans to Rupert Davenport-Hines (and others), 14 June 1981, Evans Day File.]
But there was not a stampede to follow. The quirkiness of the Information Service was both its attraction and, sometimes, the reason for its impracticality. Private Eye, the satirical magazine with a mission to persecute Evans whenever opportunity presented itself, tried to sabotage it by encouraging its readers to enter a ‘Useless Information Competition’. The Eye would pay £10 for each attempt to mislead The Times with bogus submissions and add a £5 bonus if the paper actually printed it. On more than one occasion, this childish exercise succeeded, very much to Evans’s exasperation.[135 - Private Eye, 28 August 1981; Evans to Anthony Whitaker, 23 October 1981, Evans Day File, A327/3692.]
In overall charge of the redesign was Edwin Taylor, previously Evans’s design director at the Sunday Times (for which he had won the 1980 Newspaper Design Award). Another recruit from the Sunday Times, Oscar Turnill, joined him in the task with Brian MacArthur and Tim Austin, the home news subeditor, assigned to help in the section reorganization. Predictably, there were letters of complaint from readers who regarded any alteration to be, by its very nature, for the worse. Evans found what he called ‘this outcry from the more settled members of the community’ rather tedious, not least because many of the layout alterations were, if anything, taking the paper back to the ‘light face’ traditions of Stanley Morison who had established the classic look of the paper in 1932 and invented the world’s most popular typeface, Times New Roman.[136 - Evans Day File, 22 May 1981.] Evans delighted in writing back to the small legion of detractors in order to point out their foolishness with a brittleness that suggested sensitivity to criticism. ‘I suspect that if we changed to printing on gold leaf paper there would be murmurs of disapproval in the clubs,’ he told one complainer.[137 - Evans to N. P. L. Price, 27 May 1981, Evans Day File.] On occasion, he even took to telephoning his assailants. One of these turned out to be a dentist who was in mid-operation when his receptionist interrupted him with the news there was an urgent call for him on the phone. The patient was then left, mouth stuffed with cotton wool, while his dentist discussed the principles of newspaper layout with the editor of The Times.[138 - Anthony Holden to the author, interview, 9 April 2003.]
The next innovation was the introduction of a Friday tabloid section entitled Preview. Given the accolades later heaped upon the Guardian’s G2 (which The Times eventually copied with T2) tabloid section, Preview was ahead of its time. Covering forthcoming arts and entertainments, it was geared, in particular, to the younger end of the market and was perfectly launched in June 1981 to coincide with a strike at Time Out magazine. While falling within Anthony Holden’s empire, its driving force was a former Time Out journalist, Richard Williams. Evans was delighted with Williams’s work and marvelled that Murdoch had given the project financial backing after only a single brief meeting, a speed of decision making that Evans contrasted favourably with the months it took to approve innovations from the Thomson Organisation.[139 - Ibid.]
In the month that Preview was launched The Times axed its least successful section. Europa was a monthly journal, largely comprising economic stories and ‘business profiles’ that was produced jointly with Le Monde, La Stampa and Die Welt on the first Tuesday of every month. The Times had got involved in 1973. Britain had joined the EEC and Rees-Mogg was at that stage a firm enthusiast for the process of European integration in which political institutions were not enough – The Times proclaiming that ‘Europe need a European press’. The fact that Europa proved to be a patchwork of almost hypnotic dullness did not disqualify it from winning the 1978 Zaccari prize for spreading EEC ideals. But idealism and economics were not compatible partners and it brought Gray’s Inn Road nothing but losses. The plug was pulled in June (July was the final issue) 1981 after the previous issue had managed to carry no advertising whatsoever. The jilted European papers then approached the Guardian as a replacement for The Times. When the Guardian politely declined the whole project was wound up.[140 - Gerald Long to Herbert Kremp (joint editor-in-chief Die Welt), 15 June 1981, Evans file 1, A153–658; TNL News.]
The demise of Europa went largely unnoticed, evidence, if any were needed, that it should have been wound up years before. More successful – at least at generating revenue – were the sections produced by the Special Reports team. These usually appeared (especially throughout the winter months) twice a week. Around one hundred appeared a year, totalling 650 pages. Most related to holiday or investment opportunities in foreign climes and had a function in attracting advertising that would not otherwise have reached The Times.[141 - John Grieg to Harold Evans, 9 March 1981 Evans box 1.]
There was one major news occurrence for which the newspaper had ample time to prepare. The wedding of Charles, Prince of Wales, to Lady Diana Spencer was to be the event of the year in Britain, a moment of romance and glamour in which momentarily to forget the country’s deepening recession. It would be the first marriage of a Prince of Wales for more than a century and only the seventh in almost six hundred years. Evans was determined that The Times’s coverage would outclass the competition. In this he had an ally in the proprietor. Putting aside his republican inclinations, it was Murdoch who came up with the idea of having a fullcolour front page for the paper’s royal wedding edition and to publish a souvenir magazine.[142 - Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, pp. 271, 274.]
The result was a sixty-four-page glossy ‘royal wedding’ magazine. This was not as profligate as might seem since it attracted twenty-five pages of advertising suitably tailored to the occasion: the new video recording machines, the Vauxhall Royale (available in saloon or hatchback), jewellers, Harrods and a back page emblazoned with the bright livery of Benson & Hedges. It was the first time The Times had produced a colour magazine and, once again, when looking to innovate Evans had turned to his previous paper for the personnel to achieve it. George Darby, associate editor of the Sunday Times Colour Magazine, had led the nine-strong production team. Given away free with the paper the day before the wedding, all half a million copies were snatched up. ‘If we had printed a million,’ Evans declared, ‘we’d have sold the lot.’[143 - Evans, press release, 30 July 1981.] But it was not the first time The Times had given away a royal souvenir: in 1897 it had marked Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee with a commemorative plate – colour-printed in Germany.
It was on the day of the wedding that the paper achieved its real coup. All newspapers then printed in black and white since none of the Fleet Street machine rooms could handle full-colour reproduction on standard newspaper runs. But The Times had an alternative plan to dish its monochrome competitors. The photographer, Peter Trievnor, was engaged to catch the bride and groom as they emerged from the great west door of St Paul’s Cathedral. With the precision planning of a crack assassin, he lay in wait for them from a seventh floor window in Juxon House, one of the ugly sixties office blocks then rudely jostling the Cathedral. It was calculated that he would only have a few seconds during which the royal couple would be in range. He had previously had two trial runs from the same vantage point on previous days in order to get it right. Even still, the margin for error was considerable especially given the happy couple’s unerring ability to wave in a way that obscured one or the other’s face. In the event, he managed to get eight shots in the few seconds in which the Prince and Princess passed the chosen spot.
Having taken what he hoped would be the photograph at 12.10 p.m., Trievnor raced to the foot of the building where a motorbike was waiting to collect the film. Once processed, it was hurried to Gray’s Inn Road where Evans and the design director, Edwin Taylor, selected the image they wanted. The transparency was then biked to where the colour separations were done and from there – by now coming up against heavy post-wedding traffic – to Battersea Heliport. It was mid-afternoon and Reg Evans, the paper’s head of editorial services, took it by helicopter to Peterborough where East Midlands Allied Press pre-printed the colour pictures onto reels. These reached Gray’s Inn Road at 10.18 p.m. Feverishly the reels were fitted. But they did not work. The registration was terrible and there was static on the newsprint. Anxious moments passed until eventually the quality improved. In time, it was running perfectly and at 1.30 a.m. the first colour front page of The Times – indeed, of any national broadsheet – rolled off the press.
The result caused a sensation. The paper was a sell-out. A telegram arrived at Gray’s Inn Road – ‘Congratulations on a great technical achievement and a beautiful paper this morning. Gavin.’[144 - Lord Astor to Gerald Long, 30 July 1981, A153–655.] It was from Lord Astor whose newspaper The Times had been until 1966. Actually, the revenue from higher sales was cancelled out by the cost of printing in colour, but it might prove merely a loss leader if it gained permanent converts to the paper. The circulation figures for August (which included the royal wedding edition) showed the paper’s circulation had leapt to 303,000, up from 268,797 the same time the previous year.[145 - TNL News, August 1981.] What remained to be seen was whether this was a one-off wedding bonanza or a movement that could be sustained.
One change that the wedding brought that did stay was on the paper’s masthead. From the first edition in 1785 until 1966 The Times’s masthead had borne the royal coat of arms, but this had fallen victim to ‘modernization’ when the paper was redesigned to carry news on the front page. The presence of the royal arms had accentuated the uneven lengths of ‘The’ and ‘Times’ and made the masthead appear off-centre at the top of the page. Stanley Morison had wanted to remove it in 1932 but was dissuaded by the strong opposition of John Walter, scion of the paper’s founder, who still held shares in the company.[146 - Jack Lonsdale, letter in TNL News, October 1981.] But the eventual exclusion of the device was a doubtful improvement since it made the paper’s masthead excessively austere and bare. Evans had intended to revive the royal arms for the paper’s two hundredth anniversary in 1985 (he had little doubt he would still be in the chair for it) but the huge acclaim from staff and readers to his inclusion of it on the royal wedding edition convinced him that it should stay there forthwith.
In fact, The Times had no more right – and never had – to carry the royal arms than any other newspaper. It did not have the necessary royal warrant, a point the College of Arms had, with ineffectual menaces, periodically brought to the editor’s attention. Although there was some inconsistency over the years, the paper had tended to use the royal arms of the day, but Evans decided to go back to the original coat of arms of King George III. It is this set of arms – complete with the white horse of Hanover in the bottom right quarter – that has graced each edition of the paper since 1981.
With Gray’s Inn Road awash with self-congratulation and the royal couple sailing away on Britannia for their honeymoon, Evans chose his moment to slip out of the country for a three-week holiday. He had scarcely rested since his appointment and most impartial observers could only conclude his opening months had been a success, speckled with moments of triumph. In fact, he too was off to get married.
A fifty-two-year-old father of three, Evans had been divorced from his schoolteacher wife, Enid, after twenty-five years of marriage in 1978 and for the past six years had been seen in the company of his fiancée, the up-and-coming twenty-seven-year-old editor of Tatler, Tina Brown. The couple married on 19 August at the Long Island home of Evans’s friend, the renowned Washington Post editor, Ben Bradlee. Bradlee was Evans’s best man and, with the bride’s parents in Spain, Anthony Holden stepped in to give the bride away. Anna Blundy, daughter of the Sunday Times’s fearless foreign correspondent, David Blundy, was maid of honour. However far from Fleet Street, it was still a journalists’ wedding. Some months later, Evans dropped a memo to Colin Watson, the obituaries editor, telling him to advise his contributors to ‘introduce the subject’s marriage(s) if any, at the appropriate chronological moment. A marriage and the support of a wife is often an important point in a person’s life and we have come to the conclusion that it is wrong merely to tack on a sentence to say that so and so is survived by various people.’[147 - Evans to Colin Watson, 10 January 1982, Evans Day File A759/9329.]
IV
Mr and Mrs Harold Evans spent part of their honeymoon staying with Henry Kissinger. Evans wanted Kissinger to write a weekly column for The Times and, after consultations with Murdoch, promised a financial inducement the scale of which would have been unprecedented in the paper’s history.[148 - Evans to Henry Kissinger, 21 May 1981, Evan Day File.] In the meantime, he had been reading the drafts for the second volume of Kissinger’s memoirs, Years of Upheaval 1973–77, even helping to rewrite certain passages. This was not a role he would have easily taken upon himself with regard to a senior British political figure. In London, Evans was anxious to avoid compromising entanglement between press and politicians, but he enjoyed a more relaxed perspective across the Atlantic and, in later years, he and his wife would happily mix their journalistic careers with the society of, in particular, leading Democrats.
It was a verdict on the past four years rather than a discovery of latent Toryism that had encouraged Evans to vote Conservative in the 1979 general election. Observing him in the morning conferences, Frank Johnson came to the conclusion that Evans, while an enthusiastic campaigner, did not have a considered political position or particular insight into the Westminster village. He had grown up assuming that the welfare state had improved opportunity immeasurably. The arguments propounded by Keith Joseph and the Institute for Economic Affairs, then gripping the radical right of the Conservative Party, had made little impact upon him.
But they had not escaped Frank Johnson, the lone Thatcherite in the editor’s trusted circle (Evans used to tease him in the morning conference by summoning his contribution with the cry, ‘I call upon the Leader of the Opposition’). Evans and Johnson shared a non-middle class background. Johnson was the son of a pastry chef. Working his way up from local reporting to the Sun, he had been a parliamentary sketchwriter for the Daily Telegraph before joining James Goldsmith’s short-lived Now! magazine (fortuitously leaving it for The Times only days before that journal’s demise). While Evans was a proud Durham University graduate, Johnson was an autodidact with strong interests in opera and history who had been cultivated by the Telegraph’s coven of in-house Tory philosophers. ‘I believed Britain was in a life or death struggle,’ he later reflected, ‘and that if Thatcher lost, it was all over for Britain.’ He did not sense that Evans, admiring the achievements of the welfare state and sixties progressivism, shared the same sense of urgency. What was more, Evans had placed the paper’s political direction in the hands of Bernard Donoughue who, fresh from advising James Callaghan, was opposed to the line Johnson wanted The Times to take.[149 - Frank Johnson to the author, interview, 15 January 2003.]
That line was set almost from the first day of Evans’s editorship by the paper’s analysis of Geoffrey Howe’s 1981 Budget. The headline, ‘Harsh Budget for workers but more for business’, was, according to Paul Johnson in the Spectator, ‘the headline which we all thought was the copyright of the Morning Star and kept in permanent type there’. The subheading, which claimed ‘unexpectedly harsh tax increases’, did not seem to follow the accurate predictions that the paper had been making on this very subject over the previous days. Meanwhile, the assertion that the Budget was pro-business was contradicted in the business news section where both the City and industry were stated as being distinctly cool about the measures. The Times’s handling was, according to Paul Johnson, ‘a disaster’. He also detected hyperbole in the headlines of succeeding days such as ‘Chancellor under savage attack from all quarters’ and a headline on higher education cuts ‘Fears of university system collapsing from loss of income’.[150 - Paul Johnson, Spectator, 11 March and 21 March 1981.] This was the sensitivity of a Thatcheritie convert, but ‘all quarters’ and ‘collapsing’ left little margin for error.
It was certainly difficult to read the front page without concluding a disaster had befallen the country. Fred Emery’s report made the most of ‘this muddle of severity against consumers with no clear thrust of benefits to business that worries a number of senior Conservatives’.[151 - Fred Emery, The Times, 11 March 1981.] By contrast, the summary of the Treasury’s forecasts by the economics editor, David Blake, was in the older, straight-reporting tradition of the principal news page. The leader column was where opinion was supposed to be located. This Evans wrote himself. He rejected both ‘the primitive compass of monetary aggregates’ and ‘crude expansion’. Instead he argued that the country was locked in a vicious circle where rising unemployment was pushing up current expenditure while capital expenditure, a fifth of all public spending as recently as 1974, had fallen to one tenth. The consequence of this for the country’s infrastructure was harming business, thereby pushing up social security payments. It was not entirely clear where the editorial thought the balance should be, although Evans’s belief that ‘prudent control of the money supply’ was ‘no longer an adequate prescription for policy’ implied he was backsliding from Rees-Mogg’s commitment to sound money.[152 - The Times, leading article (by Harold Evans), 11 March 1981; Evans Good Times, Bad Times, p. 214.] As Evans assured Michael Foot with a slight sideswipe at one of Rees-Mogg’s more distinctive obsessions, ‘I cannot promise much but at least there will be no more articles calling for the return of the gold standard.’[153 - Evans to Michael Foot, 26 March 1981, Evans Day File A327/3626.]
The Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, believed the Budget’s critics had got it wrong. Far from being deflationary, reducing Government borrowing would precipitate a fall in interest rates and a reduction in sterling’s overvalued exchange rate.[154 - Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, pp. 137–8.] In the short term this proved accurate, with interest rates falling 2 per cent, to 12 per cent, the day after the Budget. By October, though, it was a run on the pound that caused nervousness, and interest rates were hiked back up to a crippling 16 per cent.
At the end of March, 364 economists sent a letter to The Times denouncing monetarism. The signatories included seventy-six present or past professors and five former chief economic advisers to the Government. It was the idea of two Cambridge professors, Frank Hahn and Robert Nield, and academics at thirty-six universities appended their names. Although it became famous as the ‘Letter to The Times’, the newspaper almost squandered it. David Blake wrote up the story, but its front-page position was anything but prominent and much of it was continued fifteen pages on in the business news section. By the time it attracted a leader article, the following day, it had been downgraded by the altogether more dramatic story of the assassination attempt on President Reagan.
But the letter was important, not only as a counterblast of the learned and eminent against the Government’s economic policy but also as a measure of the culture clash between those now in power and the academic community whose stipends were about to be cut. The letter did give grounds for ambiguity. It claimed there was ‘no basis in economic theory or supporting evidence for the Government’s belief that by deflating demand they will bring inflation permanently under control’ or, as a consequence, bring about an economic recovery. In ignoring the alternatives to monetarism, ‘Present polices will deepen the depression’.[155 - The Times, 30 March 1981.]
When the leading article ‘An Avalanche of Economists’ appeared, it was somewhat more circumspect. It avoided explicitly endorsing the round-robin letter but made clear The Times believed the Treasury’s fixation with Sterling M3 concentrated minds upon too narrow a measure of the money supply. Rather, there was now a need for controlled reflation rather than further deflation.[156 - The Times, leading article, ‘An Avalanche of Economists’, 31 March 1981.] The monetarist response appeared in the business pages in an article by Patrick Minford, Professor of Economics at Liverpool University. His article so pleased the Prime Minister that she wrote to congratulate him.[157 - Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, p. 138.] Suspecting the 364s’ ‘apparently political ends’, Minford claimed they were more Keynesian than Keynes: Keynes had supported reflation in 1932 when there was sub-zero inflation and less than 1 per cent money supply growth. He had thus advocated price stability. But the public sector borrowing requirement for 1980–81 was an inflationary 4 per cent. Consequently, reducing the PSBR would create the structure for the sort of price stability Keynes had in mind. Recent history suggested incomes policies were not an effective alternative. What was more, Minford even maintained ‘there is no evidence that those with sound long-term prospects are going to the wall’ since ‘the stock market is now increasing the capitalization of even the hardest hit sectors’.[158 - Patrick Minford, The Times, 7 April 1981.] Nigel Lawson later wrote of the 364 economists, ‘Their timing was exquisite. The economy embarked on a prolonged phase of vigorous growth almost from the moment the letter was published’.[159 - Nigel Lawson, The View from No. 11, 1992, p. 98.] This may have surprised the still swelling ranks of the unemployed, but it was true, nonetheless. The standard measure of national output, gross domestic product (GDP), reached its bottom in the first quarter of 1981, at the very moment when the massed ranks of academia staked their reputations to the statement ‘present policies will deepen the depression’.
The end of fixed exchange rates in 1972 had freed governments from the necessity of manipulating their balance of payments to stay in check in order to uphold the exchange rate parity. This liberty permitted running up a persistent budget deficit as a means to stimulate demand and fund the welfare benefits of those for whom there remained no demand. But easing discipline in this way quickly drove western governments onto a road to ruin and by the late seventies Whitehall was desperately trying to rein back the PSBR’s share of GDP. The squeeze applied by the Thatcher Government’s high interest rate policy also had the effect of pushing up the exchange rate because high rates of interest made it attractive for ‘forex’ traders to buy sterling. At a time when North Sea oil revenues were already giving the pound the credentials of a petrocurrency, the resulting high exchange rate made exports yet more uncompetitive. During 1981, The Times became increasingly hostile to the notion that the Government, obsessed by its monetary targets, should have no view on what the appropriate exchange rate should be. In July, a leader column, ‘The Price of Floating’, attacked the whole post-1972 free-for-all. Railing against ‘the ideology of do-nothing monetarism’ with its exclusive focus on combating inflation, the editorial maintained that since ‘it is doubtful if a sensible exchange rate policy can be maintained unilaterally’ it was necessary to restore international cooperation.[160 - ‘The Price of Floating’, leading article, The Times, 8 July 1981.]
Supporting calls for new world central banking institutions to curb the supposed excesses of the foreign exchange markets, Evans wrote a leading article claiming, ‘our fortunes and our prospects have been devastated’ by ‘the experiment with floating rates and the stupendous growth of international mobile funds’. There was ‘a currency casino’ in operation when ‘on the world market the average trading volume in currency is now some 70,000 million dollars a day, a volume by which the global trade in goods, services and investment is insignificant’. The leader article mentioned Enoch Powell and Samuel Brittan among the false prophets who had preached floating as a means of ridding the country of its balance of payments problems. In fact, Peter Jay had penned an influential four column Times leader article in September 1976 advocating monetarism and a ‘cleanly’ floating currency only days before he had drafted the speech his father-in-law, James Callaghan, delivered to the Labour Party conference denouncing reflationary politics – a turning point in the country’s affairs. But in July 1981, The Times renounced its own former position with the excuse that ‘the beginning of wisdom is the admission of error’ (unfortunately the ‘i’ was missing from the word ‘is’ when the sentence was printed).[161 - ‘The Ottawa Opportunity’, leading article, The Times, 17 July 1981; see Grigg, The Thomson Years, p. 390; Edmund Dell, The Chancellors, p. 427.]
Margaret Thatcher had told the 198 °Conservative Party conference, ‘You turn if you want; the lady’s not for turning.’ With Evans at the steering wheel, The Times now made clear it was performing a very public U-turn. It marked the 1981 party conference debate on economic policy with a damning analysis of monetarism by James Tobin, the Yale professor who had the previous day been named as the winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize for Economics.[162 - James Tobin, The Times, 14 October 1981.]
‘Three million unemployed and still more to come’ was the front-page headline for Melvyn Westlake’s report that one in eight of the workforce was without a job and that the figure – which excluded a third of a million more on special employment and training schemes – was likely to keep rising at least until 1983. This proved an optimistic forecast. The accompanying leader column concluded that with output below its 1974 level and the national fabric fragmenting:
It is devastatingly clear that Britain needs massive investment, private and public, to restore its competitive strength … The Europeans are valiantly trying to create a pool of lower interest rates to protect their nascent recovery from another surge of American interest rates … we need not be flotsam on the high seas.[163 - ‘Britain’s Economic Legacy’, leading article, The Times, 27 January 1982.]
The paper’s position had suffered from the conundrum that if it thought the exchange rate was so overvalued, why was it wanting to see it locked in at such a rate? But a relatively trouble-free realignment of the major currencies within the European Monetary System encouraged the leader column to adopt the line that it was ‘a good time for Britain to join’.[164 - ‘The Flexible Side of EMS’, leading article, The Times, 6 October 1981.] This allowed the paper to preach currency stability and commitment to the ‘European Vision’ that Rees-Mogg’s paper had encouraged. But it was premature for it to declare, ‘the excuse that the pound is now a petrocurrency is not valid’.[165 - ‘Wanted: European Vision’, leading article, The Times, 2 December 1981.] On currency stability, as on ‘European Vision’, The Times would find consistency as difficult to sustain as did the Treasury.
Indeed, it was across the English Channel that the paper needed to look if it wanted to see alternatives to monetarism in practice rather than theory. A golden opportunity was provided by the victory of François Mitterrand over Válery Giscard d’Estaing. Sixteen years had separated Mitterrand from his first challenge (to de Gaulle in 1965) and his taking possession of the Elysée Palace. More importantly, as Charles Hargrove reported from Paris, it was a ‘turning point’ in French politics. It was the first presidential victory for the left in the twenty-three year life of the Fifth Republic. Indeed, it was the first time the left had been in complete power since Léon Blum’s ill-fated Popular Front in 1936. With the news of Mitterrand’s triumph, Ian Murray reported that French customs officers were given urgent instructions to stop attempts to export money from the country: ‘The officers have been told to watch particularly for large cars not registered in frontier areas.’[166 - Charles Hargrove and Ian Murray, The Times, 11 March 1981.]
While the Conservatives had abandoned exchange controls shortly after coming to power in Britain, Mitterrand tightened the French State’s preventative powers to see capital exported beyond its border. A real socialist experiment was underway. Editorially, The Times was caught between fearing the possibility that a far left resurgence in the coming National Assemby elections could lead to a left – Communist coalition and the satisfaction of seeing the fall of Giscard d’Estaing and ‘his scandalous relations’ with the Central African Empire’s Emperor Bokassa.[167 - ‘The Choice for France’, leading article, The Times, 12 May 1981.] Writing in his column, Ronald Butt suggested Mitterrand’s election might ‘bring greater flexibility and a greater significance to the European voice’ and ‘establish for the first time that the European Community is not simply a vehicle for the centre-right’ as it had been under its Christian Democrat domination (for even Germany’s SPD Chancellor Schmidt ‘makes the kind of leader many a British Tory would be glad to own’). The consequence could be a softening in the anti-EEC attitude of Britain’s Labour Party.[168 - Ronald Butt, The Times, 14 May 1981.]
The British summer of 1981 was one of disorder. From a news reporting perspective, the most graphic examples came on the streets of Ulster and the deprived inner cities of England.
The hunger strikes among Irish Republican prisoners housed in the ‘H-Blocks’ of the Maze prison near Belfast had started in October 1980 with demands to wear their own clothes, to have the restrictions on their movement within the prison lifted and to be exempted from doing any work. The Government made a concession, permitting ‘civilian style’ (but not personal) clothing, but was wary of going further for fear that it was all part of an orchestrated IRA campaign to give their terrorists effective run of the prison and to see them accorded ‘political prisoner’ status. Indeed, a May 1980 report by the European Commission on Human Rights had rejected the bulk of the prisoners’ complaints. A letter was smuggled out from an inmate of Wormwood Scrubs to The Times endorsing the view that Irish terrorists enjoyed a far laxer regime than British individuals convicted of more minor misdemeanours on the mainland.[169 - Letter to the editor, The Times, 30 May 1981.] The hunger strike had been called off in December 1980 when one of the participants lost consciousness. This was followed by a mass ‘dirty protest’ in which cells were deliberately fouled.
In March the dirty protests ended and the hunger strikes recommenced. By the time the campaign ended, seven months later, ten Republican prisoners had starved themselves to death. But it was the first prisoner to die who captured the public imagination and caused the most serious political upset. Bobby Sands was a twenty-seven-year-old Republican who had served five of his fourteen-year sentence for being caught with a gun in a car. His decision to stand for Parliament, in absentia, on an anti-H-Block ticket in the Fermanagh and South Tyrone by-election was given a boost when the Nationalist SDLP opted to stand aside, giving him a direct run against his Unionist opponent. The consequence of uniting the Nationalist and Republican vote was to hand Sands victory by a margin of 1446 votes.
Filing his Times report, Christopher Thomas suggested the result had ‘dealt a severe blow to the stronghold of moderate Roman Catholic opinion, the Social Democratic and Labour Party, from which it may never fully recover. Recriminations over the party’s failure to contest the seat are biting deep.’[170 - Christopher Thomas, The Times, 11 April 1981.]The Times’s leader was in no mood to indulge dangerous games. ‘The House of Commons should move at once, that is before the Easter recess, to unseat him,’ it announced, continuing, ‘that would be an entirely proper thing to do since he is precluded from attending the House for the duration of this parliament.’ The clear extent of polarization precluded pushing ahead with early ‘attempts to introduce provincial institutions acceptable to the leaders of both communities’. Instead, the Government was faced with no option but to concentrate on ‘normalizing’ the ‘administration of the province within the United Kingdom’.[171 - Leading article, The Times, 11 April 1981.]
In May, Sands died. The immediate response was an orgy of rioting in Belfast and protests beyond. But the main legacy was a propaganda coup for Irish Republicanism, attracting the world’s media and drumming up financial support from United States citizens. The Times did not form up behind the long procession of mourners that followed Sands’s IRA-decorated coffin. ‘By refusing to submit to Mr Sands’s blackmail, the British government bears no responsibility whatever for his death,’ the leader column stated. ‘He was not in prison for his beliefs, but for proved serious criminal offences. He was not being oppressed or ill-treated. Indeed the opposite was true. The prison rules applying to Northern Ireland allow for a more comfortable existence than do most English prisons.’ It ended, ‘There is only one killer of Bobby Sands and this is Sands himself.’[172 - Ibid., 5 May 1981.] He did not get an obituary.
The paper’s position continued to be stalwartly supportive of the Thatcher Government’s inflexible approach, maintaining, ‘It has chosen the right ground to stand on – denial of separate political status in name and substance.’ As for the ‘murderous’ IRA leadership, ‘Hope is their oxygen. It must be denied them.’[173 - ‘If Ireland Is To Be United’, leading article, The Times, 2 July 1981.] Mrs Thatcher would later refer to the need to cut off the IRA’s ‘oxygen of publicity’. But far from gulping for air, the Republican movement appeared wholly revived. Indeed, the upsurge of tension in Ulster ensured that The Times had to send its first itinerant news team there for many years, with Tim Jones and John Witherow joining the permanent reporter, Christopher Thomas. ‘Amid mixed scenes of jubilation and despair,’ Thomas reported from Enniskillen the victory of the IRA supporting candidate who retained – with an increased majority – the Fermanagh seat on Sands’s death. The leader column condemned a situation in which ‘the Irish Government and the Roman Catholic Hierarchy of Ireland so conspicuously qualify their condemnation of this extension of terrorist violence by piling the blame on British ministers for allowing it to continue’. In doing so, the hunger strikers were gaining the virtual ‘status of martyrdom’.[174 - ‘Fermanagh Does It Again’, leading article, The Times, 22 August 1981.]
The IRA ensured that the hunger strike ended in October with a bang. They detonated a nail-bomb on a coach in Chelsea Barracks carrying Irish Guards. The following month the Unionist MP for Belfast South was shot dead while he was holding a surgery for his constituents. An Anglo-Irish summit brassed up the existing ministerial and official collaborations under a new name, ‘The Inter-Governmental Council’, but by the following spring, when the proposals of the Northern Ireland Secretary, Jim Prior, for ‘rolling devolution’ of responsibilities held by Whitehall back to Ulster were ready to get underway, they faced opposition from the SDLP and from across the border from the Taoiseach, Charlie Haughey. Sinn Fein made gains in the elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly in October 1982 and the SDLP members refused to take their seats, effectively torpedoing the project. Once again, the Province’s future appeared to be wedged in an impasse. It would take time, and a more emollient attitude in Dublin with the election of Dr Garret Fitzgerald, before the next initiative could be sprung upon the Province.
During 1981, political unrest in Ulster was matched by social disorder in Britain’s inner cities. In April, petrol bombs were thrown for the first time on the streets of the mainland. The Brixton riots injured 279 policemen and forty-five members of the public. Twenty-eight buildings were set on fire while surrounding shops were systematically looted. News of scuffles in Brixton came late and received minor billing in the following day’s paper under the brief headline, ‘Police hurt in scuffles with blacks’. But after a weekend of serious rioting and looting, the events dominated Monday 13 April’s paper, forcing Michael Leapman’s report from Cape Canaveral on the launch of the space shuttle Columbia to take second place on the front page. Inside the edition, Martin Huckerby, who had been jostled by the mob, provided a graphic eyewitness report of the chaos in Brixton:
The only sign of authority was an abandoned fire engine astride the junction, its windows smashed and its wrecked equipment strewn across the road … Red hot debris dripped from a series of burning buildings along both sides of the road. Amid the roaring of the flames and crashing of collapsing buildings there were screams and shouts. Despite the furnace of heat, figures could be seen running through the smoke, hurling missiles at unseen police.[175 - Martin Huckerby, The Times, 13 April 1981.]
Elsewhere on the page the various angles were covered: an interview with a white woman who said she had come to fear the brooding violence of her largely black neighbourhood and ‘a young, sharply dressed Guyanan black’ who approved ‘ “of what’s happened. It’s the only way people can put across their case”.’ The police’s view was also represented and there was an article on Lambeth Council’s attempts to grapple with housing allocation between its white and black areas. The leading article backed the establishment of a broad ranging enquiry – which the Home Secretary, Willie Whitelaw, announced that day would be conducted by Lord Scarman. On 15 April, Op-Ed featured a gripping article by the Indian journalist Sasthi Brata detailing how, blindfolded and threatened, he was taken by a black gang in Brixton to see their amateur bomb-making cottage industry while one of his captors told him: ‘“There’s going to be a lot more, a big lot more, just tell ’em that. We ain’t kidding. We goin’ burn ’em down, everythin’ everywhere.”’[176 - The Times, 13 April 1981; Sasthi Brata, The Times, 15 April 1981.]
Naturally, the immediate aftermath of the riots in Brixton (and those that followed in Southall and the Toxteth area of Liverpool) were dominated by the apportioning of blame. Political activism was pitched against insensitive policing, moral degeneracy against a trinity of overt racism, poor housing and unemployment. The affected areas combined high numbers of immigrants with a level of social deprivation that was all too obvious to see. But to what extent was the Thatcher Government to blame? That The Times stated nothing justified the rioters’ behaviour was to be expected but it went further, conceding that the wider social issues were relevant and that the Scarman Inquiry should have the widest remit to consider them. As for the Government, the leader article chose to pick on its inability to articulate and demonstrate a belief that its policies had a positive social dimension worthy of the same priority as the fight against inflation.[177 - Leading articles, The Times, 14 April, 7 July and 13 July 1981.]
But there was also the question of racism. In a leader entitled ‘The Soiled Coin’, The Times believed racist sentiments ‘will not be resisted by preaching integration. This is a fallacy of the sixties. It is unrealizable, it is questionable if it is desirable, and it raises more fear and animosity than it dissipates with its overtones of inter-racial sex, marriage and a coffee-coloured Britain.’ Social pluralism, it argued, was obtainable without tolerance requiring ‘that every Englishman should have a black man for his neighbour or that every Asian should forget his cultural identity’. Rather, while ‘the Government cannot be expected to resolve such a complex and volatile problem overnight’ it could at least follow the American lead in encouraging the rapid promotion of ‘qualified coloureds to positions of obvious authority – in the army, the police and above all the public service – so that the coloured community can identify with those who take decisions as well as those at the receiving end’.[178 - ‘The Soiled Coin’, leading article, The Times, 10 July 1981.]
When it was published in November, the 150 page Scarman Report denied the existence of ‘institutional racism’ in Britain. Militant activists also disliked the report’s support for the police who ‘stood between our society and a total collapse of law and order on the streets’. But most sides of the community supported the principal recommendations: racist behaviour by police officers to be a sackable offence, better training, greater independent monitoring of the police complaints procedure, new statutory consultative committees with community liaison but no change to the Riot Act. Whitelaw moved immediately to endorse the principles of the report. Much of this was supported by The Times, although not Scarman’s enthusiasm for ‘taking the investigation as well as the adjudication of complaints out of the hands of the police’ which was ‘a minefield of good intentions’. Instead, ombudsmen and better lay scrutiny of the results of investigation would be preferable. The paper also lamented the failure to reform the Riot Act, taking the view that ‘if a riot is in progress the offence is, or ought to be, being in on it. No one should be able to feel that he can join in with impunity provided no further offence can be proved against him.’[179 - ‘The Scarman Report’, leading article, The Times, 26 November 1981.]
But The Times also gave space on the Op-Ed page to Darcus Howe, editor of Race Today, billing him as ‘a militant voice of black dissent’. According to Howe, the fault lay primarily with the way in which the police exercised their powers against the West Indian community. The trigger for the riots, Operation Swamp, had been regarded as a form of licensed harassment by Brixton’s youth. Instead, Howe argued for the ‘immediate abolition of all powers of stop and search’.[180 - Darcus Howe, The Times, 26 November 1981.]
The police countered that without ‘stop and search’ powers they had little chance of containing the violence and drug-related disorder that was prevalent in the inner cities and the areas dominated by blacks in particular. Yet, over the following fifteen years, the issue of racism slowly receded from the forefront of public debate until reignited towards the end of the century by the influx of asylum seekers and by the police’s inadequate handling of the racist murder of a black teenager, Stephen Lawrence. With the resulting Lawrence Inquiry, specific sore points like ‘stop and search’ not only became live issues again, but Scarman’s rejection of ‘institutional racism’ within the police force would be publicly revoked.
The critical tone adopted towards the Thatcher Government’s fixation with setting targets for narrowly defined money supply growth may have given the impression that under Evans The Times believed the State was a font of civic largesse. Certainly, the paper took the view that the Government needed to invest more in capital expenditure, citing the view of one with such impeccable monetarist credentials as Milton Friedman that there was no necessary relation between monetary growth and the size of the public sector borrowing requirement. But the paper took a more parsimonious view with regard to current expenditure. The Treasury’s demand of a 4 per cent public sector pay increase (at a time when inflation was running in double-digit per cent) was welcomed as an essential contribution to combating inflation. Indeed, the leader column argued that public sector workers had no right to expect the same pay parity with those in ‘the risk-taking’ private sector. What was more, those working in the nationalized industries should also see their wage increases pruned, ‘and that includes the wages of the miners and water workers as well as civil servants. If it means a hard winter, so be it.’[181 - ‘Moonshine and Money’ and ‘A Hard Winter’, leading articles, The Times, 17 September and 20 October 1981.] In this respect, The Times seemed ready to take on the miners before Mrs Thatcher, with memories of their defeat of Edward Heath, was prepared to do.
Not many miners read The Times. But on the issue of cuts in higher education, the newspaper was trespassing on the personal finances of a core area of its readership. In March 1980 the Government had announced three-year spending cuts in higher education. By May the following year, it was clear the University Grants Committee had failed to mitigate the full effects and universities braced themselves for falling matriculation rolls and the possibility of whole departments being axed as a consequence of an 8.5 per cent cut being enforced. Their woes were compounded by a fall in the income from foreign students, following the Government’s announcement that it would stop subsidizing fees for foreign students who would, in future, be charged the full cost of their course. Diana Geddes, the education correspondent, analysed the ‘grim future’ facing Britain’s universities. As a consequence of the 1963 Robbins Report, the proportion of eighteen-year-olds in higher education had risen from 3 per cent in the early 1950s to 14 per cent by the 1970s. The Government was now putting this process into reverse, having, as Geddes put it, ‘abandoned once and for all the Robbins principle that all those suitably qualified by ability and attainment should have the right to higher education’.
The universities were now paying the price for becoming the dependent wards of the State: over 90 per cent of their income came from public funds. But even ‘an overdue pruning of dead wood’ would be expensive. Redundancy bills alone could reach £200 million. This would wipe out most of the savings from reducing student numbers. Geddes’s article suggested that the Government might be better achieving its cuts by instead reducing its contribution to local authority-administered colleges and polytechnics – these ‘less respected institutions in the public sector’ – many of whose staff did not enjoy the same academic tenure and who would thus be much cheaper to sack.[182 - Diana Geddes, The Times, 30 March 1981.] In its leader column, the paper was prepared to accept the wrath of its readership in academia by stating that the cuts were necessary in the economic climate in which the country found itself.[183 - ‘Universities Under the Knife’ and ‘The Cost of University Cuts’, leading articles, The Times, 3 July and 10 October 1981.]
The plights of publicly funded professionals certainly provided a fitting moment for the Social Democratic Party (SDP) to launch itself. Departing the editor’s chair in carefree demob spirit, Rees-Mogg had penned one of his last leader articles by endorsing Shirley Williams as the best future hope for 10 Downing Street. The Labour Party’s lurch to the left under James Callaghan’s successor, Michael Foot, had been demonstrated in January 1981 when a special conference held at Wembley voted to elect future leaders through an electoral college made up principally of trade union block votes and of party activists. The Parliamentary Labour Party would be reduced to the status of minority shareholders. The immediate consequence of this was the breakaway of the moderate ‘Gang of Four’ (Shirley Williams, David Owen, Roy Jenkins and Bill Rodgers) to form the Council for Social Democracy. In March, the first twelve Labour MPs resigned the whip and the SDP was born.
The ‘Gang of Four’ were Murdoch’s first guests to lunch at Gray’s Inn Road. The main boardroom’s table was rather long, ensuring a disconcerting distance between each of the quiet revolutionaries. Fearing they might be given short shrift from the proprietor, Evans came away relieved that Murdoch had asked ‘polite, probing questions on policy’.[184 - Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, pp. 218–19.] Indeed, the SDP’s Communications Committee harboured hopes, believing Murdoch was ‘usually open to persuasion, if not to be converted, at least to give us a fair crack’.[185 - Ivor Crewe and Anthony King, SDP: The Birth, Life and Death of the Social Democratic Party, p. 261.] With no established national organization and without the funding of the trade unions or big business, the party’s success was dependent upon achieving maximum publicity in order to attract a mass membership quickly. The party’s birth was the main front page story in every national daily apart from the Sun. The Times reported the party’s opening press conference under the informative if underwhelming headline ‘SDP pleased by initial recruitment response’. Fred Emery and Ian Bradley reported from ‘a crowded news conference in London, staged brilliantly for television, and with a claque of applauding supporters’.
The SDP was launched with twelve policy tasks. Several were phrased in the inclusive language common to the public aspirations of all mainstream politicians. But a few distinctive polices stood out. The party differed from Thatcherism through its belief in a long-term incomes policy and a mixed economy in which ‘public and private firms should flourish side by side without frequent frontier changes’. In other words, it rejected monetarism as the principal means of curbing inflation and it would not role back the frontiers of the State. It was at odds with the Labour left by wanting to stay within the EEC and NATO and in resisting unilateral nuclear disarmament. It upheld traditional Liberal Party interests in constitutional reform, particularly of the House of Lords and the introduction of proportional representation. Yet overall, its bias was summed up from the first by Bill Rodgers who told the assembled press that the SDP was ‘not a new centre party, we are very plainly a left-of-centre party’.[186 - The Times, 27 March 1981.] As The Times put it in its leader, ‘with the exception of proportional representation there is no major policy being propounded by the Social Democrats now which was not at least attempted by the Callaghan Government’.[187 - ‘The Gang Becomes a Party’, leading article, The Times, 27 March 1981.]
It was natural that there should be curiosity and, indeed, excitement at the launch of a major new force in British politics. The SDP’s difficulty was in sustaining it in the months ahead, denied, as it was, the ability of the Government or the official Opposition to set the agenda in Parliament. It needed constant media interest. In this respect, The Times was less helpful than might have been expected. Unless there was a by-election campaign underway, the SDP rarely got more than two front-page mentions a week.[188 - Crewe and King, SDP, p. 257.] This was surprising, given the extent to which the SDP gained the reputation of being the journalists’ party with high-profile supporters like the Guardian’s Polly Toynbee, Anthony Sampson of the Observer and even the Daily Mirror’s agony aunt, Marjorie Proops. Tony Benn was convinced the BBC was an ‘agency of the SDP’.[189 - Ibid., p. 254.] The chronicler of the Guardian would even conclude that the ‘chief reason’ for the paper’s ‘success in the early 1980s was that the Social Democratic Party was founded in its pages and the battle for the soul of the Labour party fought out there’.[190 - Geoffrey Taylor, Changing Faces: History of The Guardian, 1956–1988, p. 213.] No such claim could be entertained by The Times. But the paper’s editorial line might have tilted more obviously towards the SDP if Rees-Mogg had continued as editor. He had made clear his belief that Shirley Williams was a figure around which a new national consensus could be constructed. Back in 1972, when the Labour Party appeared close to self-destruction over the Heath Government’s EEC entry terms, the Rees-Mogg Times had looked favourably on the possible creation of a government of the centre (that is to say, pro-EEC) under the leadership of Roy Jenkins. In the three general elections during which Rees-Mogg was editor (the paper was off the streets in 1979) The Times had expressed the hope of seeing an increase in the Liberal Party’s seats so that they might prove a moderating force on the two principal parties.
But if The Times under Harry Evans did not rush to pledge itself to the SDP’s red, white and blue colours, the atmosphere in Gray’s Inn Road was nonetheless respectful towards the new party. Its initial by-election performance suggested it was being taken seriously by an electorate fearful of Labour’s leftwards lurch and repulsed by the economic and social cost of Thatcher’s medicine. At a by-election in Warrington in July, Roy Jenkins achieved a 23 per cent swing to the SDP, almost unseating Labour in its heartland. The Conservative candidate lost his deposit. In October, following the creation of the ‘Alliance’ with the Liberal Party, a Liberal activist, Bill Pitt, became the first Lib-SDP Alliance candidate to win a seat, taking Croydon North-West from the Conservatives on a 24 per cent swing. Then, in November, Shirley Williams took Crosby from the Conservatives, recording the biggest turnover of votes in any parliamentary by-election. Repeated at a general election on a nationwide scale, it would give the Alliance 533 MPs, Labour 78 and the Conservatives four. The SDP really looked as if it might succeed in its great project, to break the mould of British politics.
By-elections are problematic for newspapers since the lateness of the declaration plays havoc with newspaper production. Nonetheless, Brian MacArthur and his team managed to beat the competition with the speed in which The Times led with Bill Pitt’s capture of Croydon. Unfortunately, the front page went to press with a pre-arranged victory article, ‘Our Credibility Barrier is Broken’ by Shirley Williams, to accompany it. By placing a partisan opinion piece by Williams on the front page, the paper appeared to be not only confusing news with comment but almost endorsing her party. This was a genuine slip. Nonetheless, Evans had to field a call the next day from an irate Gerald Long, the uncompromising new managing director of Times Newspapers, demanding an explanation.[191 - The Times, 23 October 1981; Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 289.]
Whatever the placement on the front page, nobody could be in any doubt what the back page of The Times made of the SDP’s progress. That was where Frank Johnson’s daily parliamentary sketch appeared. To Johnson the ‘Gang of Four’ provided a rich quarry for satire. Roy Jenkins was ‘a Fabergé of an egghead … shining, exquisitely crafted, full of delights, a much loved gracious figure who is to the liberal classes what the Queen Mother is to the rest of us’. The SDP, he would later note in 1986, was ‘a happy party, fit for all factions’, there being:
the Owenites; the Jenkinsites; the Elizabeth Davidites; those who want a successor to Polaris; those who want a successor to their Volvo; militant Saabs; supporters of Tuscany for August as opposed to the Dordogne; members of those car pools by which middle class families share the burden of driving their children to the local prep school; owners of exercise machines; people who have already gone over to compact discs … readers of Guardian leaders; and (a much larger group) writers of Guardian leaders.[192 - Frank Johnson, ‘A Happy Party, Fit for all Factions’, The Times, 16 September 1986.]
But besides the affectionate whimsy, Frank Johnson was also a perceptive judge. He foresaw the strategic weakness in the SDP’s condition. As he noted in September 1982, in lacking ‘the irrational emotions, the cranky zeal, that drives on the rank and file of the other parties’ the SDP’s supporters would eventually become demoralized by any faltering in momentum. And that faltering would come. Johnson had been introduced to Maurice Cowling and the school of Tory historians at Cambridge’s oldest college, Peterhouse, who rejected Whig and Marxist interpretations of historical progress and inevitability in favour of a ‘high politics’ view of men and events. Johnson applied this approach in his own analysis. Try as the SDP might to take a rational or scientific approach, he reminded them ‘politics is not a “subject” or an academic discipline. It is simply the random play of chance on a few ambitious politicians. No one, no matter how great an authority on “politics”, predicted the Falklands war.’[193 - Frank Johnson, The Times, 15 September 1982.]
This was not an approach shared by the theorists of the left, where historical inevitability remained the vogue – especially if it could be given a push with the sort of underhand tactics still employed in the Eastern Bloc or Britain’s student unions. Twenty-four hours after Labour had won control of the Greater London Council (GLC) on 7 May 1981, its group leader, the moderate Andrew McIntosh, was ousted in an internal coup by the left wing Ken Livingstone. The radical left now had the opportunity to show what they could do with – or to – Britain’s capital city. As ‘Red Ken’ put it to Nicholas Wapshott who interviewed him for The Times shortly after the successful putsch, ‘if the left GLC fails, it will be a sad day for the left everywhere’. Wapshott did not paint a favourable background for his subject, stating that, ‘as the housing chief of Camden, Livingstone’s performance was generally considered abysmal’ and ended with Livingstone enthusing about his pet salamanders: ‘I feed them on slugs and woodlice. They just live under a stone, come out at night and are highly poisonous. People say I identify with my pets.’[194 - Nicholas Wapshott’s interview with Ken Livingstone, The Times, 14 May 1981.]
The Times was not impartial in its commentary on the left’s progress within the Labour Movement. The paper thought it iniquitous and was not slow to say so. When the former Labour Cabinet minister Lord George Brown asked if he could pen articles for the paper, Evans replied affirmatively, suggesting ‘we are particularly interested in the Communists making inroads into the Labour Party’.[195 - Evans to Lord George Brown, 2 July 1981, Evans Day File.] During September, the paper ran extracts from a forthcoming book by David and Maurice Kogan on the activities of left-wing activists in Tony Benn’s campaign team, the ‘Campaign for Labour Party Democracy’ and the ‘Rank and File Mobilizing Committee’ who were trying to make the party leadership answerable to the activists rather than the Members of Parliament.[196 - The Times, 23 and 23 September 1981.] Labour was now led by the left wing, nuclear unilateralist, Michael Foot. But in September the battle commenced for the Deputy Leadership. Although this was not a position that involved the wielding of great power itself, the belief that Foot, aged sixty-eight, was a caretaker leader turned it into the struggle for the future of the party, one that was made critical by the possibility of it being won by Tony Benn.
Outside the ranks of his supporters, Tony Benn was perhaps the most feared figure in British politics. For those on the right, it would be more accurate to describe him as a hate figure. He certainly frightened The Times. Having seen Benn at close quarters during his period working with Callaghan, none was keener to save the Labour Party from him than Bernard Donoughue. With the Deputy Leadership election pending, Donoughue suggested the moment had come for a hatchet job on Benn in the form of an investigation into his considerable financial interests.[197 - Bernard Donoughue, 10 September 1981, Evans Day File 1/17.] This would show the great tribune of wealth redistribution to be a multimillionaire who had craftily ring-fenced his own money. The piece appeared on 25 September in a profile of the contenders which described Benn as ‘a wealthy aristocrat who waged a remarkable campaign to shed his peerage and upbringing’. The profile stated that his ‘main assets’ were:
shares in Benn Bros, publishers; large house in Holland Park and farm in Essex; most of the Benn family wealth comes from legacies and trusts connected with his American-born wife, Caroline. The estimated total is several million dollars: city sources confirm the existence of a Stansgate trust in the tax haven of the Bank of Bermuda. No details of amounts or beneficiaries have ever been disclosed.[198 - The Times, 25 September 1981.]
The following day The Times found itself in the embarrassing position of printing an apology attached to Benn’s letter of complaint. Evans also wrote a personal letter to him. Benn’s letter stated, ‘Neither I nor my family have ever owned a farm nor had any assets in any trust in Bermuda or any tax haven in the world … I might add that your account of my wife’s assets is grossly exaggerated.’[199 - Tony Benn, letter to the editor, The Times, 26 September 1981.] So much for ‘city sources’ – the information had been supplied by two outside informants. The editor dictated a memo to Anthony Holden, Fred Emery and Adrian Hamilton, the business editor, concluding that the lesson to be learned was ‘that incidental attacks on someone like this are not worth making. It is only worth attacking or exposing someone, in any event, when we have very high certainty of our evidence.’[200 - Evans to features, home and business editors, 29 October 1981, Evans Day File 1/17.]
The Deputy Leadership result was to be announced at the Labour Party Conference in Brighton. The declaration was expected in the evening so two different leader articles had been pre-prepared depending on the result. The leader assuming a Benn victory concluded that Michael Foot should ‘resign immediately’. ‘Both from personal self-respect,’ it elaborated, ‘and for the good of the Labour Party he should resign instead of providing a fig leaf of shabby respectability for the extremists who have now taken over the Labour Party.’[201 - Evans Day File, A327/3626.]
In the event, The Times was not able to run that night with either leading article: a strike by the NGA print union prevented the paper from coming out. Thus was missed the chance to report on an evening of great drama. John Silkin had been eliminated in the first ballot. Benn’s rival, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Denis Healey, appeared to have victory in the bag when the Silkin-supporting TGWU announced that it would use its 1.25 million block votes in the electoral college to abstain in the second round. Healey duly arrived in triumph at the conference hall only to discover that the TGWU had decided at the last moment to vote for Benn instead. This suddenly made the result a cliffhanger. When the declaration was made, Benn secured 49.574 per cent of the vote. Healey had squeezed home by a hair’s breadth.
Unrepentant in defeat, Benn claimed the ‘incoming tide’ was with him despite the fact that, ‘The privately-owned Press without exception have done all they possibly could to discredit the Labour party, its electoral mechanism, Socialism and the arguments we were putting forward in the campaign. To have got Fleet Street down to fifty-point-something in the Labour party is quite an achievement.’[202 - Tony Benn, quoted in the Daily Telegraph, 28 September 1981.] At least The Times and the rest of the ‘privately-owned Press’ knew what to expect if ever the great champion of State control ever did surf in on the ‘incoming tide’.
Healey’s victory prevented a potentially fatal defection of Labour MPs and supporters to the SDP. By a fraction of 1 per cent he probably saved his party. In doing so, he dished the SDP. When The Times returned after the strike, its sigh of relief was all but audible. For the contest to be ‘a turning point’ the moderates within the Labour Party would have to regain their lost ground.[203 - ‘Unfinished Business’, leading article, The Times, 1 October 1981.] Over 80 per cent of party activists in the constituencies had voted for Benn in the Deputy Leadership ballot, but his colleagues in the Parliamentary Labour Party held him in less regard and when Foot made clear he wanted rid of his turbulent priest, Benn failed to be elected by the MPs into the Shadow Cabinet. But he had not finished in his assault on the media. In March 1982, Benn chose a conference of Pan-Hellenic socialists in Athens to announce that British democracy was threatened by its military (in its pursuit of the arms race) and by its media. Britain, he said, did not have a free press because he could not point to a single newspaper that reflected his views. Catching the eye of The Times reporter, Mario Modiano, Benn added:
And The Times, dare I say to you, is really disreputable. It does not print truthfully and faithfully what happens and it pretends, because it is printed in small print that it is above argument. But it is a political propaganda instrument like the Sun, but it is printed in rather better print and rather shrewder language.[204 - Tony Benn, quoted in The Times, 13 March 1982.]
Benn had a particular reason for lumping the Sun and The Times together. In January 1982, the Sun had printed allegations of widespread drunkenness, absenteeism, rota tampering and moonlighting by train drivers. In retaliation, the drivers’ ASLEF union called on its members to ‘black’ not only the Sun but – on the grounds it had the same owner – The Times as well. Without access to the trains, the paper could not be distributed. The ‘blacking’ continued even after a promise to revoke it in the High Court had been secured. Ultimately, the dispute kept The Times off the streets for five days. Benn told an NUJ branch meeting that unions were right to black newspapers that printed ‘lies’ about them in a struggle in which ‘day after day Fleet Street conducts its campaign against working people’. He accused journalists who did the bidding of their editors and owners instead of reporting facts accurately as being like ‘Jews in Dachau who herded other Jews into the gas chambers’.[205 - Ibid., 27 January 1982.] But if Benn had come to the conclusion that new laws were needed to – as he phrased it – ensure wider press diversity, News International drew different lessons from the dispute with ASLEF: the sooner the strike-prone British Rail distribution system could be replaced with a non-unionized road freight service, the better.
V
Harold Evans had descended upon The Times like a whirlwind, whisking up copy, tossing forth ideas, upturning traditional – sometimes lazy – ways of doing things; chopping and changing, a centrifugel force pulsating without let-up late into the night. Left in the wake of this force of nature was a fair degree of desolation. To notice this, the editor would have had to look back. And this was not his job. Murdoch had wanted someone who would upturn a few chairs in the cosy atmosphere of the old clubroom and Harry Evans, ably assisted by his young protégé, Tony Holden, succeeded admirably in this rearrangement. It was to be his undoing.
At the time Evans was appointed, Murdoch installed a new managing director at Times Newspapers. While Evans would handle the creative side of the paper, Gerald Long would stabilize its finances. Evans had been able to work his magic at the Sunday Times partly thanks to the millions Thomson let him spend in realizing his ideas. But Murdoch was trying to make The Times’s books balance and this was not going to be achieved by throwing money around. Thus there might well have been tension between Evans and whoever was assigned to keep his paper on an even financial keel. Nonetheless, in choosing Gerald Long, Murdoch found a character whose individual chemistry was never likely to bond with that of the editor.
Long had been born in 1922, the son of a well-read postman. Sent to the ancient but minor public school of St Peter’s, York, he had progressed to Cambridge. During the war, he had been in the Army Intelligence Corps, serving in the Middle East and Europe. After the end of the war he had helped to establish German newspapers in the British-occupied zone of the country. In 1948 he joined Reuters and, after a stint in Paris, became Reuters’ chief representative in Germany between 1956 and 1960. When he became chief executive in 1963, Reuters was a loss-making company. But Long had innovative ideas. Taking advantage of developments in information technology, he introduced ‘Monitor’, a terminal that allowed subscribers to check share prices around the world, thereby creating an electronic dealing floor. ‘Monitor’ became part of the technology that drove the international financial revolution from the 1960s onwards. And in turning its owner into as much a provider of financial as news services, it transformed Reuters’ fortunes. In recognition, Long started to be referred to as the company’s ‘second founder’. He had been chief executive of Reuters for eighteen years and was looking for a fresh challenge when Murdoch asked him to renovate Times Newspapers. He accepted immediately.
It was not one of Murdoch’s more successful transplants. Long had no knowledge of modern newspaper production, editing or advertising. As chairman of Reuters, Sir Denis Hamilton had seen rather more of Long than had Murdoch and did not think the appointment wise. Hamilton accepted that Long had ‘a first-class brain’ but ‘he was not a leader’.[206 - Hamilton, Editor-in-Chief, p. 182.] Evans was intrigued by this man who was ‘something quite special, an intellectual who has seen the world’. Yet he found his irascibility impossible to deal with: ‘His normal manner was so aggressive it provoked reaction. It was derived from reading books rather than observing men.’[207 - Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 324.] It quickly became clear that he did not get on with the editor. This put the proprietor in a position. Should he side with his editor or his managing director? If neither, would he have to waste time as a court of higher authority, perpetually adjudicating on their disputes?
The precarious financial position of Times Newspapers in 1981 provided the context for the tug of war. The recession was hitting advertising. TNL’s cash cow, the Sunday Times Colour Magazine, was finding it hard to generate its former yield and selling display advertising was especially tough for a paper like The Times whose questionable future had been so frequently in the news. The new advertising director, Mike Ruda, did away with the separate Times and Sunday Times advertising display sales departments, combining them together on the fifth floor of The Times building. Ruda, a fifty-year-old former javelin thrower for South London Harriers, had been in newspaper advertising since 1954. He had been advertising director of the joint Sun and News of the World ad sales and Murdoch looked to him to introduce some of that drive into Gray’s Inn Road. Ruda did not like what he found, later commenting:
There was very poor morale. There was a notable lack of what I would call professional selling skills and those people – and there were very few of them – who did have any ability, had been suffocated. Drastic action had to be undertaken fairly quickly to get rid of the dead wood.[208 - Michael Ruda, interview, ‘The Greatest Paper in the World’, Thames Television, broadcast 2 January 1985.]
Ruda set about his task. Among those he brought in to help sell space was Clive Milner, a young advertising rep from the Observer who would end up becoming managing director not only of Times Newspapers but also of the entire News International Group. Evans was uneasy about the changes, telling Murdoch he thought integrating The Times and Sunday Times advertising departments was a questionable idea ‘because selling the two papers seems to require entirely different techniques’.[209 - Evans to Murdoch, 3 December 1981, Evans Day File.] Murdoch, however, believed the merger directly benefited The Times. It had not enough advertising while the Sunday Times attracted more than it had space to print. Integration facilitated diverting some of this surplus to the daily broadsheet.[210 - Rupert Murdoch to the author, interview, 4 August 2003.] The process of integration continued in other areas and in November 1982 the two papers’ circulation offices were brought together. Long was even put in charge of a feasibility study to see what the savings would be if The Times building was relinquished and its staff accommodated next door in the suitably refurbished Sunday Times building.[211 - TNL News, April 1981; Murdoch’s report to the TNL board, 9 June 1981.] The very thought of such a cohabitation horrified many Times stalwarts for whom a set of floorboards seemed to offer insufficient protection for their paper’s editorial independence from the more popular Sunday title. Few in either paper were sorry when the proposal was ditched. It was also a relief to hear Murdoch state that he would not shift the papers to the East End site of Wapping, where he was fitting out a new printing facility for the Sun and the News of the World.[212 - TNL News, April 1981.]
When it came to industrial relations, The Times was done no favours by being within infection range of the Sunday Times. At the end of the first week in June 1981, SOGAT called a strike at the Sunday Times that cost the paper 400,000 copies. The union had acted in breach of its agreement with News International setting out a specific disputes procedure in which production was supposed to continue while negotiations took place. This was no trivial matter, for it threatened to unwind the agreements by which Murdoch had purchased the papers. Consequently, the TNL board voted unanimously to close both papers unless the union chapels agreed to abide by the disputes procedure. Long accompanied the announcement with the explanation, ‘This is not a threat. It is a decision. Anybody who thinks it is a bluff does not know Rupert Murdoch.’[213 - Ibid., July 1981.] This did the trick – for the moment. Talks with SOGAT commenced and a written undertaking to abide by the disputes procedure was procured. It would last all of three months.
When News International bought The Times, the paper was produced on Linotype machines, a nineteenth-century, hot-metal technology. In purchasing Times Newspapers, Murdoch had secured agreement with the print unions to switch production from hot metal to ‘cold composition’ thus doing away with the Linotype machines and molten metal. Henceforth, the Linotype operators would be redeployed to type with computer keyboards, as had long been the norm in the rest of the world. But this did not mean computerized page make-up. Instead the computers were capable only of printing up text galleys that were passed on to a team armed with scalpels, scissors and glue who cut and pasted the lines of text into position on a drawing board. When a full page had been arranged in this way, a negative would be made of it and converted into a photosensitive polymer plate. From this, the newspaper would be run off.
Back in 1974, Marmaduke Hussey had complained that moving to ‘cut and paste’ cold composition would scarcely be worth the trouble given that it still involved having to employ process engravers who produced the pictorial printing plates. He argued that only a move to full computerized page composition made sense.[214 - Marmaduke Hussey, memorandum, 9 December 1974, Grigg Papers.] Eight years later, Murdoch had no more hope than Hussey of getting such a system installed at Gray’s Inn Road in the face of union hostility and – it has to be said – the limitations of the technology then on offer. Getting the halfway house of ‘cut and paste’ accepted was regarded as an achievement in itself even though it had long been the established method throughout the regional presses.
From the first, The Times’s switch to cold composition was beset with teething problems. It was not deemed possible to move the paper overnight from hot to cold composition. Instead the process was gradually expanded and it was not until the following year that the entire paper was produced by photocomposition. The initial results were disappointing. It had taken so long to install the ‘new’ technology that its makers no longer manufactured it. This made finding replacement parts increasingly difficult.[215 - TNL News, September 1984.] Reproduction was so appalling that in October 1981 Evans suggested that the paper should use ‘the Sunday Times hot metal facilities for the front and back for as long as we possibly can. I say this because converting to cold type on the front page will be the worst advertisement for The Times and certainly hinder our sales and our authority.’[216 - Evans to Bill O’Neill, 20 October 1981, Evans Day File.] Rather than employ speed typists, the NGA had insisted Times Newspapers re-employ the old Linotype operators to work the new computer keyboards. Many of them seemed to have inordinate difficulty adjusting to this change. The initial average of fifteen words per minute frankly beggared belief in an industry driven by deadlines. To this was added the introduction of a further stage in the process – the making of a photo polymer pattern plate, compounding delay and minimizing the time available to pick up errors. Readers zealously spotted the resulting mistakes and wrongly attributed them to declining editorial standards. Nor did speed improve much with practice. On one occasion, Evans found himself standing at the paste-up board until half past midnight trying to insert some copy that had been sent two and a half hours earlier. At that time of night, Rees-Mogg, when he was editor, had long since gone home, had dinner and retired safely to bed. Some thought that Evans should have conserved his energies by following his predecessor’s example, leaving the trials of the production process to his night staff. But Evans was too involved to delegate when so much was going wrong, complaining to Gerry Long, ‘It says something for our deadlines and for our production efficiency in this area that a[n El] Salvador story which was on the front page of the New York Herald Tribune, printed in Zurich and flown to Britain, could not be got into the London Times last night.’[217 - Evans to Gerald Long, cc. Bill Gillespie, John Collier, 29 January 1982, Evans Day File.]
In the executive dining room, opinion was divided about the extent to which those ‘mastering’ cold composition were governed by incompetence, laziness or genuine malevolence. Nor were the NGA compositors the only union members treated with suspicion. Denis Hamilton had long been of the view that Reg Brady, the father of the Sunday Times NATSOPA chapel, had natural intelligence and would have been a constructive force if the social circumstances of his background had delivered him into managerial rather than union responsibilities. Instead Hamilton had watched while Brady ‘caused more trouble in the machine room than any other man in the history of the newspaper, discovering all manner of disputes and grievances’.[218 - Hamilton, Editor-in-Chief, pp. 171–2.] Many of Murdoch’s most trusted lieutenants, including John Collier and Bill O’Neill, had started off in print union politics before their potential was spotted and harnessed by News Group’s management. It was decided to make Brady an offer and, to the fury of his union brothers, he accepted the Murdoch shilling and switched sides.
Brady’s fondness for a Soviet fur hat gave him an appropriately Cold War demeanour but, in the event, his defection to the capitalists did not unlock the potential that Hamilton had seen in him. Union officials refused to talk to him, thereby preventing him from playing any constructive role. Indeed, if disarming him prevented Brady from pursuing his previous destructive function, it did not seem to make much difference in the intractable war of attrition at Gray’s Inn Road. The closed shop persisted, preventing management from having a free hand in who was employed. Evans was even unable to fill a secretarial vacancy in his own office because NATSOPA sent a succession of clearly unsuitable candidates from which he had to choose. One secretary he did employ, Liz Seeber, was astonished by the ludicrous demarcation rules prescribing her actions. In the first couple of weeks at her job a typewriter broke but, on lifting it from her desk to remove it, ‘about three people said “Oh my God, don’t do that, you’ll bring SOGAT out on strike.”’ So she had to put it down, ring a SOGAT official and wait until – in their own time – a small deputation arrived armed with a trolley to wheel it away.[219 - Liz Seeber to the author, interview, 18 July 2002.] It was not an environment geared to exercising personal initiative. Furthermore, it provided a cover for laziness and intimidation. In Notes from a Small Island, Bill Bryson recounted the misery he used to experience every night as a subeditor on The Times’s business news desk when he tried to get hold of the Wall Street report from the SOGAT member whose task it was to receive it in the wire room. When each night the employee failed to take it to his desk, Bryson had to go up to the wire-room door and ask for it. He would invariably be told to go away (although in blunter language) because the employee was eating pizza and could not be bothered to look for it. Sometimes the threat of violence would be implied. Instead, the employee would come down with it when he felt like it – even if this meant it would miss the copy deadline. Obedient to the union’s demarcation rules, he would not allow a non-SOGAT member like Bryson to cross the wire room’s threshold to look for the incoming report himself. As Bryson later noted, it was just one of the ways the union exerted control on the newspaper industry ‘by keeping technological secrets to itself, like how to tear paper off a machine’.[220 - Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island, pp. 47–8.]
In the Gray’s Inn Road machine room the inter-union demarcation rules had far greater implications. There, NGA members had regarded it as a precondition of their superiority that NATSOPA members employed alongside them were not permitted to earn above 80 per cent of their own rate. In September 1981, NATSOPA members were awarded 87.5 per cent of the NGA’s £106 per night wage in return for improved productivity and a small reduction in their manning levels. Although the NGA was not offering similar concessions, it nonetheless demanded that its members’ wages should rise commensurately in order to restore their 20 per cent advantage. This would have added 28.3 per cent to the NGA payroll and management refused the request. So the NGA went on strike. No Sunday Times appeared on 27 September and The Times ceased production that evening.
Those turning up for work on the Monday had to cross a twenty-six-man picket line. Eight hours of negotiation at ACAS failed to produce a breakthrough. In the meantime, all 1400 Sunday Times employees were suspended without pay, a decision to extend this to The Times being deferred until the following day. Working closely with John Collier, Murdoch threatened the paper with destruction unless the NGA backed down. It was, he said, ‘the most serious situation I have ever seen in Fleet Street’:
We are being held up by a small group of men who never work more than half a shift a week for us. It is a straight attempt at hijacking us. If the company gives in on the dispute we will be rolled over by other unions. Unless the NGA back down, I will close The Times. We have lost money, millions of pounds. We are still being held up and there is no point in going on. We are simply not putting any more money into the company.[221 - Murdoch, quoted in the Financial Times, 30 September, and the Daily Telegraph, 29 September 1981.]
The hopes of putting aside the ghosts of the Thomson years appeared dashed. It was Hussey’s shutdown strategy of 1978–9 all over again. But Murdoch had one advantage. In 1978–9, the unions knew Times Newspapers would sooner or later back down rather than see their titles permanently closed down. With Murdoch, it was not possible to be so sure. Unlike Thomson, he could liquidate the company at minimal cost and with the advantage of having separated ownership of the property assets from the newspapers.
This was brinkmanship of the highest order. Earlier in the month the embattled management of the FT had threatened to shut their loss-making paper unless a similar differentials dispute was resolved. Now Murdoch was following suit and he personally took charge in the negotiations, accepting Len Murray’s invitation to come to the TUC’s headquarters, Congress House. It was there, after hours of torturous exploration, that the NGA finally accepted Murray’s proposals at 2 a.m. on Wednesday morning. There would be a written (but not legally binding) guarantee of future uninterrupted production and acceptance of an agreed disputes procedure. Murdoch thanked Murray who ‘persuaded me not to pull the plug for the last few hours while he worked around the clock to get this together’.[222 - Murdoch, quoted in The Times, 2 October 1981; TNL News, October 1981.] After three days off the streets because of a dispute among those printing its Sunday sibling, The Times was back in business with the essential battlegrounds of management versus union rights and inter-union demarcation disputes unresolved. ‘In recent months, Rupert Murdoch has learnt that he has no special magic in dealing with London print unions,’ concluded the Australian Financial Review. ‘From the point of view of News Corp. shareholders, the danger is that Murdoch will delay closure of The Times beyond the point which commercial sanity dictates.’[223 - Australian Financial Review, reproduced in TNL News, November 1981.]
VI
At best, The Times survived the September crisis with a stay of execution. But there was little cause for celebration. Sales continued to be up on the same month the previous year and, while the royal wedding-fuelled circulation surge of July was always likely to be a one-off, new readers were continuing to outstrip the dead and disaffected. In normal circumstances the improvement would be considered to be excellent but Evans’s reputation had created an unrealistic level of expectation that detracted from the gains that were made. The editor himself was concerned by a disturbing fall in reader subscriptions.[224 - Evans to Ken Beattie (TNL commercial director), 4 November 1981, Evans Day File A327/3626.] But whatever angle was taken on the sales figures, the more important statistic was that, between July and November 1981, the paper was losing between £250,000 and £374,000 every week. None doubted that Richard Williams had done an excellent job with Preview, the new arts listing tabloid section, but it was expensive to run, failing to attract much advertising, and market research showed few signs that it was raising the paper’s circulation. When Ken Beattie, the commercial director, circulated a paper at the TNL board meeting calling for Preview to be scrapped, Evans did not mince words in a note he sent Beattie: ‘I really do think that you have an obligation to consult me as Editor first before the Chairman. You put me in an impossible position if the Chairman is persuaded against the project which is close to my heart and was, I thought, to his. I tell you frankly that I could not continue to edit The Times in circumstances like this.’[225 - Evans to Ken Beattie, 21 October and 29 October 1981, Evans Day File.]
While Evans was determined to defend – seemingly with his professional life – an innovation like Preview, he was less staunch in support of the arts coverage he had inherited in the main section of the paper. He had a succession of disagreements with John Higgins, the arts editor. One battleground was the failure to take television reviewing seriously. Another concerned Higgins’s enthusiasm for giving so much space to opera staged outside Britain. Higgins had greatly improved the arts coverage in the Financial Times but Evans was less impressed by his efforts in Gray’s Inn Road, threatening, ‘I will have to see a marked improvement or consider different ways of covering the Arts.’[226 - Evans to John Higgins, 17 November 1981, Evans Day File A327/3626.] He proceeded to take the Saturday Review section out of Higgins’s hands but mishandled the appointment of Bevis Hillier who, having been half-promised various competences, was left in a semi-employed limbo. Hillier was so dissatisfied with his treatment that when he was finally given the Saturday Review section to edit in January 1982 he resigned a month later with six months’ severance pay.
Hillier was not alone in becoming exasperated by the editor’s swings between drive and indecision. The political commentator Alan Watkins claimed that Evans would offer him a job whenever they ran into one another, the details ‘about which I would hear nothing until we met a few months later, when he would suggest lunch, about which I would likewise hear nothing’.[227 - Alan Watkins, Spectator, 23 July 1983.] But the journalist Evans most wanted in his paper was the star columnist he had allowed to take a sabbatical – Bernard Levin. ‘Not a day goes by,’ he told Levin in September 1981, ‘without the Editor of The Times, in advanced years, being accosted on the streets, in clubs and society dinners, and racecourses and parlours and, in his bedroom before his shaving mirror, about the absence of Mr Bernard Levin from the columns of the newspaper.’[228 - Evans to Bernard Levin, 2 September 1981, Evans Day File.] Evans’s pleading became desperate. He suggested Levin could return as a television critic, a music critic or even a parliamentary sketchwriter (despite the fact that Frank Johnson was winning such acclaim in this role).[229 - Ibid., 6 August 1981, Evans Day File.] Evans even suggested that Levin should pay a visit to Gray’s Inn Road to ‘satisfy yourself that the place is still inhabited by reasonable men’.[230 - Ibid., 12 November 1981, Evans Day File.] Levin kept his distance.
Indeed, the trickle of departures among the editorial staff was turning into a torrent. First out of the door was Hugh Brogan, the respected Washington correspondent, who resigned shortly after Evans’s arrival in protest at what he anticipated would be Murdoch’s certain destruction of the paper’s integrity. But Evans soon found himself at loggerheads with the paper’s New York correspondent, Michael Leapman, as well. Exasperated by the frequency with which Brian Horton, the foreign editor and French restaurant lover, spiked his copy, Leapman assumed the worst and accused Evans of political censorship.[231 - Evans to Michael Leapman, 11 June 1981, telex 125912.] One of Horton’s techniques was to unsettle Leapman by sending him dismissive comments about the quality of his grammar. Not that Horton knew better. He covertly obtained the judgments from the literary editor, Philip Howard, who innocently thought Horton was seeking advice on grammatical matters as a form of self-improvement. [232 - Philip Howard to the author, interview, 5 December 2002.] Leapman, meanwhile, continued to express dissatisfaction and when Evans demanded an assurance of a ‘reasonable’ attitude from him he resigned,[233 - Evans to Michael Leapman, 29 June 1981, Evans Day File.] preferring to become ‘William Hickey’ in the Express instead.
As Evans’s closest colleague, Anthony Holden, the features editor, became the lieutenant most closely associated with the drive to introduce new blood – by which was also meant the determination to sack old favourites. Marcel Berlins took voluntary redundancy.[234 - Anthony Holden to the author, interview, 9 April 2003.] With this, The Times lost a distinguished and authoritative commentator on legal affairs. The leader writer, Roger Berthoud, also packed up and left. Another to seek redundancy was the paper’s Whitehall correspondent, Peter Hennessy. This was a grievous blow for Hennessy was, as Patrick Marnham has pointed out, the first journalist to persuade senior civil servants to talk regularly about what was really going on in the corridors of Government.[235 - Patrick Marnham, Spectator, 20 February 1982.] Evans was sorry to see him go but was unable to dissuade him from doing so.[236 - Evans to Peter Hennessy, 10 January 1092, Evans Day File A759/9329.] In the course of Evans’s opening year as editor, more than fifty members of the editorial staff left with redundancy payouts.
Too much was happening all at once. Familiar faces were leaving, less familiar ones arriving. The paper was riddled with mistakes due to the delays caused by switching to cold composition, a change that was not even improving the print quality of the paper. This was not the best moment to reorder the contents, but the editor did so all the same, deciding that, instead of constantly having to shift around the various news, sport and law sections of the paper in order to keep the centre of the paper fixed, the centre pages should float instead. At one stage he even considered the sacrilege of moving leaders and letters to pages two and three. Even without going that far, floating the paper’s philosophical core a few pages either way succeeded only in giving the impression that editorial policy was adrift. Readers were not impressed. Nor were the leader writers, increasingly airing their doubts about the editor’s variable decisiveness. Owen Hickey, the chief leader writer, tackled Evans directly, assuring him that readers did not want to turn to the centre of their paper and find obituaries on the left and badminton on the right.[237 - Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 293.]
The Times was not used to being in a state of perpetual revolution. But this was now the inevitable tension in a paper stretched on the live wire between the two electricity pylons of Rupert Murdoch and Harold Evans. Recognizing his desire to be closely involved, the backbench would try and track Evans down when news broke during the course of the night. Calls would be made across London to establish his whereabouts. Eventually, he would be discovered subbing a sports report elsewhere in the building. The problem was that, called away from his handiwork, he would then forget to return to it, leaving the subeditors unable to ascertain which bits had been sent. They were left with no option but to unpick his work and start again from scratch. No matter how helpful – how the master of the paper – Evans thought he was being, subs did not always welcome his attempts to steer every boat in the paper’s flotilla from early morning to late at night. The Times had long published the Oxford and Cambridge exam results, but the editor decided to extend the service to all the universities. Compiling these graduation lists involved an enormous amount of extra work done after the London edition had been put to bed. On one occasion, around midnight, Tim Austin was working on them when Evans arrived back from a dinner in his black tie. Seeing it was Durham, his alma mater, Evans volunteered to do the subbing himself. Unfortunately, he got the style wrong and the whole section had to be redone. ‘He just did not know when to stop,’ concluded Austin; ‘he was not the best at delegating.’[238 - Tim Austin to the author, interview, 4 March 2003.]
The editor’s insistence on making his mark in almost every possible part of the paper might have been a tolerable if irritating eccentricity had it only affected his relations with colleagues. The problem was that his interventions were wrecking the paper’s deadlines. The Times was becoming increasingly unobtainable in Scotland because the train at King’s Cross would not wait while Evans held up production in order to make some needless alteration. This was a question of priorities and the editor appeared to have lost sight of the commercial imperatives at work. The leader writers would deliver their copy on time only for Evans to announce that he would run them through his own typewriter. Aware that another deadline was being missed, Fred Emery would race over to the editor’s office to find its occupant kneeling on the floor with a pair of scissors in his hands. He would be cutting up the original copy and trying to insert some extra lines of his own on scraps of paper with glue. Emery did not even believe the editor’s additions improved the sense of the original. ‘Rhythms and disciplines are crucial to a daily newspaper’s morale and professionalism,’ Emery believed. When they were destroyed, ‘things fall apart’.[239 - Fred Emery to the author, interview, 24 January 2005.]
There was a journalistic maxim that ‘you can edit with a typewriter or a calculator, but not both’.[240 - Made famous by Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, quoted in Toby Young, How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, p. 143n.] This was exactly the problem at The Times in the dying days of 1981. The editor led with the typewriter while his managing director and the proprietor attempted to rule with the calculator. Famous names were departing and, as so often with voluntary redundancy, it was those most marketable to an alternative employer who were going while those who feared leaving the life raft clung on. Yet, Evans persisted in hiring new journalists, often at higher salaries than those they replaced. Each appointment became a battleground, particularly since, in the short term, even the redundancy programme was adding to the paper’s costs. One of many disputes concerned finding a replacement for Michael Leapman. Murdoch maintained that The Times could not afford its own correspondent in New York in addition to its office in Washington DC. Instead it should seek a saving by using News Group’s New York bureau instead. Ignoring both this opinion – which he felt was an attempt to see copy in The Times written by employees answerable to Murdoch rather than to himself – and that of Brian Horton, Evans sent out Peter Watson, formally of the Diary column.[241 - Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, pp. 329–31.] Evans simply did not see how he could satisfy the proprietor’s instruction to improve the paper without being left alone to hire whoever he felt could best achieve it.
At the heart of the matter was Evans’s complaint that he was not given a clear budget allocation. A memo from Gerry Long demanding that all company executives seek written authorization for ‘any proposed action’ was understandably resented.[242 - Gerald Long to department heads, 19 June 1981 (reissued 5 January 1982), ref. A751/9253/42.] Evans insisted that this was no way to run a newspaper. ‘I am a little shaken,’ he told Murdoch with restrained anger. ‘I do find it difficult to accept the principle of day-to-day approval for detailed items. I can’t honestly edit the paper properly without having discretion … It makes life difficult and erodes authority if I am not to be the sole channel for your instructions.’[243 - Evans to Murdoch, 16 September 1981, Evans Day File, A327/3626.] It was demeaning for the editor of The Times to have to scurry up and down stairs to the proprietor or managing director every time he wanted to spend money. In May 1981, John Grant, the managing editor, had drawn up a £9.1 million budget on inherited staffing levels for the next eleven months.[244 - Minutes, editorial management meeting, 4 May 1982, ref. 3629/3/4.] The redundancy programme was supposed to cut that budget substantially and when, on 20 January, Evans was presented with a spending limit – £7,723,000 – along with the warning that he had already crossed it, it was clear there would have to be further job cuts. Evans’s defence that ‘in terms of real as distinct from money costs, The Times’s editorial budget is less than at any time in recent years’ fell upon deaf ears.[245 - Evans to Murdoch, undated draft, January 1982, Evans Day File.] Times Newspapers lost £8 million between June and November 1981, wiping out News International’s summer profits. Worse, this came at a time when the finances of News Corp., the parent company, were already being drained through the New York Post’s costly circulation war with the rival Daily News. In these circumstances, The Times really did look like a luxury the increasingly transatlantic Murdoch could ill afford.
There was little by way of Christmas cheer. Evans injured himself putting up decorations and took time off to recover. With Charles Douglas-Home away on sabbatical, the paper was edited by Brian MacArthur and Fred Emery. It was at this moment that Evans committed an act that infuriated Murdoch. The proprietor knew that Evans had taken time off to recover from his spell of concussion but, long after he assumed that the editor was back at his desk, he was aghast to discover that he was, in fact, mysteriously in the United States. Evans had intended to keep his transatlantic mission secret but his secretary had forgotten to tell either MacArthur or Emery that this was the case. Hours before Murdoch was due to fly over to London from New York, he telephoned The Times expecting to speak to Evans, only to discover he was unaccountably in America. The proprietor was furious and perhaps not a little suspicious. When Evans hurried back to the office (having been tracked down by MacArthur and warned to return to London immediately), it was to find a bitter letter from Murdoch waiting for him, berating him for the time he had taken to convalesce. Given how manically hard Evans had worked since his appointment, this was unfair, although, in the circumstances in which the paper found itself, the furtive trip to America certainly looked peculiar. Indeed, the letter read more as if the proprietor was issuing a written warning, putting on record that he was distancing himself from his chosen editor. This was ominous. Evans fired back a six-point rebuttal of Murdoch’s charges, reasserting his acceptance of the necessity for hard work and pleading, ‘I love The Times. We have until now, I thought, had an extremely close liaison.’[246 - Ibid., 11 January 1982, Evans Day File.]
From this moment on, suspicion governed Evans’s attitude to Murdoch. He began to suspect Murdoch was complaining about him behind his back and that one of those listening was Paul Johnson, whose media column in the Spectator was giving Evans critical reviews. Unless he was there in the room to monitor possible interference, Evans was nervous about Murdoch sounding forth on politics to Times journalists. On his return from his Christmastide absence, Evans discovered that Murdoch had expressed a preference for economic sanctions against the USSR while chatting to Owen Hickey. Hickey, who was not likely to compromise his intellectual self-certainty to anyone, did not feel Murdoch was leaning on him. But Evans went out of his way to write a leader condemning the policy as a ‘romantic notion’ and, worse, an ‘apocalyptic strategy’.[247 - Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, pp. 319–23.] Whether this could be considered an overreaction depended upon how narrowly the proprietor’s guarantee not to direct editorial policy could be reasonably defined. To assume he had to take a Trappist vow whenever a conversation touched upon the modern world was clearly ridiculous. The problem was, did all journalists have the strength to put from their mind Murdoch’s stated opinions when they filed copy he might read and note?
Evans’s predicament was that tensions were now running high not only with Murdoch but with Gerry Long as well. Scarcely anyone had missed The Times’s decision to cancel its detailed coverage of the European Parliament but Long also wanted to cut costs by scrapping the paper’s Westminster gallery staff and rely on PA reports instead.[248 - Evans to Charles Douglas-Home, no date, February 1982, Evans Day File.] This would certainly undermine the paper’s claims to be offering something more than its competitors and Evans would have none of it. It was not just Evans who had difficulty relating to Long. Frank Giles, the Sunday Times editor, also felt ‘to describe his nature as complex is about as observant as pointing out that Schubert’s Eighth Symphony is unfinished’.[249 - Frank Giles, Sundry Times, p. 221.] Shortly before he assumed the editorship, Evans had a foretaste of Long’s eccentricity when he went to the latter’s house for dinner. When the discussion turned to how The Times’s reputation should be restored, Long became animated, telling Evans, ‘The man you need for authority is Penning-Rowsell of the Financial Times’ and reached from his bookshelves the proof – a copy of Penning-Rowsell’s The Wines of Bordeaux.[250 - Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 172.] This proved to be a portent of his priorities. Although Long proceeded to demonstrate his readiness to sacrifice good journalists in pursuit of cutting costs, he was never prepared to compromise gastronomic standards at The Times. On one occasion when Sir Geoffrey Howe, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, came to lunch at Gray’s Inn Road, roast lamb was on the menu. When Howe asked for mint sauce, the waitress pulled rank, grandly announcing, ‘Mr Long does not allow mint sauce on the fifth floor.’[251 - Anthony Holden to the author, interview, 9 April 2003.]
Evans could not unseat Murdoch, but he could try and undermine Long. The easiest way of doing this was to provide Long with a public platform for self-immolation. Long had suggested the financially imprudent idea of importing a French and a German food critic to eat their way round Britain’s most famous restaurants as part of a forthcoming Times series of articles on expensive foods.[252 - Evans to Anthony Holden, 23 November 1981, Evans Day File A327/ 3626.] Discovering that the managing director had been in acrimonious correspondence with the leading restaurateur Albert Roux, Evans persuaded Long that publishing the exchange would be a wonderful opening salvo to start the series. Long had dined at Roux’s celebrated Le Gavroche restaurant and had asked for the ‘farmhouse cheeseboard’. But, horror of horrors, he suspected that one of the cheeses, a St Paulin, was industrially produced, a fact confirmed upon consulting his trusty Androuet Guide du Fromage. ‘This met at first with an indignant response from your waiter,’ Long informed Roux. Perhaps unwisely, the waiter retaliated with the flip put-down, ‘if Monsieur knows cheese better than I do, then of course Monsieur is right’. This remark appeared to have straightened the bristles on Long’s Lord Kitchener-style moustache. Roux wrote to assure him that the offending cheese was a product ‘made by craftsmen on the scale of a cottage industry’ thereby generating a fresh debate on Long’s second major hobby – semantics. Long replied at great length, also finding fault with the turbot and making clear he was sending the correspondence to Michelin who had recently given Le Gavroche the only three star rating in England. Despite the provocations, Roux attempted to bring the argument to a close, somewhat incredibly assuring Long, ‘the fact that you have taken so much trouble to write about food leaves me with endless pleasure’, and inviting him and his wife to dine with him. Boorishly, Long declined the offer.
The unintentionally hilarious correspondence appeared in the paper on Saturday 6 February, suitably illustrated with a Calman cartoon of a French waiter intoning, ‘I’m a bit – how to say – cheesed off by these complaints.’ Running into Anthony Holden in the office, Long asked him what he thought of the exchange. When the features editor replied that it was ‘in the great tradition of British eccentrics’, Long was uncomprehending, exclaiming, ‘Eccentric? What’s eccentric about it?’[253 - Leapman, Barefaced Cheek, p. 228.] He would soon find out. When Murdoch toured the Sunday Times on the Saturday afternoon (supposedly its busiest period), he found its journalists, feet on table, laughing with childlike glee at Long’s cheese pantomime. Evans had knowingly published a correspondence that made the managing director appear ridiculous. What was more, he had allowed Long to demonstrate his obsession with expensive dining at exactly the moment he was also calling for six hundred redundancies, mainly among the clerical staff at Times Newspapers. Long may have hoped that his correspondence would lead Michelin to reconsider the three stars awarded to Le Gavroche. But it was Long who was about to find himself downgraded.
Times Newspapers employed 671 clerical workers (excluding managers and juniors). The combined clerical payroll of its daily and Sunday rivals, the Guardian and the Observer, was 250. It was clear that TNL was grossly overmanned; indeed, it was the principal reason why a company capable of generating nearly £100 million a year in revenue was still so monumentally in the red. Murdoch was blunt with the staff: ‘You will say you have heard of Times crises before. I say to you here that if the crisis facing us today is not resolved within days rather than weeks our newspaper will have to be closed.’[254 - Murdoch, personal message to all The Times and Sunday Times staff, 8 February 1982.] Despite intense hostility to this ‘straight forward mugging’ from Barry Fitzpatrick, the father of the Sunday Times clerical chapel, and rumours that those doing management’s bidding by applying for voluntary redundancy would be blacked by their union brothers,[255 - TNL News, March 1982; Evans to Gerald Long, 18 February 1982, Evans Day File.] negotiations to find the job cuts got underway with the more moderate union officials. It was another torturous exercise and, in the midst of it, Gray’s Inn Road was rocked by a second crisis.
A meeting of the TNL board had been convened on 16 December 1981. In Murdoch’s absence, Long had taken the chair and, with Evans and Frank Giles present, won universal – if qualified – approval to remove The Times and Sunday Times titles trademarks from TNL to News International. The stated reason was that September’s NGA dispute had demonstrated that without this change The Times could not be published if the Sunday Times was liquidated. Transfering the titles to News International would give greater flexibility in future industrial disputes.[256 - Minutes of TNL directors’ meeting, 16 December 1981, ref. 6968/1; Evans to Long, 16 February 1982, Evans Day File.] Consent was agreed subject to ‘a reasonable price’ being paid for them. At a rushed TNL directors meeting held two days before Christmas at the Sun’s headquarters in Bouverie Street (with only Long, John Collier, the company’s secretary Peter Ekberg and Farrar’s lawyer, Geoffrey Richards, present) News International’s offer of £1 million for The Times and £2 million for the Sunday Times was accepted.[257 - Minutes of TNL directors’ meeting, 23 December 1981, ref. 6968/1.]
The first Evans and Giles heard of the 23 December meeting and its decision to transfer the titles of the papers they edited was on 16 February 1982 when they were sent a copy of the minutes. They were horrified.[258 - Evans to Long, Frank Giles to Long, 16 February 1982, ref. 6968/1.] Why had they not been informed of the meeting? Why was it held at the Sun’s headquarters? The impression was clear: Murdoch’s henchmen had attempted to ‘pull a fast one’. But what was their motive? If TNL was liquidated while still in possession of its principal assets – the titles – it could be bought by another buyer. Evans approached Jim Sherwood of Sea Containers and encouraged him to buy The Times from Murdoch.[259 - Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 359.] Murdoch promptly rebuffed Sherwood’s offer when it was sent to him on 9 February. Transferring the titles to News International would, wrote one chapel father (Peter Wilby), allow Murdoch to liquidate TNL and restart the papers at a later date with a more favourable set of union (or nonunion) staffing agreements.[260 - Peter Wilby (Father of the Sunday Times NUJ chapel) to Sir Edward Pickering, 20 February 1982.] This, and the rejection of the Sherwood offer, suggested that if Murdoch did not get the mass redundancy package accepted he really did intend to abolish TNL and relaunch the titles on his own terms, in his own time. It also placed a gun to the head of the unions in the negotiations over cutting six hundred jobs.
Transferring the titles to News International ran counter to Sir Denis Hamilton’s strategy of ring-fencing Times Newspapers in the Articles of Association so that, as he put it, ‘in no way could it be mixed up with the operational or financial side of News International’.[261 - Denis Hamilton, Editor-in-Chief, p. 183.] But Evans and Giles could no longer appeal to Hamilton who, seeing the way events were moving, had resigned as chairman of the company’s board of directors. The new chairman was none other than Keith Rupert Murdoch. All of a sudden, it seemed Murdoch was doing to Times Newspapers what he had done to the News of the World chairman, Sir William Carr – arriving in the guise of a financial white knight, only to seize the keys to the castle. Yet, was it not inevitable that the person paying the bills also wanted outright control of the company? The only prop keeping TNL on its feet was the money being pumped into it by News International. As Richard Searby, chairman of the parent News Corporation, bluntly put it, ownership of the titles was the security it needed if it was to continue backrolling this liability.[262 - Richard Searby to Sir Edward Pickering, 17 February 1982.] The City reacted to the news by wiping £4 million from News International’s stock market value.
There were two problems with this strategy. First, if Murdoch attempted to close TNL and relaunch The Times in a manner that displeased the print unions they could strike at Bouverie Street, bringing down the Sun and the News of the World, the two sure cash cows that contributed most to keeping his media empire afloat. Secondly, the titles transfer appeared to be illegal under point 2 (iii) of the terms set out by John Biffen unless the board of independent directors’ gave their approval, a detail overlooked in the hastily convened and inquorate TNL meeting of 23 December. Biffen had stipulated that a fine or two years imprisonment would apply to Murdoch if he broke the conditions upon which his purchase of TNL had been granted. This included changing the Articles of Association without consent. The Times NUJ chapel pressed for the transferral to be disallowed, threatening if necessary to seek a High Court injunction.[263 - TNL News, March 1982.] Rees-Mogg added his voice to the controversy, writing to Biffen and denouncing the attempted titles shift on the BBC’s The World This Weekend. The independent directors also waded in, Lord Dacre describing it as a ‘gross incivility … the Proprietor met the national directors on January 12 and said nothing about it’ while Lord Greene at least struck a supportive note for the newspaper’s reporting of the fracas by claiming ‘All I know about it is what is in The Times.’[264 - The Times, 15 February 1982.] Evans had certainly ensured that his paper could not be faulted when it came to washing its owner’s dirty linen on both front and back pages. Even if Murdoch’s exact motives were unclear, the manner in which Long had acted created a suspicion of shadiness. The Shadow Trade Minister, John Smith, complained that Murdoch was attempting ‘a breathtaking subterfuge, which raises very serious questions about his future intentions for both newspapers’.[265 - Ibid., February 1982.] The Conservative former Cabinet minister Geoffrey Rippon asked Mrs Thatcher to consider establishing an enquiry.
Murdoch, Searby and Long had miscalculated. Talks with Department of Trade officials indicated the transfer was probably illegal. Searby got to work on preparing a dignified retreat. The decision to transfer was reversed pending a meeting of the Times board of independent directors who duly made clear their opposition to the plan, killing it there and then.[266 - Richard Searby to Sir Edward Pickering, 19 February 1982; Minutes of TNHL board meeting, 22 February 1982.] Meanwhile, the deadline for achieving the six hundred redundancies had been reached. But when the requests for voluntary redundancy were counted they numbered scarcely more than one hundred and fifty. Murdoch flew back to London.
For ten hours, the unions and management tried to reach agreement, but the gulf remained too wide. Murdoch announced that 210 clerical workers would be sacked on a last in first out basis if the number of voluntary redundancies did not rise commensurately. The unions replied by issuing a joint statement, making clear they did ‘not accept the mandatory notices’ that were due to be sent out the following morning. The mood at a meeting of NATSOPA clerical workers on 24 February was firmly defiant. In the Spectator, the cartoonist Michael Heath drew an egg timer with the words The Times on it – the sand had almost run out.[267 - Spectator, 27 February 1982.]
At such a moment it would have been helpful if the editor and the proprietor could have managed the pretence of a united front. Evans tried to woo Murdoch by telling him what he wanted to hear but the latter cold-shouldered him.[268 - Evans to Murdoch, 21 and 23 February 1982. Evans Day File.] Back on 10 February, the Guardian had reported rumours that Evans’s future had been discussed at a meeting of Times Newspapers’ board of directors. Had this been true (it was not) it would have narrowed the ‘mole’ down to those seated around the boardroom table. Murdoch was quick to deny the story, issuing a statement decrying the ‘malicious, self-serving and wrong’ rumours and praising his editor, whose ‘outstanding qualities and journalistic skills are recognized throughout the world’. Not everyone was convinced. Private Eye, with its vendetta against ‘Dame Harold Evans’ (supposedly confusing him with Dame Edith Evans, first lady of the English stage), played up the stories, as did the new William Hickey columnist in the Daily Express. Evans was not the sort of Fleet Street editor who took a relaxed view about what rival newspapers wrote about him. He believed in the righteous purpose of the fourth estate and was not prepared to tolerate its failings in regard to himself.
Back in September, Evans had taken such exception to a sloppily researched article about his Times editorship in Harpers & Queen entitled ‘O Tempora! O Mores!’ that he forced the magazine’s editor to publish a blow-by-blow rebuttal of points of error. These corrections ranged from ‘Mr Anthony Holden’s mother-in-law is not the Queen’s gynaecologist’ to ‘Mr Holden’s wife does not play the harpsichord’. Readers of the glossy fashion magazine were also to be alerted to the fact that ‘Mr Peter Watson did not go for a trial for Bristol Rovers’ and ‘Mr Brian MacArthur has never written a headline “It’s a beaut”.’[269 - Evans to Willie Landels, 24 September 1981, Evans Day File A327/3626.] Many thought Evans would have been better letting some of this trivia go. But he was even more incandescent when, on 1 March 1982, the BBC’s Panorama alleged – in a feature on the crisis at The Times – that he had moved an illustration of Libyan hit men from an inside page to the front page on Murdoch’s instructions. Evans demanded the BBC issue a statement at the beginning of the following week’s programme conceding the claim was ‘false in detail and inference’.[270 - Evans to Elwyn Parry Jones (producer, Panorama), 2 March 1982, Evans Day File A759/9329.] The allegation was indeed untrue, but it had come from someone intent on mischief from inside the newspaper. The BBC ignored Evans’s demand. While this was going on, he was also preparing to go to court against Private Eye after it accused him of being a ‘two-faced hypocrite’ who had tried to do a deal with Rothermere’s Associated Newspapers for Times Newspapers even after he had approved Murdoch on the vetting committee (but before Murdoch offered him the Times editorship). Private Eye had a witness, Hugh Stephenson, and its case would have been strengthened had it known that after Evans had approved Murdoch on the vetting committee, he had written to congratulate Jonathan Aitken on his anti-Murdoch speech in the Commons. Nonetheless, Evans was adamant that he had not assisted Associated, and was determined to get legal redress, dismissing Stephenson as ‘a disappointed potential Editor of The Times’.[271 - Evans to Tony Richmond-Watson, 26 February 1982, Evans Day File 1759/9329; also Evans to Long, 9 March 1981, and Evans to Murdoch, draft memo, undated [February] 1982.] Richard Ingrams, the Eye’s editor, remained determined to find fault with Evans, subsequently grumbling, ‘the fellow has a nasty habit of suing for libel, an aspect of the great crusader for press freedom not often noted by his admirers’.[272 - Richard Ingrams, Spectator, 5 November 1983.]
During February, the divisions within Gray’s Inn Road ceased being gossip and became hard news. ‘There were two teams producing one newspaper,’ recalled Tim Austin. One team comprised those loyal to the editor. Primarily there were the two men he had brought in to sharpen features and policy, Anthony Holden and Bernard Donoughue. There were also others like Holden’s deputy, Peter Stothard, who had crossed the bridge from the Sunday Times with its illustrious editor. They were in no doubt that, left to his own devices, Evans was a genius who was transforming The Times for the better. They gave him their total loyalty. It was Evans’s great strength that he inspired such emotions in those he appointed and encouraged. It was his weakness that he could not command such loyalty from many of the entrenched Times staff he inherited. Those in the latter camp were a more diffuse entity, brought together only by their belief that the paper was descending into chaos and needed to be rescued by someone who understood its (supposed) core values. Much of what they disliked about Evans’s editorship were actually decisions driven by Murdoch in his desire to cut costs and modernize the paper. But while they could not get rid of the man whose money was keeping them in employment, they could balance what they saw as his less enlightened traits if there was a new editor who combined a will to stand up to him with a sensibility for stabilizing the atmosphere on the paper. Such a man existed in the deputy editor, Charles Douglas-Home. And it was no secret that he was increasingly disaffected with Harold Evans.
Towards the end of February, just as Fred Emery was poised to go on a skiing holiday, he received a telephone call. ‘I’m sorry you’re going away,’ said the caller, by way of introduction. ‘Who’s speaking?’ demanded Emery, momentarily failing to register the mild Australian accent. The proprietor asked if he could pop in to see him before he went skiing, making clear that it was a matter of some urgency. Intrigued, Emery hurried over, wondering what could possibly be so pressing. Murdoch came straight to the point. ‘I’m thinking of changing the editor,’ he said, adding that he now believed Douglas-Home should succeed. He wanted to know what Emery thought. Emery asked what his reasons for the change might be and was told, ‘Harry is all over the place.’ He was particularly concerned about the influence of Bernard Donoughue and the generous terms upon which he had been hired (while maintaining his City interests). Emery admitted that the paper was indeed in chaos. He also supported Douglas-Home’s candidature, while adding that there might be a problem with some of the home news reporters who had never forgiven him for keeping a secret dossier on their private lives. Although disabusing Murdoch on the issue of Evans’s politics (he was not, as the proprietor suspected, endorsing the SDP), Emery had largely confirmed his suspicions. Emery was thanked and told to proceed with his skiing holiday.[273 - Rupert Murdoch to the author, interview, 4 August 2003.]
There were several theatres of war, but none more important than that over the leader column. Evans recognized that the chief leader writer, Owen Hickey, was an authoritative commentator. On important issues such as the Middle East and Ireland, Hickey shared Evans’s generally pro-Israeli, pro-Ulster Unionist disposition. But Hickey did not contribute much to the leader conferences, preferring to act as if the column was his personal fiefdom where he should be left undisturbed to formulate his own thoughts. Leader writers had long believed themselves to be a higher caste of Times journalist and jealously guarded their right to opine. It was Thomas Barnes (editor, 1817–41), who had introduced the unsigned leader article, prompting William Cobbett to rail against its anonymous pronouncements as if ‘each paragraph appears to be a little sort of order in council; a solemn decision of a species of literary conclave’.[274 - Quoted in Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 222.] Barnes and his team had ‘thundered out’ in the cause of reform, giving the paper its ‘Thunderer’ nickname in the process. But as Evans was aware, the tone had long since become more Delphic. ‘If this was the citadel of The Times,’ he concluded, ‘it was stultified by charm.’ He parodied the style of one of the leader writers, Geoffrey Smith, along the lines of, ‘The crucifixion was not a good thing, but then it was not altogether a bad thing either.’[275 - Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 228.]
The reflective and balanced articles were all very well, but Evans wanted to ‘get into the engine-room of government policy, leading as well as reacting’.[276 - Ibid., p. 229.] He looked to Bernard Donoughue, whom he had brought in to formulate the paper’s political strategy, to provide this. Donoughue succeeded in impressing upon the editor the case for using the paper to attack the Government’s economic policies. This raised problems of personality as well as politics. Donoughue and Hickey did not work effectively together.[277 - Bernard Donoughue, The Heat of the Kitchen, p. 286.] They especially disagreed on Ireland where, despite his Catholicism and his ownership of a farm in the Republic, Hickey remained a conviction Unionist. Nor was Hickey alone in finding Donoughue’s manner that of the bully and there was resentment of him as another Evans import who was indulged by his patron more than the longer serving staff. Certainly he looked ‘like a tough centre forward in professional football’ as Evans put it, gap-toothed and hair sitting ‘tightly on his head in orderly rows of crinkly black like the paper one finds in boxes of chocolates’. But he had every claim to authority as the son of a Northamptonshire car factory worker who had gone down with a First from Oxford and, before his thirties were out, was running the Number Ten Street Policy Unit first for Wilson and later for Callaghan. When Thomson had put Times Newspapers up for sale, Donoughue had been Evans’s lieutenant trying to cobble together the Sunday Times consortium and had briefed MPs to block Biffen’s non-referral of Murdoch’s bid to the Monopolies Commission.
Donoughue was a man of great talents but, unintentionally, he contributed to Evans’s downfall. His role was widely resented by his colleagues who were agreed that he was a disruptive and alien presence at The Times (although they were divided over whether they believed his loyalty was first and foremost to the Labour Party – for whom he was assumed to be informally spying – or to his patron, the editor). Evans was a news-driven editor not a political thinker and consequently felt he needed Donoughue to provide ideological direction. But he was asking for trouble in appointing as his political guru a man who fundamentally opposed the line of the chief leader writer, hated the proprietor, appeared addicted to fuelling conspiracy theories and treated established members of staff with rudeness or suspicion. Rightly or wrongly, most traditional Times journalists took the view that Evans, like a Plantaganet monarch with foreign favourites, relied too heavily on bad counsel. Their desire to be rid of Evans, was, as much, a will to be shot of Donoughue.
When Donoughue arrived, Hickey had already been a leader writer for twenty-six years and the contrast between the two could scarcely have been more marked. Hickey conveyed a shy, donnish and in dress slightly down-at-heel exterior that conflicted with his early days. At Clifton College – the sports-conscious public school to which his Catholic Irish parents had sent him – he had captained both the rugby and cricket teams. During the war he had served with the Third Battalion of the Irish Guards, losing an eye in Normandy. He maintained that he owed his life to his batman who had carried him from the battlefield. After the war he had gone up to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he continued to play cricket and rugby and went down with a First in Greats. In 1949, William Haley had persuaded him to move from the Times Educational Supplement to The Times and he had written the paper’s leaders opposing the 1963 Robbins Report’s call for the rapid expansion of Britain’s universities. He had also drafted much of the 1970 ‘White Swan’ letter against Rees-Mogg’s efforts to broaden The Times’s appeal (which, he believed, meant lowering its standards).[278 - Obituary of Owen Hickey, The Times, 5 December 2000. In the spirit of his anonymous work, Hickey had requested not to be given an obituary. The request was ignored.] But he saved his spiciest writing for the daily round-up he gave each morning to Rees-Mogg on the previous day’s paper, with such acerbic observations as ‘by-line suggests our reporter was at Hammersmith and Covent Garden simultaneously. A reading suggests she was at neither’ and ‘Alan Hamilton has been south of the border long enough not to regard artichokes in cans and sardines as delicacies’.[279 - Owen Hickey to Rees-Mogg, 13 November and 23 December 1980.] He was, in the verdict of the managing editor, John Grant, ‘the conscience of the paper’. Increasingly it was a troubled conscience.
Evans wanted to run a Times campaign against lead in petrol. Des Wilson, chairman of CLEAR (Campaign for Lead-Free Air), had sent Anthony Holden copies of private correspondence from the Government’s Chief Medical Officer to the Government warning of the health dangers – especially to children – of lead in petrol. To Evans there seemed the possibility of a Government cover-up waiting to be exposed, but the reaction of the paper’s old guard was summed up by the home news editor, Rodney Cowton, who asked with an air of distaste if he was being ordered to run ‘a campaign’ on the subject. The increasingly truculent Charles Douglas-Home phrased it even more dismissively, pondering aloud, ‘What is campaigning journalism?’ To his thinking, the concept was suspect, smacking of personal agendas and sensational (unbalanced) reporting. Temporarily out of the office, Evans wanted Holden to make a big issue out of the story, but Douglas-Home pulled rank and used his authority as deputy editor to shunt the story into the obscurity he believed it deserved.[280 - Peter Stothard to the author, interview, 8 November 2004; Anthony Holden to the author, interview, 9 April 2003.] It was a direct challenge to Evans’s authority. The gloves were off.
Evans now had to face a barrage of jabs and cuts from several directions. Some colleagues, who might have helped absorb the blows, were absent. Emery was hurtling down black runs. The other acting editor over the festive period, Brian MacArthur, had impressed Murdoch and been rewarded with the deputy editorship of the Sunday Times. This was The Times’s loss. Nor did Evans enjoy the loyalty of many who remained. Louis Heren all but denounced him on BBC television. Equally unhappy about the situation over which Evans was presiding, John Grant, the managing editor, threatened to resign. This spurred Douglas-Home to call on Murdoch to tell him that, if Grant left, he too would go. The prospect of losing both the deputy editor and the managing editor spurred Murdoch to depose Evans more quickly than he had intended. The fact that Granada television’s What The Papers Say had just awarded him the title of Editor of the Year was a mere inconvenience.
Donoughue had repeatedly challenged Douglas-Home to prove his loyalty to Evans, and the protestations of allegiance were wearing thin.[281 - Donoughue, The Heat of the Kitchen, pp. 288–9.] Evans was to paint an unflattering picture of his deputy’s behaviour during this period, implying that he was motivated by a self-serving desire to seize the editorship for himself. On the other hand, Evans’s critics thought that when it came to being self-serving, Evans still had questions to answer about his own role in accepting the editorship from someone he had made such concerted attempts to prevent owning the paper.[282 - Spectator, 5 November 1983.] But Douglas-Home’s motives were less clear-cut than the Evans loyalists assumed. Far from being a sycophant towards the proprietor, he was distinctly wary of him. It was what he regarded as Evans’s weakness in the face of Murdoch’s ill temper that disheartened him.[283 - Frank Johnson to the author, interview, 15 January 2003.] There was more than a whiff of snobbery from some of the staff who lined up behind the Eton and Royal Scots Greys Douglas-Home over the northerner and his posse of meritocratic henchmen but a principal belief was that ‘Charlie’ was the man who would stand up to Murdoch, which ‘Harry’ had supposedly failed to do. It was Evans’s misfortune that Murdoch himself now wanted a dose of Douglas-Home as well.
But did Douglas-Home want to work with Murdoch? Far from pulling out all the stops to supplant Evans, he had entered into negotiations to leave The Times for the Daily Telegraph. Notified of this, Evans had begun to look around for a new deputy and had even approached Colin Welch.[284 - Frank Johnson to the author, interview, 15 January 2003.] Welch, who had resigned as the deputy editor of the Telegraph in 1980, was a noted Tory journalist of the intellectual right. If Evans felt Murdoch’s pressure to adopt a more right-wing tone in the paper, then he could not have appeased the proprietor more than by contemplating a prominent role for Welch. Having told Evans of his decision to resign, Douglas-Home proposed postponing his actual leaving until the immediate crisis was over (financially it also made sense to wait until the new tax year in April). In the meantime, he received information that would make him pause further – for a well-placed source assured him that Evans was losing his grip on the situation and would soon be leaving Gray’s Inn Road himself. The source was Evans’s own secretary, Liz Seeber. Given her job description, Seeber was hardly displaying the customary loyalty to her boss, but she had come to the conclusion Evans was presiding over the paper’s collapse and that the only way of saving it was to help Douglas-Home stay in the game. ‘The atmosphere was so unpleasant, it was a dreadful environment to work in’ was how she defended her actions. ‘You had people like Bernard Donoughue permanently in and out of Harry’s office and you just wanted it to be over; it was no longer running a newspaper, it was Machiavellian goings-on.’[285 - Liz Seeber to the author, interview, 18 July 2003.] Douglas-Home later repaid her efforts by giving a book written by her husband a noticeably glowing review.[286 - Philip Howard to the author, interview, 5 December 2002.] But even with this flow of information about what Evans was up to, Douglas-Home still wavered. On the anniversary of Evans’s appointment, Murdoch telephoned Marmaduke Hussey to tell him, ‘I’ve ballsed it up. Harry is going so I’m putting in Charlie.’ Hussey later wrote, ‘I knew that already because Charlie had come to see me the night before and was doubtful whether to accept the job. “For heaven’s sake,” I told him. “I’ve spent five years trying to secure you the editorship – if you want out now I’ll never speak to you again.”’[287 - Hussey, Chance Governs All, p. 179.]
There were certainly some dirty tricks played. Evans loyalists were maintaining that the editor was in a life or death battle to save The Times’s editorial independence from a proprietor bent on imposing his own (increasingly right-wing) views on the paper. This claim was undermined by the leader writer, Geoffrey Smith, who walked into a BBC studio and read out a memo Evans had sent to Murdoch asking for the latter’s view on how the Chancellor’s forthcoming Budget should be presented in the paper. The letter was dynamite but it was between the editor and the proprietor, so why was it being read out for broadcast by a Times leader writer? It was a typed letter and the answer appeared to rest with the holder of the carbon copy. Whether it had touched the intermediary hands of the deputy editor remained a matter for speculation. But one thing was clear: that members of the staff were cheerfully appearing on radio and television alternately to stab or slap the back of their editor was an intolerable situation. For a week, the chaos at The Times dominated the news. Times journalists would gather round the television for the lunchtime news, one half of them cheering Geraldine Norman who would be broadcast condemning Evans, the other half cheering Anthony Holden’s championing of him. Then they would all return to their desks and get on with the job of producing Evans’s newspaper.
Because of their well-placed mole, Evans’s critics had access to more than one incriminating piece of evidence. In a first-year progress report of 21 February, Evans had adopted an excessively ingratiating tone towards Murdoch. ‘Thank you again for the opportunity and the ideas,’ he purred. ‘We are all one hundred per cent behind you in the great battle and I’m glad we’re having it now.’ Evans’s upbeat assessment appeared to offer Murdoch what it could be assumed he wanted. Evans announced that he had approached the right-wing Colin Welch about joining The Times, adding a line that seemed designed to appeal to the Australian’s sociopolitical assumptions, ‘I did talk to Alexander Chancellor but came to the conclusion he represents part of the effete old tired England.’ However, ‘there would be mileage I think in your idea of having some international names (like Dahrendorf, Kissinger, Kristol)’. Regrettably, Evans proceeded to speak ill of past or present colleagues: ‘You’ll perhaps have seen the attack on me in the Spectator for getting rid of “stars” but believe me Hennessy, Berthoud and Berlins they mention were all bone idle. So are many of the others who have gone or are going. It is another part of the old-Times brigade not wanting to work, Louis Heren stirring it up a bit.’[288 - Evans to Murdoch, 21 February 1982, Evans Day File.] The unfortunate tone of this letter tended to support Douglas-Home’s contention that Evans was not always the bulwark for liberty and defender of his staff that his supporters protested him to be.
In fact, if Evans’s tone had been intended to please his proprietor, he was to be sorely disappointed. Two days later, ‘Dear Chairman’ was how he began a huffy note that objected to the ‘cursory comment on the detailed report of our first year which I volunteered to you’. To Murdoch’s criticism that the editorial line had lacked consistency, Evans shot back, ‘You have not, as it happens, made this criticism on several occasions to me but only once (7 January 1982) though I have been made aware of what you have said to other members of the staff when I have not been present.’[289 - Ibid., 23 February 1982, Evans Day File.] When it came to the embattled editor, the proprietor’s heart had turned to stone.
Tuesday 9 March marked the first anniversary of Harold Evans’s appointment as editor. It was hardly a soft news day appropriate for distracting him. It was Budget Day and Evans ensured that The Times covered, reported, reproduced and analysed Sir Geoffrey Howe’s measures in an impressive level of detail. ‘The Chancellor of the Exchequer,’ Evans crooned justifiably to Murdoch afterwards, ‘has gone out of his way to say that the Budget coverage of The Times had restored The Times as a newspaper of record for the first time for many years.’[290 - Ibid., 11 March 1982, Evans Day File.] Written by Donoughue, the leader took a measured view although the front page headline ‘Howe heartens Tories: a little for everyone’ was certainly more positive than the previous year’s assessment. Rab Butler’s death was also front-page news and together with the obituary was accompanied by an article by his one-time acolyte, Enoch Powell. Powell was as insightful as he was admiring of the man thrice denied the opportunity to become Prime Minister. It ‘was mere chance’, he noted, that Butler’s childhood injuries prevented him from serving in either war, ‘but to some of us it was a chance that seemed to match an aspect of his character. He was not the kind of man for whom any cause – not even his own – was worth fighting to the death, worth risking everything.’[291 - Enoch Powell, The Times, 10 March 1982.]
Having only recently returned from his own father’s funeral, Evans was back at Gray’s Inn Road and was just preparing to listen to the Budget speech when he was summoned upstairs to see Murdoch. The proprietor announced he wanted his immediate resignation. He had already asked Douglas-Home to succeed him and Douglas-Home had accepted. According to Evans’s account of the conversation, Murdoch had the grace to look emotional about the situation. Nonetheless he stated his reasons – ‘the place is in chaos’ and Evans had lost the support of senior staff. Evans shot back that it was management’s decisions that had created the chaos and reeled off a list of the senior staff that remained loyal to him. He had no intention of accepting this summary dismissal. Instead he left, refusing to resign, with Murdoch threatening to summon the independent national directors to enforce his departure.[292 - Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 369.]
The independent national directors were supposed to ensure that the proprietor did not put inappropriate pressure on his editor. Instead, Murdoch was threatening to use them as an ultimate force to ensure the editor was removed from the building. Evans had taken the drafting of the editorial safeguards extremely seriously. The following morning he went to seek the advice of one of the independent directors, Lord Robens. The two men met in the Reform Club, Evans confiding his predicament to the ageing Labour peer above the din of a vacuum cleaner engaged in a very thorough once over of their meeting place. Robens considered the matter and suggested that, rather than staying on for six more months of this torture, Evans should go away on holiday. According to Evans’s account, Robens advised, ‘Don’t talk to Murdoch. Leave everything to your lawyer. Relax. We’ll stand by you.’[293 - Ibid., p. 377.] The meeting concluded, Evans strode out from the Reform’s confident classicism into St James’s Park, continually circling the gardens like a yacht with a jammed rudder while he tried to decide whether to fight for his job and the paper’s integrity or to go quietly. Eventually he compromised. He would go noisily.
Back at the office, Evans was received by the unwelcoming committee of Murdoch, Searby and Long who pressed him to announce his resignation before the stand-off created yet more appalling publicity for The Times. But believing there were higher issues at stake, making an issue was precisely Evans’s purpose. The television cameras massed outside Gray’s Inn Road and Evans’s home. His admirers and detractors organized further public demonstrations of support and disrespect while those inside the building tried to put together the paper, unsure whether to take their orders from Evans or Douglas-Home.
The headline for 12 March ran ‘Murdoch: “Times is secure”.’ His threat to close down the paper had been lifted by the agreement with the print and clerical unions to cut 430 full-time jobs (rather than the six hundred requested) and cut around four hundred shifts. Taken together with the savings from switching to cold composition, the TNL wages bill would shrink by £8 million. There would now be one thousand fewer jobs at Gray’s Inn Road than had existed when Murdoch had moved in. This was an extraordinary indictment on the previous owner’s inability to overcome union-backed overmanning. At the foot of the news story appeared the unadorned statement: ‘Mr Harold Evans, the Editor of The Times, said he had no comment to make on reports circulating about his future as editor. He was on duty last night as usual.’[294 - The Times, 12 March 1982.]
In the leader article he wrote, entitled ‘The Deeper Issues’ (some felt this referred to his own predicament), Evans surveyed the panorama of the British disease: the human waste of mass unemployment, the crumbling inner cities, ‘idiot union abuse’, the ‘bored insularity’ of Britain’s approach to its international obligations and the failure of any political party to find answers. There was a scarcely repressed anger from the pen of an editor who had just buried his father – an intelligent and encouraging man for whom the limits of opportunity had confined to a job driving trains. But there were also pointed references to Evans’s own finest hour (the Thalidomide victims) and an attack on ‘the monopoly powers of capital or the trade unions, or too great a concentration of power in any one institution: the national press itself, to be fair, is worryingly over-concentrated’.[295 - ‘The Deeper Issues’, leading article, The Times, 12 March 1982.] There was no need to name names.
Saturday’s Times gave an accurate picture of the situation at Gray’s Inn Road – the report was utterly incomprehensible. Murdoch was quoted as stating ‘with the unanimous approval of the independent national directors’ that Evans had been replaced by Douglas-Home. Lord Robens described this statement as ‘a bit mixed up’. Evans was quoted claiming he had not resigned and his staying on was ‘not about money, as alleged. It is and has been an argument about principles.’ Gerald Long claimed that the independence of the editor had never been in dispute. Holden said it was. Douglas-Home said it wasn’t, going on the record to state:
There has been to my knowledge, and I have worked closely with the editor, absolutely no instruction or vestige of an instruction to the editor to publish or not to publish any political article. There has been no undue pressure to influence the editor’s policy or decisions.[296 - The Times, 13 March 1982.]
Times readers could have been forgiven for believing they were looking not at a news report but at a bleeding gash running down the front page of their paper. During the day, the Journalists of The Times (JOTT) group passed a motion that they released to the press calling for Evans to be replaced by Douglas-Home. They found fault with the ‘gradual erosion of editorial standards’ and Evans’s indecision: ‘The way the paper is laid out and run has changed so frequently that stability has been destroyed.’ Geraldine Norman had been to the fore of getting this motion accepted, much to the disquiet of many of the two hundred subscribing JOTT members whose approval she had not canvassed.[297 - Leapman, Barefaced Cheek, p. 235; Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, pp. 393–4.] A pro-Evans counterpetition was circulated and also attracted support. Nobody wanted another week of this madness.
Meanwhile, Fred Emery had telephoned from the slopes in order to find out what was happening in his absence. Douglas-Home asked him to come back immediately, particularly requesting that he be back in time to edit the Sunday for Monday paper. Emery raced back and found the journalists had become even more polarized during his absence. He also discovered the reason Douglas-Home wanted him back to edit the paper on the Sunday evening. The editor-in-waiting was singing in a choir that evening. In the circumstances, this was a high note of insouciance.
The denouement came the following day, Monday, 15 March, in a series of remarkable twists and turns. Nobody seemed to know whether the editor was staying or going. However, he did periodically emerge to give the impression that he was still in charge. Taking inspiration from a photograph of himself playing tennis, he swung a clenched fist in the air and assured Emery, ‘I play to win!’ Half an hour later, he had tendered his resignation in the curtest possible letter addressed ‘To The Chairman’. It read in its entirety:
Dear Sir,
I hearby tender my resignation as editor of The Times.
Yours faithfully,
H. M. Evans
His colleagues found it easier getting accurate news from the far Pacific than from within the building. All they knew was that Evans had overseen a statement in the early editions of the paper reporting that he had not resigned. They were thus surprised when at 9.40 p.m. he curtly announced to the rolling cameras of News at Ten that he had indeed quit. His decision to give advance warning to ITN in order to maximize the publicity but not his own journalists dampened the send-off he might otherwise have been accorded.[298 - Tim Austin to the author, interview, 4 March 2003; Fred Emery to the author, interview, 24 January 2005.] Instead, when he was sure the cameras were in position, he walked out of the building, stopping only to shake hands with the uniformed guard at the reception desk (unsurprisingly, there was no sign of his secretary). Stopped by a television reporter as he got into the back seat of a waiting car, he refused to make further comment beyond observing, with a weary expression, that it was a tale longer than the Borgias.[299 - ‘The Greatest Paper in the World’, Thames Television, broadcast 2 January 1985.]
VII
Harold Evans came home to a party organized by Tina Brown, his wife. His stalwart supporters came to rally round. Anthony Holden had already created a stir that evening at a function for authors of the year (of which he was one). Seeing Murdoch in the corner of the room he stormed over, almost elbowing the Queen to the ground in the process, and proceeded to harangue the newspaper proprietor. The exchange ended with Murdoch assuring him he would never work on any of his papers again and Holden telling him where he could stick them. Such was the excited gravitation towards this verbal brawl that the Queen found herself momentarily deserted and ignored by the room’s inhabitants.[300 - Anthony Holden to the author, interview, 9 April 2003.] Holden resigned from The Times with immediate effect without taking a penny of compensation. This was a principled stand that impressed Murdoch. Evans, meanwhile, negotiated a pay-off in excess of £250,000. After only one year’s employment, this sum was at the time considered so large that it almost (but not quite) dented Private Eye’s preening glee at his departure in its 26 March edition, unpleasantly entitled and illustrated ‘Dame Harold Evans, Memorial Issue. A Nation Mourns’.[301 - Private Eye, 26 March 1982.]
The generous severance terms did not stop Evans writing Good Times, Bad Times, an account of his struggles at Gray’s Inn Road which was published in 1983. Inevitably, not everyone liked and some did not recognize the picture he painted. His successor as editor, Douglas-Home, refused to read it. He did, however, see enough of the extracts in the press to pronounce, ‘that it presented a quite insurmountable question of inaccuracy’.[302 - Douglas-Home to Michael Leapman, 11 November 1983, Douglas-Home Papers.] The most damaging charges Evans brought both in his book and in subsequent allegations concerned his relations with the proprietor, especially in matters of editorial independence. Evans believed he had incurred Margaret Thatcher’s displeasure and that, in sacking him, Murdoch was enacting a tacit understanding with the Prime Minister as a result of her pressure to ensure his bid for Times Newspapers was not referred to the Monopolies Commission. Perhaps, as Sir John Junor had prophesied to Tina Brown, Murdoch had always intended to sack Evans after a year as soon as he had been the fall guy for unpopular changes Murdoch wanted forced upon the paper.[303 - Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, pp. 177–8.] Such was the regard Evans was held in at the Sunday Times, Murdoch would have had difficulty removing him from that editorship, but switching him next door suited his purposes perfectly.[304 - Evans to the author, interview, 25 June 2003.] Many of the changes Evans effected were those Murdoch had himself wanted to see brought about: redundancies, the paper redesigned with new layout, sharper reporting, more sport and less donnish prevarication as a cover for laziness. On this interpretation of events, Murdoch had used Evans and then flung him overboard.
In Good Times, Bad Times, Evans stated that early in 1982 Murdoch had visited Mrs Thatcher suggesting that she find for Evans a public post so that he could be levered out of the editorship. According to Evans’s account, the Prime Minister had asked Cecil Parkinson, the Conservative Party chairman, to cast around for a job for him and Parkinson had come up with the post of chairman of the Sports Council. Mrs Thatcher, it seemed, was keen to assist Murdoch in finding an easy way to be rid of his turbulent editor.[305 - Ibid.; Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, pp. 1–2.] Evans had caused annoyance by running on his front page a story concerning a letter from Denis Thatcher to the Welsh Secretary written on Downing Street paper (though since this was where he lived, it was not clear what other address he could have given) concerning the slow pace of resolving a planning application made by a subsidiary of a company to which he was a consultant. Most commentators considered undue prominence had been given to a rather minor indiscretion (Mr Thatcher had made clear ‘obviously nothing can be done to advance the hearing’) and even the Times leader on the subject placed it third, where it belonged, below Liberal Party defence policy and political developments in Chad.[306 - The Times, 17 and 18 September 1981.] There was also the question of why Evans had printed a letter that had been stolen from the Welsh Office and touted around by a Welsh news agency. But it hardly necessitated a Thatcher – Murdoch conspiracy to do away with him. Under Evans, The Times had opposed the Government’s obsession with narrow definitions of monetary policy but, as Tony Benn and Michael Foot could attest, it was far from being an outright opponent of the Conservatives. On most issues and in particular on trade union reform, it was supportive. Indeed, had Rees-Mogg continued as editor, it might have been every bit as sympathetic towards the SDP as the measured approach adopted by Evans. And Evans would later make clear both that, had Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands during his watch, The Times would have been stalwart in its support of Britain’s armed liberation of the islands and that the paper would probably have endorsed the Conservatives in the 1983 general election.[307 - Harold Evans to the author, interview, 25 June 2003.] If the Prime Minister wanted the removal of a Fleet Street editor it is hard to see how Evans of The Times could be top of her list. Murdoch asserted that the conspiracy theory was ludicrous, maintaining that he ‘never ever’ discussed getting rid of Evans with Mrs Thatcher. Asked about it in 2004, Cecil Parkinson stated, ‘I cannot remember this incident. I certainly have no recollections of searching for a job for Harold Evans.’[308 - Lord Parkinson to the author, 2 July 2004.] Murdoch doubted that Thatcher and Parkinson had conjured up the Sports Council chairmanship as a way of facilitating Evans’s departure on the grounds that ‘they were not Machiavellian enough’ and adding, ‘I don’t think they cared about The Times. She didn’t.’[309 - Rupert Murdoch to the author, interview, 5 August 2003.]
Did Murdoch interfere in editorial policy? Donoughue disliked hearing that Murdoch thought his leader articles were too generous towards Tory ‘wets’ or Social Democrats.[310 - Donoughue, The Heat of the Kitchen, p. 288.] Evans chose to disregard the proprietor’s expressed hope that The Times would take a critical line on the Civil List.[311 - Evans to the author, interview, 25 June 2003.] Although he certainly gave vent to uncompromising opinions when the conversation turned to political matters, Murdoch always maintained that he had never instructed Evans to take any line in his paper other than one of consistency – a steady course the proprietor claimed was lacking. Douglas-Home was incredulous that Evans could not tell the difference between Murdoch ‘sounding off’ as opposed to giving orders. In Douglas-Home’s experience, Murdoch ‘didn’t object to anyone standing up to him on policy issues’. Of course it was easier for the more robustly right-wing Douglas-Home to find this to be the case. But he went further, claiming that it was Evans who had endangered his own editorial independence by constantly ringing Murdoch for reassurance.[312 - Notes of discussion between Alastair Hetherington and Douglas-Home, 31 October 1983, Douglas-Home Papers.] No subsequent Times editor ever claimed undue pressure was applied by Murdoch on editorial policy. Murdoch did not prevent Frank Giles from pursuing a far more ‘wet’ political line at the Sunday Times, also a paper whose direction Mrs Thatcher might have been expected to take a keen interest in. Murdoch did not stop Giles from being sceptical about Britain seeking to retake the Falklands by force or from being overtly sympathetic towards the SDP in the 1983 general election. It was not for his politics that he was eventually replaced by Andrew Neil, an outsider whom Murdoch believed would breathe new energy into the Sunday title as he had once hoped Evans would do with the daily.
Understandably, Evans’s allegations confirmed the suspicions of all those on the political left who believed Murdoch was a malign influence on news reporting. They had seen it with the Sun and its crude caricature of the left. Now they had evidence that it was consuming The Times. Staged at the National Theatre, David Hare’s 1985 play Pravda – A Fleet Street Comedy was widely interpreted as an attack on Murdoch’s style of proprietorship. Co-written with Howard Brenton whose The Romans in Britain had caused outrage because of its overt depictions of Romans sodomizing Ancient Britons (apparently a metaphor for the British presence in Ulster), Pravda depicted the sorry tale of Lambert La Roux, a South African tabloid owner, buying a British Establishment broadsheet only to sack its editor just after he had received an Editor of the Year award. Anna Murdoch went to see the play. After this, her husband’s only comment on it was to suggest, with a wink, that Robert Maxwell might find it actionable.
But more seriously, if Evans felt he had been improperly treated by Murdoch he could have appealed to the independent national directors to adjudicate on the matter. Given the lengths to which he had gone to write these safeguards into the contract by which Murdoch bought the paper it was surprising that he did not avail himself of the opportunity to challenge the proprietor in this way. Perhaps he thought the independent directors would not support his case. Even Lord Robens, who had spoken supportively to him in an alcove of the Reform Club, was not so stalwart behind his back. According to Richard Searby, Robens promptly told Murdoch that he was the proprietor and if he thought Evans should be sacked, he should be sacked.[313 - Richard Searby to the author, interview, 11 June 2002; similarly rendered in Rupert Murdoch’s interview with the author, 4 August 2003.] Whatever his reasoning, Evans preferred to make his case in a book instead. The audience was certainly wider.
Deeply involved in the union negotiations and in attempting to overcome the production difficulties during Evans’s year in the chair, Bill O’Neill felt that the problem was not one of politics but of personalities. Evans ‘considered himself a creator, an editorial genius’, O’Neill maintained ‘and not someone who would be burdened with incidentals, like the huge losses the title he edited was running. You could not engage Evans in debate. He would agree with everything you put to him.’[314 - Bill O’Neill, Copy Out manuscript.] In his fourteen years as editor of the Sunday Times, Evans had benefited from supportive allies in Denis Hamilton and a proprietor, Roy Thomson, who was happy to invest heavily into ensuring Evans’s creative talents bore fruit. With his move to The Times, he had difficulty adapting to the culture shock of working for a new proprietor who, after initially encouraging further expansion, suddenly demanded urgent economies in order to keep the title afloat. Hamilton’s disillusion and departure also robbed him of a calming and understanding influence. Evans complained that ‘every single commercial decision of any importance was taken along the corridor in Murdoch’s office, while we went through our charades’ on the TNL board.[315 - Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 312.] But what did he expect? Who was writing the cheques? It was as if Evans had confused editing the newspaper with owning it. As Evans proved at the Sunday Times and in his subsequent career in New York (to where he and Tina Brown decamped), he was at his best when he had a generous benefactor prepared to underwrite his initiatives. Especially in the dark economic climate of 1981–2, Murdoch was not in the mood to be a benefactor.
Indeed, if Evans was a victim of Murdoch’s ruthless business sense, he was most of all a victim of the times. The dire situation of TNL’s finances meant Murdoch was frequently in Gray’s Inn Road and was particularly watchful over what was going on there. Furthermore, Murdoch and his senior management could hardly absolve themselves totally of their part in the chaos surrounding Evans’s final months in the chair. Murdoch had told Evans to bring in new blood and frequently suggested expensive serializations to run in the paper. When the costs of these changes reached the accounts department he then blamed Evans for his imprudence.[316 - Evans to the author, interview, 25 June 2003.] The failure to agree with the editor a proper budget allocation compounded these problems, although Murdoch refuted Evans’s claims that he did not know what the financial situation was, maintaining he ‘got budgets all the time’.[317 - Rupert Murdoch to the author, interview, 4 August 2003.] The swingeing cuts in TNL clerical staff had to be made, but the brinkmanship necessary to bring them about created a level of tension that clearly had negative effects on morale within the building. Murdoch’s own manner at this time, frequently swearing and being curt to senior staff, contributed to the unease and feeling of wretchedness.[318 - Anthony Holden to the author, interview, 9 April 2003.] As the years rolled by with the financial and industrial problems of News International receding while he developed media interests elsewhere, so Murdoch spent less time living above the Times shop. Therefore, if Evans wanted to be left to his own devices, it was his misfortune to have accepted the paper’s editorship at the worst possible moment. Had he been appointed later, at a time when the paper was no longer enduring a daily fight for survival and justification of every expense was no longer necessary, he might have proved to be a long serving and commercially successful Times editor. This, after all, was what became of his protégé, Peter Stothard.
Rees-Mogg took the view on his successor’s downfall that an editor could fall out with his proprietor or several of his senior staff but not with both at the same time.[319 - Rees-Mogg, ‘The Greatest Paper in the World’, Thames Television, broadcast 2 January 1985.] In the eyes of the old guard, Evans had two principal problems. First, he frequently changed his mind. This had all been part of the creative process when he had edited a Sunday paper, since he had a week to finalize his position, but it made life on a daily basis extremely difficult. The second irritation was that he surrounded himself with his own people who were not, in heart and temperament, ‘Times Men’. For this reason, Donoughue and Holden were disliked in a reaction that overlooked their considerable talents. In the closing months of the drama, Holden would periodically arrive at his office to find childish sentiments scrawled on his door. Invariably they were of an unwelcoming nature.[320 - Anthony Holden to the author, interview, 9 April 2003.] Indeed, the pro-Evans petition circulated in the dying moments of his tenure demonstrated perfectly the essential rift between The Times old guard and Evans’s flying circus of new recruits. Six of the thirteen senior staff members signed the pro-Evans petition (the other seven were either absent or pointedly refused to endorse him). But of Evans’s six senior supporters, five had been recruited by him from outside the paper in the course of the past year. Only one of the seven who did not sign had worked for The Times for less than twelve years.[321 - Sunday Times, 14 March 1982.]Good Times, Bad Times concentrated on Murdoch as the assassin. But at the moment of impact there were plenty of other bullets flying from a plethora of vantage points.
Tony Norbury, able to speak from the vantage point of over forty years experience on the production side of the paper, believed that although Evans’s demise was inevitable and perhaps necessary, he was nonetheless ‘the Editor who saved The Times’.[322 - Tony Norbury to the author, interview, 27 April 2004.] In the space of a year, he had brought about great changes and many of them were for the better. The layout was much improved. Circulation was up by 19,000 on the comparable period in 1980. The paper was revitalized. It was no longer in retreat. Probably his greatest legacy was those journalists he brought in who stayed with the paper in the years ahead, among whom Peter Stothard, Frank Johnson, Miles Kington and the medical correspondent, Dr Thomas Stuttaford, were to loom large. Indeed, it would be quite wrong to assume that the old guard were necessarily right in opposing Evans’s innovations. Their victory over him in March 1982 was personal and vindictive. It was also temporary. Much of what he attempted to teach the paper about ‘vertical journalism’ would, in time and in a less frenetic environment, eventually be accepted and adopted.
It was Evans’s other concept, the ‘editing theory of maximum irritation’, that did for him. As one of the senior financial journalists snootily put it, ‘What is this silly little man doing running around trying to tell us how to do our jobs?’[323 - Quoted in Donoughue, The Heat of the Kitchen, p. 287.] Evans’s mistake was to make too many radical changes too quickly and in a manner that left old Times journalists feeling excluded. His attempts to make the paper more like its more popular Sunday neighbour were especially disliked. A critic at the Spectator found fault that ‘instead of spending the morning in Sir William [Rees-Mogg’s] musty but absorbing library we should be outside “in the field” with Mr Evans getting down to what a French investigative reporter once termed “the nitty grotty”. It’s all lead poisoning from petrol fumes nowadays, and why not? Only that several other papers tell us about that sort of thing all the time.’[324 - Patrick Marnham, Spectator, 20 February, 1982.] While the Sunday Times was a ‘journalists paper with a high-risk dynamic’ to break news, The Times ‘must get its facts and opinions right’ and its editor ‘must possess great steadiness and consistency … He must be patient and move slowly.’[325 - Paul Johnson, Spectator, 20 March 1982.] Or, as Philip Howard put it, ‘The Sunday Times and The Times are joined by a bridge about ten yards long and somewhere along that bridge Harry fell off.’[326 - Philip Howard, ‘The Greatest Paper in the World’, Thames Television, broadcast 2 January 1985.]
One of the few journalists brought in by Evans who did not support him in his time of trial was Frank Johnson. ‘I cannot think of a better thing I did in 1981 than ask you to join The Times,’ Evans wrote to congratulate him when he was named Columnist of the Year at the British Press Awards.[327 - Evans to Frank Johnson, 12 March 1982, Evans Day File.] But Johnson, who had always admired the old Times, was relieved when Douglas-Home took over. With Murdoch’s threat to close the paper lifted and Evans, Holden and Donoughue seeking alternative employment, the atmosphere at Gray’s Inn Road improved remarkably swiftly. Douglas-Home, the editor most of the senior staff had wanted in the first place (and but for Murdoch would probably have got), was at last in the chair. But what buried the internecine bickering most decisively was a major incident in – of all unlikely places – the South Atlantic. As Britain’s armed forces sailed towards the Falkland Islands and an uncertain fate, office politics suddenly looked self-indulgent and thoughts switched back to the job everyone was paid to do – report the news.[328 - Frank Johnson to the author, interview, 15 January 2003.]
CHAPTER THREE
COLD WARRIOR
The Falklands War; the Lebanon; Shoring up NATO; Backing Maggie
I
The journalists of the Buenos Aires Siete Dias had a commendable knowledge not only of their government’s intentions but also of how The Times of London liked to lay out its front page. Forty-eight hours before the invasion began Siete Dias’s readers were presented with an imaginary front page of that morning’s edition of The Times. It was good enough to pass off as the real thing. The masthead and typeface were accurate. Even the headline ‘Argentinian Navy invades the Falkland Islands’ was grouped across the two columns’ width of the lead report rather than stretched across the whole front page. That was a particularly observant touch. The accompanying photograph of advancing Argentine troops was also in exactly the place the page designers of Gray’s Inn Road would have put it – top centre right with a single-column news story hemming it back from the paper’s edge. Someone, at least, had done his homework.
The real Times of London for that day had an almost identical front-page layout. The only visual difference was that the lead headline announced ‘Compromise by Labour on abolition of Lords’ – which could have been confidently stated at almost any time in the twenty years either side of 31 March 1982. But the perceptive reader would have noticed something more portentous in the adjacent single column headlined ‘British sub on the move’. The story, ‘By Our Foreign Staff’, claimed that the nuclear-powered hunter-killer submarine, HMS Superb ‘was believed to be on its way’ to the Falkland Islands although the Royal Navy ‘refused to confirm or deny these reports’. This was odd. The Times was not in the habit of knowing, let alone announcing, the sudden change of course of a British nuclear submarine. In fact, the story had been planted. It was intended to warn the government in Buenos Aires that their invasion intentions had been discovered. But it was too late. The Argentinian troops had already boarded the vessels. The aircraft carrier Veinticinco de Mayo had put out to sea.
In the aftermath of a war that caused the deaths of 255 Britons and 746 Argentinians, questions were asked about why London failed to perceive the threat to the Falkland Islands until it was too late. The press had not seen it coming. But they could hardly be blamed when Britain’s intelligence community had also failed to pick up on the warning signs. In retrospect, the Government’s dual policy of dashing Argentina’s hopes of a diplomatic solution while announcing a virtual abandonment of the islands’ defence appeared like folly on a grand scale.
Despite talk of there being oil, there had long been little enthusiasm in the Foreign Office for holding onto the barren and remote British dependency, eight thousand miles away and important primarily for the disruption it caused Britain’s relations with Argentina, a bulwark against South American Communism where much British capital was invested. The general impression was given that if Buenos Aires wanted the islands that much, they could have them. But the will of the 1800 islanders, stubborn and staunchly loyal subjects of Her Majesty, complicated the matter. In November 1980, Nicholas Ridley, a Foreign Office minister, thought he had the answer when he suggested transferring the islands’ sovereignty formally to Argentina while leasing back tenure in the short term so that the existing islanders would not be handed over to an alien power effectively overnight. This idea had been broadly supported in a third leader in The Times, written by Peter Strafford, albeit on the condition the Falkland islanders agreed to it.[329 - John Grigg, The History of The Times, vol. VI: The Thomson Years, p. 549.] They lost no time in making clear they did not. Their opposition emboldened Margaret Thatcher and the House of Commons, sceptical of the ‘Munich tendency’ within the Foreign Office, to dismiss the proposal out of hand.
Argentina was a right-wing military dictatorship. During the 1970s ‘dirty war’, its ruling junta had murdered thousands of its citizens. If the British Government was determined to close the diplomatic door over the islands’ sovereignty to such a regime it might have been advisable to send clear messages about London’s determination to guard the Falklands militarily. Yet, this is not what happened. The public spending cuts of Margaret Thatcher’s first term did not bypass the armed forces. In 1981, John Nott, the Defence Secretary, proposed stringent economies. Guided by Henry Stanhope, the defence correspondent, The Times had argued that if there had to be cuts it would be better for the greater blow to fall upon the British Army of the Rhine rather than the Royal Navy since the BAOR’s proportionate contribution to the NATO alliance was not as significant as the maritime commitment. Yet, when Nott’s spending review was published in June, he proposed closing the Chatham dockyards and cutting the number of surface ships. One of those vessels was HMS Endurance, which was to be withdrawn from its lonely patrol of the South Atlantic.
Although it was understandably not described as such, the Endurance was Britain’s spy ship in the area – as the Argentinians had long assumed. But for those who did not look beyond its exterior, it appeared too lightly defended to put up much resistance to an Argentine assault. Consequently, scrapping the ship appeared to make sense in every respect other than the psychological signal it transmitted to Buenos Aires. It was a fatal economy. Britain appeared to be dropping its guard over the Falkland Islands. The junta saw its chance. Only a small but prophetic letter, from Lord Shackleton, Peter Scott, Vivian Fuchs and five other members of the Royal Geographical Society, printed in The Times on 4 February 1982, pointed out the strategic short-sightedness of withdrawing the only white ensign in the South Atlantic and Antarctic seas.[330 - From Lord Shackleton and others, letters to the editor, The Times, 4 February 1982.] The paper did not pick up on the point.
To be fair, there were remarkably few early warning signs. General Leopoldo Galtieri’s inaugural speech as Argentina’s President in December 1981 contained no reference to reclaiming ‘Las Malvinas’. The first indication Times readers received that all was not well came on 5 March 1982 when Peter Strafford reported that Buenos Aires was stepping up the pressure over the islands. Strafford speculated that with the Falklands defended by a Royal Marines platoon and local volunteers – a total of less than one hundred men – an invasion was possible ‘as a last resort’. But it seemed far more likely that Buenos Aires would apply pressure through the United Nations or by threatening to sever the only regular air service out of the islands which was operated by the Argentine Air Force.
It was not until 23 March that The Times again focused its attention firmly on developments when it reported the Foreign Office’s confirmation that an illegal detachment of about fifty Argentinians claiming to have a contract to dismantle the whaling station at Leith on South Georgia, a British dependency eight hundred miles south-east of the Falklands, had hoisted their national flag. The Foreign Office was quoted as reacting ‘sceptically to the suggestion that the landing on South Georgia last week was instigated by the Argentine Government’.[331 - The Times, 23 March 1982.]
Whitehall could not be expected to dispatch the Fleet every time a trespasser waved his national flag on some far-off British territory. In the same month in which the ‘scrap metal merchants’ were posing for photographs on the spectacularly inhospitable and all but uninhabited South Georgia, Thomas Enders, the US Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America, had visited President Galtieri and passed on to the British Foreign Office Minister Richard Luce the impression that there was no cause for concern. Nonetheless, Margaret Thatcher asked for contingency plans to be drawn up and for a reassessment of the Joint Intelligence Committee’s existing report on the invasion threat to the Falklands. It was too late. On the evening of 31 March, John Nott passed to the Prime Minister the appalling news: an intelligence report that an Argentine armada was at sea and heading straight for the Falklands. Their estimated date of arrival was 2 April.[332 - Peter Hennessy, The Prime Minister, p. 413.]
The Times had already reported, on the front page for Monday 29 March, ‘five Argentine vessels were last night reported to be in the area of South Georgia’. The second leading article that day, ‘Gunboat or Burglar Alarm?’, warned that the Falklands were probably the real target. It attempted to marry the diplomatic tone taken when the leader column had last addressed the subject in November 1980 that the islanders’ future ‘can only be on the basis of an arrangement with their South American neighbours’ with a belated note of half-warning, ‘Britain should help them get the best arrangement possible, and to do that should be prepared to put a military price on any Argentine smash-and-grab raid’.[333 - ‘Gunboat or Burglar Alarm?’, leading article, The Times, 29 March 1982.] Tuesday’s front page reported that ‘two other Argentine naval vessels were said to have left port’ but that London was still making no official comment. The following day came the leaked report that a nuclear submarine was on its way to the Falklands. On Thursday 1 April, the paper conveyed accurately the atmosphere in the Gray’s Inn Road newsroom with a headline that ought to have become famous in its field: ‘Impenetrable silence on Falklands crisis’.
Apart from some ‘library pictures’ of the Falkland Islands’ capital, Port Stanley, and rusting hulks in South Georgia’s Grytviken harbour, it was not possible to accompany the unfolding saga with ‘live’ pictures. There was no press cameraman on the islands. However, the Sunday Times had dispatched Simon Winchester to follow up on the South Georgia ‘scrap metal merchants’. Winchester was in Port Stanley when the Argentine forces landed. On 2 April, The Times was able to use his copy, announcing that the invasion was expected any moment and citing the state of emergency alert broadcast to the islanders by their Governor, Rex Hunt. It made for dramatic reading. Ironically, while a paper like The Times, famed for its correspondents in far flung places had not got round to getting a reporter in situ, the Sun – not celebrated for its foreign desk or international postings – did have a man there. Its reporter, David Graves, had set off for South Georgia on his own whim. He too was in Stanley when the shooting started.[334 - Peter Chippindale and Chris Horrie, Stick It Up Your Punter, pp. 128–31.] Unfortunately, neither journalist would be filing from there for much longer. Both Winchester and Graves had to move to the Argentine mainland. There, Winchester, together with Ian Mather and Tony Prime of the Observer were arrested on spying charges. Over the next few weeks, the British media was put in the impossible position of trying to report what was happening on a group of islands where they had no reporters.
If the Government had dithered before the invasion, it was resolute – or at any rate its Prime Minister was – in its response. A Task Force would be dispatched to take the islands back if no diplomatic solution had been reached in the time it would take the Royal Navy to reach the Falklands. All the newspapers recognized the necessity of getting their journalists on board the ships, but the Royal Navy was hostile to carrying any superfluous personnel on board – least of all prying journalists. It took considerable pressure from Downing Street to get the Navy to accept the necessity of any press presence.[335 - Bernard Ingham, Kill The Messenger, p. 285.] After much bullying, it was agreed that the newspaper journalists would be corralled upon the aircraft carrier HMS Invincible, travelling with the first batch of the Task Force. There would be only five places available.
It was left to John Le Page, director of the Newspaper Publishers’ Association, to decide which newspapers would make the cut. He opted for the method of Mrs Le Page drawing the winning titles out of a hat. This pot-luck approach produced random results, not least of which was that the Daily Telegraph would be the only representative of the ‘quality press’. Neither The Times, nor the Guardian, nor the country’s major tabloid, the Sun, was selected. This was no way to report a war. Outrage followed with Douglas-Home and his rival disappointed editors demanding representation. Bernard Ingham, the Prime Minister’s press secretary, only managed to cool the heat emanating from his telephone receiver by insisting the three papers were included after all.[336 - Charles Douglas-Home, evidence to the House of Commons Defence Select Committee, 18 July 1982; Geoffrey Taylor, Changing Faces: History of the Guardian, 1956–1988, p. 225.]
The Times only heard that a place had been secured for its nominated reporter, John Witherow, at 10.15 p.m on Sunday 4 April. He had to race to catch the train to Portsmouth – for Invincible was scheduled to set sail at midnight. Almost the only instructions Witherow received from Gray’s Inn Road was to pack a dark suit. There was, after all, the possibility he might be asked to dine with the officers in the wardroom. He at least came better prepared for the rigours of a South Atlantic winter than the Sun’s representative who arrived at Portsmouth docks on a motorbike wearing a pair of shorts.[337 - Guardian, 11 July 1988; Miles Hudson and John Stanier, War and the Media: A Random Searchlight, p. 169.]
Robert Fisk was The Times’s star war reporter, but he was in the Middle East. And as it transpired, he would soon have an invasion on his doorstep to cover. John Witherow was a thirty-year-old reporter on the home news desk, who had come to the paper from Reuters as recently as 1980. The son of a South African businessman, he had been brought to England as a child and sent to Bedford School. Before reading history at York University, he had done two years voluntary service in Namibia where he taught and helped establish a library for the inhabitants and was befriended by Bishop Colin Winter, an outspoken critic of Apartheid. He was hardly the obvious choice but, although there was no certainty that the Task Force would see action, his status as a young and unmarried reporter who was not committed anywhere else at that moment weighed in favour of his being sent on an assignment that could take weeks or months – or even take his life.
Only representatives of the British media were allowed to accompany the Task Force, Margaret Thatcher taking the view ‘we certainly didn’t want any foreigners reporting what we were doing down there!’.[338 - Hudson and Stanier, War and the Media, p. 170.] Witherow and his fellow journalists were soon to discover the limitations imposed upon them, their dispatches monitored by MoD minders and by Royal Naval press officers. The minders occasionally prevented details in dispatches leaving the ship only for the same disclosures to be released by the MoD in London. There was to be considerable friction over this and other scores. When either bureaucratic or technical difficulties prevented Witherow getting his dispatches out, the burden of war reporting fell on Henry Stanhope in London. For his information, Stanhope was reliant upon MoD briefings. But in the first weeks of the Task Force’s long journey, the focus was on how diplomacy might yet avert shots being fired in anger. Julian Haviland, the political editor, reported the mood in Westminster as did Christopher Thomas from Buenos Aires. Nicholas Ashford filed from Washington and from New York Zoriana Pysariwsky followed developments at the UN.
With the hawkish Charles Douglas-Home in charge, there was never any doubt what line the paper would take. The seizure of the islands was, the leading article declared as soon as the invasion was confirmed, ‘as perfect an example of unprovoked aggression and military expansion as the world has had to witness since the end of Adolf Hitler’. Russia would back Argentina and nothing but words could be expected from the UN. If need be, it would be necessary to meet force with force.[339 - ‘Naked Aggression’, leading article, The Times, 3 April 1982.] On Monday 4 April – the day the Task Force left Portsmouth harbour – there was only one leading article, stretching down the page and occupying sixty-eight column inches and more than five and a half feet. It was written by the editor. ‘When British territory is invaded, it is not just an invasion of our land, but of our whole spirit. We are all Falklanders now’ the paper thundered. The Argentine junta had eliminated its opponents – ‘the disappeared ones’ as they were euphemistically known. ‘The disappearance of individuals is the Junta’s recognized method of dealing with opposition. We are now faced with a situation where it intends to make a whole island people – the Falklanders – disappear.’ This could not be tolerated. The words of John Donne were intoned. And it was time for the Defence Secretary, John Nott, and the Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, to consider their positions.[340 - ‘We Are All Falklanders Now’, leading article, The Times, 5 April 1982.]
During the weekend, Margaret Thatcher and her deputy, Willie Whitelaw, had tried to shore up Carrington’s resolve to stay. But, as Thatcher put it in her memoirs, ‘Having seen Monday’s press, in particular the Times leader, he decided that he must go.’[341 - Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, p. 186.] Nott, however, was persuaded to hang on. For Douglas-Home, the most important task was to bolster the Prime Minister’s reserve not to back down. On 2 April, the Foreign Office had presented her with a litany of diplomatic pitfalls if she proceeded with her intention to send, and if necessary, use, the Task Force just as the MoD had listed the military impediments. Her decision to disregard such advice filled many in Whitehall with alarm. It was essential to restrict the strategic decisions to an inner core. An inner ‘War Cabinet’ was formed to meet once (sometimes twice) a day to conduct operations. On it sat Mrs Thatcher, her deputy Whitelaw, Nott, Carrington’s successor at the Foreign Office, Francis Pym and Cecil Parkinson (who, although only Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, could be expected to back his leader’s resolve if the Foreign Office tested it).
In New York, Britain’s UN Ambassador, Sir Anthony Parsons, had achieved a notable triumph in securing Resolution 502, which demanded an Argentine withdrawal from the islands. The Security Council presidency was in the hands of Zaire and Spain and Panama sympathized with Argentina. Russia, which could have vetoed the resolution outright, had no reason to back a NATO country and was heavily dependent on Argentine grain. Parsons’s skill (and a telephone lecture from Mrs Thatcher to King Hussein of Jordan) ensured most of the opposition was neutered into abstention. Only Panama voted against Britain. Yet, while the United States had voted favourably, its true position was equivocal. It could not rebuff its most senior NATO ally, but it did not want to undermine the anti-Communist regime in Buenos Aires. The 1947 Rio Treaty allowed for any American country to assist any other that was attacked from outside the American continent. Washington believed this was a shield against Soviet interference. A British strike could fatally crack the edifice. Indeed, the night the Argentinians had invaded, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Walter Stoessel and Thomas Enders (respectively US Ambassador to the UN; Deputy-Secretary of State; Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America) were among a group of senior US officials who had dined at the Argentine Embassy. Kirkpatrick, in particular, was no friend of Britain. On 13 April she went so far as to suggest ‘If the Argentines own the islands, then moving troops into them is not armed aggression.’[342 - The Times, 14 April 1982.] Could Britain proceed without US endorsement? The lesson of Suez was not encouraging.
The dispatch of the US Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, as a peace broker between Buenos Aires and London bought Washington time to avoid taking sides. President Mitterrand proved a staunch supporter of Britain’s claim to take back islands recognized by international law as her own, but not all the European partners were so steadfast. When the EEC embargo on Argentine imports came up for its monthly renewal in mid-May, Italy and Ireland opted out of it. The closer the Task Force got to fighting the more jumpy became the Germans. Beyond the EEC, Britain’s greatest allies proved to be Pinochet’s Chile, Australia and New Zealand. Auckland’s Prime Minister, Robert Muldoon, wrote a personal article in The Times making clear ‘New Zealand will back Britain all the way’.[343 - Ibid., 20 May 1982.] He offered one of his country’s frigates to take the place of a Royal Naval vessel called up for South Atlantic operations.
To Conservatives of Douglas-Home’s cobalt hue, reclaiming the Falklands had implications beyond assuring the self-determination of its islanders. It was also about marking an end to the years of continuous national retreat since Suez. It was about proving that Britain was still great and was not, as Margaret Thatcher put it in reply to Foreign Office defeatists, a country ready to accept ‘that a common or garden dictator should rule over the Queen’s subjects and prevail by fraud and violence’.[344 - Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, p. 181.] That Tories saw an opportunity to commence a national revival of self-confidence troubled the left and many liberals. They had no love for a right-wing military junta in Buenos Aires but they worried a triumphant feat of British arms would restore militaristic (right-wing, class-ridden) attitudes. It was little wonder they turned to the UN in the hope of a compromise that would fudge such absolutes as ‘ownership’ and ‘nationalism’. Indeed, Britain at large appeared to be apprehensive. During April and early May, opinion polls suggested there was support for sending the Task Force but considerable doubt about whether reclaiming the islands was worth spilling British blood.[345 - Max Hastings and Simon Jenkins, The Battle for the Falklands, p. 161.]
Despite his own stalwart position, Douglas-Home was careful to ensure the widest possible spectrum of views should be aired in the paper. Never shy to criticize, Fred Emery told him ‘your leaders have been a sight too romantic, losing sight of the practicalities’.[346 - Fred Emery to Charles Douglas-Home, 29 April 1982, ref. A751/9256/9/2.] David Watts was in the camp that argued that the islanders had precious little future without Argentine collaboration and that the utility of 1800 Falkland Islanders to the national interest was less than the financial portfolios of the 17,000 British citizens living in Argentina. A full-page pro-Argentine advert was published.[347 - The advertisement was sponsored by a group describing themselves as Argentine citizens residing in New York State, The Times, 24 April 1982.] The historian and anti-nuclear campaigner E. P. Thompson was given much of the Op-Ed page to explain ‘why neither side is worth backing’. He concluded that Mrs Thatcher’s ‘administration has lost a by-election in Glasgow and it needs to sink the Argentine navy in revenge’.[348 - E. P Thompson, ‘Why Neither Side Is Worth Backing’, The Times, 29 April 1982.] The letters page started to fill. Many disliked Douglas-Home’s editorial line. The former Labour Paymaster-General, Lord (George) Wigg got personal:
I have no confidence in improvised military adventures in pursuit of undefined objectives, and my doubts are further emphasized by the attitude of The Times which, during my lifetime, has been wrong on every major issue, and I have little doubt that the time will come when your current follies will be added to the long list of failures to serve your country with wisdom in her hour of need.[349 - Lord Wigg, letters to the editor, The Times, 6 April 1982.]
Sackloads of letters abhorred the idea of a resolution through violence in the South Atlantic. The playwright William Douglas-Home (the editor’s uncle) was among those wondering if a referendum could be held to ask the islanders whether they wanted to be evacuated and, if so, to where, ‘otherwise a situation might arise in which the Union Jack flew again on Government House with hardly anybody alive to recognize it’. Four to five hundred letters were arriving at Gray’s Inn Road every day. Leon Pilpel, the letters page editor, considered that in the past thirty years only two other issues had generated comparable levels of correspondence – the 1956 Suez crisis and the paper’s resumption in 1979 after its eleven-month shutdown. In the first three weeks of the crisis the number of letters received suggested that a little over half disagreed with the paper’s editorial line and favoured a negotiated settlement rather than using the Task Force. But there were also sackloads of letters from America supporting the Prime Minister’s resolve.[350 - Leon Pilpel in TNL News, May 1982.] It was hard to gauge to what extent this reflected most Times readers’ views. Doubtless an anti-war editorial policy would have stimulated a greater torrent of pro-war letters.
Among broadsheets, The Times and the Daily Telegraph stood alone in unambiguously supporting the Task Force’s objectives. Not even all the ‘Murdoch Press’ (as the left now chose to call it) supported the war. The Sunday Times’s editor, Frank Giles, believed ‘The Times’s leaders brayed and neighed like an old war horse’.[351 - Frank Giles, Sundry Times, p. 224.] By contrast, the Sunday Times warned its readers that any attempt to retake the islands by force would be ‘a short cut to bloody disaster’. Impressed by no force other than that of the market, the Financial Times opposed sending the Task Force. Britain, it maintained, should not seek to retain control of an ‘anachronism’. Instead it should propose turning the islands over to a UN Trusteeship.[352 - David Kynaston, The Financial Times: A Centenary History, pp. 463–6.] The Guardian became the main protest sheet against liberating the islands. The paper’s star columnist, Peter Jenkins, perfectly encapsulating the Guardian mindset by warning, ‘We should have no wish to become the Israelis of Western Europe’. The strident tone adopted by the Sun – derided for turning from ‘bingo to jingo’ – particularly confirmed bien pensant opinion against liberating the Falklands. Accusations of fifth columnists in the fourth estate raised temperatures further. The Guardian’s editor, Peter Preston, denounced the Sun as ‘sad and despicable’ for questioning the patriotism of the Daily Mirror and the BBC’s Peter Snow.[353 - Taylor, Changing Faces, pp. 228–33, 234–5.] There would be worse to come.
The New Statesman, edited by Bruce Page, a noted investigative journalist who had worked with Harold Evans at the Sunday Times, baited The Times for its ‘We Are All Falklanders Now’ editorial. ‘It is not easy to believe,’ the New Statesman pronounced, ‘that even a government as stupid and amateurish as Mrs Thatcher’s can actually be sending some of the Navy’s costliest and most elaborate warships to take part in a game of blind-man’s bluff at the other end of the world.’ The weekly house magazine of the left exploded in a torrent of loathing, which, surprisingly, was directed not against the side led by a right-wing military junta but against ‘the thing we still have to call our government – the United Kingdom state … so long as it has its dominion over us it will betray us – and makes us pay the price of betrayal in our own best blood’. For its 30 April edition, the New Statesman splashed across its cover the most demonic looking photograph of Mrs Thatcher it could tamper with, above the bold capital letter indictment ‘THE WARMONGER’.[354 - New Statesman, ‘Mad Margaret and the Voyage of Dishonour’, 9 April 1982; New Statesman, 30 April 1982.]
The peace lobby tried to talk up every diplomatic initiative to avoid the coming confrontation. In contrast, Buenos Aires’s offers were met with the Sun’s famous headline suggestion to ‘Stick it up your junta!’[355 - Chippindale and Horrie, Stick It Up Your Punter, p. 136.] Al Haig’s shuttle diplomacy stumbled on. But as far as Margaret Thatcher and the editorial policy of The Times was concerned, it was hard to see what offer would be acceptable that fell short of handing the islands back to their British owner. Not everyone in the War Cabinet saw the matter in such absolutes. The new Foreign Secretary, Francis Pym, supported a compromise he negotiated with Haig in Washington. The Task Force would turn back and the Argentine occupation would end. In its place a ‘Special Interim Authority’ would be established in Stanley that would include representatives of the Argentine government and a mysterious as yet unknown entity described as the ‘local Argentine population’. There would be no explicit commitment to self-determination. Mrs Thatcher stated in her memoirs that she believed the deal would have allowed Buenos Aires ‘to swamp the existing population with Argentinians’ and that, had it been approved, she would have resigned.[356 - Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, pp. 205–8, 211.] But, rather than be seen to be negative, it was decided to wait and see what the junta made of the scheme. On 29 April, they rejected it. The following day, the United States at last came out formally in support of Britain. By then, South Georgia was back in British hands. With Witherow and the other reporters hundreds of miles away on the Invincible, there were no journalists with the landing force and the only photograph The Times could run with was an old panorama of a peaceful looking Grytviken harbour.
As the prospect of a major confrontation became inevitable, so Douglas-Home spent long periods on the telephone with intelligence officers and assorted defence experts. As Liz Seeber, his secretary, put it, ‘He did seem to be remarkably well informed on some things’.[357 - Liz Seeber to the author, interview, 18 July 2002.] D-notices, a system established in 1912, set out the guidelines for the British news media’s reporting of national security matters. Whitehall had only just reviewed and extended them two days before the Argentines had invaded. Concerned that Julian Haviland’s article citing ‘informed sources’ that there was already an advance party on the Falklands breached D-notice 6 on ‘British Security and Intelligence Services’, Douglas-Home discreetly edited the piece before allowing it onto the front page for 27 April. This was an example of self-censorship, without the Secretary of the D-notice committee even being contacted on the subject.[358 - The Economist, 22 May 1982.]
The censors reviewing John Witherow’s dispatches from HMS Invincible forbade any mention of the Task Force’s strengths, destinations, of the capability of the onboard armoury or even the weather. In London, the Vulcan bombing raid on Stanley’s airfield was portrayed as a success (despite Argentine film footage that showed the airstrip was still useable). Witherow spoke to one of the personnel in the flight control room who told him the raid had been a disastrous flop. Witherow filed his copy to this effect, only to have the censor change it to read that the mission had been a success. This, however, was an extreme and rare example. Generally, as at Gray’s Inn Road, self-censorship helped ensure that little of substance was actually excised from Witherow’s copy.[359 - John Witherow to the author, interview, 9 August 2002.] Yet, this did not make relations on board Invincible easy. Unlike the Army, which had learned through long (and occasionally bitter) experience as a consequence of the Troubles in Ulster, the Navy was not used to dealing with the press at such close quarters. There was also the question over whether naval procedures applied to the journalists on board. It did not go down well that during the first ‘Action Stations’ Witherow went onto the bridge of Invincible protesting that ‘as he represented The Times, he could go where he liked’.[360 - Quoted in David E. Morrison and Howard Tumber, Journalists at War: The Dynamics of News Reporting During the Falklands Conflict, p. 144; Hudson and Stanier, War and the Media, p. 170.] As the Task Force steamed closer to the Total Exclusion Zone around the Falklands, relations between the press corps and their MoD ‘minder’ broke down completely. Recognizing the problem, the Invincible’s captain, Jeremy Black, did his best to help and assigned his secretary, Richard Aylard (later the Prince of Wales’s private secretary), to smooth things over with the journalists. Nonetheless, Witherow’s copy was vetted four times before it reached Gray’s Inn Road. Once the MoD press officer, Aylard and Black had vetted it on the Invincible, it was transmitted to Admiral Sir John Fieldhouse’s Command HQ at Northwood, Middlesex, where the MoD censors vetted it again. Despite Captain Black’s request that, after they had cleared it, Northwood should release the journalists’ dispatches at the same time as its own statements, this frequently did not happen.[361 - John Witherow to the author, interview, 9 August 2002; The Economist, 22 May 1982; Charles Douglas-Home, evidence to the House of Commons Defence Select Committee, 18 July 1982.]
Transmitting copy from ship to shore was a major problem. Understandably, the journalists’ dispatches were the lowest priority of all the information punched out by the Invincible’s messenger centre. It took half an hour for the operator to transfer a journalist’s dispatch onto tape. Further delays took place trying to transmit it by satellite and the copy frequently got lost in the process, requiring it to be sent again. The whole process frequently took two to three hours – just to send one dispatch. And there were five Fleet Street journalists, all sending in their handiwork. It was hardly surprising that Black objected to 30 per cent of his outgoing traffic being taken up by press copy when he had far more important operational detail to convey. At one stage, there was a backlog of one thousand signals waiting to be cleared. Eventually Black demanded that press copy could only be transmitted at night, when there was usually less operational messaging needing to be sent. This ensured that copy was appearing in The Times around two days after it was written. A seven-hundred-word limit was also imposed.[362 - Robert Harris, Gotcha! The Media, The Government and the Falklands Crisis, pp. 35–6.]
It had been decided that dispatches would be ‘pooled’ so that all the news media would have access to them. In any case, it proved almost impossible for any of the Fleet Street editors to make contact with their journalists on board ship. Witherow managed to get a brief call through to Fred Emery on 18 May, but this was a rare exception.[363 - Emery to Douglas-Home, 18 May 1982, ref. A751/9256/9/2.] ‘Those of us without experience of war would have done better,’ Witherow later reflected, ‘if we’d had the office saying “give us 2000 words on how the Harrier pilots spend their time” – we didn’t know what they wanted and were just firing into a void all the time.’ By the time newspapers were flown on board ship for the journalists to analyse, they were two to three weeks out of date. Witherow concluded that the failure to provide the embedded reporters with better communication channels ended up harming the Task Force’s own publicity: ‘if they had allowed it, they would have got much better and less spasmodic, coverage’.[364 - John Witherow to the author, interview, 9 August 2002.]
Witherow did not find the crew to be particularly pugnacious. ‘They knew the ships were hopelessly defended,’ he recalled; ‘this became apparent when I saw them strapping machine guns to the railings of Invincible to shoot down low flying planes.’[365 - Ibid.] On 1 May, the Fleet came under air attack. In London, the War Cabinet was concerned about the strike range of the carrier Veinticinco de Mayo and the cruiser General Belgrano. Although the latter was an aged survivor of Pearl Harbor, it was fitted with anti-ship Exocet missiles and was escorted by two destroyers. The Task Force’s commander, Admiral Woodward, feared the carrier and the cruiser were attempting a pincer movement against his ships. On Sunday 2 May the War Cabinet gave to the submarine HMS Conqueror the order to torpedo the Belgrano. Three hundred and twenty-one members of its crew went down with her.
The Belgrano’s sinking was to be the most controversial action of the conflict. But, at first, it was very difficult to establish much information about it. Such was the paucity of information from the MoD, it did not make the newspapers until Tuesday 4 May editions. Even then, The Times had to rely on its US correspondent, Nicholas Ashford, for the news that ‘authoritative sources in Washington’ had confirmed the cruiser had sunk and that as many as seven hundred of its crew might have drowned. Filing from Buenos Aires, Christopher Thomas backed up Washington’s claims. All the MoD in London could offer was that they were ‘not in a position to confirm or deny Argentine reports’. Witherow, however, did manage to get a dispatch out that concentrated on the Navy’s ‘compassion’ in sparing the Belgrano’s escort ships and in searching for survivors. The best the picture desk could procure was a tiny image with the caption ‘The General Belgrano in a photograph taken 40 years ago’.[366 - The Times, 4 May 1982.] A further sixteen days would pass before the dramatic photograph of the ship – listing heavily and surrounded by life rafts – would make it into the paper, halfway down page six.
News that the Belgrano had been hit had prompted the infamous ‘Gotcha!’ headline in the Sun. The NUJ had called an eleven day strike and the paper was being brought out by only a handful of editorial staff on whom the excitement and stress were clearly beginning to have a deleterious effect. The paper’s combative editor Kelvin MacKenzie pulled the crude headline after the first edition once news of serious loss of life began to permeate the Bouverie Street newsroom, but by the time ‘Gotcha!’ had been replaced by the more contrite (though less factually accurate) headline ‘Did 1200 Argies drown?’ the damage had been done.[367 - Chippindale and Horrie, Stick It Up Your Punter, p. 137.] Reacting to the anti-war stance of its rival, the Daily Mirror, the Sun’s reporting of the conflict was not only stridently patriotic but also frequently couched in language that suggested the war was some sort of game show. In particular, the ‘Gotcha!’ front page brought the Sun considerable opprobrium, but The Times, while opting for the lower-case headline ‘Cruiser torpedoed by Royal Navy sinks’, was equally certain of the need to send her to the bottom of the ocean. Those who pointed out the ship had been torpedoed outside the Total Exclusion Zone were slapped down, the leader column declaiming, ‘it is fanciful to imagine that any Argentine warship can put to sea – let alone sail some three hundred miles eastward towards the Falkland Islands – without having hostile intentions towards the British task force’.[368 - ‘For a Better Peace’, leading article, The Times, 5 May 1982.]
The press and political recriminations over the Belgrano had only just begun when the news broke that HMS Sheffield had been hit – the first British warship to be lost in battle since the Second World War. Witherow’s dispatch from Invincible led the coverage, describing how the Sheffield ‘was completely blotted out by the smoke which formed a solid column from the sea to the clouds’. The sea was ‘full of warships all manoeuvring at top speed’ with the Invincible’s personnel spreadeagled on a floor that ‘shook with vibrations’ as the carrier dodged the incoming assaults.[369 - The Times, 5 May 1982.] The war situation was now totally transformed. ‘The cocktails on the quarterdeck in the tropics seem another existence,’ Witherow stated two days later. The quarterdeck ‘is now swept by sleet and spray and piled high with cushions from the officers’ wardroom, ready for ditching overboard to reduce risk of fire’.[370 - Ibid., 7 May 1982.]
‘In military terms, the Falklands war is turning into a worse fiasco than Suez,’ announced Peter Kellner, the New Statesman’s political editor, adding that The Times ‘in superficially more measured tones’ was as guilty as the rest of ‘the jingo press’ in getting Britain’s servicemen into this mess.[371 - Peter Kellner, New Statesman, 7 May 1982.] As news of the Sheffield’s casualties slowly emerged, there was a palpable ‘told you so’ from those who thought going to war ridiculous. The Times published a letter from the acclaimed professor of politics Bernard Crick lambasting ‘the narrowly legal doctrine of sovereignty’ that had produced the ‘atavistic routes of patriotic death when our last shreds of power lie in our reputation for diplomatic and political skill’. Instead of making war, Britain should work ‘in consort’ with the EEC and its friends to put ‘pressure on the USA to control its other allies’.[372 - Professor Bernard Crick, letters to the editor, The Times, 6 May 1982.]
Conspiracy theorists soon suggested that the Belgrano had been sunk in order to derail a peace plan being proposed by Peru. Thatcher later stated that she knew nothing of the Peruvian proposals (which envisaged handing the islands over to a four-power administration) when the order to sink the cruiser was given and, in any case, Buenos Aires proceeded to reject the proposals. The Times did not think much of the Peruvian plan, sniffing that it promised to turn the Falklands into ‘some latter-day post war Berlin’.[373 - ‘You Cannot Joke With War’, leading article, The Times, 12 May 1982.] But the Belgrano’s sinking created an international outcry. President Reagan begged Mrs Thatcher to hold off further action. The Irish Defence Minister declared Britain ‘the aggressor’. The Austrian Chancellor opined that he could not support Britain’s colonial claims over the islands. At home and abroad, Thatcher’s critics demanded she return to the United Nations for a diplomatic solution. But with the South Atlantic winter setting in, and Galtieri scouring the world’s arms market for more Exocet missiles, prevarication was not what the Task Force wanted.[374 - Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, pp. 216, 221; The Times, 5 May 1982.]The Times was deeply sceptical of further diplomatic overtures. Nonetheless Pym got to work with Perez de Cuellar, the UN Secretary-General, on a plan to place the islands under the interim (though some concluded indefinite) jurisdiction of the United Nations. Nigel Lawson later wrote that he thought the plan would have commanded a Cabinet majority.[375 - Nigel Lawson, The View From No. 11, pp. 126–7.] Instead, on 19 May, the Argentine junta rejected the proposals. Pym wanted to try again, but his colleagues overruled him. On 21 May, British troops went ashore at San Carlos Bay. The liberation had begun.
The following morning The Times led with ‘Troops gain Falklands bridgehead’ above a photograph of three Royal Marine Commandos running the Union Jack up a flagpole. The image had not quite the vivid urgency of the US Marines planting Old Glory at Iwo Jima, but, compared to the paper’s front-page treatment of the campaign until that moment, it was positively dramatic. The day before the landing, Sir Frank Cooper, the permanent under-secretary at the MoD, had deliberately misinformed a press briefing that British strategy would take the form of a series of smash and grab raids at various locations around the islands rather than a single D-Day-style landing.[376 - Harris, Gotcha!, p. 111.] All the papers, including The Times, advised their readers accordingly. Thus, news that there was a major invasion thrust in San Carlos Bay came as a complete surprise. The intention behind Cooper’s misleading briefing was to throw the Argentinians off the scent. Amphibious landings were precarious at the best of times and if the defending force had guessed the location, the outcome could have been in the balance. Instead, it would take time for the Argentinians to work out that what was going on in San Carlos Bay was something more than one of the smash and grab raids authoritatively traced throughout the British media to a ‘senior Whitehall source’.
Although the landing went unopposed, talk of success was premature. The RAF’s failure to gain commanding air superiority and the bravery of the Argentine pilots made it far from certain that the campaign would succeed. The Times reported an MoD briefing that five – unnamed – warships had been hit together with the Argentine claim that they had sunk a Type 42 destroyer and a Type 22 frigate. Such sketchy detail caused considerable anxiety to all those with loved ones in the Task Force and appeared to be another instance of the press having to deal with a MoD that was self-defeating in its dilatory release of vital information. But on this occasion, it ensured a better initial headline: Fleet Street led with the good news that British troops were ashore, rather than the battering the naval armada was receiving. Only later did it emerge that HMS Ardent and, subsequently, HMS Antelope, had been lost.
Frustrated in his bid to land with the troops, Witherow had got himself transferred to what less intrepid reporters might consider a precarious posting – on board an ammunition ship moored in the ‘bomb alley’ of San Carlos Water. In view of the highly inflammable cargo, he was cheerily assured that if the ship was hit, he wouldn’t need a lifejacket but a parachute. ‘The bombs came within fifty metres. We were feeling a bit nervous,’ he recollected; ‘whenever the planes came in, everybody let loose, bullets, guns, missiles.’ It was a perfect spot to observe the Argentine air force’s finest hour. Night-time offered little relief. Fears that Argentine divers might lay mines necessitated the dropping of depth charges: ‘You would be lying in your bunk at 4 a.m. right next to the waterline,’ Witherow recalled, ‘when suddenly BOOM!’[377 - John Witherow to the author, interview, 9 August 2002.]
With the bridgehead on East Falkland secured and the British troops beginning to move inland, Witherow became increasingly frustrated. Having journeyed down with the Navy, he had not had an opportunity to make the now imperative links with the Army that those journalists who had travelled later with the troop ship Canberra had established. Most prominent in this group was Max Hastings of the London Evening Standard. With Hastings and the Army were Michael Nicholson of ITN and the BBC’s Brian Hanrahan who were able to file voice reports (pictures would have to wait) from the beachhead. Eventually, Witherow and the other four journalists on the ammunition ship were helicoptered onto East Falkland. But within hours, they were told they were too inadequately clothed to proceed with the troops and were going to be sent back to the ship. Deciding anything was better than skulking on a floating powder keg, they attempted to hide behind some bales of wool. They were discovered and escorted from the island. Next they were put on board HMS Sir Geraint, a logistical support vessel that promptly sailed back out to sea. For several days Witherow and his companions wondered why their ship appeared to be taking a peculiar course, circling round the aircraft carriers. Eventually they realized the Sir Geraint was trying to draw an Exocet missile attack upon itself so as to save the carriers. Having placed the press corps on, respectively, an ammunition ship and a decoy for air assault, it was clear what the Royal Navy thought of their travelling journalists. The land campaign had been going for two weeks before Witherow was next permitted to step ashore with 5 Brigade.
By then the most famous land battle of the war, Goose Green, had been won. Without air support and with little in the way of artillery, 2 Para had attacked and overcome an entrenched enemy nearly three times their size, taken 1400 prisoners and freed 114 islanders shut up in a guarded community hall. It was an impressive feat and earned a posthumous Victoria Cross for Colonel ‘H’ Jones, the commanding officer who fell with seventeen of his men. But not everyone had played his or her part. With a level of ineptitude far surpassing their usual reticence, the MoD in London had announced the capture of Goose Green eighteen hours before it happened. The BBC’s World Service reported the news that the attack was about to take place. In the meantime, the Argentine troops rearranged their defences to guard against an assault from exactly the direction 2 Para were approaching – supposedly in secrecy.[378 - Hudson and Stanier, War and the Media, p. 175.] This scandalous lapse was primarily the MoD’s fault, but it generated further animosity between the troops and the reporters. In Gray’s Inn Road, the fall of Goose Green was not the main story. Instead, Fred Emery decided to lead with the Pope’s arrival in Britain because the first steps of a pontiff on British soil were of greater historical significance.[379 - Fred Emery to Charles Douglas-Home, ref. A751/9256/9/2.]
The British Army’s objective was now to yomp across East Falkland, eject the Argentines from the defensive positions in the hills to the west and south of Stanley and liberate the capital. Having finally got himself accredited to 5 Brigade, Witherow proceeded to spend some days with the Gurkhas before attaching himself to the Welsh Guards, a regiment he rightly assumed would be in the thick of any fighting. Despite the cold weather, he spent most nights huddled up in barns or sheds or, occasionally, trying to sleep outdoors. The only way he could now get copy to London was to write it down, persuade a helicopter pilot to carry it on his next trip back to HMS Fearless (where all journalists’ copy was being directed) and then have the ship transmit it to the MoD censors in Northwood from where it would, it was hoped, be passed, unedited, onto Gray’s Inn Road. This chain of action only worked if the pilot remembered to pass the copy to someone who knew what to do with it next. Frequently, the copy got mislaid, put aside or discarded at some point along this convoluted process. One of the reports that got lost in transit was a graphic eyewitness account of the horror on board the stricken landing ships Sir Tristram and Sir Galahad from Mick Seamark of the Daily Star. Some felt its loss was convenient.[380 - Hudson and Stanier, War and the Media, p. 173.]
Witherow was at Bluff Cove when the disaster struck. His dispatch – which did get through – conveyed the essentials that between five hundred and six hundred men from the Royal Marines and the Welsh Guards had been on the ships, awaiting disembarkation when the air attack came. One survivor was quoted as stating, ‘People were screaming, trapped in their rooms. People were in agony. There was mangled wreckage in the corridor.’[381 - The Times, 11 June 1982.] The attack had come on Tuesday 8 June yet such was the MoD’s reticence in releasing details that the death toll had still not been confirmed when The Times went to press for its Saturday 12 June edition – four days after the ships had been hit. Henry Stanhope was left to report the rumours of forty-six deaths and 130 wounded but that ‘the Ministry’s refusal to give casualty figures has also prompted wide speculation in Washington where some sources say British casualties in the Tuesday raids are estimated at 300 dead and a large number wounded’.[382 - Ibid., 12 June 1982.] The actual figure was fifty-one fatalities and forty-six injuries.
The MoD’s failure to respond quickly with accurate information was not a cause of media incompetence, as was widely assumed at the time, but of military cunning. The Argentinians believed they had inflicted nine hundred casualties and checked the British advance. Determined to foster this misimpression in their opponents’ minds, the MoD deliberately briefed the press that losses had indeed been very heavy and the assault on Stanley might have to be postponed. Henry Stanhope dutifully reported this misinformation.[383 - Ibid., 10 June 1982.] The true death toll was withheld until the assault on Stanley had commenced on time and at full strength.[384 - Hastings and Jenkins, The Battle for the Falklands, pp. 320–21.] As Admiral Sir Terence Lewin later put it, ‘The Bluff Cove incident, when we deliberately concealed the casualty figures, was an example of using the press, the media, to further our military operations.’[385 - Quoted in Harris, Gotcha!, p. 118.]
Witherow moved up with the Welsh Guards as they advanced for the final push. Passing gingerly through a minefield he observed the battle of Mount Tumbledown from ‘quite a way back’. Comprehensively defeated in the hills around the capital, the Argentine garrison was now preparing to surrender. Reaching the outskirts of Stanley, Witherow noted that the road ahead appeared to be open. He decided to advance on the city, hoping to be the first journalist – indeed the first person with the Task Force – into the islands’ capital. Gallingly, he discovered the omnipresent Max Hastings of the Evening Standard had beaten him to it. By the time Witherow’s report made it into The Times it was as the follow-up to Hastings’s celebrated dispatch describing the moment he liberated the Upland Goose Hotel. Taking advantage of the order to 2 Para to halt just outside the city while negotiations were entered into, Hastings had seen his chance and – exchanging his Army-issue camouflaged jacket for an anorak – wandered into the city. Finding an Argentine colonel on the steps of the administration block, Hastings recorded, ‘I introduced myself to him quite untruthfully as the correspondent of The Times newspaper, the only British newspaper that it seemed possible he would have heard of.’[386 - Hastings and Jenkins, The Battle for the Falklands, p. 349.]
Having innocently printed the MoD’s misinformation about delays to the final assault, The Times was as taken by surprise by the speed of the Argentine surrender as were MPs who had gathered in the Commons chamber expecting a ministerial progress report only to discover that the Argentines were ‘reported to be flying white flags over Port Stanley’. In the preceding hours, the MoD had insisted upon a news blackout from the South Atlantic so that no reporter could get the news of the ceasefire out before the Prime Minister had announced it to Parliament. The Times could feel a sense of vindication for the strong editorial line it had taken from the first, the leader column starting, ‘In war, only what is simple can succeed’ because ‘it was clear that it was the sheer simplicity of Britain’s immediate response to the original invasion which has sustained the operation over all these weeks and made such an historic victory possible.’[387 - ‘The Truce’, leading article, The Times, 15 June 1982.] Having initially supported the 1956 Suez fiasco, The Times had not always made the right call in such matters. Douglas-Home had risked the paper’s reputation in taking an unambiguous stance right from the beginning. Notwithstanding the loss of life, it was natural that there was a sense of relief at Gray’s Inn Road that the gamble had succeeded in its objective.
In The Winter War, the book he co-wrote with Patrick Bishop of the Observer, Witherow pointed out that the Falklands campaign was a nineteenth-century affair in the respect that it was about territory rather than ideology. Moreover, apart from the missiles, ‘the basic tools for fighting were artillery, mortars, machine guns and bayonets’, weapons that ‘would have been familiar to any veteran of World War II’.[388 - John Witherow and Patrick Bishop, The Winter War, p. 17.] It thus proved to be markedly different from the British military operations of the following twenty years in which air power and technology would predetermine the outcome on the ground and Britain would be but a junior partner in an American-led coalition. Witherow maintained that Britain’s campaign was never a preordained walkover against a bunch of useless conscripts. Argentine equipment had been generally as good as that possessed by the British. Indeed, with supplies being flown into Stanley airport right up to the eve of the surrender (so much for Britain’s claim to have disabled the runway) the Argentine troops in the area were better fed and supplied than the British. What was more, they had had plenty of time to prepare defences and ‘initially out-numbered their attackers by three to one, a direct inversion of the odds that conventional military wisdom dictates. They had nothing like the logistical problems that beset their attackers.’[389 - Ibid., pp. 18, 26.] There had been moments of luck – in particular the failure of so many Argentine missiles to detonate after hitting their target – but it was undeniably a great feat of British arms. Some began to hope that it presaged an end to the long years of managing decline that had inhabited the Whitehall psyche since Suez.
The Franks Report cleared the Thatcher Government of negligence in failing to foresee the invasion but found fault with Whitehall’s capacity for ‘crisis management’. The extent to which the Government and the MoD in particular had manipulated the news coverage of the campaign rumbled on elsewhere. The Commons Defence select committee provided newspaper editors, Douglas-Home among them, with the opportunity to draw attention to the many deficiencies that MoD restrictions and poor communication links had produced. Many journalists were outraged that senior Whitehall figures like Sir Frank Cooper had consciously misled them into writing that there would be no single D-Day-style landing only hours before such an undertaking got underway. This kind of deceit undermined trust in Government information. Doubtless Sir Frank calculated that the exact veracity of a particular briefing was less important than the survival of several hundred soldiers who would be sent to their deaths if the Argentines were ready to meet the landing party. If this was the calculation then only a public servant with a peculiar set of priorities would have done otherwise. But it was a stunt that could not be repeated too often. If journalists began to disbelieve everything Government officials told them, the whole point of briefings would break down. Operational reasons were also used to justify the slow release of information. The MoD’s decision to announce that ships had been hit without naming which and the late release of casualty figures from the Bluff Cove disaster caused distress to anxious relatives and angered all those who believed news involved immediacy of information. Where the balance resided between Whitehall’s obligation to provide a free society with truthful information and its duty not to needlessly endanger servicemen’s lives could not be easily resolved.
In the twenty years following the Falklands’ campaign, the number of commercial satellites proliferated, permitting war correspondents to communicate swiftly and directly to their offices and readers or viewers. Those reporting from the South Atlantic in 1982 did not enjoy such liberty. They had no alternative but to entrust their copy to the British military who alone had the capability to transmit it back to London and, in the first instance, to the MoD censors. If the armed forces did not like the look of the copy they were under no obligation even to send the dispatch. Whitehall had been able to prevent any foreign press from covering the operation by the simple device of refusing them a berth on any of the ships travelling with the Task Force. But subsequent wars were not fought over inaccessible islands close to the Antarctic. And since they involved joint operations with allies, what reporters with one country’s troops could transmit became the effective property of all.
Indeed, the Falklands War would be the last major conflict in which newspaper reports were more immediate than television pictures. The experience of the BBC and ITV crews on the aircraft carrier Hermes was even more frustrating than that of the Fleet Street journalists on Invincible. Because the British military transmitters were at the edge of their South Atlantic coverage, satellite transmission rendered pictures of too poor a quality to show. Using commercial satellites ran supposed security risks if Argentina managed to dial in to them and gain potentially useful information. Instead, all film footage had to be flown from the Falklands to Ascension Island before it could be broadcast. This created monumental delays. The first television pictures of the landings at San Carlos were shown on British television two and a half weeks after the event. Some of the footage took twenty-three days to reach transmission. This was three days longer than it took Times readers to find out the fate of the Charge of the Light Brigade in 1854.[390 - Harris, Gotcha!, p. 56.]
The quality of The Times’s reporting of the Crimean War had been one of the most illustrious episodes in the paper’s history. But besides seeing its editorial line vindicated, The Times’s coverage of the Falklands’ crisis was competent rather than remarkable. It did not, of course, want to compete with the attention-grabbing antics of the tabloids. Nonetheless, its news presentation lacked sharpness. Perhaps it was at its most deficient in its layout. Sometimes the picture selection beggared belief. The front-page headline for 3 June, ‘Argentina lost 250 men at Goose Green’, was accompanied by a photograph entitled ‘Languid lesson: Students basking in Regent’s Park, London yesterday’. The photograph that should have been used – of dejected Argentine soldiers being marched out of Goose Green into captivity – appeared on page three where there was no directly related article. Put simply, Douglas-Home had none of the visual awareness of his ousted predecessor. The magic touch of Harold Evans and his design team was noticeably lacking.
Max Hastings of the Evening Standard had proved to be the most successful reporter of the conflict, a reality that created enmity from some of the other reporters who felt he had been given preferential treatment on account of his being au fait with Army ways. Journalists’ squabbling over who got the best coverage appeared petty to soldiers and sailors whose every thought and action had been directed towards a team effort and a common purpose. Three of the journalists, including the representative from the Guardian, so hated the experience of covering the war that they quit and had to be brought home before the campaign was over. Witherow had stuck it out. Right at the very last moment, he was almost rewarded with the scoop he had been so long seeking. Having surrendered to General Moore, General Menendez, the Argentine commander-in-chief, was being held in a cabin on HMS Fearless. With Patrick Bishop, Witherow managed to sneak into the cabin and began interviewing the defeated general. Unfortunately, the inquisition had not advanced far when a naval officer walked in, discovered what was afoot and bundled the two reporters out.[391 - Hudson and Stanier, War and the Media, p. 178.]
The strident jingoism of the Sun and the less patriotic ‘even-handedness’ of the BBC generated the two shouting matches within the media. The Times gave little space to the first issue but it refused to join what it termed the ‘shrill chorus of complaint’ heard from the Sun and right-wing Tories who perceived the BBC’s attempts to present both sides of the argument as tantamount to treason. The MoD’s inability to speed the supply of copy from the South Atlantic inevitably ensured news services turned to other sources – including Argentine ones – to find out what was going on. What else could they do but cite ‘Argentine claims’ against ‘British claims’? However, the Panorama presenter Robert Kee had taken the unusual step of writing a letter to The Times criticizing the one-sided anti-war tone of one of the offending reports on his own programme.[392 - Robert Kee, letters to the editor, The Times, 14 May 1982.] This ensured the end of Kee’s Panorama career but it was noticeable that The Times did not share the Sun’s view that there were ‘traitors in our midst’, especially in the Corporation.
The boost in national newspaper circulation during the conflict was scarcely perceptible. By the end of hostilities, the increase was below 1 per cent. This tended to support the analysts’ claim that the tabloid market had long been at saturation point. But if people were not buying more newspapers, it did not mean they were not above switching titles. Looked at over a slightly broader period, comparing the same March to September period of the previous year, The Times circulation had risen 13,000 to 303,300. This compared to a 66,000 fall in the Telegraph to 1,313,000 while the war-sceptic Guardian had risen by over 8 per cent (33,500) to 421,700, increasing the margin of its lead over The Times.[393 - Taylor, Changing Faces, p. 237.] In sales figures, it was the Guardian that, ironically, had the best war.
II
The stalwart position adopted by the new editor came as no surprise to those who knew him. Among those who did not, there was an easy temptation to portray Charlie Douglas-Home as a placeman of the Establishment. He had gone to Eton and Sandhurst but not to university. His middle name was Cospatrick. His uncle, Sir Alec, had succeeded Harold Macmillan as Prime Minister and his defeat in the subsequent 1964 general election was widely interpreted as victory for British meritocracy. His mother moved in Court circles. His cousin, Lady Diana Spencer, was still in the first year of her marriage to Prince Charles. As the Princess of Wales she carried the hopes not only of a dynasty but also of much of the nation. Even without this connection, Douglas-Home had been a close friend of the Prince of Wales since the 1970s, the two men having been brought together by Laurens van der Post.
Charlie Douglas-Home certainly had the self-confident attributes of one used to privileged surroundings and high-achieving company. In particular, he had a quick and natural wit that put those he met at their ease. But his background also contained its fair share of family problems, dysfunctional relationships and alcoholism. His brother, Robin, was an accomplished pianist (he was regularly engaged entertaining the members of the Clermont Club in Berkeley Square) and a great lover of beautiful women. Married in 1960 to Sandra Paul, the model and future wife of the Tory leader Michael Howard, he subsequently had affairs with Jackie Kennedy, Princess Margaretha of Sweden and, ultimately, Princess Margaret. After he lost the affections of the Queen’s sister to Peter Sellers, he committed suicide in 1968, aged thirty-six. Following the funeral, Charlie came across a manuscript for a novel that was thinly disguised as an account of his brother’s affair with Princess Margaret. He lit a fire and placed it on it.
Three novels (and a biography of Frank Sinatra) by Robin Douglas-Home had already been published in his brief lifetime. One, entitled Hot for Certainties, ruthlessly parodied his parents although he was saved from parental wrath primarily because each recognized the cruel portrait of their spouse but not of themselves. Both Robin and Charlie had developed a love for playing the piano from their mother, a concert pianist and close friend of Ruth, Lady Fermoy, the Queen’s lady-in-waiting. Margaret Douglas-Home was also a fantasist whose tall stories gave Charlie an early training in the journalist’s requirement not to take statements at face value but rather to interview many people and ask searching questions in order to get a true picture. At Ludgrove, his prep school, he had been one of only two boys considered to have intellectual potential. The other was the boy he befriended and sat next to, the future left-wing writer Paul Foot (despite their subsequent political differences, they remained on good terms). At Eton, where he was a scholar, Douglas-Home’s favourite subject had been history and he had been accepted to go up to Oxford. His college, Christ Church, got as far as putting his name on his door, but he never arrived – at the last minute he discovered that his mother had squandered the money that would have sustained him there.
Instead, he took a commission in the Royal Scots Greys and went out to Kenya as the ADC to the Governor, Sir Evelyn Baring. This proved an important early grounding in political decision taking and the tasks of government. He later wrote Baring’s biography which he subtitled The Last Proconsul. When he returned to Britain, Douglas-Home determined upon becoming a journalist. He began as a crime reporter at the Scottish Daily Express. It was a rough but useful training in reporting from the sharp end, with the young recruit catapulted not only into the seamy side of low life in the Gorbals but also into the hard-drinking culture prevalent in the Glasgow offices of Beaverbrook’s paper. His great break came first in moving down to London in 1961 as the Express’s defence correspondent and then in covering the same portfolio at The Times four years later.
By then he had shown himself to be not only fearless in the ganglands of Glasgow but also in pursuit of the country fox. Hunting was a passion he pursued with a physical recklessness that appeared to know few bounds. He parted from his horse regularly, although never for long. His friend since school days, Edward Cazalet, noted that he used to regard it as ‘a military exercise on a grand scale: the terrain, the plan, the tactics were invariably analysed to the full. I know of no-one who got more thrill from riding flat out over fences despite the falls he took.’ More traditional members of the hunting fraternity were less impressed. They admonished Douglas-Home for wearing his father’s pink hunting coat and black cap, which they believed he was not entitled to wear. Never one to put great store by appearance, he merely dyed the coat blue and sewed on his own regimental buttons. The effect was not entirely harmonious. Unfortunately, a senior officer in the regiment witnessed him in this costume and reported him to the colonel, writing along the lines of, ‘Whenever in this dreadful coat a button happened by chance to coincide with a button hole, I saw, to my horror, the Regimental Crest.’ Douglas-Home was ordered to remove the offending item. He refused. The matter went higher. Still he refused. Finally, a general was brought in to settle matters. At this point Douglas-Home won the argument by observing that if the regimental crest was deemed worthy to grace beer mugs and place mats, it was surely not out of place amid the risks and dangers of the hunting field.[394 - Address by Edward Cazalet at Charles Douglas-Home’s Memorial Service, 25 November 1985.]
His chosen profession also involved him in dangers potentially greater than the ever-looming prospect of a hunting accident. In 1968, when he was The Times’s defence correspondent, he was arrested by Soviet forces after he discovered 25,000 troops waiting, concealed, along the Czechoslovak border. His report broke in The Times on 27 July. Just over three weeks later the tanks he had stumbled upon rolled in to crush the Prague Spring. The experience made a great impression upon him and deepened his intense hostility towards the Communist expropriation of half of Europe. He was also conscious that for many in Britain and the West, the desire to live in peaceful co-existence had deadened their condemnation of left-wing totalitarianism. His wife had been staying in a hotel in Folkestone when the news broke that Soviet forces had arrested her husband. She was promptly asked to leave the hotel. Its manager did not want the custom of the wife of a man who had been arrested.[395 - Jessica Douglas-Home, Once Upon Another Time, p. 11.]
The treatment of dissidents in Eastern Europe was an issue that deeply concerned both the editor and his wife. Douglas-Home had met and married Jessica Gwynne, an artist poised to embark upon her career as a theatrical set and costume designer, in 1966. Both subsequently became friends of Roger Scruton, the Tory philosopher who edited the Salisbury Review. Scruton was in touch with many of Eastern Europe’s leading underground samizdat thinkers. He was also involved with the Jan Hus Foundation, a support group that had been founded with money from Times readers who had been shocked following the paper’s reporting of the arrest in Prague of Anthony Kenny, the Master of Balliol, while discussing Aristotle in a dissident’s flat. When Douglas-Home became editor of The Times, Scruton encouraged him to publish an anonymous article by the Czech dissident Petr Pithart, who later became the Prime Minister of the Czech and Slovak Federation. Accompanied by Scruton, Jessica Douglas-Home made the first of her many trips behind the Iron Curtain in October 1983 to meet with and assist dissidents. Dodging the secret police became part of her routine. Meanwhile, every Tuesday The Times published brief biographies of political prisoners from around the world in a series called ‘Prisoners of Conscience’, written by Caroline Moorehead.
Another writer who shared the Douglas-Homes’ loathing for Communism was Bernard Levin. In October 1982, he returned to The Times to write his ‘The Way We Live Now’ column. After a gap of eighteen months, his first article commenced with the words ‘And another thing …’[396 - The Times, 22 October 1982.] Levin, a scourge of authority in almost any guise – from the North Thames Gas Board upwards – never shirked from what he saw as his duty to denounce the totalitarian mindset. The son of a Ukrainian Jewish mother and (an absentee) Lithuanian Jewish father, Levin had shaken off the left-wing views of his youth at the LSE and his early days as the That Was The Week That Was resident controversialist but not the argumentativeness or iconoclasm. While he continued to despise many aspects of the traditional British Establishment, in particular almost all the judiciary and most of the politicians, he was unsparing in his criticism of Soviet repression in Eastern Europe. There was no shortage of material for his scorn.
Throughout 1981, Dessa Trevisan in Warsaw and Michael Binyon, the Times correspondent in Moscow, had been filing alarming reports about the deteriorating situation in Poland. The economy was in desperate shape and the Solidarity Movement, the Eastern Bloc’s first free trade union, was openly challenging the authority of the Communist Party. Moscow had been issuing the Warsaw government with ominous requests to put its house in order and crack down on ‘anti-Soviet activities’.[397 - Ibid., 19 September 1981.] There were fears of a repeat of the Prague Spring of 1968 with Soviet tanks this time invading Poland to restore Communist unity. On 13 December 1981, Poland’s leader, General Jaruzelski, took the hint and imposed martial law.
For The Times, as with all news services, the problem was how to get reports out from a country that had imposed a news blackout. With the Polish borders sealed and all telephone and telex links shut down, it was extremely difficult to get any accurate news out of the country. Peter Hopkirk pieced together some details from ‘western diplomatic sources’ and a variety of eyewitness reports from businessmen leaving the country as the crackdown commenced. There were troops and armoured vehicles on the city streets but reports varied as to the extent of the strike action in the mines and factories. Roger Boyes, the Times correspondent in Warsaw, managed to get out a daily diary of the first four days of martial law and this appeared in the paper on 17 December. Solidarity’s leaders had been arrested and Lech Walesa was being held in isolation in a government villa outside Warsaw. ‘Chopin martial music and the general [Jaruzelski] on the screen and radio all day,’ Boyes noted. Announcers were wearing military uniform. Troops had occupied the Gdansk shipyards and surrounded the Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, some of whose staff were led away. ‘Troops are to be seen everywhere with fixed bayonets.’[398 - Ibid., 17 December 1981.]
Prior to the imposition of martial law, The Times had taken the view that between offering fresh financial aid ‘tied to IMF-type conditions’ and witnessing the economic collapse of Poland, the first was preferable. Unlike the second option, it was more likely to detach the country from the Soviet Union. Jaruzelski’s actions in December 1981 killed off any hopes in Gray’s Inn Road of sending in the investment analysts.[399 - ‘Can We Help Poland?’, leading article, The Times, 23 September 1981; ‘What the West Should Do’, leading article, The Times, 17 December 1981.] Harold Evans (still editor at that time) wrote to Rupert Murdoch, ‘You ought to know that The Times leader on the West’s reaction to Poland last week described the attitude of Lord Carrington as “flacid and feeble” (among other things) and he has let it be known that he is extremely annoyed.’[400 - Harold Evans to Rupert Murdoch, 17 January 1982, Evans Day File A759/ 9329.]
Following street scuffles and clashes with the police, 205 arrests were made in Gdansk over the weekend of 30–31 January 1982. More violent demonstrations led to 1372 arrests on 3–4 May and the reimposition of evening curfews in Warsaw for young people. With a Polish Pope in Rome who had become a rallying point against oppression, the Church in Poland was caught in a difficult position – a spiritual power trying to negotiate with a temporal one. As Roger Boyes suggested, ‘the perpetual paradox of Church strategy is that the closer it moves to talking to the government, the further it moves from the main body of Catholic believers’.[401 - The Times, 13 August 1982.] In November, the release of Lech Walesa after 336 days in custody raised hopes that the end of martial law in Poland might be in sight. But still the West held back in refusing aid.
The Polish situation sharpened the debate over whether the West should invest in the Communist east (a debate held in parallel to that over economic sanctions against South Africa). The cause célèbre was the construction of the Siberian gas pipeline. British jobs were involved in it. France and Germany wanted it to help with supplying their own energy needs. There were fears that a decision to cease cooperation would provoke Moscow into pressuring Poland to default on her massive debts to British and European banks. During 1982, however, President Reagan, having banned American companies from equipping the gas pipeline, sought to apply US law retrospectively against European companies involved in its construction. Considering the United States was continuing to sell Midwest grain cheaply to the Soviet Union, there was a measure of inconsistency in the President’s position. The Times, already irritated by Washington’s initial irresolution on the Falklands’ crisis, was deeply unimpressed, lambasting an idea that ‘set a precedent that could undermine the basis of international business trust’.[402 - ‘Trade Across the Curtain’, leading article, The Times, 16 November 1982.] Reagan backed down and the ban was lifted on 21 August 1983, exactly one month after the end of martial law in Poland. In July, Douglas-Home, accompanied by Murdoch, was granted a twenty-minute audience with President Reagan in the White House.
Michael Binyon had been The Times’s man in Moscow. Urbane, with the manner of the British diplomats with whom he spent so much of his time, the Cambridge-educated Binyon had arrived in the Soviet capital with his wife and three-year-old child in 1978. Extraordinarily, the paper had had no Moscow correspondent since 1972, a consequence of Soviet obstruction and a serious handicap to the paper’s pretensions as a world paper of record. Yet, as Binyon discovered, ‘the Russians had a great respect for The Times. They thought it was the official voice of Britain in the same way that Pravda is for the Soviet Union. They took it very seriously.’[403 - Michael Binyon, quoted in TNL News, September 1982.]
There was virtually no night life in Moscow, only endless ambassadorial receptions. Binyon had the distinction of being touched out of a photograph published in Izvestia at a reception for Michael Foot. He was more readily recognized for his work at the British Press Awards in 1981, when he picked up the David Holden prize. According to the judges, his reporting from the Soviet Union had been ‘one of the joys of the year. He combines hard reporting, descriptive writing and highly significant detail.’ Such observation filled his subsequent book, Life in Russia. But in mid-1982 he was moved on to become the paper’s Bonn correspondent. His replacement in Moscow was Richard Owen. Owen was thirty-four and had been at The Times for only two years, having previously gained a Ph.D. from the LSE and worked for the BBC. He spoke Russian, German, French and some Polish. He was still settling in Moscow when the Tass news agency confirmed Brezhnev’s death after eighteen years at the superpower’s helm. ‘When the end came, and it had been coming for a long time,’ reported Owen ‘the Soviet leadership seemed temporarily paralysed.’ The previous day The Times had led with the headline ‘Rumours of top leader’s death sweep Moscow’, based on Owen’s observations that ‘television schedules were changed without explanation and television news readers appeared dressed in black’. With the official confirmation, The Times went through its usual motions: page six cleared for a full-page obituary – ‘President Brezhnev: consolidator of Soviet power’ – while on the following page Owen assessed the runners and riders. ‘One of the main weaknesses of the Soviet system,’ he stressed, ‘is that it makes no provision for political succession.’ Konstantin Chernenko was the favourite followed by Yuri Andropov, while, of the less likely contenders, ‘Michael Sergeyevich Gorbachov is perhaps the most interesting Politburo member in the long term … He is confident, quiet, efficient, and biding his time.’[404 - The Times, 12 November 1982.]
In the event, Andropov pipped Chernenko, The Times trying to find the crumb of comfort that, having been head of the KGB for fifteen years, he would at least know what was going on in the country.[405 - ‘Enter Mr Andropov’, leading article, The Times, 13 November 1982.] Fifteen months later, Owen was again prophesying a successor when Andropov died in February 1984 (he had not been seen in public since the previous August). The obituary had no option but to focus on his professional CV since – despite being at the forefront of Soviet politics for so many years – details such as whether he had a wife remained unknown (he did, but she made her first public appearance in the wake of his funeral). This time it was the seventy-two-year-old Chernenko who succeeded.
The West’s tense relations with the teetering old men of the Kremlin formed the backdrop to the most important non-party political movement of the early 1980s, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. In Britain, the particular rallying call was the arrival of ninety-six US cruise missiles at the Greenham Common air base in Cambridgeshire. A hard core of women ‘peace protestors’ had been camping out at the air base for fifteen months when, on 12 December 1982, they were joined by a mass demonstration of thirty thousand women who linked hands and circled the perimeter wire of the base. With flowers and poems being inserted in the wire, the tone of the protest harked back to the ‘make love not war’ hippy movement of the late 1960s, although the women-only nature of the demonstration reduced, to some extent, the opportunities for hedonism available. There were sixty arrests. A CND demonstration outside Parliament led to 141 arrests. Douglas-Home was not much impressed, but the huge scale of national unease over the deployment of US nuclear weapons could not be so easily dismissed as an offshoot of a particular strain of feminism. Uncertainty about the power struggle in Moscow and dislike for the gun-totting tough talk of the ex-Hollywood cowboy (as his detractors so frequently described him) Ronald Reagan produced a broad coalition which feared that the sober reality of MAD (mutually assured destruction) would prove insufficient deterrence against either side attempting a first strike. With Monsignor Bruce Kent as its general secretary, CND drew particular support from many Church groups and individuals. When The Church and the Bomb, a report by the Church of England’s working party, argued that the retention of Britain’s nuclear deterrent was immoral, the editor’s brand of muscular Christianity rose to the fore: ‘The immorality of possessing nuclear weapons with the improbable intention of using them is only a small fraction of the immorality of actually using them. Set that against the certain rather than probable moral benefits of sustained peace in Europe, and the working party’s case falls down.’[406 - ‘The Morality of Deterrence’, leading article, The Times, 19 October 1982.]
The 1982 Labour Party conference voted for the third year in succession in favour of Britain’s unilateral nuclear disarmament. The motion, put forward by the SOGAT ’82 print union, gained the necessary two-thirds majority to ensure it was binding on party policy (it had, in any case, the support of the party leader). It called for ‘developing with the trade union movement a detailed programme for the conversion of the relevant parts of the arms industry to the manufacture of socially-useful products so that no compulsory redundancy should arise from this policy.’ Truly, the party was committed to turning swords into ploughshares. Few on the editorial floor at Gray’s Inn Road doubted the ability of SOGAT to master the art of turning sophisticated technology into labour-intensive machinery.
III
Like Rupert Murdoch, Harold Evans had been broadly sympathetic towards Israel, putting on record his doubts about some of his leader writers’ wish to endorse a Palestinian state at a time when the PLO was not prepared to acknowledge the state of Israel. He had been up against the pro-Palestinian view of, in particular, Edward Mortimer, a leader writer and foreign specialist at The Times since 1973. An Old Etonian, Balliol man and fellow of All Souls, Mortimer’s history of Islam, Faith and Power, was published in 1982. Rather pointedly, he stuck up a pro-Palestinian poster in his office.[407 - Harold Evans to Owen Hickey, Richard Owen, Brian Horton, 5 November 1981, Evans Day File; Harold Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 237.] He would later become chief speech writer to the Secretary-General of the UN, Kofi Annan. In June 1982, The Times affirmed its commitment to an independent Palestinian state: ‘Lebanon for the Lebanese, must be the slogan; Israel for the Israelis; and a Palestine of some sort, west of Jordan, for the Palestinians.’[408 - ‘Lebanon for the Lebanese’, leading article, The Times, 14 June 1982.]
In June 1981, Israeli jets struck the Osirak nuclear plant near Baghdad. The Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, justified it as a pre-emptive strike at a project that was covertly developing Iraq’s attempts to gain nuclear weapons, and he had no doubt that such a capability would be used to annihilate Israel. The Israeli attack raised several issues, not all of them subject to definitive answers. Was Iraq really developing such a capability and, if so, would she use it against Israel? Did such a possibility justify a pre-emptive attack of this kind? There was also the diplomatic angle, given the outrage felt by Arab countries and the French government. France had built the reactor and French personnel (one of whom was killed in the attack) were helping to operate it. The Times took the view that the Iraqis probably were acquiring weapons-grade enriched uranium but that the Israeli action would only drive Saddam Hussein into the arms of Syria. The action ‘may cause rejoicing in Israel in the short term, but it has not guaranteed Israeli security in the longer term’ concluded the leader column.[409 - ‘Israel’s Pre-Emptive Strike’, leading article, The Times, 9 June 1981.] The unpalatable central issue – whether it was in anyone’s interest for Saddam Hussein to acquire nuclear weapons – was sidestepped.
Robert Fisk was the paper’s Middle Eastern correspondent. Having completed a Ph.D. at Trinity College Dublin on Irish neutrality during the Second World War, he had joined The Times in 1971 in his mid-twenties, reporting on the Troubles in Northern Ireland and winning Granada TV’s What The Papers Say award for Reporter of the Year in 1975. It was while in Ireland that he uncovered a succession of British Army cover-ups, further cementing his dislike of what he saw as the repressive tendencies of authority and officialdom. ‘I learned that authority lies, governments lie, ministries of defence lie,’ he said of his time in Ulster, adding that his response was to ‘keep challenging, to reject and refuse what you’re handed’.[410 - Robert Fisk to the author, interview, 21 September 2004.] The police took him in for questioning following their discovery that he had been receiving classified documents from a rogue Army press officer who was later convicted for manslaughter. His subsequent switch away from reporting on Ireland was wrongly attributed to this incident. In fact, he merely wanted a change of scene. But Gray’s Inn Road was no place for a man of Fisk’s peripatetic courage. He had an ally in Douglas-Home, at that time home news editor, who, despite his own regard for the British Army, always encouraged Fisk to investigate further. In 1976 he was dispatched to the Middle East, finding plenty of trouble to write about in the Lebanon and Iran before covering the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan where he gained considerable access to the Soviet forces. At the IPC awards he had won International Reporter of the Year for two years running in 1980 and 1981. Frequently shot at, ‘you reach a point’ he laconically observed, ‘when one shell looks very much like another’.[411 - TNL News, March 1983.]
Fisk had arrived in the Lebanon just as the Syrians were invading the country. The Lebanon had collapsed into anarchy and the Syrian occupation had the backing of the Arab League and East Beirut’s Christian population. It was not long before Damascus’s intervention became, in turn, deeply resented and the Christians began to look for a new saviour – Israel. Syria, meanwhile, decided to crush ruthlessly its own fanatical Muslims. In February 1982 there was an insurrection by Sunni fundamentalists in the Syrian city of Hama. With the Syrian government warning foreign journalists they risked being shot by their forces if they tried to travel there, it was impossible to gauge exactly the extent of the uprising and the undoubted ferocity with which it was being suppressed. Fisk, however, decided to get a closer look and took a detour from the road to Damascus. As he approached, he could see the smoke from the ruins of Hama’s old city rising but roadblocks prevented him from getting any closer – as they had prevented any other journalist from enquiry. Fisk, however, had a stroke of luck when two displaced Syrian soldiers approached his car and asked if they could hitch a lift with him back to their units. This was his opportunity. With shells whizzing overhead, Fisk’s car sped across the battlefront, making it to the Syrians’ lines from where Soviet-made T62 tanks were firing across the Orontes river. A mosque was being shelled to pieces; a giant eighteenth-century wooden waterwheel was on fire, water cascading from its shattered structure; huge mortar cannons rocked back and forth, pounding the ancient walled city to obliteration. Bullets pinged and whirled back from the insurgents. The siege, Fisk learned, had been going on for sixteen days. There had been ferocious fighting in the cellars and passageways underneath the city as well as within it at street level. Syrian troops had even been blown up by a new and shocking phenomenon – women suicide bombers who embraced them clutching uncorked grenades. Some troops had defected to the insurgent Muslim Brotherhood.[412 - Robert Fisk to the author, interview, 21 September 2004; Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation, pp. 183–7.]
At Gray’s Inn Road there was considerable concern for Fisk’s safety, not least when he telegrammed, ‘My decision is to stick it out.’[413 - Telegram from Robert Fisk, 25 February 1982, HME 1/19.] The Syrian government was keen to silence him and complained to the British Ambassador in Damascus that Fisk was filing false reports from Hama and other places ‘which he had not visited’.[414 - Brian Horton to Harold Evans, 5 March 1982, HME 1/19.] Syrian radio denounced him as a liar. The Times, however, stood by its reporter’s claim to have been the only journalist to have witnessed the scenes of carnage. The following year he returned to Hama to find out what had happened in the aftermath. To his amazement the old city had simply disappeared. Where ancient walls and crowded streets had once stood, now there was only a giant car park. The death toll remained unknown but was estimated at around ten thousand. The Baathist regime had successfully destroyed its militant Islamic opposition. [415 - Fisk, Pity the Nation, pp. 183–7.]The Times was no advocate of instability for its own sake in the area. It believed the Syrian President, Hafez al-Assad, was ‘a man of straightforward dealing and statesmanlike behaviour’ and warned Israel not to take advantage of Syria’s internal problems by invading southern Lebanon.[416 - ‘The Best Assad We Have’, leading article, The Times, 15 February 1982.]
Instead, with the world’s attention on the Falklands War, Israel attacked southern Lebanon following the shooting on 3 June 1982 of the Israeli Ambassador to Britain outside the Dorchester Hotel in London. Israel claimed that since the ceasefire agreed with the PLO in July 1981 she had been subjected to more than 150 terrorist attacks. The Times disputed the legitimacy of this casus belli, questioning not only the statistics but also pointing out that none of the attacks during this period had come from the northern front.[417 - ‘Israel Erupts’, leading article, The Times, 8 June 1982; ‘An Unbalanced Policy’, leading article, The Times, 10 June 1982.] The implosion of Lebanon, once a land of democracy and prosperity, was, of course, a long affair. Civil war in 1975 was followed by occupation by Syria. Hating their Palestinian and Syrian guests, many Lebanese Christians regarded the Israeli invaders as liberators. But in Gray’s Inn Road, sympathy with Begin’s Israel was wearing thin. Peace with Egypt in 1978 and massive military and financial aid from the United States, far from giving Israel the sense of security necessary for it to make concessions to the dispossessed Palestinians, appeared to have encouraged aggression: the attack on Iraq’s nuclear plant in June 1981, the bombing of Beirut the following month and the annexation of Golan in December. In leading articles written by the paper’s Middle East expert, Edward Mortimer, both the invasion of the Lebanon and the equivocal attitude to it from Washington were condemned.[418 - ‘An Unbalanced Policy’, leading article, The Times, 10 June 1982.]
The Israeli offensive into the Lebanon temporarily displaced the Falklands’ conflict on the front page. Christopher Walker was able to file censored reports on the Israeli advance including a gripping account of the storming of Beaufort castle, the twelfth-century crusader fortress that had been the PLO’s main forward position in southern Lebanon for over a decade. Robert Fisk filed daily from Beirut, chronicling the air assault on the city. Transmitting his reports was an arduous business. At five o’ clock each morning he would travel south to observe the Israeli advance, often with reporters from the Associated Press bureau, coming under ferocious air attack, before returning to Beirut to file his report from a telex machine in time for it to make the copy deadline at Gray’s Inn Road. The situation deteriorated as Beirut became surrounded. The electricity supply was curtailed and food and petrol were not allowed into the city. Fisk kept his generator running by bribing an Israeli tank crew to supply him with fuel at extortionate rates. Filing to London could take hours because, whenever the generator cut out, the telex went down too. At eight o’clock in the evening, the task would be completed and Fisk, exhausted, had anxious moments waiting for Gray’s Inn Road to confirm it had indeed received all of his copy. Periodically, a message would be returned thanking him for his report and apologizing for the fact the unions had called another strike and so it would not be appearing after all. When they were printed, his reports were graphic, gripping and made no attempt to be impartial. ‘To say that Israel’s war against the Palestinians is turning into a dangerous and brutal conflict,’ he wrote, ‘would be to understate the political realities of its military adventure into Lebanon’[419 - The Times, 8 June 1982.]
By 14 June, Israeli tanks had linked up with the Christian Phalange in East Beirut. The Palestinians were hemmed in and surrounded. Yet Fisk, still in the city, predicted disaster for the invader: ‘a war which was initially supposed to take their troops only 25 miles north of their own border’ now appeared poised to degenerate into costly street fighting, ‘terrorizing the entire civilian population of West Beirut and killing hundreds of people. Is it a war that will ultimately be worth winning?’[420 - Ibid., 15 June 1982.] From the greater comfort of Gray’s Inn Road, Edward Mortimer agreed, adding that ‘the inability of the wealthy and supposedly powerful rulers of the Gulf to save Lebanon and the Palestinians from being destroyed with weapons supplied by the United States will add fuel to the brushfire of Islamic revolution blowing in from Iran’.[421 - Edward Mortimer, ‘Why the West should fear the shame of the Arabs’, The Times, 8 June 1982.]
The disaster came in September. A disengagement force led by US Marines had overseen the evacuation of the PLO guerrillas from West Beirut, a notable triumph for Israel. But it was no harbinger of peace. Scarcely had the US Marines left than chaos returned. On 14 September, Bashir Gemayel, Lebanon’s Christian President-elect, was killed in a terrorist bomb blast on a Beirut Phalangist Party office. Two hours later, Israeli troops moved into West Beirut. The next day they surrounded the Sabra and Chatila camps which were teeming with Palestinian refugees. As early as the 18 September edition of The Times, Leslie Plommer was able to report from Beirut that Phalangists had entered the camps, started fires and removed individuals while Israeli troops looked on. Two days later, Fisk filed a report that painted an altogether more serious picture. His dispatch dominated the front page. The shooting, he wrote, had lasted fourteen hours. He estimated the deaths at around a thousand (the actual figure is still disputed, though thought to be between 600 and 1400). Fisk had gained entry to the Chatila camp shortly after the last Phalangists had left: ‘in some cases, the blood was still wet on the ground … Down every alley way, there were corpses – women, young men, babies and grandparents – lying together in lazy and terrible profusion where they had been knifed or machine gunned to death,’ he wrote. The smell of death was everywhere. Having feasted on the dead, flies moved pitilessly to the living. Fisk had to keep his mouth covered to stop them swarming into it. ‘What we found inside the camp … did not quite beggar description although it would be easier to re-tell in a work of fiction or in the cold prose of a medical report.’ It was certainly graphic, men shot at point-blank range, one castrated. ‘The women,’ Fisk continued:
were middle-aged and their corpses lay draped over a pile of rubble. One lay on her back, her dress torn open and the head of a little girl emerging from behind her. The girl had short, dark curly hair and her eyes were staring at us and there was a frown on her face. She was dead.
Another child lay on the roadway like a discarded flower, her white dress stained with mud and dust. She could have been no more than three years old. The back of her head had been blown away by a bullet fired into her brain. One of the women also held a tiny baby to her body. The bullet that had passed through her breast had killed the baby too.
Further gruesome descriptions followed, the dispatch ending with Fisk moving on from the camp and finding himself with Israeli troops under fire from a ruined building. Taking cover beside a reticent army major, he tried to solicit information on what had happened at Chatila: ‘Then his young radio operator, who had been lying behind us in the mud, crawled up next to me. He was a young man. He pointed to his chest. “We Israelis don’t do that sort of thing,” he said. “It was the Christians”.’[422 - The Times, 20 September 1982.]
Subsequently Journalist of the Year again, Fisk’s dispatch from Chatila became famous with the closing statement adopted as its title. It was reproduced in The Faber Book of Reportage, an international anthology edited by John Carey in 1987, one of only four historic examples of Times journalism to be included.[423 - Fisk thus joined the illustrious Times company of William Howard Russell’s report of the Battle of Balaclava and Charge of the Light Brigade, November 1854; Nandor Ebor’s dispatch on Garibaldi’s liberation of Palermo, June 1860; and James (Jan) Morris on the conquest of Mount Everest, June 1953.] Fisk also secured an interview with Major Saad Haddad who denied his Israeli-sponsored private army had participated with the Phalangist militia in the massacre. The tone of Fisk’s interview was decidedly sceptical. The Times leader column was quick to point the finger at Israel’s shared culpability: ‘Even if they did not actively will the massacre, they are guilty of knowingly creating the conditions in which it was likely to happen.’[424 - ‘After the Massacre’, leading article, The Times, 20 September 1982.] The following February, the paper devoted extensive coverage, led by Christopher Walker in Jerusalem, to the findings of the Kahan Commission, the Israeli judicial enquiry, into the tragedy. It was highly critical of the Begin administration’s general disregard and in particular found fault with Ariel Sharon, the Defence Minister and architect of the Lebanon invasion, who had permitted the Phalangists to enter the camp despite the obvious likelihood that they would slaughter its inhabitants.
The instant response of The Times to the massacre was to argue that, since neither Syrian nor Israeli forces had brought the stability necessary for a civilian government to succeed in the Lebanon, a multinational UNsanctioned force should be sent. The Times wanted full British participation, something Mrs Thatcher was keen to avoid.[425 - Ibid.] Reagan, however, responded immediately, ordering eight hundred US Marines back into West Beirut. France and Italy followed as, reluctantly, did Britain. They marched into a trap. On 23 October 1983, two Shia Muslim suicide bombers killed 242 US Marines and 58 French troops stationed in Beirut. In one day, more servicemen had been killed than Britain lost throughout the Falklands War the previous year. In December, French and US jets retaliated, hitting Syrian positions. It was all in vain. In the new year the Lebanese government fell, having lost control of West Beirut. In March, the multinational force packed its bags and left. The Israelis were drawing and redrawing their defence line closer and closer to their own border. The Lebanon was being left to the militias, the Syrians and the undertakers.
IV
While Robert Fisk and other courageous reporters around the world dodged shot and shell to file their copy for The Times, the paper continued to be under an industrial life sentence itself. At the NUJ’s annual conference at Coventry in March 1982, the union’s president, Harry Conroy, warned that the freedom of the press was being undermined by the Thatcher Government, the proprietors and ‘the misuse of new technology’. The Times had sent its Midlands correspondent, Arthur Osman, to cover the speech but he was barred from entering the conference on the grounds that the NUJ did not allow non-NUJ journalists to cover its affairs. Mr Osman’s crime was to be a member of the Institute of Journalists union. First up to condemn The Times for having the temerity to employ a member of a different trade union was Jake Ecclestone, long-term scourge of Times Newspapers’ management, who had finally left The Times’s employment the previous year and taken up the position of deputy general secretary of the NUJ. Those who spoke most volubly about safeguarding the freedom of the press were, it seemed, less keen on the freedom of association.
The Fleet Street paradox was that, although the various print unions hated one another and the various journalist unions hated one another, they remained great believers in trade union solidarity across unrelated industrial sectors. British Rail still had the contract to deliver The Times. In June 1982 a rail strike paralysed distribution of the paper. Yet rather than assist the companies that employed their members, the SOGAT print union refused to distribute any newspapers that were switched to road distribution, thereby closing off the only means of circumventing the National Union of Railwaymen’s ability to shutdown the press.[426 - Brenda Dean to all Fathers of chapel working under NPA Agreement, 25 June 1982, 6985/21.] This was far from being an isolated incident. In August, Fleet Street was silenced by a sympathy strike by the London press branch of the EETPU (electricians’ union) in support of a 12 per cent pay claim by NHS nurses. Fleet Street’s proprietors, working though the Newspaper Publishers Association, could not see what the going rate for hospital nurses had to do with those employed to produce newspapers and secured a High Court injunction against what was classed as ‘secondary action’. Frank Chapple, the EETPU’s moderate general secretary, also appealed to his members not to pull the plug on the press. Undaunted, Sean Geraghty, the branch secretary, led his 1300 members out. No national newspaper managed to publish. Geraghty had excluded only the Communist Morning Star from the EETPU strike. Despite this thoughtful dispensation, it too failed to appear when SOGAT members halted its production.
Having lost a day’s production due to Geraghty’s action, Fleet Street braced itself for a longer shutdown when the NGA print union threatened to go on strike if Geraghty went to prison for contempt of court. As the law stood there was no debate about the matter. James Prior’s 1980 Employment Act had made secondary action illegal. Geraghty had ignored a High Court injunction to this effect. Yet, the belief by trade unionists that the matter could nonetheless be determined by the effect of industrial action rather than the writ of a court of law was instructive. The Times suspected that the NGA’s motivation was to test the secondary action legislation by creating a martyr ‘like the commotion that attended the jailing of five London dockers who defied the Industrial Relations Court in 1973 and hastened its demise’.[427 - ‘An Unlawful Interruption’, leading article, The Times, 12 August 1982.] In the event, a showdown was avoided. Geraghty was fined £350 and legal costs of £7000.
Yet, this would not prove to be the end of secondary or ‘sympathy’ action. On 22 September, The Times, together with all the other national newspapers, did not appear when the print unions downed tools and joined the TUC’s ‘Day of Action’ in support of health service workers. Douglas-Home was perturbed by the handful of the paper’s journalists who joined the boycott work campaign. He was particularly uneasy with the decision of Pat Healy, the social services correspondent, to be adopted as the Labour candidate for Bedford at the next general election, believing that readers would question the impartiality of her reporting. There was, it has to be said, no shortage of precedent for the conscientious journalist becoming a politician and the matter, perhaps wisely, was allowed to rest.
Industrial action silenced The Times again between 20 December 1982 and 3 January 1983. The dispute was caused by nine EETPU members who refused to operate new equipment until management renegotiated their terms and cost Times Newspapers more than £2 million. They won the support of their fellow electricians. Murdoch again threatened to close down the paper. Being off the streets was not the best omen for the paper’s new year. In the end, management had to abandon its plan to implement a wage freeze on all staff for 1983. Any hope of The Times scraping out of the red was lost. When, on 3 January, the paper returned to the streets, a leader article written by Douglas-Home, entitled ‘All Our Tomorrows’, laid bare the feeling in Gray’s Inn Road. It started on a positive, almost lyrical note:
For many people, life without a newspaper would be like music without time – a blur of inchoate sounds, an endless and incomprehensible cacophony. It is newspapers which puncture the march of time, syncopating their narrative of events with commentary, analysis and entertainment. Newspapers comprehend the sound of history in the making, and give it meaning.
But it questioned how long a newspaper could expect to keep its readers’ loyalty if it could not keep its side of the bargain:
The British press is only too ready fearlessly to expose bad management, bad unions, and bad industrial relations wherever they occur, except in its own backyard. The subterfuge and cynicism which poison industrial relations in Fleet Street remain a close secret. That is a strange kind of conspiracy of silence to maintain when the newspaper houses themselves find any other kind of cooperation almost impossible to achieve.[428 - ‘All Our Tomorrows’, leading article, The Times, 3 January 1983.]
The response of the unions was to go back on strike and The Times was not published between 27 January and 3 February when SOGAT struck. As part of a pooling of Times and Sunday Times library resources, management had appointed a member from SOGAT’s supervisory branch, but SOGAT insisted that management could only employ someone to a library position from the union’s clerical branch. Amazingly, this was the demarcation issue upon which SOGAT shut down the paper. Twenty-six days after this dispute was settled, The Times was again shut down when members of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers (AUEW) walked out as part of another TUC-endorsed ‘Day of Action’ – this time in protest at the Government’s efforts to ban union membership among national security and intelligence civil servants at GCHQ in Cheltenham.
V
Those who were preoccupied by Douglas-Home’s aristocratic credentials or the fact that his uncle had been a ‘wet’ Tory Prime Minister, did not, at first, realize that he was of a determinedly Thatcherite frame of mind. No one should have been surprised that he took an uncompromising line on the Falklands’ crisis, the first issue to dominate the news after he assumed the chair. Defence was his special subject and he was an ex-soldier and military historian. But some were surprised when he continued to take a bullish view of Mrs Thatcher’s domestic agenda as well. There were complaints that his leaders were too often uncritical in their support of the Government. The veteran liberal sage Hugo Young believed that, under Douglas-Home, The Times developed ‘the most right-wing world view in the serious press’ in Britain. Young told Douglas-Home that the paper had even come to outdo the Daily Telegraph in this respect, ‘mainly by virtue of so rarely finding President Reagan to the left of you’.[429 - Hugo Young to Douglas-Home, 16 February 1985, Douglas-Home Papers.] When Douglas-Home asked the Labour MP Clare Short why she had stopped reading The Times she told him it had ‘deteriorated into a crudely biased, right-wing paper. Someone else used the phrase “up-market Sun”.’[430 - Douglas-Home/Clare Short correspondence, 26 March and 2 April 1985, Douglas-Home Papers.] A consequence of this belief was that it was sometimes difficult to coax senior Labour MPs to write for the Op-Ed page, although in Peter Stothard’s experience of trying to commission articles from them this was also partly attributable to their disappointment at being offered the going rate of only £150 per article.[431 - Peter Stothard to Douglas-Home, 13 April 1983, Douglas-Home Papers.]
The left’s dissatisfaction with what they saw as an increasingly partisan and hostile paper was balanced by those on the right who had found the bien pensant pieties of the middle ground stale and unchallenging. In an article ‘Welcome Back Thunderer’ for the Wall Street Journal, Seth Lipsky commended the paper’s new sense of purpose, supporting the US intervention in Grenada, agreeing that the USSR was ‘an evil empire indeed’ and condemning the hypocrisy of those who wanted to place sanctions on South Africa.[432 - Seth Lipsky, ‘Welcome Back Thunderer’, Wall Street Journal, 14 November 1985.] Others agreed that it was time ‘The Thunderer’ got some fire back in its belly after a long period in which, according to the leader page of the Spectator, it had ‘tended to support a government only when it was taking an easy way out’.[433 - Leading article, Spectator, 2 November 1985.]
The appointment of Roger Scruton as a regular columnist in 1983 began a four-year run in which the Tory philosopher and enthusiastic foxhunter succeeded in running to ground his quarry – from trendy dons and churchmen to CND campaigners and modern architects. Scruton was a friend of Charles and Jessica Douglas-Home but it was Peter Stothard, with whom responsibility for columnists fell, who took the brunt of the backlash from the soi-disant ‘great and the good’ at their most outraged. Reflecting on the matter a decade later, Stothard concluded that ‘no decision brought me more trouble’ than Scruton’s weekly philippics since ‘barely would a piece have appeared in print before my in-tray was filled with “dump the mad doctor” from all sides of polite society and the political left’.[434 - The Times, 4 March 1993.] An admirer of Edmund Burke, Scruton was an articulate, intelligent and authentic critic of modernity’s failings, which, in the eyes of progressives bent on cultural conformity to their own nostrums, made him something equivalent to a dangerous revolutionary.
Yet, it was with Douglas-Home’s leader writing policy that dissent within the ranks of the paper’s ‘college of cardinals’ was most strongly expressed. None were closet fellow travellers: they were as opposed to the Kremlin’s world view as was the editor. Nonetheless, two leader writers in particular who specialized in foreign policy, Richard Davy and Edward Mortimer, were increasingly unhappy with Douglas-Home’s tendency to see the editorial column as a fire and brimstone preacher’s pulpit rather than the open house for mid-term discussion and the expression of honest doubt. ‘Until Charlie took over,’ Davy lamented, ‘the best Times leaders started from an independent position and argued their way to a conclusion giving due weight to other views … He seemed to want leaders to do no more than fulminate about the Soviet threat whereas I wanted to discuss the political and diplomatic problems of dealing with it.’ Davy believed that the tired, old men who ran the Kremlin could not last forever and it was necessary to reinvigorate the 1970s spirit of détente. He was horrified when Douglas-Home looked at him blankly and replied, ‘What is there to talk about?’ To the editor, détente was indistinguishable from appeasement while to his chief foreign leader writer it was a form of diplomacy that ‘merely required periodic adjustment to new circumstances and regular checks to keep it in line with military security’. Where necessary, this meant not only attempting to encourage the trapped peoples of Eastern Europe but also to find means of ‘improving relations with their ghastly governments at the same time’. There was, of course, no meeting of minds with Douglas-Home on this point and when in 1984 Davy realized that he was no longer going to be given the space to present his more nuanced argument he resigned. Edward Mortimer left shortly thereafter, also disillusioned. With their departures, Mary Dejevsky started writing leaders. She was much closer to the editor’s perception of Cold War realities. With hindsight and the opening of previously closed archives, Davy concluded that Douglas-Home was more hawkish than Ronald Reagan – the latter had, after all, established private channels to Moscow even when his public pronouncements remained at their most defiant.[435 - Richard Davy to the author, 2 January 2005.]
On most political matters, Douglas-Home and Rupert Murdoch were of like mind. Unquestionably, this made the proprietor more benevolent towards his editor than he had been towards Harold Evans. Consequently, the self-confident Douglas-Home felt able to take the sorts of liberties with his boss that it would not have been sensible for Evans to have risked. Douglas-Home was not averse to putting the phone down on Murdoch – particularly if there was an audience to appreciate such lèse-majesté. The belief that their editor had the social confidence not to be intimidated by the proprietor certainly enhanced his popularity among the staff. Many, however, were uneasy about the political repositioning of the paper. Hugh Stephenson, the former editor of The Times business section who had gone on to edit the New Statesman, felt the political move defied commercial sense, doubting ‘whether there is room for two Daily Telegraphs’.[436 - ‘Not the Age of The Times’, New Statesman, 11 January 1985.] But Murdoch was an admirer of the Telegraph’s sense of mission and identity and believed The Times should be equally purposeful. At one stage, Douglas-Home got so tired of hearing Murdoch sing the Telegraph’s praises that he shouted back, ‘then why didn’t you buy the bloody Telegraph?’[437 - Rupert Murdoch to the author, interview, August 2003. Other accounts render the expletive variously.]
An unshakeable belief in defence and NATO was at the core of Douglas-Home’s views. At a time when Labour was committed to unilateral nuclear disarmament and the Cold War was going though a tense phase, it was natural that he should back the Conservatives. But under his editorship The Times became much more sympathetic to monetarist policies at home. The dislike of monetarism red in tooth and claw evident in the leader columns of Harold Evans was cast aside. ‘British economic policy should be guided by two rules: the first is that the Government should have a balanced budget and the second is that the growth of the money supply should be roughly similar to that of underlying production capacity’ the column now announced. ‘Only if the Government adheres to them consistently will it achieve price stability and, in the long run, price stability is the only macro-economic objective which it can deliver.’ Yet there were complications associated with pursuing purity in a world of sin. Britain’s problem was the same as that experienced by Switzerland in 1978: trying to achieve balanced budgets and price stability when other countries remained profligate turned the currency into such a safe haven for international investors that the exchange rate rose to levels that made manufactured exports prohibitively expensive. Although The Times continued to advocate a way round this problem by re-establishing fixed exchange rates it conceded, somewhat lamely, that in the meantime Britain could do little more than ‘set an example of good monetary management and encourage other industrial countries to behave the same way’.[438 - ‘The International Framework’, leading article, The Times, 11 February 1983.]
Certainly, if everything else depended upon bringing down the cost of money, there was finally some cause for hope. By November 1982, the inflation rate had fallen to 6.3 per cent, the lowest for a decade, but there was still no sign of this having a positive impact upon the unemployment rate. The Times leader column could draw comfort from the reality that ‘few people would have believed in 1979 that an unemployment total of three million would be accompanied by so little social discontent’[439 - ‘Beyond the Budget’, leading article, The Times, 8 February 1983.] but many felt complacent observations of this kind failed to grasp the extent of social disarray. It was not until September 1983 that there was the first recorded fall in unemployment since 1977, the true extent of joblessness masked by a proliferation of training schemes of varying degrees of usefulness.
The recession was reflected in the fortunes of the business pages of The Times. Confronted with the necessity of finding economies, the axe fell on The Times business news. Anthony Hilton was appointed City editor but the once large supporting staff was decimated. The journalistic range contracted accordingly. Even great culls present opportunities for those who remained and this was the attitude of the new financial editor, Graham Searjeant, who came over from the Sunday Times in 1983. Douglas-Home greeted him with words of advice that could have served well many a new boy: ‘Never attempt to be definitive, because you will have to write again tomorrow.’[440 - Graham Searjeant to the author, interview, 11 January 2005.] Searjeant proved to be one of the most accomplished business commentators of the next two decades, contributing not only in the business pages but also, anonymously, as a leader writer. For the paper as a whole, though, the comprehensive filleting of The Times business news – the section the old Thomson ownership had once imagined would rival the FT in its coverage – represented a major contraction. It left the FT with an almost unassailable advantage in this vital sector of the market for the next decade.
It was thus surprising that The Times was endorsing the Thatcherite vision of the enterprise economy while simultaneously cutting back on its own business coverage. The transformation to Thatcherite cheerleader was not swift or unquestioning, however. The bulk of the Government’s privatization campaign to roll back the frontiers of the nationalized economy lay ahead in a second term of office. The first attempt, in 1982, left The Times noticeably underwhelmed. The privatization of a majority stake in ‘Britoil’, as the British National Oil Corporation was renamed, was, as its author Nigel Lawson put it, ‘the largest privatization the world had ever known’.[441 - Lawson, The View From No. 11, p. 208.] But with Labour immediately pledging to renationalize the oil assets at the sale price, investors were cautious. This, together with a flotation in November 1982 that badly coincided with gloomy predictions about future oil prices, ensured it was embarrassingly undersubscribed. Neither Adrian Hamilton in the business news section nor The Times leader writers were surprised, concluding that ‘a decent interval before the next major sale would be judicious’.[442 - ‘The Pains of Privatisation’, leading article, The Times, 22 November 1982.] What was more, the paper still had to be convinced that ‘selling assets at a discount’ and ‘transferring ownership from twenty million taxpayers to a few hundred thousand shareholders, simply to raise a relatively small amount of money’ made sense.[443 - ‘Selling at a Discount’, leading article, The Times, 28 October 1982.] This was one tune that time and experience would later change.
Whatever the battles over the opinion pieces in the paper, there was still enough of the journal of record spirit within The Times to ensure straight, unbiased reporting on the news pages. The political editor was Julian Haviland, whom Harold Evans had appointed after he had spent more than twenty years at ITN. Haviland was reinforced by Tony Bevins, the chief political correspondent, and a team of four journalists working from the House of Commons to report British political news. In any case, despite the claims that it was now a bastion of right-wing prejudices, it was hard to discern too much enthusiasm for the Conservative Party even on the comment pages of The Times as the 1983 general election approached. ‘Only the conquest of inflation and of the Falklands were measureable successes,’ the leader column conceded, ‘with the rest having to be taken on trust from a not very eloquent band of ministers.’[444 - ‘The Love that Labour Lost’, leading article, The Times, 6 June 1983.] But the Labour Party manifesto, immortalized by Gerald Kaufman as ‘the longest suicide note in history’, put beyond the slightest doubt which party the paper would endorse. Labour’s manifesto called not only for the scrapping of Trident, unilateral nuclear disarmament and withdrawal from the EEC, but for the reimposition of exchange controls and the threat to the major clearing banks that if they refused to ‘cooperate with us fully … we shall stand ready to take one or more of them into public ownership’. Nationalization would be extended over electronics and pharmaceutical companies, on all tenanted land and on any private property ‘held empty without justification’. Private schools would lose charitable status and were to be ‘integrated’ into the local authority sector ‘where necessary’.[445 - The New Hope for Britain, Labour Party 1983 general election manifesto.] There was scarcely a word in the entire manifesto with which The Times columnists and leader writers did not take issue. Claiming to feel sympathy for his predicament, Bernard Levin described Michael Foot as ‘lurching between disaster and calamity with all the skill and aplomb of a one-legged tightrope-walker’. He was, Levin maintained, a man ‘unable to make his own Shadow Cabinet appointments or indeed to blow his nose in public without his trousers falling down’.[446 - The Times, 1 December 1982.]
The paper was also critical of the Liberal-SDP Alliance’s offering which was ‘a worthy compilation of much that has been tried, half-tried or at least seriously considered over the last political generation’.[447 - ‘All Their Tomorrows’, leading article, The Times, 8 June 1983.] Editorially, the switch from Harold Evans to Douglas-Home probably made little difference to the paper’s hostility to Michael Foot’s Labour Party, but it ensured a less charitable attitude towards the centre-left alternative. Despite this, subsequent estimates suggested that a third of Times readers voted for the Alliance. With the exception of the Guardian (41 per cent), this was the highest proportion for any national newspaper’s readership.[448 - Ivor Crewe and Anthony King, SDP: The Birth, Life and Death of the Social Democratic Party, p. 498.]
Due to the 1978–9 shutdown, the 1983 general election was the first that The Times had covered since 1974. There was a last minute danger that it would miss out again when Fleet Street was hit by a fresh wave of strikes. A nine-week dispute with its print workers ensured the Financial Times missed the general election. Two hundred thousand copies of the Observer’s final edition before election day were lost when the NGA decided to punish the newspaper’s editor, Donald Trelford, for not allowing the NGA space in his paper to attack a Conservative Party advertisement. Since the Observer supported Labour, it was hard to see what the NGA’s action was intended to achieve. The following night, the NGA members took exception to the main leader in the Daily Express and refused to print it. Early editions of the paper appeared with a blank space where the offending leader should have appeared. In these circumstances, The Times could consider itself lucky to escape the unions’ ad hoc attempt at press censorship.
Nor, happily, did the paper have to contend with any political direction from the proprietor’s office. Although Murdoch was in London on polling day, he had not felt the need to be in the country during the election campaign. He did not interfere with The Times’s stance (not that he would have felt the need to) and the same was true at the less resolute Sunday Times whose editor, Frank Giles, later made clear that ‘at no period had Murdoch raised with me the question of our political line. Nor had [Sir Edward] Pickering.’[449 - Giles, Sundry Times, p. 230.]
The Times reported the election result below the headline (which it would have been safe to have prepared in advance) ‘Mrs Thatcher back with a landslide’. Julian Haviland’s reporting was updated as results came in, though, by 2 a.m., the picture was pretty clear. Tony Benn was ousted in Bristol East, the paper quietly whooping that ‘the man who seemed certain to challenge for the Labour Party leadership next autumn has lost his principal power base, a seat in Parliament’. No less significant was the defeat of two of the Gang of Four – Shirley Williams and Bill Rodgers. It was a frustrating night for the Alliance. It received almost as many votes as Labour but the vagaries of the electoral system ensured it made little headway with a quarter of the vote translating into one twenty-eighth of the seats. All but five of the former Labour MPs who had defected to the SDP were defeated. The results were received from Press Association wires and rekeyed. The Times managed to publish around 450 results by the time the last election-night edition rolled off the press, which was more than any of its rivals. The Saturday paper was accompanied by a twelve-page supplement produced by Alan Wood, who was covering his seventh general election. It provided short biographies of all 650 MPs, an unprecedented feat. The final tally was Conservatives 397 seats, Labour 209, Alliance 23 (and Others 21). Margaret Thatcher was the first twentieth-century Conservative Prime Minister to win two successive working majorities. It was the worst result for Labour since 1935. Pat Healy, the only Times employee standing, found the soil of North Bedfordshire unfertile for Labour.
Michael Foot was the first post-election casualty of his party’s disastrous showing at the polls. His oratorical style had amused Frank Johnson who drew attention to the Labour leader’s ‘peroration trouble’ – the habit of inserting an extra subclause into the ending of a speech that forced him to digress, take the tempo down, rewind and recapitulate like the conclusion of a Beethoven symphony. Foot’s successor, Neil Kinnock, also proved a gift for Johnson, who played on his supposed ‘windbag’ tendencies. Editorially, The Times was not confident about the new leader, fearing he was still far too left wing. The day after Kinnock won the party leadership, a four-sequence photo shot was spooled across the front page showing him on Brighton beach stumbling into the advancing sea and having to be hauled to safety by his wife Glenys. The caption read: ‘Early lesson for new leader: time and tide wait for no man.’[450 - The Times, 3 October 1983.] Douglas-Home wanted Foot, liberated from the cares of leadership, to write regular book reviews for The Times, but, citing various commitments, he politely declined.[451 - Michael Foot to Douglas-Home, 15 September 1983, Douglas-Home Papers.]
Cecil Parkinson had masterminded the Conservatives’ 1983 election campaign and was talked of as Thatcher’s eventual successor. The Times reacted to the revelation that Sarah Keays, Parkinson’s former secretary, was expecting his child with a stalwart defence: ‘whatever society’s aspirations to the contrary, life in this land is full of split homes, illegitimacy, and one-parent families. Why then does the public expect its leaders to preserve the outward forms of a morality which it no longer practises, if it ever did?’[452 - Leading article, The Times, 7 October 1983.] But when Parkinson responded to questioning on the matter during the course of an interview on Panorama, Sarah Keays decided to offer her side of the story exclusively to The Times. Douglas-Home was at Blackpool for the Conservative Party conference, but as soon as the offer was put to him he dispatched a reporting team to visit her in Bath. In the small hours of 14 October, the Daily Telegraph journalist Graham Paterson was awoken in his Blackpool hotel room by an irate editorial office in Fleet Street desperate to find out what was going on and furious at having been scooped by its rival.[453 - Graham Paterson to the author, interview, 18 September 2002.] The headline said it all. ‘Sarah Keays talks to The Times of “loving relationship”’ appeared across the top of the paper that morning, overshadowing the enthusiastic reception Parkinson had received at the Conservative Party conference the previous day. Within hours, Parkinson had resigned. The one hundredth anniversary Conservative Party conference had turned from celebration to deep gloom, with many outraged that The Times had sunk to the depths of printing what they took to be the fury of a woman scorned. The familiar cry went up that the ‘paper wasn’t what it used to be’ and ‘what is The Times coming to?’. The use of a picture of two of Parkinson’s daughters looking distressed outside the family home came in for particular attack. The editor was deluged with letters of complaint, one reader who had been subscribing to the paper for sixty years assuring him, ‘the tone of The Times is beginning to resemble that of the so-called gutter press … you have become VULGAR’.[454 - Enid M. Macbeth to the Douglas-Home, 15 October 1983, ref. 3627/2/12. Mrs Macbeth was, however, won over by Douglas-Home’s reply and wrote to tell him she would be continuing with the newspaper-reading habit of her lifetime after all (letter, 25 October 1983).] Yet Sarah Keays was not paid for her story and, as Douglas-Home told Alastair Hetherington, ‘what ground have I got for not publishing it? Answer: only those of protecting the Minister, and that’s not my job.’[455 - Douglas-Home to Alastair Hetherington, undated, Douglas-Home Papers.] Further offence was caused when the paper quoted Miss Keays’s claim that the Daily Telegraph had recommended aborting the child. In fact, the Telegraph had stated that such an option ‘hardly seems a moral advance’ and prominent space had to be hurriedly found for the Telegraph’s editor, Bill Deedes, to point this out.[456 - The Times, letters to the editor, 15 October 1983; W. F. Deedes, Dear Bill, p. 283.] For its part, The Times continued to be sympathetic to Parkinson’s predicament. Jock Bruce-Gardyne wrote an Op-Ed appreciation of the fallen minister, ‘hounded out by hypocrisy’. Bernard Levin also raised his eyebrows at the moral panic, finding his usual seam of satire in the lofty pronouncements of the Daily Mirror, the Daily Telegraph and the Bishop of Bath and Wells.
Despite her reputation for supporting ‘Victorian values’, the Prime Minister was not noted for taking the moral high ground with those she liked and, in time, Parkinson was allowed back into the Cabinet where he proceeded to set in motion the process that would lead to ‘Big Bang’ – deregulating financial services and opening up the City more widely to global competition. But the ‘love child’ revelations had ruined his chances of succeeding Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street. The episode’s coverage was said – by those with little knowledge of the paper’s history – to be symbolic of the way The Times under Rupert Murdoch’s ownership had departed from its values. It had given supposedly excessive space to a minor scandal, sensationalizing the accusations of a wronged woman. It had also failed to chastise sufficiently the lax moral standards expected of a man in public office who, for some, had committed the additional sin of being a brazen Thatcherite. As the paper approached its bicentenary, questions over its news presentation, priorities and Thatcherite bias threatened to undermine its continuing claim to being a unique national treasure of objectivity and truth. Matters were not helped when the paper announced it had access to the diaries of Adolf Hitler …
CHAPTER FOUR
ANCIENT AND MODERN
The Hitler Diaries; the Arts; Sport; Portfolio; The Times’s Bicentenary; Death of an Editor
I
In its one hundred and ninety-eighth year The Times made one of its most embarrassing mistakes: it announced it had bought the rights to sixty volumes of Adolf Hitler’s private diaries. It would prove to be the most expensive fraud in publishing history. With hindsight, the newspaper’s verification procedures appeared astonishingly nonchalant. It helped persuade its parent company, News Corp., to offer $1.2 million for diaries whose contents had been subjected to no more than the most superficial examination. Had the manuscripts been checked, it would have been quickly apparent that they contained little more than bloodless drivel lifted primarily from Max Domarus’s published book Hitler’s Speeches and Proclamations. Some of the entries were positively comic: ‘Must not forget tickets for the Olympic Games for Eva’; ‘on my feet all day long’; and ‘Because of the new pills I have violent flatulence, and – says Eva – bad breath’. Stern magazine, from whom News Corp. bought the rights, refused to reveal its sources or to provide a convincing account of the diaries thirty-eight-year provenance. No comprehensive scientific tests had been done on the ink or the paper. These were basic procedures overlooked in the rush to claim a scoop.
Considering that The Times had been the victim of a serious hoax in the past, it should have been alive to the consequences of repeating the error. On 18 April 1887 – the first time the paper had run a story under a double-column headline – it had published a letter supposedly written by Charles Stewart Parnell, the Irish Nationalist leader, applauding the murder of the Chief Secretary of Ireland’s under-secretary. The letter was subsequently found to be a forgery (its real author, Richard Pigott, fled to a Madrid hotel where he shot himself in the head) and The Times was fined £200,000 – a sum so large that it did almost as much financial damage to the paper as the harm incurred to its international reputation. That misfortune was, perhaps, ancient history by 1983, but the Sunday Times had suffered at the hoaxer’s hand well within the memory of many of those at Gray’s Inn Road. In 1968, when Harold Evans was its editor, the Sunday Times’s owners, Thomson, secured for the paper thirty volumes of Mussolini’s diaries with a £100,000 advance payment on a promised £250,000. Thomson’s historical and forensic experts adjudged the diaries plausible. In reality, they were the work of two old Italian women. Thomson failed to get any of the money back.
The Hitler Diaries that came to light in 1983 were the work of Konrad Kujau, a Stuttgart con man with a number of convictions for petty crime. Had The Times been handed the volumes directly by such a shadowy figure at the back door of Gray’s Inn Road, basic steps to ensure their veracity would doubtless have been undertaken. Yet, because the newspaper was offered them by Stern, a current affairs journal with a serious reputation, it took far too much on trust in believing that Germany’s leading magazine was sufficiently professional not to deal in forged goods. The ensuing debacle would descend into an extraordinary and unedifying blame game that pitted The Times against the Sunday Times, everyone at Gray’s Inn Road against the extraordinary misjudgment of the historian Lord Dacre and every rival newspaper into paroxysms of gleeful jeering at the expense of Rupert Murdoch. But the font of woe was Stern magazine. It had paid $4.8 million (£3.5 million) for the diaries through a journalist-researcher of twenty-eight years’ standing on its payroll, Gerd Heidemann (Kujau’s intermediary), and was not afraid to cut corners in order to ensure a return on the investment.
In 1980, Gerd Heidemann had told Anthony Terry, the Sunday Times’s European editor, in confidence that he was trying to track down Adolf Hitler’s private papers which he believed had been lost in a plane crash on 21 April 1945. Little more was heard for some time although in late 1982 the far-right historian David Irving had contacted the Sunday Times with an offer to investigate reports of faked Hitler diaries and assorted memorabilia being traded between a German historian and a man in Stuttgart. Had the paper taken up Irving’s offer, a lot of bother and embarrassment might have been saved. But even though this was long before Irving was found guilty by a High Court judge in April 2000 of falsifying history in his portrayal of the Holocaust, he was already regarded as politically too dangerous to employ. Gitta Sereny was sent to investigate instead. Heidemann showed her round his personal archive in Hamburg but, before she could probe further in Stuttgart, she was ordered back to London as part of a cost-cutting exercise.[457 - Sunday Times, 1 May 1983; Robert Harris, Selling Hitler, pp. 234–6.] This proved a false economy.
The next Times Newspapers learned of the matter was when Stern’s Peter Wickman and the foreign rights salesman, Wilfried Sorge, came to visit Gray’s Inn Road. Douglas-Home was convalescing in Norfolk at the time so The Times’s two deputy editors, Colin Webb and Charles Wilson, met the Stern team. All were obliged to sign confidentiality contracts. Webb agreed with Brian MacArthur of the Sunday Times a division of spoils: The Times would break the story and the Sunday Times would serialize it. Clearly, though, they would need to be confident that the diaries were genuine and Webb suggested getting Lord Dacre to authenticate them. It was, it seemed, an inspired choice. As an independent director of Times Newspapers since 1974, Dacre could be trusted with what was a commercially sensitive matter while, in his other guise as the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, he was well placed to pass a professional judgment. This agreed, Webb telephoned Douglas-Home with the news. With as much haste as he could muster, Douglas-Home returned to Gray’s Inn Road to take charge of what promised to be one of the paper’s greatest scoops.[458 - Colin Webb to the author, interview, 20 February 2003.]
Educated at Charterhouse and Oxford, Hugh Trevor-Roper had been in British Intelligence during the war and was a member of the team that cracked the code of the Abwehr, the German secret service. At the end of the war he had been put in charge of determining the details of the Führer’s demise. This led to his acclaimed 1947 publication, The Last Days of Hitler. Another work, Hitler’s Table Talk, followed and in 1957 he became Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford. In 1978 he edited The Goebbels Diaries. The following year he took up a life peerage as Lord Dacre and in 1980 swapped Oxford for the commodious Master’s Lodge of Cambridge’s oldest college, Peterhouse. Given this curriculum vitae and his place on the board of Times Newspapers, it would have been perverse for The Times to have commissioned anyone else to authenticate the diaries. Yet, his work on the Third Reich was but a part – and not the main part – of his broad-ranging interests. His real area of speciality was seventeenth-century cultural and ecclesiastical history. Crucially, Webb and Douglas-Home were unaware of a key failing – Dacre’s post-war researches had been facilitated by Army interpreters. He was not an especially fluent reader of German.
Douglas-Home assured Dacre that his mission to the Zurich bank vault where the diaries were being stored was merely intended to allow him to gauge in general terms the look and feel of the documents and that Times Newspapers would not require him to pronounce definitively until he had read subsequent typed transcripts of the diaries up to 1941. But, at the last moment, just as Dacre was about to catch his flight, Douglas-Home telephoned again and explained that Murdoch had now been informed and wanted to secure the serialization rights quickly. Therefore, it would be necessary for Dacre to convey his interim impressions by telephone as soon as he had visited Zurich. Reluctantly – fatally – Dacre acquiesced.
Amid great secrecy, Dacre descended into the vault of the Handelsbank in Zurich chaperoned by Wilfried Sorge, Jan Hensmann, the financial director of Stern’s parent company, and Stern’s editor, Peter Koch. Dacre had been assured that the paper of the diaries had been definitively tested and dated to the correct period. This was untrue. Furthermore, he was assured that Stern knew the identity of the Wehrmacht officer who had retrieved the diaries from the wreck of the aircraft in April 1945 and in whose possession they had been kept until offered to the magazine. In fact, Stern
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notes
Footnotes
1
Financial Times, 23 October 1980; UK Press Gazette, 27 October 1980.
2
Listener, 30 October 1980.
3
Price Waterhouse’s audit for the TNL Directors’ Report (Hamilton 9762/6).
4
UK Press Gazette, 27 October 1980.
5
Sir Gordon Brunton to the author, interview, 8 April 2003.
6
The Times, 23 October 1980.
7
Times Archive, Box 9383.1.
8
Patrick Marnham in Spectator, 20 February 1982.
9
Louis Heren on Panorama, BBC TV, 17 November 1980.
10
William Rees-Mogg, undated memo [22 October 1980], Box. 9335.
11
William Rees-Mogg, ‘Now The Times is going to fight for herself’, The Times, 23 October 1980.
12
In particular, see The Times, letters page, 28 October 1980.
13
Harold Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, pp. 97, 108.
14
John Grigg, The History of The Times, vol. VI: The Thomson Years, p. 554; Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 108; Listener, 30 October 1980.
15
William Rees-Mogg to the author, interview, 3 December 2001.
16
William Rees-Mogg to the author, interview, 3 December 2001.
17
Quoted in Piers Brendon, The Life and Death of the Press Barons, p. 247.
18
Michael Leapman in The Times, 27 September 1980; Michael Leapman, Barefaced Cheek, p. 190.
19
William Rees-Mogg to the author, interview, 3 December 2001; Leapman, Barefaced Cheek, pp. 184–6; Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, pp. 96–7.
20
William Rees-Mogg to the author, interview, 3 December 2001; William Rees-Mogg in Independent, 29 October 1990.
21
Minutes of ad hoc committee on TNL, Thomson British Holdings Ltd, 18 September 1980. Hamilton Papers 9758/4.
22
Sir Gordon Brunton to the author, interview, 8 April 2003.
23
Rupert Murdoch to the author, interview, 4 August 2003.
24
Denis Hamilton, Editor-in-Chief.
25
Quoted in Simon Jenkins, The Market for Glory, p. 53.
26
Newsweek, 3 November 1980.
27
Sir Gordon Brunton to the author, interview, 8 April 2003.
28
Linda Melvern, The End of the Street, p. 175.
29
Tim Austin to the author, interview, 4 March 2003.
30
Marmaduke Hussey, Chance Governs All, pp. 129, 132.
31
Financial Times, 18 February 1986.
32
Bill O’Neill, Copy Out manuscript.
33
William Rees-Mogg to the author, interview, 3 December 2001; Hussey, Chance Governs All, p. 164.
34
Andrew Knight to the author, 2 December 2004.
35
Simon Jenkins, The Market for Glory, p. 149.
36
And the feeling appeared equally hostile among staff at the Sunday Times: Harold Evans to Sir Gordon Brunton, memo, 9 February 1980.
37
The Times, 30 August 1980.
38
Ibid.
39
Letters from Alan Reid and T. C. M. Powell, The Times, 30 August 1980.
40
William Rees-Mogg, unsigned leader, ‘How to Kill a Newspaper’, The Times, 30 August 1980.
41
Sir Gordon Brunton to the author, interview, 8 April 2003.
42
Lord Thomson of Fleet, press release, 22 October 1980. File 9335.
43
Harold Evans at a luncheon talk to Morgan Grampian journalists, quoted in UK Press Gazette, 27 October 1980.
44
Paul Johnson, Spectator, 31 January 1981.
45
Grigg, The Thomson Years, pp. 554, 556; Sir Gordon Brunton to the author, interview, 8 April 2003; Denis Hamilton, Editor-in-Chief, p. 179; Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 125.
46
Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, pp. 89–91, 111, 125.
47
Iverach McDonald, The History of The Times, vol. V: Struggles in War and Peace 1939–1966, pp. 409–28; Jenkins, Market for Glory, p. 53.
48
Rupert Murdoch to the author, interview, 4 August 2003.
49
Sir Gordon Brunton to the author, interview, 8 April 2003.
50
Quoted in S. J. Taylor, An Unlikely Hero, p. 180.
51
Sir Gordon Brunton to the author, interview, 8 April 2003.
52
Richard Searby to the author, interview, 11 June 2002.
53
Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 122.
54
Sir Denis Hamilton to Sir Gordon Brunton, 9 January 1980, Brunton Papers.
55
Sir Denis Hamilton to the Directors of TNHL, 16 January 1981. Hamilton Papers.
56
Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, pp. 106–7.
57
Harold Evans to Sir Gordon Brunton, 20 January 1981, (underlining as in original), Brunton Papers.
58
Denis Hamilton to Directors of TNHL, 16 January 1981. Hamilton Papers.
59
Quoted in the Sunday Times, 15 February 1981.
60
Minutes of the TNL Editorial Vetting Committee, 21 January 1981, file A759–9335.
61
William Rees-Mogg to the author, interview, 3 December 2001.
62
Paul Johnson, Spectator, 20 April 1985.
63
Statements by Sir Gordon Brunton and Rupert Murdoch, press releases, 22 January 1981, Hamilton Papers A759–9335.
64
Evening Standard, 22 January 1981.
65
Sunday Times, 15 February 1981; Daily Telegraph, 29 September 1981.
66
Sir Gordon Brunton to the author, interview, 8 April 2003.
67
The Times, 20 January 1981.
68
Record of Murdoch’s remarks to staff, 26 January 1981, Hamilton Papers A759–9335; The Times, 27 January 1981.
69
The Times, 27 January 1981.
70
Market share breakdown in memo of 26 January 1981 in Hamilton Papers.
71
Paul Johnson, Spectator, 31 January 1981.
72
James Evans (Director, The Thomson Organisation) to John Biffen, 26 January 1981; Thomson submission to the Department of Trade and Industry.
73
Sir Gordon Brunton to the author, interview, 8 April 2003.
74
Rupert Murdoch to the author, interview, 5 August 2003.
75
Ibid.
76
Woodrow Wyatt, Journals of Woodrow Wyatt, Vol. I, p. 372, diary entry, 14 June 1987.
77
Rupert Murdoch to John Grigg, Grigg, The Thomson Years, p. 573.
78
Lord Biffen to the author, interview, 1 August 2003.
79
Hamilton Papers 9758/4; The Times, 28 January 1981; Sunday Times, 15 February 1981.
80
Hansard, 27 January 1981; The Times, 28 January 1981.
81
Jonathan Aitken to the author, interview, 27 May 2003.
82
Hansard, 27 January 1981.
83
Jonathan Aitken to the author, interview, 27 May 2003.
84
The Times, 26 February 1981; Alan Watkins, A Short Walk Down Fleet Street, pp. 178–9; Jenkins, Market for Glory, pp. 169–70.
85
Thomson submission to the Department of Trade and Industry.
86
John Biffen to John Smith, 3 February 1981, letter reprinted in The Times, 4 February 1981.
87
Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 143.
88
Ibid., pp. 151–3; Sunday Times, 18 February 1981.
89
Jenkins, Market for Glory, p. 58.
90
The Times, 13 February 1981.
91
O’Neill, Copy Out.
92
Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island, pp 46–7.
93
O’Neill, Copy Out, p. 15; Sunday Times, 15 February 1981; Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 182; Grigg, The Thomson Years, p. 576; The Times, 13 February 1981.
94
Richard Searby to the author, interview, 11 June 2002.
95
Quoted in William Shawcross, Murdoch, p. 38.
96
Shawcross, Murdoch, pp. 47–9; Rupert Murdoch to the author, interview, 4 August 2003.
97
Quoted in Shawcross, Murdoch, p. 61.
98
Murdoch quoted in Chief Executive magazine; quoted in TNL News, November 1982.
99
Maxwell Newton in ‘Six Australians: Profiles of Power’, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 1 January 1966, quoted in Neil Chenoweth, Virtual Murdoch, p. 32.
100
Sunday Times, 15 February 1981; Daily Telegraph, 30 September 1981.
101
Rupert Murdoch, speech at Melbourne University, 15 November 1972.
102
Sun, headlines, 11 January and 30 April 1979.
103
Leading article, ‘The Fifth Proprietorship’, The Times, 13 February 1981.
104
Quoted in Leapman, Barefaced Cheek, p. 174.
105
Hugh Stephenson to Denis Hamilton, 13 February 1981, Hamilton Papers 9383/12.
106
Quoted in Michael Leapman, Barefaced Cheek, p. 203.
107
Owen Hickey to Denis Hamilton, 11 February 1981, Hamilton Papers 9383/12.
108
John Grigg, The History of The Times, vol. VI: The Thomson Years, p. 376; Leapman, Barefaced Cheek, p. 201.
109
Rupert Murdoch to the author, interview, 4 August 2003.
110
Bruce Page, ‘Into the arms of Count Dracula’, New Statesman, 30 January 1981.
111
Rupert Murdoch to the annual lunch of the Advertising Association, quoted in TNL News, April 1981.
112
Richard Searby to the author, interview, 11 June 2002; Leapman, Barefaced Cheek, pp. 204–5.
113
Marmaduke Hussey, Chance Governs All, p. 179.
114
Sir Edward Pickering to the author and Richard Searby to the author, 11 June 2002; Rupert Murdoch to the author, 4 August 2003; Denis Hamilton, Editor-in-Chief, p. 181; Leapman, Barefaced Cheek, p. 205.
115
Louis Heren, February 1981, Quarterly of the Commonwealth Press Union.
116
Hugh Stephenson, ‘Not the age of The Times’, New Statesman, 11 January 1985.
117
Harold Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, pp. 188–9.
118
Evans in British Journalism Review, vol. 13, no. 4, 2002.
119
Michael Leapman, Treacherous Estate, 1992, p. 51.
120
Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 340.
121
TNL News, April 1981.
122
Spectator, 20 June 1981.
123
Ibid., 28 February 1981.
124
Harold Evans to Frank Giles, 27 and 29 April 1981, Evans files.
125
Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 253.
126
Evans Day File, 29 April 1981.
127
Evans Day File, 6 April 1981.
128
Clive Jenkins to Harold Evans, 3 July 1981 and Evans to Jenkins 12 July 1981; Jenkins to Anthony Holden, 3 July 1981, Evans Day File, 3 July 1981.
129
The Times, 23 October 1980.
130
Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 263.
131
Anthony Holden to the author, interview, 9 April 2003.
132
The Times, 23 November 1963.
133
Ibid., 2 April 1981.
134
Evans to Rupert Davenport-Hines (and others), 14 June 1981, Evans Day File.
135
Private Eye, 28 August 1981; Evans to Anthony Whitaker, 23 October 1981, Evans Day File, A327/3692.
136
Evans Day File, 22 May 1981.
137
Evans to N. P. L. Price, 27 May 1981, Evans Day File.
138
Anthony Holden to the author, interview, 9 April 2003.
139
Ibid.
140
Gerald Long to Herbert Kremp (joint editor-in-chief Die Welt), 15 June 1981, Evans file 1, A153–658; TNL News.
141
John Grieg to Harold Evans, 9 March 1981 Evans box 1.
142
Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, pp. 271, 274.
143
Evans, press release, 30 July 1981.
144
Lord Astor to Gerald Long, 30 July 1981, A153–655.
145
TNL News, August 1981.
146
Jack Lonsdale, letter in TNL News, October 1981.
147
Evans to Colin Watson, 10 January 1982, Evans Day File A759/9329.
148
Evans to Henry Kissinger, 21 May 1981, Evan Day File.
149
Frank Johnson to the author, interview, 15 January 2003.
150
Paul Johnson, Spectator, 11 March and 21 March 1981.
151
Fred Emery, The Times, 11 March 1981.
152
The Times, leading article (by Harold Evans), 11 March 1981; Evans Good Times, Bad Times, p. 214.
153
Evans to Michael Foot, 26 March 1981, Evans Day File A327/3626.
154
Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, pp. 137–8.
155
The Times, 30 March 1981.
156
The Times, leading article, ‘An Avalanche of Economists’, 31 March 1981.
157
Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, p. 138.
158
Patrick Minford, The Times, 7 April 1981.
159
Nigel Lawson, The View from No. 11, 1992, p. 98.
160
‘The Price of Floating’, leading article, The Times, 8 July 1981.
161
‘The Ottawa Opportunity’, leading article, The Times, 17 July 1981; see Grigg, The Thomson Years, p. 390; Edmund Dell, The Chancellors, p. 427.
162
James Tobin, The Times, 14 October 1981.
163
‘Britain’s Economic Legacy’, leading article, The Times, 27 January 1982.
164
‘The Flexible Side of EMS’, leading article, The Times, 6 October 1981.
165
‘Wanted: European Vision’, leading article, The Times, 2 December 1981.
166
Charles Hargrove and Ian Murray, The Times, 11 March 1981.
167
‘The Choice for France’, leading article, The Times, 12 May 1981.
168
Ronald Butt, The Times, 14 May 1981.
169
Letter to the editor, The Times, 30 May 1981.
170
Christopher Thomas, The Times, 11 April 1981.
171
Leading article, The Times, 11 April 1981.
172
Ibid., 5 May 1981.
173
‘If Ireland Is To Be United’, leading article, The Times, 2 July 1981.
174
‘Fermanagh Does It Again’, leading article, The Times, 22 August 1981.
175
Martin Huckerby, The Times, 13 April 1981.
176
The Times, 13 April 1981; Sasthi Brata, The Times, 15 April 1981.
177
Leading articles, The Times, 14 April, 7 July and 13 July 1981.
178
‘The Soiled Coin’, leading article, The Times, 10 July 1981.
179
‘The Scarman Report’, leading article, The Times, 26 November 1981.
180
Darcus Howe, The Times, 26 November 1981.
181
‘Moonshine and Money’ and ‘A Hard Winter’, leading articles, The Times, 17 September and 20 October 1981.
182
Diana Geddes, The Times, 30 March 1981.
183
‘Universities Under the Knife’ and ‘The Cost of University Cuts’, leading articles, The Times, 3 July and 10 October 1981.
184
Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, pp. 218–19.
185
Ivor Crewe and Anthony King, SDP: The Birth, Life and Death of the Social Democratic Party, p. 261.
186
The Times, 27 March 1981.
187
‘The Gang Becomes a Party’, leading article, The Times, 27 March 1981.
188
Crewe and King, SDP, p. 257.
189
Ibid., p. 254.
190
Geoffrey Taylor, Changing Faces: History of The Guardian, 1956–1988, p. 213.
191
The Times, 23 October 1981; Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 289.
192
Frank Johnson, ‘A Happy Party, Fit for all Factions’, The Times, 16 September 1986.
193
Frank Johnson, The Times, 15 September 1982.
194
Nicholas Wapshott’s interview with Ken Livingstone, The Times, 14 May 1981.
195
Evans to Lord George Brown, 2 July 1981, Evans Day File.
196
The Times, 23 and 23 September 1981.
197
Bernard Donoughue, 10 September 1981, Evans Day File 1/17.
198
The Times, 25 September 1981.
199
Tony Benn, letter to the editor, The Times, 26 September 1981.
200
Evans to features, home and business editors, 29 October 1981, Evans Day File 1/17.
201
Evans Day File, A327/3626.
202
Tony Benn, quoted in the Daily Telegraph, 28 September 1981.
203
‘Unfinished Business’, leading article, The Times, 1 October 1981.
204
Tony Benn, quoted in The Times, 13 March 1982.
205
Ibid., 27 January 1982.
206
Hamilton, Editor-in-Chief, p. 182.
207
Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 324.
208
Michael Ruda, interview, ‘The Greatest Paper in the World’, Thames Television, broadcast 2 January 1985.
209
Evans to Murdoch, 3 December 1981, Evans Day File.
210
Rupert Murdoch to the author, interview, 4 August 2003.
211
TNL News, April 1981; Murdoch’s report to the TNL board, 9 June 1981.
212
TNL News, April 1981.
213
Ibid., July 1981.
214
Marmaduke Hussey, memorandum, 9 December 1974, Grigg Papers.
215
TNL News, September 1984.
216
Evans to Bill O’Neill, 20 October 1981, Evans Day File.
217
Evans to Gerald Long, cc. Bill Gillespie, John Collier, 29 January 1982, Evans Day File.
218
Hamilton, Editor-in-Chief, pp. 171–2.
219
Liz Seeber to the author, interview, 18 July 2002.
220
Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island, pp. 47–8.
221
Murdoch, quoted in the Financial Times, 30 September, and the Daily Telegraph, 29 September 1981.
222
Murdoch, quoted in The Times, 2 October 1981; TNL News, October 1981.
223
Australian Financial Review, reproduced in TNL News, November 1981.
224
Evans to Ken Beattie (TNL commercial director), 4 November 1981, Evans Day File A327/3626.
225
Evans to Ken Beattie, 21 October and 29 October 1981, Evans Day File.
226
Evans to John Higgins, 17 November 1981, Evans Day File A327/3626.
227
Alan Watkins, Spectator, 23 July 1983.
228
Evans to Bernard Levin, 2 September 1981, Evans Day File.
229
Ibid., 6 August 1981, Evans Day File.
230
Ibid., 12 November 1981, Evans Day File.
231
Evans to Michael Leapman, 11 June 1981, telex 125912.
232
Philip Howard to the author, interview, 5 December 2002.
233
Evans to Michael Leapman, 29 June 1981, Evans Day File.
234
Anthony Holden to the author, interview, 9 April 2003.
235
Patrick Marnham, Spectator, 20 February 1982.
236
Evans to Peter Hennessy, 10 January 1092, Evans Day File A759/9329.
237
Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 293.
238
Tim Austin to the author, interview, 4 March 2003.
239
Fred Emery to the author, interview, 24 January 2005.
240
Made famous by Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, quoted in Toby Young, How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, p. 143n.
241
Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, pp. 329–31.
242
Gerald Long to department heads, 19 June 1981 (reissued 5 January 1982), ref. A751/9253/42.
243
Evans to Murdoch, 16 September 1981, Evans Day File, A327/3626.
244
Minutes, editorial management meeting, 4 May 1982, ref. 3629/3/4.
245
Evans to Murdoch, undated draft, January 1982, Evans Day File.
246
Ibid., 11 January 1982, Evans Day File.
247
Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, pp. 319–23.
248
Evans to Charles Douglas-Home, no date, February 1982, Evans Day File.
249
Frank Giles, Sundry Times, p. 221.
250
Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 172.
251
Anthony Holden to the author, interview, 9 April 2003.
252
Evans to Anthony Holden, 23 November 1981, Evans Day File A327/ 3626.
253
Leapman, Barefaced Cheek, p. 228.
254
Murdoch, personal message to all The Times and Sunday Times staff, 8 February 1982.
255
TNL News, March 1982; Evans to Gerald Long, 18 February 1982, Evans Day File.
256
Minutes of TNL directors’ meeting, 16 December 1981, ref. 6968/1; Evans to Long, 16 February 1982, Evans Day File.
257
Minutes of TNL directors’ meeting, 23 December 1981, ref. 6968/1.
258
Evans to Long, Frank Giles to Long, 16 February 1982, ref. 6968/1.
259
Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 359.
260
Peter Wilby (Father of the Sunday Times NUJ chapel) to Sir Edward Pickering, 20 February 1982.
261
Denis Hamilton, Editor-in-Chief, p. 183.
262
Richard Searby to Sir Edward Pickering, 17 February 1982.
263
TNL News, March 1982.
264
The Times, 15 February 1982.
265
Ibid., February 1982.
266
Richard Searby to Sir Edward Pickering, 19 February 1982; Minutes of TNHL board meeting, 22 February 1982.
267
Spectator, 27 February 1982.
268
Evans to Murdoch, 21 and 23 February 1982. Evans Day File.
269
Evans to Willie Landels, 24 September 1981, Evans Day File A327/3626.
270
Evans to Elwyn Parry Jones (producer, Panorama), 2 March 1982, Evans Day File A759/9329.
271
Evans to Tony Richmond-Watson, 26 February 1982, Evans Day File 1759/9329; also Evans to Long, 9 March 1981, and Evans to Murdoch, draft memo, undated [February] 1982.
272
Richard Ingrams, Spectator, 5 November 1983.
273
Rupert Murdoch to the author, interview, 4 August 2003.
274
Quoted in Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 222.
275
Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 228.
276
Ibid., p. 229.
277
Bernard Donoughue, The Heat of the Kitchen, p. 286.
278
Obituary of Owen Hickey, The Times, 5 December 2000. In the spirit of his anonymous work, Hickey had requested not to be given an obituary. The request was ignored.
279
Owen Hickey to Rees-Mogg, 13 November and 23 December 1980.
280
Peter Stothard to the author, interview, 8 November 2004; Anthony Holden to the author, interview, 9 April 2003.
281
Donoughue, The Heat of the Kitchen, pp. 288–9.
282
Spectator, 5 November 1983.
283
Frank Johnson to the author, interview, 15 January 2003.
284
Frank Johnson to the author, interview, 15 January 2003.
285
Liz Seeber to the author, interview, 18 July 2003.
286
Philip Howard to the author, interview, 5 December 2002.
287
Hussey, Chance Governs All, p. 179.
288
Evans to Murdoch, 21 February 1982, Evans Day File.
289
Ibid., 23 February 1982, Evans Day File.
290
Ibid., 11 March 1982, Evans Day File.
291
Enoch Powell, The Times, 10 March 1982.
292
Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 369.
293
Ibid., p. 377.
294
The Times, 12 March 1982.
295
‘The Deeper Issues’, leading article, The Times, 12 March 1982.
296
The Times, 13 March 1982.
297
Leapman, Barefaced Cheek, p. 235; Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, pp. 393–4.
298
Tim Austin to the author, interview, 4 March 2003; Fred Emery to the author, interview, 24 January 2005.
299
‘The Greatest Paper in the World’, Thames Television, broadcast 2 January 1985.
300
Anthony Holden to the author, interview, 9 April 2003.
301
Private Eye, 26 March 1982.
302
Douglas-Home to Michael Leapman, 11 November 1983, Douglas-Home Papers.
303
Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, pp. 177–8.
304
Evans to the author, interview, 25 June 2003.
305
Ibid.; Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, pp. 1–2.
306
The Times, 17 and 18 September 1981.
307
Harold Evans to the author, interview, 25 June 2003.
308
Lord Parkinson to the author, 2 July 2004.
309
Rupert Murdoch to the author, interview, 5 August 2003.
310
Donoughue, The Heat of the Kitchen, p. 288.
311
Evans to the author, interview, 25 June 2003.
312
Notes of discussion between Alastair Hetherington and Douglas-Home, 31 October 1983, Douglas-Home Papers.
313
Richard Searby to the author, interview, 11 June 2002; similarly rendered in Rupert Murdoch’s interview with the author, 4 August 2003.
314
Bill O’Neill, Copy Out manuscript.
315
Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 312.
316
Evans to the author, interview, 25 June 2003.
317
Rupert Murdoch to the author, interview, 4 August 2003.
318
Anthony Holden to the author, interview, 9 April 2003.
319
Rees-Mogg, ‘The Greatest Paper in the World’, Thames Television, broadcast 2 January 1985.
320
Anthony Holden to the author, interview, 9 April 2003.
321
Sunday Times, 14 March 1982.
322
Tony Norbury to the author, interview, 27 April 2004.
323
Quoted in Donoughue, The Heat of the Kitchen, p. 287.
324
Patrick Marnham, Spectator, 20 February, 1982.
325
Paul Johnson, Spectator, 20 March 1982.
326
Philip Howard, ‘The Greatest Paper in the World’, Thames Television, broadcast 2 January 1985.
327
Evans to Frank Johnson, 12 March 1982, Evans Day File.
328
Frank Johnson to the author, interview, 15 January 2003.
329
John Grigg, The History of The Times, vol. VI: The Thomson Years, p. 549.
330
From Lord Shackleton and others, letters to the editor, The Times, 4 February 1982.
331
The Times, 23 March 1982.
332
Peter Hennessy, The Prime Minister, p. 413.
333
‘Gunboat or Burglar Alarm?’, leading article, The Times, 29 March 1982.
334
Peter Chippindale and Chris Horrie, Stick It Up Your Punter, pp. 128–31.
335
Bernard Ingham, Kill The Messenger, p. 285.
336
Charles Douglas-Home, evidence to the House of Commons Defence Select Committee, 18 July 1982; Geoffrey Taylor, Changing Faces: History of the Guardian, 1956–1988, p. 225.
337
Guardian, 11 July 1988; Miles Hudson and John Stanier, War and the Media: A Random Searchlight, p. 169.
338
Hudson and Stanier, War and the Media, p. 170.
339
‘Naked Aggression’, leading article, The Times, 3 April 1982.
340
‘We Are All Falklanders Now’, leading article, The Times, 5 April 1982.
341
Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, p. 186.
342
The Times, 14 April 1982.
343
Ibid., 20 May 1982.
344
Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, p. 181.
345
Max Hastings and Simon Jenkins, The Battle for the Falklands, p. 161.
346
Fred Emery to Charles Douglas-Home, 29 April 1982, ref. A751/9256/9/2.
347
The advertisement was sponsored by a group describing themselves as Argentine citizens residing in New York State, The Times, 24 April 1982.
348
E. P Thompson, ‘Why Neither Side Is Worth Backing’, The Times, 29 April 1982.
349
Lord Wigg, letters to the editor, The Times, 6 April 1982.
350
Leon Pilpel in TNL News, May 1982.
351
Frank Giles, Sundry Times, p. 224.
352
David Kynaston, The Financial Times: A Centenary History, pp. 463–6.
353
Taylor, Changing Faces, pp. 228–33, 234–5.
354
New Statesman, ‘Mad Margaret and the Voyage of Dishonour’, 9 April 1982; New Statesman, 30 April 1982.
355
Chippindale and Horrie, Stick It Up Your Punter, p. 136.
356
Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, pp. 205–8, 211.
357
Liz Seeber to the author, interview, 18 July 2002.
358
The Economist, 22 May 1982.
359
John Witherow to the author, interview, 9 August 2002.
360
Quoted in David E. Morrison and Howard Tumber, Journalists at War: The Dynamics of News Reporting During the Falklands Conflict, p. 144; Hudson and Stanier, War and the Media, p. 170.
361
John Witherow to the author, interview, 9 August 2002; The Economist, 22 May 1982; Charles Douglas-Home, evidence to the House of Commons Defence Select Committee, 18 July 1982.
362
Robert Harris, Gotcha! The Media, The Government and the Falklands Crisis, pp. 35–6.
363
Emery to Douglas-Home, 18 May 1982, ref. A751/9256/9/2.
364
John Witherow to the author, interview, 9 August 2002.
365
Ibid.
366
The Times, 4 May 1982.
367
Chippindale and Horrie, Stick It Up Your Punter, p. 137.
368
‘For a Better Peace’, leading article, The Times, 5 May 1982.
369
The Times, 5 May 1982.
370
Ibid., 7 May 1982.
371
Peter Kellner, New Statesman, 7 May 1982.
372
Professor Bernard Crick, letters to the editor, The Times, 6 May 1982.
373
‘You Cannot Joke With War’, leading article, The Times, 12 May 1982.
374
Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, pp. 216, 221; The Times, 5 May 1982.
375
Nigel Lawson, The View From No. 11, pp. 126–7.
376
Harris, Gotcha!, p. 111.
377
John Witherow to the author, interview, 9 August 2002.
378
Hudson and Stanier, War and the Media, p. 175.
379
Fred Emery to Charles Douglas-Home, ref. A751/9256/9/2.
380
Hudson and Stanier, War and the Media, p. 173.
381
The Times, 11 June 1982.
382
Ibid., 12 June 1982.
383
Ibid., 10 June 1982.
384
Hastings and Jenkins, The Battle for the Falklands, pp. 320–21.
385
Quoted in Harris, Gotcha!, p. 118.
386
Hastings and Jenkins, The Battle for the Falklands, p. 349.
387
‘The Truce’, leading article, The Times, 15 June 1982.
388
John Witherow and Patrick Bishop, The Winter War, p. 17.
389
Ibid., pp. 18, 26.
390
Harris, Gotcha!, p. 56.
391
Hudson and Stanier, War and the Media, p. 178.
392
Robert Kee, letters to the editor, The Times, 14 May 1982.
393
Taylor, Changing Faces, p. 237.
394
Address by Edward Cazalet at Charles Douglas-Home’s Memorial Service, 25 November 1985.
395
Jessica Douglas-Home, Once Upon Another Time, p. 11.
396
The Times, 22 October 1982.
397
Ibid., 19 September 1981.
398
Ibid., 17 December 1981.
399
‘Can We Help Poland?’, leading article, The Times, 23 September 1981; ‘What the West Should Do’, leading article, The Times, 17 December 1981.
400
Harold Evans to Rupert Murdoch, 17 January 1982, Evans Day File A759/ 9329.
401
The Times, 13 August 1982.
402
‘Trade Across the Curtain’, leading article, The Times, 16 November 1982.
403
Michael Binyon, quoted in TNL News, September 1982.
404
The Times, 12 November 1982.
405
‘Enter Mr Andropov’, leading article, The Times, 13 November 1982.
406
‘The Morality of Deterrence’, leading article, The Times, 19 October 1982.
407
Harold Evans to Owen Hickey, Richard Owen, Brian Horton, 5 November 1981, Evans Day File; Harold Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 237.
408
‘Lebanon for the Lebanese’, leading article, The Times, 14 June 1982.
409
‘Israel’s Pre-Emptive Strike’, leading article, The Times, 9 June 1981.
410
Robert Fisk to the author, interview, 21 September 2004.
411
TNL News, March 1983.
412
Robert Fisk to the author, interview, 21 September 2004; Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation, pp. 183–7.
413
Telegram from Robert Fisk, 25 February 1982, HME 1/19.
414
Brian Horton to Harold Evans, 5 March 1982, HME 1/19.
415
Fisk, Pity the Nation, pp. 183–7.
416
‘The Best Assad We Have’, leading article, The Times, 15 February 1982.
417
‘Israel Erupts’, leading article, The Times, 8 June 1982; ‘An Unbalanced Policy’, leading article, The Times, 10 June 1982.
418
‘An Unbalanced Policy’, leading article, The Times, 10 June 1982.
419
The Times, 8 June 1982.
420
Ibid., 15 June 1982.
421
Edward Mortimer, ‘Why the West should fear the shame of the Arabs’, The Times, 8 June 1982.
422
The Times, 20 September 1982.
423
Fisk thus joined the illustrious Times company of William Howard Russell’s report of the Battle of Balaclava and Charge of the Light Brigade, November 1854; Nandor Ebor’s dispatch on Garibaldi’s liberation of Palermo, June 1860; and James (Jan) Morris on the conquest of Mount Everest, June 1953.
424
‘After the Massacre’, leading article, The Times, 20 September 1982.
425
Ibid.
426
Brenda Dean to all Fathers of chapel working under NPA Agreement, 25 June 1982, 6985/21.
427
‘An Unlawful Interruption’, leading article, The Times, 12 August 1982.
428
‘All Our Tomorrows’, leading article, The Times, 3 January 1983.
429
Hugo Young to Douglas-Home, 16 February 1985, Douglas-Home Papers.
430
Douglas-Home/Clare Short correspondence, 26 March and 2 April 1985, Douglas-Home Papers.
431
Peter Stothard to Douglas-Home, 13 April 1983, Douglas-Home Papers.
432
Seth Lipsky, ‘Welcome Back Thunderer’, Wall Street Journal, 14 November 1985.
433
Leading article, Spectator, 2 November 1985.
434
The Times, 4 March 1993.
435
Richard Davy to the author, 2 January 2005.
436
‘Not the Age of The Times’, New Statesman, 11 January 1985.
437
Rupert Murdoch to the author, interview, August 2003. Other accounts render the expletive variously.
438
‘The International Framework’, leading article, The Times, 11 February 1983.
439
‘Beyond the Budget’, leading article, The Times, 8 February 1983.
440
Graham Searjeant to the author, interview, 11 January 2005.
441
Lawson, The View From No. 11, p. 208.
442
‘The Pains of Privatisation’, leading article, The Times, 22 November 1982.
443
‘Selling at a Discount’, leading article, The Times, 28 October 1982.
444
‘The Love that Labour Lost’, leading article, The Times, 6 June 1983.
445
The New Hope for Britain, Labour Party 1983 general election manifesto.
446
The Times, 1 December 1982.
447
‘All Their Tomorrows’, leading article, The Times, 8 June 1983.
448
Ivor Crewe and Anthony King, SDP: The Birth, Life and Death of the Social Democratic Party, p. 498.
449
Giles, Sundry Times, p. 230.
450
The Times, 3 October 1983.
451
Michael Foot to Douglas-Home, 15 September 1983, Douglas-Home Papers.
452
Leading article, The Times, 7 October 1983.
453
Graham Paterson to the author, interview, 18 September 2002.
454
Enid M. Macbeth to the Douglas-Home, 15 October 1983, ref. 3627/2/12. Mrs Macbeth was, however, won over by Douglas-Home’s reply and wrote to tell him she would be continuing with the newspaper-reading habit of her lifetime after all (letter, 25 October 1983).
455
Douglas-Home to Alastair Hetherington, undated, Douglas-Home Papers.
456
The Times, letters to the editor, 15 October 1983; W. F. Deedes, Dear Bill, p. 283.
457
Sunday Times, 1 May 1983; Robert Harris, Selling Hitler, pp. 234–6.
458
Colin Webb to the author, interview, 20 February 2003.